Jackie Collins

The plot may read like a TV movie, but it's really a dinner theater story.It's about the Harborlights Dinner Theater in Fells Point, which is scheduled to go up for foreclosure auction today amid a dispute between its current and past owners.The infighting over the theater reads like the infighting over Hollywood studios in a Jackie Collins script -- just with fewer zeroes.The Fells Point theater has been dark since last year. But in court, the show could go on for a while.Here's the treatment: The current owners, a group led by Louis TC B. Chitty, opened the dinner theater in 1985.

ONE LOOK AT "Kaleidoscope," NBC's movie tonight, tells you both why Danielle Steel sells a zillion of the books she churns out and why they make such lousy movies.And that's not lousy in the way a Judith Krantz or Jackie Collins book is lousy -- a low-taste, trashy, offensive sort of way -- but lousy in the sense that they just don't have the stuff to make it on the screen."Kaleidoscope," which will be on Channel 2 (WMAR) at 9 o'clock, is the opening jab in the combination NBC has to counter this week's sports programming.

Raphael B. Malsin, 95, who for more than three decades was a top executive of the Lane Bryant retail chain founded by his mother, died Friday at his home in Harrison, N.Y. He was the son of David Bryant, a New York jeweler who died in 1900, and Lena Himmelstein Bryant. It was Mrs. Bryant who, as a widowed seamstress, opened in 1904 the small Manhattan dressmaking business that eventually grew into the Lane Bryant chain. In 1940, he became chief executive of Lane Bryant Inc., and at his mother's death in 1951, the company she founded had become the largest "special-size" chain in the country, catering to women who wear larger sizes.

Maryland's state school superintendent, Joseph Shilling, gets a chance tonight to spell out his 10-point, 10-year plan to improve public education in the state in a "Town Meeting on Education," at 7 o'clock on Maryland Public Television (channels 22 and 67).Among potentially controversial aspects of the plan are the proposed extension of the school year, required attendance by students until age 18, required attendance in kindergarten and mandatory instruction with computers.Dave Durian is the host with Shilling in MPT's production center in Owings Mills, where a studio audience will include representatives of a variety of educational organizations, parents, teachers and officials.

Kathi Kamen Goldmark listened to her mother nine years ago and where did it get her?Singing in a rock band with novelist Stephen King, dining with humor writer Dave Barry, hunting for parking places with actress Shirley MacLaine, grabbing a snack with comedian Yakov Smirnoff, receiving flowers from romance writer Jackie Collins and sitting in companionable silence with author Norman Mailer, whom she describes as "shy."The relentless round of glamour, gossip and good times doesn't interfere with her work -- it is her work.

"A Long Fatal Love Chase," by Louisa May Alcott, New York: Random House, 242 pages. $21.From the first lines of Louisa May Alcott's "A Long Fatal Love Chase," the reader is in familiar territory - assuming the reader spends more time with Jackie Collins and "Melrose Place," than with the virtuous March clan from Alcott's generally adored book, "Little Women.""I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom."

We could not help noticing a recent report that "Hal," the super-intelligent but malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick's '60s-vintage sci-fi film "2001," may become a best-selling author in the 1990s. Actually, the modern-day "Hal" is a souped-up Macintosh personal computer whose hacker owner, 43-year-old Scott French, has programmed it to churn out steamy novels based on the example of the late author Jacqueline Susann's trash-to-the-max "Valley of the Dolls."It took Mr. French nearly eight years to write the intricate computer instructions that allowed his Mac to spew out such lines as "Her heart leapt into her throat and she jumped involuntarily as the stranger appeared in front of her."

Like the tennis balls he once bounced off the roof of his childhood home in Pikesville, Steven Cohen enjoyed tossing out a story. "When I was a kid," he would tell a group of friends, "we invented this game..." But before he could explain much more, the conversation would usually take off. Tales of childhood games popped up like spitballs from the back of the class. The epic battles. The dares. The strategies. The playing fields that stretched from bedroom hallways to staircases, front stoops and alleyways.

The subtitle promises "sex, money, genius and betrayal." The cover backs that up with an image of an overturned martini, broken glass strewn next to a Harvard swizzle stick and a lacy, scarlet brassiere. The first line: "It was probably the third cocktail that did the trick." Ben Mezrich's take on the founding of Facebook is certainly salacious. Booze. Women. Scandal. But the reviews? Well, those imply that the truth of the Facebook story might not include quite as much lingerie and drama as the author of The Accidental Billionaires, which came out last week, would have us believe.

LOS ANGELES -- With Lyle and Erik Menendez testifying for their lives, let's go to the phones over at Court TV.You're on, Jane in Georgia: "Lyle is a phony, cold-blooded killer. I hope there's zero chance for acquittal." Debbie from Mississippi, a counterpoint, please: "I believe that Lyle is telling the truth." And Dorothy from Texas: "When Lyle purchased three Rolexes, who was the third one for?"Now let's swing out to the scene, where Regena Woods has camped out overnight, on the front steps of the Van Nuys Superior Court, to catch Erik Menendez testify.