What was going on when I was born?

Four things should be considered when you choose a cabin on a cruise liner: size, location, amenities and price. Here are guidelines on these considerations:

I have never seen so many props in my life. I am thinking of several recent weeks of theatergoing and their accompanying barrage of bedquilts, chamber pots, rolled-up newspapers, nightsticks, stuck windows, bullhorns, coffins and doors, doors, doors. In each instance the trouble was that we were given so many things to chart as they flew through the air that we had no time left over to follow the plot.

WHEN Leon E. Bell of Hartford was convicted this summer of the $1,300 holdup of a Friendly's Ice Cream Shop in Rocky Hill on April 12 and the $380 holdup of a Burger King restaurant in West Hartford four days later, he might have expected to receive a sentence of 10 to 14 years in prison.

FOR more than 75 years, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola have been the archetypical friendly enemies. They share a common Southern heritage, they were both created by pharmacists, and both were once heralded as cures for everything from headache to peptic ulcers. In ways large and small, the Coke-Pepsi rivalry was the soul of Southern gentility.

NEWARK "FIBER, METAL, CLAY," an exhibition now on view in the art gallery at the Paul Robeson Center at Rutgers University, not only celebrates the vitality of New Jersey crafts but also heralds a coming regional event.

STAMFORD, Conn.--Victor Bisharat, the Greenwich architect most closely identified with Stamford's commercial development in the last decade, thinks perhaps it was all a mistake.

One of the many casualties in Woody Allen's newest movie, "Stardust Memories," is his own image. In previous films, Mr. Allen has symbolized the quin tessential urban antihero: funny but sensitive, ...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. HE'S always had a name that still embarrasses him somewhat--Willie Mays Aikens. And when he was young, he was too heavy; as a sophomore and defensive end at Seneca (South Carolina) High School, he weighed 258 pounds. He also stuttered so much he was too shy to go into a diner or a store.

To hear builders tell it, 1980 will go down in history as the Year of the YoYo.

"Until Feb. 1, our buildings lit up like a Christmas tree," said David Smith. "After Feb. 1, it looked like a blackout." Mr. Smith knows whereof he speaks, since he is president of Mutual Redevelopment Houses Inc., the formal name of the Penn South Cooperative between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and between 23d and 29th Streets in Manhattan. And the change that he speaks of in the night view of Penn South, ...