August 19, 1998

When Samantha Reeves, a well-regarded amateur finding her way through her freshman season on the women's professional tennis circuit, wanted to hustle herself back into shape after sustaining an ankle injury late in 1997, she said she decided to experiment with a newfangled ''all-natural'' dietary supplement, apparently on the recommendation of a friend. The product promised to help her burn fat and build muscle, and it was readily available over the counter at health-food stores. It sounded like the answer to her prayers: a training and diet aid that would help her get fit fast and get back to the business of cracking the top 100 in women's tennis.

Prominent Democrats around the country, including some of President Clinton's most loyal supporters, starkly distanced themselves from the President today and expressed deep personal disappointment with his behavior, as well as political anxiety about the future. Many said they were particularly concerned about whether the Monica S. Lewinsky matter would impair Mr. Clinton's credibility and undermine his final two years in office. With the midterm elections this fall, they were worried, as well, that the President's acknowledgment would upend the political terrain in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

Even on a warm, sunny August day, the view of Two Lights Lighthouse here is, well, Hopperesque. Scenic but somehow forlorn, frozen in a long-ago time, the lighthouse evokes the sense of isolation inherent in so many Edward Hopper paintings. Little wonder that ''Lighthouse at Two Lights,'' one of three major paintings and several watercolors he made of the scene, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was made into a popular museum poster and was reproduced on the six-cent postage stamp marking Maine's sesquicentennial as a state in 1970. ''Two Lights was a symbol of the solitary individual that faced isolation in the industrial world,'' says Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns two of the watercolors (and the Hopper estate). ''It was also symbolic of the vulnerability of that way of life.''

THE cobblestone streets around Jessie Nebraska Gifford's Vinegar Hill home are a no man's land of truckers and intrepid artists -- of both the visual and stickup kind. This little neighborhood, bordered by housing projects, the waterfront and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, makes her feel isolated sometimes. But at least she had the company of several nude men waiting to be framed. It was no setup. Seriously. Ms. Gifford is a painter who spent her summer finishing a five-paneled portrait titled ''Some Nude Men Working.'' Her subjects were friends and artists who posed for her in their ''Full Monty'' glory. Actually, they had posed a few years back for her camera, giving her a set of prints that she used for an earlier show titled ''Seven Nude Men Think About Architecture.''

For the second time in a year, mutual funds that invest in emerging markets have been snared in a foreign financial crisis. And once again, their managers are trying to value securities for which there is little or, in some cases, no real market. This time, Russian securities are at issue. So far, the Russian Government has provided almost no information to help portfolio managers gauge how much their investments are worth.