Stardom

Maybe Shane Victorino's best ability is to fit in. He, after all, was the one who replaced Bobby Abreu in right field. Then, he succeeded Aaron Rowand in center following the 2007 season, when the Phillies played their first playoff games in 14 years. "I never looked at it that way," Victorino said. No, but Victorino's precipitous rise is not lost on the always talkative centerfielder. Twice selected in the Rule 5 draft, he has started 33 straight postseason games. In that span, he's hitting .276 with six home runs and 26 RBIs.

There's another Australian actor making his mark on Hollywood, but Kodi Smit-McPhee is a little different. He's 14. Smit-McPhee burst onto the scene last year with a serious performance opposite Viggo Mortensen in John Hillcoat's film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road. " On Friday, he stars as a bullied boy who befriends a mysterious new neighbor, played by Chloe Moretz ("Kick-Ass") in "Let Me In," Matt Reeves' remake of the Swedish chiller "Let the Right One In. " Smit-McPhee spoke to the Daily News this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

And who do you think you are Running around leaving scars Collecting your jar of hearts And tearing love apart You're gonna catch a cold From the ice inside your soul - Christina Perri, "Jar of Hearts" It can't be easy to be an overnight singing sensation, a genuine, honest-to-goodness pop-culture phenom. "It feels pretty amazing," says Bensalem native Christina Perri, 23, who in less than a month catapulted from obscurity to stardom with her remarkable self-released song, "Jar of Hearts," an alternately ferocious and mournful indictment of an inconstant lover.

AS I LISTENED yesterday to NASA's chief technologist talk about the Earth's gravity and the tremendous force it takes for a space vehicle to escape its pull, I wondered whether the teenagers Robert Braun was speaking with saw any parallels in their own lives. The effervescent Braun - who worked on NASA's Mars Pathfinder - was visiting with the fabulous West Philly Hybrid X Team, comprising students in West Philly High School's Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. Braun was invited by U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, a huge fan of "the team that knows no ceiling" (and who therefore should share their story with the "federal agency that explores the heavens")

'I'm feeling particularly slutty tonight," Stefani Germanotta purred to a sold-out Susquehanna Bank Center on Thursday night. Known to her fans - as well as anyone who's passed within hailing distance of a working radio or TV set in the last year - as Lady Gaga, she arrived with the kind of explosive force that can incinerate artists unprepared for the spotlight. Since the success of her insidious, inescapable single "Poker Face," Gaga has staged a blizzard of reinvention, from sex kitten to bondage queen, as well as what might be a visitor from a far more stylish future.

Their early notice as part of the tween singing group the Clique Girlz did not, as it turned out, catapult the Monroe sisters of South Jersey to Miley Cyrus heights (though it did lead to a move to Los Angeles, where their home is a couple of miles from Miley's). And so Destinee, 15, and Paris, 13, will not be Clique Girlz when they are riding the Ikea float in the 6ABC Thanksgiving Parade, accompanied by two school choirs, or singing the national anthem at the Eagles game this Sunday, but reinvented as themselves, Destinee & Paris, back home for the holidays.

Fade in to applause: Sam Tsui is center stage at the microphone. He is joined - by another Sam. And another. And another, on up to six Sams. Videographer Kurt Schneider stands to the side, in the shadows, as the Sam sextet launches into an a cappella medley of Michael Jackson songs. This YouTube video, posted June 11, has garnered more than 1.132 million views, making the Wissahickon Senior High grads, now at Yale, into Internet stars. Their many videos, featuring Tsui's showmanship and precise vocals, have gone viral, attracting more than two million views.

Hazim Hardeman knows the odds are against him. In Philadelphia, nearly half of all high school students drop out, and the rates for African American and Latino youths are even worse. "It's hard on the streets," said Hardeman, 15, a sophomore at Dobbins Technical High. "There are so many distractions. " Still, he's determined to graduate, to go to college, to find his way out of a dead-end neighborhood. So were 250 other male teens from around the city who gathered at a town-hall meeting yesterday to sign pledges to stay in school.

SAY WHAT YOU want about Michael Jackson (and many of you are saying things that should not be printed in a family newspaper), he was not a movie star. He sang on soundtracks and crooned a love song to a rat for "Ben," but as easily as he packed arenas for live performances, he never put fannies in seats at the multiplexes. "The Wiz"? Wasn't. But just because Michael wasn't box office in life doesn't mean he can't be in death. According to a source for the Los Angeles Times and film-biz reporter Nikki Finke (deadlinehollywooddaily.

For a 24-year-old, British singer-songwriter Katie Melua certainly has no shortage of career milestones. In addition to her more than 10 million albums sold, the Georgia-born (as in Eastern Europe) performer has headlined London's massive Wembley Stadium, released a U.K. chart-topping duet with a deceased American singer, and even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the deepest underwater concert after performing on the bottom of the North Sea for some Norwegian gas rig workers.