May 8, 2005

OVER the last couple of years, three significant things have happened to me. First, I turned 30. Then I married. And friends and acquaintances stopped asking me about driving expensive sports cars and started posing a question that I found frustrating: ''What kind of compact S.U.V. should I get?'' While this may seem like a perfectly reasonable query, I have never enjoyed answering it. I don't much like S.U.V.'s outside of using them to transport other snowboarders and gear up a mountain, or to tow a boat, neither of which a compact S.U.V. does well. So I would fire back: ''Why do you want one? Wouldn't your needs be better served with a midsize sedan, or a hatchback, or a small station wagon, or a minivan, or . . .''

ON a sun-drenched morning two Augusts ago, I steadied a camera and motioned my aunt and uncle into the center of the frame. Behind them, I could see the six-story brick tenement at 1461 Boston Road in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx. I could see the narrow courtyard that led to Apartment 24, with the kitchen window open to grasp the summer breeze. I could see the toy store on the ground floor and the clothing store next door with the block letters on its striped awning bearing the words ''Cotton Frocks.'' When I developed the film a few days later, none of those things were visible. Although my aunt and uncle appeared, tan and smiling, behind them I could find no building, no stores, only a chain-link fence topped with razor wire and a weedy, pebbled lot.

WE seem to be living in apocalyptic times. On NBC's ''Revelations,'' Bill Pullman and Natascha McElhone seek signs of the End of Days. In the Senate, gray-haired eminences speak of the ''nuclear option.'' The doomsday theme is seeping into the normally circumspect world of economics. In April, Arjun Murti, a veteran analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, warned that oil could ''super-spike'' to $105 a barrel. And increasingly, economists are prophesying that the American economy as a whole may be sailing into choppy waters.

THE nowhere horse won, the Kansas City Royals of the Kentucky Derby, the 50-1 shot. These things do not happen in George Steinbrenner's baseball universe. He entrusted his would-be wonder horse to the New York-based trainer Nick Zito and watched his colt fade on the last turn, all the way to seventh. He watched Bellamy Road become as invisible as Steinbrenner was for most of the week and after the race.

PLUNKED down in front of an $18,000 mixing console, the two eighth-grade boys looked terrified. They had never run a sound board before, and suddenly here they were, one Monday last month, up in the balcony of the 900-seat auditorium at New Albany High School, desperately trying to tame the blinking, glowering, 40-channel behemoth. Reading dials and pushing slides, with a stage manager constantly calling cues in their earphones, they started to fumble and sweat as the cast of ''Into the Woods,'' way down below on the stage, went through a tech rehearsal. Nothing seemed to work right. Hideous feedback alternated with thunderous explosions each time a word began with P. Microphones came on in midsentence or while the actors were still offstage discussing homework. And there were only three days left until opening night. Though they couldn't quite feel it, the two hapless boys were far from alone. For in New Albany and beyond, high school theater -- that land of expressionistic face-painting and galumphing tap routines, that refuge of nerds and spazzes, directed by former nerds and spazzes in endless cycles of ''Annie'' and ''You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown'' -- has evolved into something far more elaborate. The facilities at New Albany include closed-circuit television monitors, 30 fly rails for raising and lowering set pieces, a large scene shop with its own loading bay. Forget cardboard sets and costumes made from sheets; New Albany's ''Beauty and the Beast'' last fall featured flying teenagers and motorized vehicles and cost $165,000.