Characters

"Hearts Afire" is within weeks of creating a TV variation on the old shotgun wedding.On Feb. 22, the characters played by John Ritter and Markie Post will be married on the first-year, Monday-night CBS sitcom. This will legitimize a romance that quickly has become one of the hottest on TV.From opening night in September, the characters played by Mr. Ritter and Ms. Post -- John Hartman and Georgie Ann Lahti -- have been unable to keep their hands off each other. The pilot episode concluded with the two -- he's a divorcee with two kids; she has never been married -- embracing in a hot tub.Since then, the couple -- both aides to a conservative Southern senator -- have been amorous in their Washington office, in a car and just about anywhere else they could create some privacy.

Henry Fool is no fool, and more's the pity if you mistake him for one.Henry Fool is a scoundrel, a poet, a thief, a revolutionary and an artiste. He's the sun around which an eclectic cast of characters spin, drawing both energy and inspiration. And he's the centerpiece of a film that offers one of the most compelling character studies of recent years.The film starts off with its protagonist nowhere in sight. Instead, we're introduced to Simon Grim, who certainly is. A garbageman who's quiet and unassuming to the point of being mentally handicapped (his state of mind remains an issue throughout the film)

Summer -- with its longer days and sultry nights -- offers more opportunities to steal away for a moment here and there. This makes it the perfect time to experiment with literary genres, try out emerging authors and, especially, get acquainted with new characters. So grab a pile of books, nestle into your hammock, your beach towel, your favorite patch of grass -- and introduce yourself. For those growing up in Chicago's West Rogers Park community in 1979, California Avenue was the great divide.

Poets and novelists turn words into pictures. But on the Internet, the world-spanning computer network, a group of people is taking this idea a bit further. They are ASCII artists, devoted to taking the characters found on a typewriter keyboard and drawing Winnie the Pooh, the Mona Lisa or Abraham Lincoln out of arrangements of letters and symbols.ASCII -- which stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is a set of 127 letters, numbers and symbols that all computers (and most typewriters)

Los Angeles -- In what is supposed to be an increasingly tough world for one hour dramas to survive, "L.A. Law" continues to thrive.And, unlike the other top-rated hour programs, such as "Murder, She Wrote" and "In the Heat of the Night," it is able to attract the younger audience desired by advertisers.But, after absorbing three new cast members last season, the 5-year-old show has to do the same this fall because Harry Hamlin, Jimmy Smits and Michelle Greene have left the cast."The opportunities of that situation are that it makes for stories and when you do series television, you're always looking for stories," Patricia Green, the series' co-executive producer, told a press conference here.

PASADENA, Calif. -- It doesn't happen often, but sometimes actors are more interesting than the characters they play. That's saying something in the case of Wendie Malick -- considering she's played everything from a neurotic fashion editor to an entire gallery of cartoon characters. Malick is best known as the pretentious editor from Just Shoot Me or the put-upon ex-wife in Dream On. In her latest TV foray she plays the uber-controlling mother of the bride in ABC's Big Day, premiering Tuesday.

English actor Paul Alexander mostly triumphs in his one-man tour de force, "Shakespeare: Dreams of Power and Passion," playing at the Theatre Project tonight through Sunday.Conceived and designed by Alexander, the compelling work presents six of Shakespeare's strongest characters (comical and tragical) who, driven by the obsessive desire for power or passion, signal their own downward spiral into oblivion.Clad in a multi-purpose Edwardian style coat and pants, the actor sometimes reclines on a crimson throne with a few props scattered around.

When Jennifer Kersten was passed over for a job after a grueling interview, she went home and played The Sims on her computer. She created characters based on the people who rejected her, then killed them off, over and over, by drowning them in a swimming pool without ladders and starving them in a room with no food. "I'm quite normal and professional," said Kersten, a 35-year-old Web site producer in Milton, Wis. "Until I get home and get into the game." When it comes to The Sims, the most popular computer game of all time, Kersten's not lying; she's the norm.

EVERY TIME a California Raisin blinks an eye, there's a human being with a hunk of clay and a dental tool -- or maybe the top of a pen -- to make him move. At least a dozen times in one second of a finished commercial, that human being will readjust that clay raisin.It may be just an eyebrow, finger, thumb and lip.It may be a whole new facial expression.The human beings who do this are called clay animators. One of them is Michael McKinney of Portland, Ore."It takes a strange combination of patience and obsession," says McKinney.