What was going on when I was born?

The Islanders, for all their gallant effort to win a second consecutive game for the first time since October, came up with only a 4-4 tie in a hard-fought game tonight with the Philadelphia Flyers in Nassau Coliseum. For a while, the Islanders appeared to have snatched victory from defeat by rallying from a 3-1 deficit on three straight goals in the third period. But the Flyers came right back for the tie on Bobby Clarke's goal at 14 minutes 22 seconds. Al Arbour, the Islander coach, accepted the tie by saying: ''It's been a long time since we've been down, 3-1, and the guys put their heads down and said, 'Not again.' ''

CHICAGO THE night of Oct. 30, the night the Bulls played their home opener against Washington, was particularly cold in Chicago. And the 60 or so women who gathered outside Chicago Stadium with picket signs wore, as one of them would recall, ''a lot of layers.'' ''The mood outside,'' recalled Stacie Geller, one of the women picketing, ''was angry.'' ''Stop Violence Against Women,'' read one of their signs. ''Don't Pay, Stay Away,'' read another. ''Quintin Dailey Must Go,'' read a third. The signs all had to do with Quintin Dailey. Quintin Dailey is a 6-foot-3-inch, 180-pound rookie guard with the Bulls, their first-round draft choice out of the University of San Francisco, where he made all-American. Dailey, 21 years old, had, a few months before, pleaded guilty to a nonsexual charge of aggravated assault of a woman who was a student nurse living in the same college dormitory as Dailey. The facts of the case remain clouded.

year-old Dutch Colonial building that houses Rutgers University's administrative offices, sits on the crest of a slope overlooking the heart of the state university's main campus here. The image of an institution on a hill extended beyond the physical in recent months as the drinking-age issue grew into an ideological debate between people from the university trying to maintain it at 19 and two citizens' groups that lobbied for an increase to 21. Not only did the two sides disagree about the legislation, but they also disagreed over the focus of each other's positions. Each side maintained that its position was the one that looked realistically at alcohol and drunken-driving problems. Those who expect the increase in the minimum age - which was approved last week and goes into effect Jan. 1 - to be a major step in solving the problems have been called dreamers; their opponents have been accused of using too much theory and philosophy.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Farber is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES Many directors shy away from working with movie stars because they fear that their own authority will be challenged by insecure actors with oversized egos. But Sydney Pollack has worked with major stars on every one of his 13 films. He has directed Robert Redford five times (in such films as ''Jeremiah Johnson'' and ''Three Days of the Condor''), Jane Fonda twice (in ''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' and ''The Electric Horseman''), and has also guided Barbra Streisand in ''The Way We Were,'' Al Pacino in ''Bobby Deerfield,'' Paul Newman and Sally Field in last year's ''Absence of Malice.'' Although most of these stars have reputations for being strong-willed, Mr. Pollack has managed to control them and has often drawn from them the best performances of their careers. In ''Tootsie'' Mr. Pollack has once again collaborated with a superstar - Dustin Hoffman, making his first movie since he won his Academy Award for ''Kramer vs. Kramer.'' In a radical departure from that film, Mr. Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an out-of-work actor who resuscitates his career by dressing as a woman, turning himself into ''Dorothy Michaels'' and winning a part on a television soap opera. His identity crisis intensifies when he falls in love with an actress on the show (played by Jessica Lange).

FIRST in the early 1970's came the idea of an MX missile as a counterbalance to large Soviet land-based missiles. Then came the notion that Soviet missiles had become so accurate and powerful they could destroy American land-based missiles in their silos. Finally came the search for a way to base the MX so it could survive a Soviet attack and come out fighting.

ANDREW P. O'ROURKE was talking to a visitor in his eighth-floor office last Wednesday when a friend phoned to ask how he felt after being being named by the county's Republican leadership to replace Alfred B. DelBello as County Executive, at least until next November's election. "Well, do you remember that movie, 'The Candidate,'" Mr. O'Rourke replied, "when Robert Redford turns to a colleague in the elevator and asks, 'Well, what do we do now?' That's how I feel." They laughed and chatted, but after Mr. O'Rourke put the telephone down he said, "The difference is that in my case I do have a good idea of what I'll be doing." The 49-year-old Yonkers Republican, long thwarted in his goal to be named a judge, is expected to be appointed by the Board of Legislators to the county's top post about Jan. 1, when Mr. DelBello is sworn in as Lieutenant Governor.

