June 23, 1991

WELL, it had to happen sooner or later. The era of endearing Soviet bad behavior in America -- banging shoes, racing cars, flirting with movie stars, slugging down whisky, begging to go to Disneyland -- seems to be over. The pounding and yelling had a certain colorful charm that is missing from the new style of visiting Soviet leaders, who strive for the earnest and brisk demeanor of debaters in a high school civics class and engage in carefully planned moments of spontaneity.

As the founding figures of American dance are passing on and financial tightrope-walking is the order of the day for both ballet and modern-dance troupes, the question that commonly hangs in the air is whether dance companies can survive their creators. A more important question is very different -- namely, whether companies should survive their creators.

Government reports show that John H. Sununu is hardly alone when it comes to Federal officials who take privately financed trips. Page 14.

THE 13-year-old, the daughter of two lawyers, had been drinking for about four years when she showed up for gymnastics practice at her private school in Massachusetts, too drunk to perform. A 15-year-old boy told a juvenile court judge: "I'm not a problem drinker. I only have a six-pack of beer an evening." A 16-year-old regularly consumed enough vodka and beer to have hallucinations in her kitchen, seeing skeletons, knives and images she took for visions of Satan's realm. These are the children of alcohol, whose numbers have waxed and waned over the centuries, from the days when ancient Greeks worshiped Dionysus, the god of wine, to London's Gin Lane in the late 18th century, to America's suburban malls and fraternity houses today. They are the inheritors -- some would say the victims -- of the country's ambivalence about the intoxicant of the ages.

LOOKING deserted under a cloudy sky one recent early morning, Paterson, the state's third-largest city and one of its poorest, appeared to be a jumble of contrasts. A homeless man huddled for shelter in the shadow of a half-completed condominium project on the outskirts of town. Downtown, a block gutted by fire stood near the site where a new Federal courthouse is rising, along the path of a long-awaited link to Route 80. But many say the stretch of pavement is a road to nowhere, because a project to bring offices into the city's core has not yet been realized.