December 1, 1993

Scofflaws will no longer be able to hide behind diplomatic immunity, State Department and city officials said yesterday. The State Department, which had turned down numerous requests by New York City, has agreed to crack down on diplomatic scofflaws in the city by denying renewal of diplomatic registration plates to those countries that refuse to pay parking tickets.

In a pastoral letter issued to the 1.5 million parishioners in the Brooklyn Diocese, Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas V. Daily promised yesterday to reinforce both the Catholic character and the financial stability of the diocese's parochial school system. The primary mission of the parochial schools remains "the teaching of the Catholic religion," the bishop said, responding to concerns that Catholic education had been losing its sense of purpose as nuns disappeared from the classrooms and the numbers of non-Catholic students increased.

HOLLYWOOD isn't a forgiving place when it comes to failure. Barry Secunda, a longtime manager of comedians there, recently had to cancel a string of nightclub dates after his hot young stand-up performer signed a television contract. When club owners asked if he could suggest anyone to take the hot property's place, Mr. Secunda would answer, "Well, you could probably get Joe Piscopo." The line always got a laugh. At 42, Joe Piscopo is a little young to be a has-been, and he's far from destitute. But the fact remains that 10 years ago he was one of the big names in comedy, a co-star with Eddie Murphy on "Saturday Night Live" and in movies with Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, and today he's the butt of show-business jokes. What path has Joe Piscopo followed, and what mistakes has he made, that took him so precipitously from stardom to near-oblivion?

PERHAPS it was latent masochism, or maybe just foolhardy hubris. About a month ago I decided that after nine years spent in dining rooms as a restaurant critic for The New York Times, I was ready to return to the kitchen. Why not celebrate by inviting five top New York City chefs to my home for dinner? This time, in a twist on our previous roles, they would carry the notepads. The idea seemed like fun at first. But then I realized it had been nearly a decade since I cooked regularly. In that time, during which I dined out almost every day, I never even turned on the oven in my apartment. To say I was rusty is like saying all Mickey Mantle needs to do before rejoining the Yankee lineup is to run a few wind sprints.

COMMENTING on the close relationships that were said to exist some years ago between the editors of The New York Review of Books and the writers whose works they critiqued, someone suggested the magazine be called The New York Review of Each Other's Books. That's pretty much the way it is with wine books. Everyone knows everyone else. How much easier it must be in the venomous academic world. Embittered scholars lash out at each other in print, confident that they will never lay eyes on their victims.