MOUNTAINSIDE IN THE corner of a large, mat-lined room at Children's Specialized Hospital last week, a physical therapist urged a 2 1/2-year-old boy to pull himself to a standing position. She had designed special exercises to help him regain the muscle tone, trunk control, coordination and balance he had lost as a result of a head injury. On a padded platform nearby, another therapist evaluated the physical and neurological development of an 11-month-old boy who suffered brain damage at birth. A third physical therapist encouraged a comatose teen-ager strapped in a high-backed wheelchair to unclench her jaws. These therapists typify a new generation of health-care professionals who, as a colleague explained, ''do far more than apply heat and give massages.''

With cable television in New York City still years away from expanding beyond Manhattan, frustrated residents of some privately owned housing complexes in the other boroughs are resorting to satellite master antennas to receive pay-television programs. The Hills of Grasmere condominium complex on Staten Island installed a big ''dish'' antenna on its property to capture satellite-beamed programs. Subscribers in the 277-unit complex of town houses, near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, began receiving five channels via satellite on Nov. 1. ''Cable might come to Staten Island in five or seven years, who knows, but until then we would have had nothing if we hadn't put up our dish,'' said Josephine Guido, a member of the Hills of Grasmere board.

It is exceedingly rare for an actor or an actress to return to a role 50 years after first playing it, rarer still when the role calls for the character to fly across the stage. Such is the case with the ageless Eva Le Gallienne, who returns to Broadway this week, one month before her 84th birthday. She opens Thursday at the Virginia (formerly the ANTA) in ''Alice,'' a new version of her Civic Repertory Theater production of ''Alice in Wonderland.'' Miss Le Gallienne is recreating her role as the White Queen (Kate Burton is playing Alice), and is also re-staging the play, with John Strasberg as co-director. Sitting in a dressing room during a recent rehearsal, she said that the revival would be close to the original, except that, with a budget of $2 million, it will ''cost 2,000 times more.'' As in 1932 and in the 1947 revival, she is using the adaptation she wrote in collaboration with Florida Friebus, which dramatizes ''the most dearly loved scenes'' from both ''Through the Looking Glass'' and ''Alice in Wonderland.'' '' 'Alice' was one of the things I was most proud of,'' she said. ''The production was ahead of its time and I don't think it dates at all. Classics don't date.''

In the category of liabilities transformed into assets, consider the construction fence erected around the old Korvette's store in Herald Square. In about 18 months, the nine-story structure will be remodeled into what the New York Land Company, its redeveloper, has dubbed the city's first ''vertical shopping center,'' a microcosm of the city with shops on each floor distinctive to particular city neighborhoods.

THE county has joined with eight other southern New York counties to lobby for financial relief from state-mandated programs. The effort is being coordinated by County Legislator Edward M. Gibbs and will focus on the increasing costs of Medicaid, education of the handicapped and operation of the court system. The coalition of Nassau, Rockland and Orange Counties and the five counties that make up New York City, expects to present its requests to state legislators at an Albany meeting tentatively set for Jan. 11. A final package outlining the coalition's concerns is being prepared. There are more than 1,200 state-mandated programs in New York that represent 52.6 percent of the county's budget for next year or $288.2 million. Some, like public assistance, education and maintenance of handicapped children and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority station maintenance and operating assistance, are programs over which the county has no control but for which it must pay, after reimbursement, $118 million or 63 percent of the programs' cost.

AFTER all the maneuvering was over last week, the one thing that some Suffolk County lawmakers agreed on was that financing the Southwest Sewer District had become almost as controversial and complicated as the troubled project itself. The main issue in dispute was $80 million in bonds that County Executive Peter F. Cohalan wants to sell. They are intended to cover the sewer district's expenses between now and April, the scheduled debut of an innovative ''leverage-lease'' program that is designed to avert a tripling of sewer taxes within the district or an increase in sales taxes countywide. The county put the bonds on the market two weeks ago, but withdrew them after obtaining commitments for only about $14 million worth. To make the deal more palatable to potential investors, Mr. Cohalan then appealed to Governor Carey for help in amending state law so the county could upgrade the bonds to ''general-obligation'' status backed by the county's ''full faith and credit.''