November 18, 1990

MOTHERS with young children crowded the lobby of the Middlesex County Board of Social Services here on a recent Friday, waiting to find out why their welfare checks or food stamps were late. It presented a perfect opportunity for Connie Mills, a recruiter for the Garden State Health Plan, a state-run health maintenance organization for low-income families. Again and again, she introduced herself and touted the main selling point of Garden State: a personal family doctor. The plan is a small, little-known division of Medicaid, the state and Federal program that pays medical bills for more than 500,000 poor and disabled people. Garden State gives Medicaid beneficiaries, who often must rely on public clinics and hospital emergency rooms, a private doctor who will manage all their medical needs and offer 24-hour coverage. In return, as Mrs. Mills emphasized, members agree to use only the doctor they choose from the Garden State list -- except in dire emergencies.

PEOPLE with breast cancer and their support groups might have been expected to be relieved when the state's top official epidemiologist said contaminated wells and hazardous-waste sites were not linked to the incidence of the disease on Long Island. Instead the reaction was outrage that the state would abandon its research in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, where breast-cancer rates have been higher than the state average for 10 years.

It's tough to feel pity for Anthony Van Dyck, an artist gifted by the age of 14 with skills that few painters develop in a lifetime. By his early 20's he had launched himself on a career that was to bring major commissions from some of the grandest of the European aristocracy and royalty, above all the king of England, Charles I, an avid collector and no slouch at separating artistic winners from losers. Bernini, Velazquez and Rembrandt, as well as Rubens, in whose studio he apprenticed. It is impossible to come away from this collection of some 100 paintings, however, without a sense of renewed respect and even awe for Van Dyck. The display -- in the care of its selection and presentation and its casting of a familiar figure in such a flattering light -- constitutes one of the finest Old Master exhibitions in recent memory, and it provides further evidence that, at a time when large-scale loan shows are being widely if somewhat prematurely pronounced obsolete and prohibitively expensive, there must still be a place made for full-scale retrospectives of major artists who have not yet had their day in the sun.

One of Manhattan's most prominent office structures, the General Motors Building at 767 Fifth Avenue, is undergoing a major facelift. The entire facade of the building, which takes up the block bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues and 58th and 59th Streets, will have its windows recaulked and about 400 of the 43,000 marble slabs that sheath its exterior replaced. The $7.5 million project is to take three years. The work is being overseen by Corporate Property Investors, a Manhattan real estate concern that has been managing the building since 1982. It plans to exercise a $500 million option to buy it from the General Motors Corporation before the end of the year. Roderick Johnson, manager of 767 Fifth Avenue Management, a subsidiary of Corporate Property Investors, said the work was being performed in part as a precaution against any of the marble slabs' falling off the exterior of the 50 story building, which was designed by the architect Edward Durell Stone and completed by General Motors in 1968. The first phase of the project, to be completed in a year and now in progress, is renovation of the Madison Avenue side. In the second year the Fifth Avenue side will be renovated and in the third year the 58th and 59th Street sides.

SOMETIMES, President Bush's cadence seems a bit off. In 1989, as change swept the Continent, the President declined to visit Eastern Europe. Now, as Mr. Bush finally visits the region, arriving in Prague on the first anniversary of Czechoslovakia's democratic revolution, Eastern Europe is no longer the center-ring attraction.