A Reporter at Large SHANGHAI BLUES by William Zinsser. REPORTER AT LARGE about the first live jazz performance in China. It came on June 2 when the American bassist and French horn-player Willie Ruff introduced himself and his partner, the pianist Dwike Mitchell to several hundred students & professors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In 1979...

Comment by Jervis Anderson. Obituary of Roy Wilkins, who died on Tues., Sept. 8, at age 80. He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1955 to 1977. In the fifties and sixties he helped to bring about some of the most dramatic improvements that black American life has undergone...

The Talk of the Town Mic and Bud by William Franzen. Talk story about Mic and Bud, the Bronx Zoo's two huge tortoises from the Aldabra Islands, off Madagascar. Writer thinks these two guys must have written, or thought about writing, the book on taking it easy. Details an hour in the tortoises' lives one Labor Day afternoon. Mic blinks, raises...

Profiles WE LIKE IT THAT WAY by Berton Roueche. PROFILE of Hope, Arkansas (pop. 10,290), the seat of Hempstead County, in the southwestern part of the state...

Books Half a Hero by Naomi Bliven.

Fiction Afloat by Ann Beattie. The narrator is spending the summer on a lake with her lover, Martin, and his daughter from his former marriage, Annie. Martin's ex-wife, Anita, is still a little in love with Martin, and each summer she gives a letter to Annie to take to him. Annie used to read...

The Sporting Scene FLYING FOR THE CUP by Wallace White. THE SPORTING SCENE about the 3rd annual American Cup International Hang Gliding Team Championship, which writer attended in October, 1980, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Six-man teams from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, and Brazil, competed in the 9-day event, which the United States won for the first...

Fiction Work by David Plante. Robert is an American who vacations in a small village in Italy. He and his lover, Alex, share a house there, as they do in America. Alex is a self-made man, and he is the stronger, more dominant man of the pair. Robert inherited his wealth, and his sympathies...

The Talk of the Town The Walkman by Lincoln Caplan. Talk story about the Walkman, a hand-sized high-fidelity tape player or radio connected by wires to a pair of high-quality foam-rubber headphones the size of half dollars. The Walkman was created by Sony, and introduced here two years ago, and in his travels recently, the writer...

The Theatre Off Broadway by Edith Oliver.

Musical Events Apollos' Son by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Masks by Mary D. Kierstead. Talk story about the vernissage of the Mask Montgomery Project, a plan to make life masks of the entire community of Montgomery, Vermont. The plan was the brainchild of a young woman named Maggie Sherman, a textile artist from Nashville, Tennessee married to a Vermonter. Tells about how funds for...

Dance Around Dusk by Mark Singer. Talk story about a group of young women who dance for beer money on 6th Ave. in the Village. Writer spotted them on the day of the power failure at the corner of Washington Place in front of a bar called McBell's. Describes what they wore and how they danced...

Poetry Grief Revisited by James Lewisohn. Offstage in the wings...