September 25, 1994

THEY CAME FROM ALL OVER THE country in the 1930's to study and perform with a woman they knew little of, a woman whose dances were so starkly geometric that wags speculated that if she gave birth it would be to a cube. The woman was Martha Graham. The dancers were part of an early Graham company referred to simply as the Group. Together they worked long hours filled with exaltation and despair, love and anger and, most of all, the sense that something new and important was being done. Dance in America was growing and changing. Martha Graham was in the vanguard of that change with dances that were, like her, impossible to ignore. Some of those dances will be performed in "Radical Graham," a two-week season of performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company that opens the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday. The event, which marks the centennial anniversary of Graham's birth, includes dances from the 1920's to 1958 and a few more recent pieces.

ELIZABETH ROBEAR of Stratford is a busy lawyer handling litigation cases, a woman who has no time for red, stinging, watery eyes, a runny nose, a sinus headache, total stuffiness or sleepless nights. But lately that's what she has had and, armed with nose spray, medication and plenty of tissues, she has been trying to get through what some experts are calling one of the worst allergy seasons in Connecticut in years. "I don't let it stop me in my tracks, but it does make everything difficult," Ms. Robear said. "This is worse than any other year for my allergies."

THESE are tales from the school-choice wars in New York City, and they often are not pretty. So withering is the competition that the battle starts now for the school year that begins 12 months hence; so high are the stakes -- a good public education in a long-suffering system -- that many parents, unable or unwilling to pay for private school, feel that to lose is to be forced to leave New York. Many others, who can't afford to leave even if they yearn to, end up hopelessly heartbroken. For two months last fall, Gloria Jacobs plunged into the dizzying search for a junior high school for her daughter, Alexa. She talked to dozens of parents. She signed up for tours of seven schools, slipping away for a couple of hours each week from her editing job at Ms. magazine. At the same time, she was searching for a nursing home for her father.

THE thousands of American troops who landed in Haiti without resistance last week stepped straight from their airplanes, ships and helicopters into a conflict that bears no resemblance to the one for which they had trained. They have been inserted into a society that has been at war with itself from the moment it became an independent state, and this makes them combatants in a struggle more complicated and perilous than an invasion.

It did not seem odd to Mike Keenan to be at Kiel Center in downtown St. Louis, rather than Madison Square Garden, to be talking about Brett Hull, rather than Mark Messier. Keenan had 60 days to shake away those cobwebs, 60 days in hockey exile, most spent at his lakeside cottage in Ontario preparing for his new job. He had time to rent a new apartment, get furniture delivered, change his driver's license, to reflect his new state.

LONG ISLAND SOUND will shimmer in the spotlight tomorrow, when Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. of Connecticut and the Federal Environmental Protection Administrator, Carol M. Browner, meet in the Bronx to sign an agreement to restore the 8,000-year-old estuary. As the two states and the Federal Government promise to support a cleanup plan that could cost billions of dollars, other plans to protect estuaries and wetlands along the South Shore and in the bays and creeks of the Peconic system are also progressing.

His peacemaking exploits in Haiti have reminded Republicans that Colin L. Powell is a hot political property. To tell the truth, they needed no reminding; they can read the polls. Nor do they expect an early statement of interest in the 1996 campaign from the retired general. What they long for, what they think they deserve, is some sign, however encoded, that he actually is a Republican.

"YOU read 2014 and tell me what it means, O.K.?" It was nearing the end of a long conversation in the corner office of Harvey R. Miller, and the famously combative chief of the bankruptcy department at the New York law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges was straining to maintain a practiced calm.

Is Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein 2d's "Show Boat" the great American musical? It is certainly our unique one, if only because of its epic narrative of five couples whose lives intertwine over 40 years. "Show Boat" is not only unique but basic, rooting its action in the American heartland, from Natchez, Miss., up the nation's essential watercourse to Chicago. "Show Boat" has seniority too: it is by far the oldest of America's handful of insistently revived classics, as well as being the first "adult" musical, treating race relations and dysfunctional marriage. "Show Boat" is all-popular, mainly because of the amazingly rich score that seems to grow organically out of "Ol' Man River," surely the great American musical number, at once hymn, folk song and political act. "Show Boat" is panoramic, a backstager that plays as a family chronicle, a study in the curative powers of art, and a cultural history.

IT used to be easy to figure out who should get custody of the children after a divorce. For most of history, fathers did. From the early years of this century until the 1970's, mothers did. But in the brave new world of changing sex roles, the advent of the working mother and the nurturing father, judges are often forced to decide between two loving parents, leaving a wake of heartache and bitterness. Several recent court rulings, among them the case of a Senate aide denied custody because a Washington judge deemed her more devoted to her career than her children, and a Michigan college student who lost custody because she put her daughter in a day care center, have terrified working mothers who feel they are being deemed unfit because they want careers. Their fear is matched only by the relief of fathers long convinced that judges denied them custody because they were men.

Behind in the polls and facing a crowd of angry, independent voters, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo let loose a blistering attack today on Senator George E. Pataki, accusing him of raising taxes as Mayor of Peekskill, achieving nothing in the Legislature and unseating the only Republican woman in the Senate. For his part, Mr. Pataki, appearing before the same crowd about a half hour after Mr. Cuomo left, seemed content to play the serene front-runner, and his treatment of the Governor was far more gentle than Mr. Cuomo had received from some disaffected constituents.

THE classic image of a building superintendent is the jack-of-all-trades handyman who can fix the plumbing, run the boiler and handle minor repairs -- the guy who would run down to the basement with a big wrench and twist the big bolt. Joseph Mazzucco is an example of the new breed -- the super supers, or, as they are increasing called, resident managers -- who are taking over in the larger luxury residential buildings.