Real Life

MIAMI - Somewhere in Mount Kisco, N.Y., there is a newborn baby. His name is Budweiser. Or, conceivably, Preparation H. His folks haven't decided yet. More to the point, they haven't signed the contract. It seems that Frances Schroeder and Jason Black are trying to sell "naming rights" to their kid. They're looking for a corporation willing to pay for the privilege of slapping its moniker on the child's birth certificate. As if he were a stadium or a subway stop. The minimum asking price: half a million bucks.

It was like having an audience with the Pope. We waited, about 10 reporters, in a room at the Mark Hotel in New York. After a time, Jason Patric walked in, sat down for a short time at the speaker's table, got up and went out.Was the interview already over? Is this all he was going to do, walk in, say nothing then leave?No. He returned, and we didn't ask why he had come in, left, then returned. We didn't ask a lot of things about the man because it was one of those interviews in which the participating reporters knew what questions they were not supposed to ask.We were not supposed to ask, for instance, about Julia Roberts.

Boston. -- Do you ever get the feeling that someone is missing from the debate about welfare reform? The other parent? The father? The sperm donor? Men?As the Congress writes ever more punitive scenarios for mothers and children, the male of the species barely gets a cameo role. tTC The only part he plays is as deadbeat dad. The only interest the lawmakers have shown is in establishing his DNA. The only policy they are talking about is getting a better grip on his wallet.I have no problem with these proposals.

Smoke filled the Baltimore Metro subway's Johns Hopkins station early yesterday as Marines, area firefighters and groaning, screaming "victims" staged a dress rehearsal for disaster - a bioterror attack. Playing roles designated by cards that hung from their necks, the "victims" were volunteers acting out the horrible symptoms of the suffering that a biological weapon could bring. The smoke was produced by machines. But Baltimore City Fire Department Capt. David Coogan, one of its planners, said that the training exercise under the 600 block of N. Broadway, near Johns Hopkins Hospital, was "very realistic."

"Leolo"Starring Maxime Collin and Ginette RenoDirected by Jean-Claude LauzonReleased by Fine LineUnrated*** The enchanted hell known as the adolescent imagination has never gotten quite the examination as the one it receives in Jean-Claude Lauzon's "Leolo," which opens today at the Charles.Clearly autobiographical, it's about a brilliant kid locked in a barren, crippled and violent family in an impoverished Montreal neighborhood in the late '40s; but rather than being bleak and hopeless, as such a description might suggest, it is instead filled with romance and magic and poetry.

Behaviour," which opens today at the Charles for a week, reminded me a great deal of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts." Same subject: the beautiful banality of real life. Same idea: follow the tangled concerns of a group of people geographically unit"Bad Behaviour," which opens today at the Charles for a week, reminded me a great deal of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts." Same subject: the beautiful banality of real life. Same idea: follow the tangled concerns of a group of people geographically united but spiritually separated as they criss and cross through each other's lives.

"Real life isn't always so neat and tidy," a character says near the beginning of "The Back Room" at Fell's Point Corner Theatre.It's a lesson that goes unlearned in this Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry by first-time playwright Michael Leicht, a 24-year-old Johns Hopkins University student.All of the conflicts in the play are resolved so tidily, their resolution seems like a fantasy. And while some of the more admirable scenes in "The Back Room" are fantasy sequences -- in one, a doctor becomes a circus ringmaster; in another, a dead man rises from his coffin to crack a few jokes -- fantasy does not seem to be the playwright's intention for the final scenes.

A wonderful children's television program brings to mind a scam that is as successful today as it was when first tried out decades ago.The program is called "Square One Television." Produced by the Children's Television Workshop and seen on public television, it makes mathematics fun. Though aimed at grade school children, it is so cleverly written that it's enjoyable even for those much older.The big part of each daily episode is a segment called "Math Net," which is a loose parody of the old "Dragnet" series.

A good newspaper is about more than breaking news, front-page headlines, investigative reporting and sports. It also should help readers understand how others conduct their everyday lives. Whether the stories appear in the features, news, sports or business sections, what distinguishes the incisive from the pedestrian is the reporter's ability to offer portraits, large and small, drawn from life, telling stories that frequently echo readers' personal struggles. Several recent articles in The Sun illustrate the variety and scope of this vital journalism.

When they tote up the made-for-TV clunkers of the year, "Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story" should be near the top of the list.The film, which stars Jill Clayburgh and airs at 8 tonight on WMAR-TV (Channel 2), is a series of pointless and excessively sentimental vignettes from the life of actress Jill Ireland."Reason for Living" is based on Ireland's autobiographical book, "Life Lines," which she wrote prior to her death last year from cancer. We pick up the story when Ireland has just finished her first book, "Life Wish," about her battle with breast cancer.