June 5, 1994

I'M tired. You're tired. We're all tired. I was sitting at the word processor Saturday at noon, trying to make sense of these playoffs. Imagine how exhausted the Knicks and the Pacers (and the Rangers and the Canucks) must be. My friend Mike From Cairo, who runs the newsstand down at the train station, is a huge Knicks fan. Lately, he has been laughing at me because his team keeps plodding along -- April, May, June -- making me plod along with them. He laughed at me Saturday morning, when I showed up off the dawn flight from Indianapolis.

SPLENDID spring weather on the heels of a brutal winter is being matched on Long Island by a thaw in an economic deep-freeze. Although serious problems remain the region has seen a resurgence in home buying, higher sales-tax receipts and a couple of months of increasing confidence among consumers and business owners. But increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve System are threatening to douse a revival on Long Island that experts say remains tentative at best.

SATURDAY is supposed to be a day off from school. But on a recent Saturday, students eagerly filled the Longfellow School in Bridgeport for an extra half-day session to brush up on their learning skills. A science teacher, Mary Council, worked with three seventh-grade girls on a weekend homework assignment, an essay on what makes a good teacher. "You're well educated," offered one student.

FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE THERE IS NO SUCH thing as bad publicity, ask Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes or Tim Miller. On June 30, 1990, with the hysteria engulfing the National Endowment for the Arts (for its financial support of what was deemed obscene art) at its peak, these four performance artists received upsetting news. Their grants from the endowment, considered a sure thing since the agency's peer review panel had already approved them, were denied. The quartet soon became known as the N.E.A. Four. Pilloried in the press and on the Congressional floor, they were labeled perverts and pornographers, usually by people who had never seen their work. Their notoriety led to canceled performances and lost income, abusive phone calls, hate mail and even death threats.

FOR underwriters, the bad old days are back. It was only a few months ago, before Alan Greenspan started doing his act, that underwriters were basking in the riches of underwriting fees. Now, the monthly volume of new equity and debt issues has fallen to under $40 billion, less than a third of its peak level of $122 billion set last June, and is at the lowest level since January 1991, just before the success of the Gulf War helped set off the bull market.