October 31, 1993

MAKING IT WORK 3 Each night, Vera Kitt and six fellow travelers board an outcast train. Their mission: to clean the subway tracks. NEW YORKERS & CO. 4 Amid loud music and cheap beer, a bar owner prowls his empire, where everyone knows his name. PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD 15 North Carolina in Gramercy Park; the Far East in Flushing Meadows. MOVIE CLOCK 16 What's showing at the local movie houses, today through Thursday. GOOD EATING 18 Ethnic Pleasures, Elmhurst to Astoria: when you crave a good parrillada, a tasty taramosalata, or a vibrant hummus. SOAPBOX 21 Four ordinary New Yorkers discuss the mayoral candidates, the issues and life in the city. Plus, "Eye of the Beholder."

A little song, a little dance, a little pesto on your pants. It is lunch time at Frank's Pizza in Port Washington, where the zingers are as pungent and plentiful as the garlic. Although it serves arguably the best pizzeria food in town, there is more to Frank's than meets the eye or the palate.

GEORGE M. C. FISHER flunked one major test of chief executive leadership last week: that of managing a graceful transition of power. Motorola Inc., its customers and competitors, and Wall Street were all stunned by the announcement Wednesday that the 52-year-old scientist-turned-manager was leaving the prospering electronics giant immediately to take over the helm at the embattled Eastman Kodak Company. Mr. Fisher left Motorola with a number of high-stakes initiatives hanging fire. The company's PowerPC microprocessor, jointly developed with I.B.M. and Apple Computer at a cost of over $1 billion to challenge the Intel Corporation's hammerlock on microchips for personal computers, is just beginning production. Iridium, its plan to build and launch 66 satellites to create a telephone network in the sky, is in its formative stages. And Motorola is wrestling with the need in most of its businesses to become more global, more deeply involved in consumer markets and more skilled in software design.

JOE the Jet fan had come home too late once too often. His roommate, Elizabeth, was steaming. "I've had enough!" she roared. "I'm throwing you out of this house right this minute."

BRINGING a final cease-fire to an election season marked by fiercely fought negative campaigns, Long Island voters will cast ballots on Tuesday to fill top elected positions and dozens of lesser posts in Nassau and Suffolk. If past patterns hold, only about half of registered voters will go to the polls in a year when no Federal or statewide offices are at stake. Polls in both counties will be open from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M.

In designing an addition to the Museum of the City of New York, James Stewart Polshek & Partners found itself in a contextual sandwich. To the west, on Fifth Avenue, was the original museum, a neo-Georgian structure with red bricks and pediments. To the east, running from 103d to 104th Streets, was the Patrick Henry Preparatory School, a gabled and yellow-brick building modeled on a French Renaissance town hall. Rather than mimic the older buildings, Mr. Polshek's office produced a spare and straightforward modern composition. "We didn't attempt to be cute," he said. "We have not replicated quoins or punched windows. But we used the same brick and the same marble trim in ways that speak to the next century rather than the past century." The point, Mr. Polshek said, was to express the expanding mission of the museum, where exhibitions are to focus on the future of the city, as well as its past.

"ALL the media knows is that all skinheads are racist, and that bothers me," said Mars T., a 24-year-old who works for a pesticide company in Passaic County and plays in a heavy-metal band. "It isn't true. There are different kinds of skinheads with different beliefs, and we shouldn't all be labeled as the same. When you're younger, you're more idealistic and anarchistic." Mars, who agreed to talk to a reporter only if his last name was not used, is a Navy veteran who said he believed in the flag and the Constitution. And he saw no apparent contradiction in his also believing that recent immigrants pose a threat to this country, particularly its white citizens, who he fears are at risk of becoming a minority.

YOU are sailing around the loop in Central Park on your new Rollerblades when suddenly your skate catches in a pothole -- or was it some horse droppings -- and you are catapulted through the air. @$#%&¦$ X¦&! The world goes black. The next thing you know, you open your eyes to find yourself flat on your back, with two people in green uniforms sliding you into a dark, gadget-filled van. You try to sit up but discover that an array of thick orange belts have you pinned to a wooden board. You open your mouth to yell but find that your neck is bound in some stiff plastic contraption that is cradling your chin and a clear plastic mask covers your mouth.

TAKE the highest law-enforcement officials on Long Island and put them on trial. Charge them with failure to do their duty and for temperaments that make them unfit to serve. Then let the people be the judge. In elections for district attorneys in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, that appears to be the approach of two Democratic challengers who face long odds in trying to unseat far better known Republican incumbents.

Nuclear disarmament begins at a conference table in Moscow, Geneva or Washington. But it is carried out in places like a circular concrete cell buried in the dusty soil of the Texas Panhandle, where spheres of high explosives are pried from their cores of plutonium, rendering a bomb of almost unimaginable power into a collection of merely hazardous ingredients. Dismantling nuclear warheads may be infinitely better than detonating them, but the job is tricky. In addition to being radioactive, plutonium is highly toxic and can burn on contact with air, and most of the explosives are old and prone to detonate with heat or shock.

The most remarkable moment in "Frank Sinatra Duets," the new album that returns the 77-year-old singer to the mainstream of popular music with a startling force and authority, is a rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" in which the Chairman of the Board is joined by Bono of U2. After Mr. Sinatra punches out the opening phrases of Cole Porter's standard, Bono slips into the song, crooning the words, "so deep in my heart, you're really a part of me," in a soft, sexy growl. From here, the two singers, who sound as though they are sitting elbow to elbow in a bar comparing notes about love and life, trade the song back and forth, with the 33-year-old Irish rock star occasionally drawing back to interpolate high, plaintive vocal doodles around his companion's gruff assertions.

HOWARD JOHNSON is a lonely llama but the teachers and students who keep him at the regional Agriscience Technology Center at Trumbull High School don't lack for advice to the lovelorn. When the llama's problem became known this year, many calls and letters were received from llama breeders and others on the pros and cons of obtaining him a mate. "We even got a fax," an animal science teacher, Kathi Simmeth, said. One Trumbull resident gave $500 to the cause.