October 23, 1994

Around the New York region, candidates for Congress are trying to show how little they have been touched by Potomac fever.

WINCHELL Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. By Neal Gabler. Illustrated. 681 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

THE rage kicks in when you least expect it. You think you're fine. You can do without baseball. You have a life. Then with absolutely no warning, reality kicks you right in the backside. The dirty so-and-sos have killed the World Series. No Country Slaughter steaming from first with the winning run. No Babe Ruth taunting the Cubs and hitting one over the wall. No Bob Gibson glowering in the shadows. No Bill Mazeroski heading for home with all of Pittsburgh about to climb on his back. No World Series. Just twitchy Bud and rigid Don. Just rage.

IN a few weeks, or perhaps days, the Long Island Lighting Company board will decide whether to support Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's proposal for a $9 billion state buyout. The chairman, Dr. William J. Catacosinos, and a majority of the 12 directors could agree that the heavy burden of debt, high electric rates and competitive forces that have apparently hurt the stock price make Mr. Cuomo's offer too good to refuse.

On Feb. 27, 1991, President Bush and his senior advisers assembled in the Oval Office to make what has turned out to be a pivotal decision of the Persian Gulf war: when to stop attacking Iraq's fleeing army. Seated at his customary white chair near the fireplace, Mr. Bush was worried that the reports of carnage in Kuwait could turn a crushing military victory into a public relations defeat.

HE Family and Medical Leave Act was supposed to transform American business, making it better for families or worse for companies, depending on which lawmaker had the floor. Instead, more than a year after the measure went into effect, companies in Westchester and experts nationwide said they have seen little impact, although one Westchester agency is involved in a current dispute.

On the streets of Harlem, amid the maze of shouting pickets, besieged merchants, confused shoppers and curious residents, the Giuliani administration's move last week to oust street vendors from the area's busiest thoroughfare is generating passions unseen in years. It has also revealed deep divisions over whether the vendors' removal has left Harlem better off. It is a question complicated by a number of factors. Foremost among them has been displaced vendors' continued picketing of stores on 125th Street, urging shoppers to boycott businesses not owned by black merchants. And with some merchants saying that their already-fragile businesses are beginning to feel the impact of the picketing and vendors saying they have effectively lost their jobs, there is no unanimity of opinion in Harlem.

Led by three aggressive, conservative newcomers, Republicans appear poised for significant gains in races for governor, with candidates ahead or in tight races in the nation's eight biggest and most politically important states. The Democratic Governors in three of the states are slightly behind or dead even in most polls, facing three inexperienced challengers. In New York, State Senator George Pataki is giving Gov. Mario M. Cuomo the race of his career, while President George Bush's eldest son, George W., seeks to unseat Gov. Ann W. Richards in Texas. Another Bush son, Jeb, is leading Gov. Lawton Chiles in Florida. [ Page 18. ]

AS strains of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" wafted over the placid surface of Long Island Sound on a flawless autumn afternoon, about 200 partygoers reminisced about a time and place long gone but still remembered in vivid, passionate detail. The graduates of the Edison Vocational and Technical High School in Mount Vernon came to the Glen Island Casino last Sunday for an elegiac celebration of an institution -- and a kinder, less complicated way of life -- that ceased to exist more than 30 years ago.

THE caravan of grease, bad music and funky fibers winds through all the boroughs, like the Marathon, but sometimes I feel as though it is following me, clogging my streets with vans from Connecticut, choking my air with the stink of last week's sausages. There are people who love street fairs, although I'm sure I've never hugged one, people who think that street fairs are a small price to pay for easy access to 20-pound sweaters, Barbie stickers, natural fruit shakes, tube sox, contact lens supplies, Farberware and the sounds of groups with names like Native Intelligence and the Andes Mountain Boys. It's street-fair season, and you hear the music even before you smell the frying fat or see the banner for the Avenue E Educational Charities Recycling Alliance's Harvest Festival. The music may sound unmelodic, but it is also arrhythmic, performed by five chunky, jolly men who are mostly blowing into wooden pipes carved by the gnarled hands of rain-forest craftsmen whose wives and daughters knitted the bulky sweaters being sold one block north. The musicians obviously have an agent, a producer and a contract, because another gnarled hand is waving a CD of their greatest hits, not including the one I imagine, "Dreamers of the Corn," a love song in which a Long Island couple at a West Side street fair are spattered by rancid boiling butter from a $2 roasted ear and in the process of cleaning their weekend black motorcycle jackets find out who they really are, suburbanites who should just stay home.

THE 1974 WORLD'S FAIR WAS HELD in Spokane, Wash., just 45 miles from the Spokane Indian Reservation, and included an American Indian exhibit, complete with traditional Indian dancing, arts and crafts, photographs, and an animatronic Indian chief. Much like the animatronic models of the Presidents in Disneyland, that generic Indian chief recited speeches given by great Indian leaders of the past. Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Chief Seattle's words were all reproduced with stirring, electronic accuracy. I was an 8-year-old Spokane-Coeur-d'Alene Indian boy who had never been to an Indian museum before, although I had been to Disneyland twice. That animatronic Indian chief fascinated me. As the rest of my family, along with a few other representatives of our tribe, danced for the tourists, I spent hours listening to that puppet chief talk, I memorized the speeches and entertained my family by reciting them word for word on our nightly drive back home to our reservation.

Refugees' Peril in Rwanda Reports are surfacing of abductions and killings in Rwanda, and concern has been expressed that some people might be abusing the powers of the new Government. Page 14. No Job Gains for Disabled After four years, the Americans With Disabilities Act has not led to an increase in the number of people with physical and mental impairments in the work force. Page 22. Gunshots Breed Speciality As hospitals in urban areas experience growing numbers of patients with gunshot wounds, many are developing a new breed of doctors to specialize in treating them. Page 32. Church Joins Catholics Upset that the Episcopal Church was not supporting their traditionalist views, a Texas congregation joined the Roman Catholics. Page 26. Kennedy Science Aide Dies Jerome B. Wiesner, an electrical engineer who was president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is dead at 79. Page 45.