March 6, 1994

THOUGH the tickets cost $1,000 and the invitation read "black tie," many men at the awards dinner of the Council of Fashion Designers of America at Lincoln Center last month interpreted the dress code liberally, not literally. Tommy Hilfiger wore a cashmere turtleneck under his tuxedo; James Truman, the editor in chief of Details, wore an iridescent shirt without a tie; Stephan Weiss wore a band-collared shirt by his wife, Donna Karan; Andre Balazs, the hotelier, wore a mandarin-collared jacket buttoned up to the neck. James Simpson, the theater director and husband of the actress Sigourney Weaver, wore a vest and open-collared shirt with his dinner jacket. Calvin Klein didn't wear a tie -- or a shirt. He wore an insouciant white silk scarf under his tuxedo, showing off a lot of skin.

Tonight's game began with blood streaming down the face of Adam Graves and with 16,297 Nassau Coliseum fans screaming support for either the Islanders or the Rangers in another chapter of the local hockey feud. It ended with Graves setting up the game-winning goal by Sergei Zubov, on the power play, with 63 seconds remaining to give the Rangers a 5-4 victory at the Coliseum, their first regular-season victory on Long Island since 1940.

IN the 1980's, when fiscal hedonism was running high and college graduates set their sights on million-dollar earnings, two young men longed for the years when people dreamed of righting injustices and changing the world for the better. The young men, Dominic C. Kulik and David Yaskulka, were operating a nonprofit educational organization they had founded as students at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., when they met Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the ice-cream manufacturers who started a trend in turning small, independent businesses into instruments for social change.

Billy Bigelow beats his wife. Billy Bigelow grew up on the wrong side of Nowhere. Michael Hayden adores his wife; he grew up in a house on a hill in the idyllic suburb of Westport, Conn. Yet their two worlds harmonize in Mr. Hayden's performance as Billy, Rodgers and Hammerstein's tortured bad boy, in Nicholas Hytner's revival of "Carousel." For all their differences, Mr. Hayden portrays Billy's boyish charm, his know-it-all toughness and his secret, painful self-doubt as if they were his own -- as in fact they were. "Billy's journey is from arrogance to having the pride beaten out of him," Mr. Hayden says. "I understand about that, the connection between his vulnerability and his violence. I know what it's like to be so gripped by fear that you can't reach out." The chaos that lurks under the picturesque village life in "Carousel," now in previews at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, where it is scheduled to open March 24, and the alcoholism and anger that drive Billy, are very familiar to the 30-year-old Mr. Hayden. His equally picturesque American childhood was all but wrecked by those same destructive forces.

AS soon as the Royals' new left fielder and leadoff hitter emerged from the batting cages, he heard voices. "Vince Coleman," a mother and her little daughter each called as they stood behind a chain-link fence. "Vince Coleman."