Tiny Tim

Tiny Tim tiptoed to the altar for the third time yesterday. The 63-year-old falsetto singer was decked out in a purple tuxedo with red suspenders, and he carried his trademark ukelele. The bride, Miss Sue, 39, wore a flowing white gown, and appeared nervous before the wedding, her first. There'll be no honeymoon. After the wedding reception, he planned to retire to his room at the Mariott in Eden Prairie and allow Miss Sue to retire to hers.

No doubt you've asked yourself recently, "Whatever happened to Tiny Tim?" Well, maybe the thought never enters your mind, but just for the record, Tim is still tiptoeing through the tulips at various stages throughout the country, and his travels bring him to Bucks County tonight for an appearance at John & Peter's, 96 S. Main St., New Hope. Tim, who long will be remembered as the man who married Miss Vicki on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in 1969, continues to sing with a shrill voice that sounds a bit like Frankie Valli hitting a high note while nursing a case of the jitters.

Tiny Tim, the tiptoe-through-the-tulips guy, was careening in a cart through the concourse of Philadelphia International Airport yesterday. But the big question still to be answered is whether he was driving. What police at the airport would say last night was that the long-haired, squeaky-voiced pop icon was the only occupant in the front seat of an electric-powered passenger cart when the cart ran wildly out of control in the Northwest Airlines section of Concourse E, hit two people and crashed into a wall.

The striking woman stretched across the glass counter top at Aqua Luna is chatting with an inquisitive customer on the phone about her latest metamorphosis. In the air at the sunny-hued New Age boutique is the faint, sweet aroma of incense, stirred by a haunting refrain from long-dead Doors rocker Jim Morrison: "Break on through to the other side . . . to the other side. " At the back of the room, another specter - a flowing white bridal veil - drapes down from the ceiling and cloaks the small round table beneath it. The offbeat accouterments of this shopkeeper's present endeavor reflect uncannily her past.

Tiny Tim is taking another plunge into the sea of matrimony. The long-haired, ukulele-plucking falsettist - whose age is somewhere between 65 and 73, depending on the source - made it official last week, announcing his engagement to Susan Marie Gardner of Minnetonka, Minn. Miss Sue, a Harvard-educated songwriter, is scheduled to become Mrs. Tiny Tim sometime this month in her hometown. The singer's first wedding, to his beloved Miss Vicki, took place 25 years ago on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

The unlikely binding event of Barbara Lebow's new play, "Tiny Tim Is Dead," is an impromptu enactment of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" by a motley group of urban street people in the junk-and litter-strewn bay of an abandoned industrial site to which they have drifted for shelter. Lebow, best known for her sentimental ethnic drama "A Shayna Maidel," a runaway off-Broadway hit of the 1980s, is too smart at crafting plays to permit such an anomaly to throw her. Out of this jetsam she has fashioned a bittersweet fantasy that manages to convey a message as potent as her play is absorbing, even while giving off the aura of a work in transition.

WELL, HELLO, DOLLIES! IT'S SO NICE TO HAVE YOU BACK AGAIN Let's call the movie "Silence of the Barbies. " The plot revolves around the mysterious theft of a $1 million Barbie doll collection belonging to Glen Offield, an unemployed art director who returns home to San Diego from a doll convention to find his house a heap of smoking rubble and his 5,000 Barbies gone. "They meant everything to me," Offield mourns. "I could do without eating. I don't know if I can live without them.

Bah, humbug! The sentiments of Ebenezer Scrooge notwithstanding, Danceteller's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, is a generally joyful affair that gets to the heart of the story with speed and verve. This production, which was presented last night at the Painted Bride Art Center and continues through tomorrow night, is a mixed-media piece combining Dickens' words with dance and pantomime. The script is by David B. Collins, and the choreography by Trina Collins, artistic director of Danceteller.

If it's for real and for ever, who's to say that anyone shouldn't be wed? Still and all, some celebrity love matches really don't click with their images or the public. Some of those we don't find out about until they're history. Here are a few marriages that have mixed us up over the years: Shannon Doherty and Ashley Hamilton Donald Trump and Marla Maples Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold (and Kim Silva) Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger Sean Penn and Madonna Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen Herve and Camille Villechaize Prince Charles and Diana Spencer Cher and Gregg Allman Tiny Tim and "Miss Vicky" Budinger Ike and Tina Turner Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates (his agent's secretary)

Good old Dickens, and good old Danceteller, which re-creates his A Christmas Carol so faithfully year after year. Beginning its ninth season Thursday at the Painted Bride Art Center, where it runs through Wednesday, Danceteller's rendition is as fresh as ever. Conceived and choreographed by Trina Collins, this Carol is a model of how dance and the spoken word can coexist happily on the same stage. So artful is the combination of movement and speech, the viewer is often unaware of where one leaves off and the other begins.

