February 25, 1996

IT is a biting-cold Friday morning in a small, overheated apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Eight-year-old Sheria Mattis pulls on a pair of blue jeans that she decorated the night before with multicolored Magic Markers and neon Band-Aids. On Fridays, her mother lets her wear whatever she wants to school. "You look beautiful," says her mother, Velma Stoner, stifling a smile as Sheria parades her outfit. But Ms. Stoner cannot help asking, "Why do you want to wear that?"

A COUPLE IN FORMAL WEDDING CLOTHES are sweeping joyfully out of a door in Amsterdam, in 1941, heading toward a waiting car. The camera then pans upward to show that many residents of the housing project are also taking pleasure in the sight of young love. For a fleeting instant, the film catches a glimpse of a 12-year-old girl leaning, almost dangerously, out a third-floor window, smiling down at the couple. It is a face now familiar from a dozen photographs -- the dark, wide eyes, the flip of dark hair, the barely contained enthusiasm. Then we see her suddenly turn inside to say something, perhaps responding to the stern call of a mother who doesn't want her to fall, or else to summon her more serious sister to share a glimpse of hope and love as Holland stands on the brink of hardship and horror. It is the only actual movie image we have of Anne Frank. And to see it, in the closing moments of Jon Blair's "Anne Frank Remembered," which opened on Friday and has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, is to realize that we have been missing something until now. We have only come to know Anne through still pictures. Every lifelike image we possess of her gestures, of her spirited sense of humor, of her infectious grin, has been manufactured in our imagination, aided by her diary. But there, in that sepia-tone, digitally clarified image of a passing instant at the end of the documentary, is a trace of Anne Frank as a live being. In her smile can be glimpsed the girl who wrote fairy tales and collected movie-star photos, before she was swallowed by darkness. It is an image that stands as a rebuke against all attempts to turn Anne Frank into an icon; it reminds us that her importance derives from minutely observed details rather than from grand principles and proclamations.

FORGET about the Renaissance. Never mind the Industrial Revolution or the founding of the world's great religions. "The Atlanta Olympic Games," Billy Payne booms out to his Chamber of Commerce dinner audience in Charlotte, N.C., "will be the greatest peacetime event in history." So who could begrudge Mr. Payne, president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, the $669,112 he earns a year, even if, apart from the chiefs of a few medical centers, he makes more than anybody else in the nonprofit field?

ALONE in the universe like an only child, the human race keeps dreaming of an imaginary playmate. Someone to share the anxieties and joys of growing up. Someone to share the blame. Someone to dispel the loneliness of the sandbox in a big world. So there came into being the once and future Martians. Once they were the little green men with death-ray weapons, enchanting and menacing. Now they are reduced in scientific imagination to putative microbes that may inhabit the planet's moist depths.

There was going to be a day like this, even at Massachusetts, where perfection suddenly became a standard. The Minutemen became the last major college basketball team to lose today when George Washington controlled every aspect of the game and held off a loud but ineffective UMass rally in an 86-76 victory. With Marcus Camby bumped and frustrated by the front line of the Colonials and Coach John Calipari ejected after receiving two first-half technical fouls, the top-ranked Minutemen endured the end of a 26-game winning streak. The defeat preserves the status of the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers as the last Division I men's team to complete an undefeated season.