January 1, 1995

Quite simply, 1994 was a bazaar of the bizarre. Has there ever been anything in sports so bizarre as no World Series, no September baseball? Or odious threats of "replacement players" in major league uniforms next season because of a labor dispute that has lasted longer than the abbreviated season?

IT is known officially as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. And the first building, now under construction in downtown Newark, is indeed that. But considering the long-range plans, it might as well be called the New Jersey Office, Shopping, Dining and Performing Arts Center. Ultimately, less than one-third of the floor area to be built on the site, or about 400,000 square feet, would be devoted to performances or subsidiary commercial uses. The rest of the space, 1 million square feet, would be in two large office towers across Center Street, on land controlled by the arts center.

HEATHER WATTS SITS AT A rear table in the restaurant near Lincoln Center that used to be the Ginger Man, sipping white wine, lighting one of the cigarettes she keeps intending to give up and talking about her impending retirement. Twenty-four years have passed since Ms. Watts joined the New York City Ballet and came to be one of the few ballerinas well known outside the rarefied world of dance, one who seemed to embody the vitality and contradictions of a contemporary woman.

For the country's talk radio hosts, about 70 percent of whom call themselves conservative, the first signs of a bear market are starting to emerge. Gone is Joycelyn Elders, the Surgeon General labeled "the condom queen" by many a drive-time talk jock. Ditto Tom Foley and Dan Rostenkowski, the term-limits poster boys of the old Democratic Congress.

BURSTING a speculative bubble is easy for a central banker. Doing so without killing a lot of innocent bystanders is not. Alan Greenspan may have accomplished the task. The operative phrase is "a lot," and there are many people who would disagree with it. Certainly there were many speculators who suffered greatly as a result of the Federal Reserve's tightening of credit, including some who did not know they were speculating. But the Fed managed to unwind huge speculation on interest rates with only minimal damage to the stock market and the economy.

"BUT officer, the school Christmas pageant starts in 10 minutes, and my daughter forgot her halo." This excuse for going 45 in a 30-mile-an-hour zone is unlikely to make much headway if you are driving, say, a swoopy new Camaro. But it might work if you are behind the wheel of a Plymouth Voyager, with the built-in infant seat and Raffi tapes in the cassette player. But, then, hardly anyone would be tempted to speed in a mini-van.

WHEN AMERICA'S 19th century art critics took it upon themselves to rank types of art, portraiture ended up at the bottom. Landscape painting had the depiction of the Romantic sublime and Manifest Destiny to recommend it. Still life coaxed nature into pretty arrangements loaded with symbolism. Genre promoted nationalism and pious sentimentality; history painting maintained its scholarly snob appeal. But, as if an association with vanity weren't bad enough in portraiture, along came photography to challenge its role of recording the human visage. Despite a brief, brilliant comeback in the work of John Singer Sargent during the robber-baron decades and in Thomas Eakins's somber psychological realism, portraiture's reputation took further beatings from Cubism and other forms of modernist abstraction. Its low point coincided with the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in the 1950's and 60's. Next thing you knew, social types were commissioning their likegesses as Day-Glo silk-screens taken from Polaroids by a fellow in a blond wig.

DICK CAFFERY walks around the circular hallway, past the windows with the expansive view of a day unfolding outside, past people sitting in chairs, his back stooped, his eyes fixed on a point in front him. He walks all day at the care center where he lives, or sometimes he crawls, getting down on his hands and knees and making his way around the edge of a dining area. Then he stands and walks again. His wife of 35 years, Dolores Caffery, follows behind him. Every now and then, when she is talking, he stops walking for a moment and turns to look in her direction, his eyes cast down. She holds his face; looks directly into his eyes. "Hi, Dick," she says. "How are you? I'm right here."

A developer is to begin marketing a 70-unit town-house condominium project this spring that will rise on just 5 acres of its 35-acre parcel in White Plains. The rest will be a perimeter buffer zone. Robert Fuller, site-improvement manager for the developer, Toll Brothers of Huntington Valley, Pa., said that the open space -- including two ponds and a corridor of wetlands and trees -- would offer "privacy and views." The units are expected to be priced in the $400,000 range.

On the back of John C. Salvi 3d's black pickup was an oversized picture of an aborted fetus. It was a picture of Jesus Christ, Mr. Salvi told people. His neighbors and co-workers today described the 22-year-old suspect in abortion clinic shootings, who was a student at the Portsmouth Beauty School, as quiet and withdrawn. They knew little about him, they said, other than that he was deeply religious and wanted to be a hairdresser. Even law-enforcement officials said today that they knew little about his background, although they said that he did not appear to be connected to any anti-abortion groups.

IN the distant days of leaded gasoline, bias-ply tires and backyard grease monkeys, engines produced tremendous horsepower while combusting great quantities of fuel. Engine-displacement figures were given in cubic inches -- 302, 327, 350 and 454, to name a few. Bigger was better, and bragging rights rose in proportion to engine displacement. The Beach Boys melodically urged a big-block Chevy to "Giddyap, Giddyap, 409," helping to assure America's lust for horsepower a place in popular culture.

PATTI E. JENSEN of Long Beach has been a waitress in the executive suites that overlook the action at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum for 11 years. The hockey lockout has not only robbed Islanders' fans of their game, but it has also cost her $8,000 in salary and tips, she said. Ms. Jensen, 44, said she and her husband, Stanley, an airline mechanic, had depended on her income to help them meet household expenses. The loss has meant that her son, a freshman at Kent State University in Ohio, went to work at a fast-food restaurant instead of depending on her for a promised $250 a month.