JUST IN TIME for Christmas, hardworking taxpayers Bob Cratchit and his family (the downtrodden American public) will be wondering what decisions Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge (Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner) will be making about their economic futures. It will be interesting to watch how this modern-day Christmas story plays out. Will they side with the Cratchit family and Tiny Tim and raise taxes on themselves and banker Henry A. Potter (Wall Street CEOs)? Or, will they continue to require that banker Potter continue his Wonderful Life with his historic-low taxation entitlement?

There are four ghosts in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," but most movie versions have downplayed the story's pee-your-pants potential. That changes with "Disney's A Christmas Carol," a Robert Zemeckis animated movie that uses the latest 3-D and computer-graphic artistry to bring up the scare quotient in Dickens' classic story. If you're Marley's ghost, you haven't rattled chains until you've thrust them forth from a 3-D screen, held them in front of some kid's face and shaken them in 60-channel IMAX sound.

What do Arthur Godfrey, Tiny Tim and Will Brown have in common? If you're of a certain age, you can guess what it is. If you're 13-year-old Will Brown, your face takes on a just-sucked-lemons expression when Tim - may he and "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" rest in peace - is mentioned. "I hate Tiny Tim. He made a fool of the ukulele," Brown, who lives in Narberth, says before taking the stage at Ardmore's MilkBoy coffeehouse. "He made people think it's a toy, that it's something to be made fun of. " Rather, Brown says, cradling his own uke, "it's fun and there's just something about it that makes me feel good.

THE EIGHT YOUNG women in matching silver crowns squeezed neatly into the front couple of booths, giggling a bit and looking politely hungry for their steaks and subs. On that July day, the eight Miss America candidates - Miss Pennsylvania from the East to Miss Wyoming from the mountains - may have been the latest celebrities to hit Atlantic City's White House Sub Shop over the last 62 years, but they were certainly not the first. The walls of the White House are chock-full of photos, many ill-focused and faded, from performer Tiny Tim to baseball's Joe DiMaggio to comedian Bill Cosby to even the Beatles, chomping down on overflowing White House sandwiches.

It was a late-night voice, a siren song from the left end of the dial, that began Lenny Kaye's 12-year obsession. I can't forget the night I met you . . . A velvety baritone rolling the words, an arm wrapping around the small of the back. Kaye, 57, the rock writer and faithful guitarist for Patti Smith, still has the notes he took during that drive on I-80 in New Jersey when he fell under the spell of the 1930s supernova named Russ Columbo: Rival to Bing Crosby . . . shot to death at age 26 by his best friend in a Hollywood bungalow . . . the death hidden for a decade from Columbo's fragile mother.

In the decidedly non-Dickensian introductory scene of the adaptation of A Christmas Carol Mum Puppettheatre is presenting, one puppet character mentions to another that death has a part in the play to come. Eerie music then fills the theater, and two spectral figures suddenly appear. "That's a bit odd," one puppet says, and the remark could well describe the script by local playwright Bruce Graham and the puppet theater's presentation of the perennially popular Charles Dickens holiday story.

From wools to sharkskins to microfibers, Joseph N. "Tim" Nichols was always among the first to eyeball the new fashions coming into Boyd's men's store in Center City. Nichols, who worked in Boyd's stockroom for 50 years and followed local sports, died of heart failure Wednesday. He was 72 and lived in North Philadelphia. "It was a good job," said Nichols's brother, Wesley. "He didn't like real heavy manual labor. So he said he liked working in stock. Plus, I think he liked working downtown and around all those people.

Marrying on TV not all that strange I enjoyed the show "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" It was like watching a pageant. Darva knew she would marry a stranger she knew nothing about and was willing to do so for whatever reason. It's television; it's entertainment; Fox got good ratings. People haven't stopped talking about it, so it did make an impact. NELLIE SMITH, Philadelphia Marrying a millionaire on the TV tube was done before when Tiny Tim, who strummed the ukulele, married his Miss Vicki on the Johnny Carson show.

For the average 10-year-old, being a flower girl goes beyond mere petal-tossing in a church. After all, who goes down the aisle first? Carrying her own little basket? That's right, it's not the bride. It's the Official Wedding Spice Girl. Radnor resident and 13-year-old actress Tara Ketterer is familiar with the high-profile nature of the role. When she was 10, she brought her flower girl duties at a fancy California wedding to a new level of glamour - she was "discovered" while dancing at the reception.

The program for William J. McKeon 3d's presentation of A Christmas Carol informs us that it is based on the public readings Dickens himself made of his story, so it is appropriate that McKeon, with a full beard and twirled-end moustache, should somewhat resemble the standard portrait of the author. The facial hair also lets the audience know from the outset that he is going to be reading, not enacting, the tale. An actor intending to present the story as a one-man theater piece with quick costume and appearance changes would probably have to be clean-shaven to make his characterizations convincing.