June 26, 1994

WANTED: CHARMING, erudite executive with the diplomatic skills of a foreign service officer, the financial skills of an investment banker and the social skills of a 1950's wife. Position requires the academic background of a serious scholar, with the willingness to let most of this knowledge go unused in favor of poring over budgets and staffing issues. Long hours, low pay and the chance to see your name in the papers every time you make even the slightest wrong move. The job, of course, is running an art museum. Right now 13 museums in the United States are looking for directors, including three of the most prestigious: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Running any of them would seem like a dream job. But as art museums have evolved into huge institutions playing host to millions, the job has become more a matter of politics than of art. Who runs art museums may seem like a matter of little concern to art lovers. But it gets to the very heart of the question of what museums should be. And like so many other nonprofit cultural institutions, museums are struggling over the question of whether they should turn their fate over to professional managers or keep it in the hands of the specialists who have been in charge until now.

One of them uses, albeit grudgingly, a pink towel to wipe away the mist that sometimes settles on her glasses as she tries to make this final march at Wimbledon go the distance. The other uses a green towel like an eraser, wiping away the years that have been less than glorious since he took this Grand Slam event by storm at age 17. Neither of them appears likely to throw in the towel anytime soon: The possibility of giving their respective careers a kick-start by winning another Wimbledon title seems to have bewitched them both.

The popular image of home buyers in the New York region has long featured married couples. Such a stereotype, however, is becoming far less valid. A survey of 856 owners and renters conducted this spring by the Dime Savings Bank in Manhattan showed that unmarried households bought 35 percent of the homes sold in the metropolitan area in the previous 12 months, up from 20 percent in a 1992 study.

If you don't recognize the name, Alexi Lalas, you will recognize the hair. Orange as a blow-dried sunset. A cascading tangle of curls. The man looks like a heavy metal Ronald McDonald. A goatee hangs from his chin like a whisk broom. Any longer, it would need its own grounds crew. "I have employed a full-time staff of highly trained professionals to keep it clean," Lalas joked on a recent afternoon at the Rose Bowl, where the United States will face Romania on Sunday in the World Cup with a chance to win its group.

IT is the 11th hour for Westchester Wildlife. The nonprofit organization, based at the Kitchawan Preserve here, has been rescuing and rehabilitating wild mammals, birds and reptiles in Westchester and beyond for four years. But now, said Barry Rothfuss, its founder and chief of operations, the organization has run out of the space and money crucial to its continued existence.