The Talk of the Town The Rink by Charles McGrath. Talk story about the Wollman Rink, in Central Park, which finally reopened a week ago--after six years of delays, countless mechanical glitches and millions of dollars in cost overruns. The day had apparently started with some sort of official ice-warming ceremony, presided over by Mayor Koch and Donald...

A Reporter at Large THE SKIPPER AND THE DAM by Alex Shoumatoff. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the so-called Pawnee montane skipper, a rare butterfly and the possible construction of a dam for Denver's water supply in its lone habitat: the South Platte Canyon, southwest of Denver... Two separate population and distribution studies of the butterfly & dozens of other studies...

The Talk of the Town Golly by William McKibben. Talk story about Ricky Jay, a professional, magician. Writer sat in his Madison Ave. hotel room last month while Mr. Jay stood at the far end of the suite with a deck of cards in his hand. He winged them against the wall with great force. "Cards as Weapons" was...

Profiles THE SOUND OF A CELLO by John Lukacs. PROFILE of Hungarian writer, Gyula Krudy. He was not yet 18, in 1896, when he arrived in Budapest from a country town. Few people knew that Krudy would be the greatest prose writer of Hungary in the 20th cen. & one of the great writers of Europe. Few people outside...

Fiction More Grim News by George W. S. Trow. Parody about a reporter who spent 4 days living with Laverne Brattle, one of the estimated 23,000,000 women stranded at the vice-presidential level. She is Vice-President of Trespassing at a startup situation in the Middle West. They meet Sally, who is a vice-president at a Burger Hell...

Dancing Slow Dancing in the Living Room: Thanksgiving by Mary Stewart Hammond. Funny, the way the healing comes...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Centennial Comment by William McKibben. Comment about the US Constitution, the upcoming bicentennial celebration for it, and the Constitutional questions raised by the current Iranian arms deal scandal... What each powerful official of our government must decide-over&over-is that as much as he would like to do a particular thing & as...

The Talk of the Town Red Spot by Mark Singer. Talk story about the Red Spot Outdoor Slide Theatre, which resembles a drive-in theatre minus the cars, but not all that much. You go to the corner of Broadway and Spring Street. There, west of Broadway, after dark, illuminating the east wall of a building on Spring, is the...

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

The Theatre by Edith Oliver.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Fiction Reset by Frederick Barthelme. People at the office assumed that the narrator and Ann had been having an affair for the five years she'd been working for him. They hadn't, though they hung around together all day, every day, and they fought and bickered and made fun of each other the way husbands and...

Poetry Dust by Vickie Karp. We find it, a motionless rage, beneath the bed...