January 11, 1995

When Andrew P. O'Rourke first ran for Westchester County executive in 1983, Vincent Natrella eagerly offered to serve on his campaign, marshaling volunteers and going door-to-door on his behalf. Several years later, Mr. Natrella rose to become chairman of the Westchester Conservative Party, and his endorsements of Mr. O'Rourke helped propel the Westchester Republican to re-election victories in 1989 and 1993.

EVERY man in the room is straightening his tie and squaring his shoulders. Forget the wives, the kids, the plates of steaming linguine. It's a Saturday afternoon on the Upper East Side at Gino Italian, where the sauces are as red as the wallpaper, and Gina Lollobrigida has just walked in, prompting the sort of pandemonium she did in the 1960's, back when her movies were banned in Burma and her surname wound up in a French dictionary as slang for "a landscape with a lot of hills." Mario Laviano, an owner of the restaurant, presses Miss Lollobrigida's right hand to his lips, overcome with nostalgia. "I once waited on her as a young man," he says, "and believe me: my plates, they shake."

EARLY winter is the best time to be in Paris. The tourists have gone home and Parisians joyfully reclaim their streets, strolling down the new, improved Champs-Elysees clutching spice cakes and chocolates. There may be a nip in the air, but the people who sit sipping aperitifs at the outdoor cafes don't seem to notice. The streets are clean and everybody -- or is this my imagination? -- seems to be smiling. Paris has always been my favorite city. The air smells delicious, and there is a great restaurant on almost every street. I love the beauty of the buildings and their human scale, the streets named for poets, the sense that there is history on every corner.

After a year of staggering losses and management turmoil in its movie business, the Sony Corporation of Japan has begun overhauling its studio operations to prove that it can indeed make money in Hollywood. And one of the first steps has been to shift much of the oversight of the business out of Southern California and into New York under the direction of Jeff Sagansky, the former president of CBS Entertainment whom Sony hired four months ago.

The consumer electronics industry is racing toward a technical standard for a new generation of silvery disks that could become a universal storage medium for the information age. And yet, even though an industry decision is expected by the end of the month, no one knows which of two competing technologies will be adopted.