Eight million people were invited to the blast; mercifully, only 35,000 of them could make it. Still, it was quite a party on Central Park Mall when New York City turned out for the season's first Guggenheim Memorial Concert. The band tooted out such swinging numbers as The New York Light Guards Quickstep and The New York Hippodrome March for the turn-of-the-century stomp. Then, too, there was a catchy little act by a couple of beblaz-ered vaudevillians, Mayor John Lindsay and Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, who went around tipping boater and bowler at each other. Hotcha!

The new moon rose over London's Albert Hall to cue in a loony howler called the Greater-Than-London Fire New Moon Carnival of Poetry. Some 2,000 shaggies and stringies in mod costume settled down for a cultural evening that began with a villanelle of squeals and grunts. The caterwauling doggerel went on, with the audience chanting a "Sound Mass"--"MUTAMA! MUTAMA! M'MUTA!"--and Actress Vanessa Redgrave, 29, whose benefit appearances in the past have included ban-the-bomb marches, standing up in Castro-style fatigues to sing Fidel's freedom song, Guantanamera. Before the moon was down, leonine Poet Robert Graves, 70, advised the kids on using drugs: "A real person needs nothing like that." Unnecessary advice, since most of the poetasters were already high on beer and left the hall in a shambles.

In the months before he shot himself to death in the summer of 1890, Vincent Van Gogh was in and out of the asylums at Aries and Saint-Remy. Released, he traveled to Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris and stayed at a cafe owned by a couple named Ravoux. There he painted a lucid portrait of the couple's 16-year-old daughter before he lapsed into the madness that took his life. Portrait de Mademoiselle Ravoux survived, was bought in 1921 for $20,000, along with two other Van Gogh works, by a sharp-eyed Pennsylvania clergyman named Theodore Pitcairn. Last week at Christie's in London, it was sold at auction to an anonymous collector for $441,000--the highest price ever paid for a Van Gogh. The proceeds will go to Pastor Pitcairn's Swedenborgian Lord's New Church in Bryn Athyn, Pa.

About a month ago, Lyndon Johnson went through an awfully hectic week, dashing about for more public appointments, ceremonies, speeches and meetings than reporters could remember in months. They were at a loss to account for it all until last week, when it came out that Writer Jim Bishop, 58, had chosen that period to poke around the White House gathering material for another of his Day books--this one A Day in the Life of President Johnson. The President put in a beautiful day. "He's a heckuva man," marveled Bishop. And, more to the point, "a heckuva producer!"

Suddenly last summer, the woman accused her husband of menacing her with a .38-cal. revolver and threatening to kill himself. A Dallas County justice of the peace patched up that fight by telling the husband, former Electronics Technician Kenneth Porter, to get the gun out of the house and go to church. The advice obviously took, for Mrs. Porter, 24, is now awaiting the birth of her third child (her first by Porter) at home in a Dallas suburb. Porter is out of work just now, but the baby bills should be paid promptly just the same. Mrs. Porter has netted about $100,000 so far in sympathetic donations and sales of the papers of her first husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

"We want dozens, as many as possible!" cried urbane Cory Grant, 62, after he became a father for the first time last February. No comment about that from his wife Dyan, 28, but Gary was still busting his buttons when little Jennifer turned four months old. He brought in a photographer to make some shots to show off to the world, then packed up the family for a trip to Bristol, England, to let his 89-year-old mother have a look at the little beauty.

Before sunset the first day, 2,500 tourists had swarmed past the brick garden wall that he had laid himself, the intricate rockeries and the stream that he had contrived, by means of pumps, to recirculate uphill. Then they wandered through the rooms of Chartwell, the manor house in Kent where Sir Winston Churchill happily wrote, painted, puttered and sometimes governed from 1922 onward. Bought in 1947 by friends and presented to the National Trust, Chartwell passed to the nation at his death early last year. Now, for four shillings, the public may visit the place where, as he wrote, "I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight."

For years it has been an unwritten rule, perfectly understandable although rather archaic, that the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra must not perform the works of German Composer Richard Wagner. Richard Strauss was verboten as well until 1953, when Violinist Jascha Heifetz played a Strauss sonata --a performance that later moved a zealot to clout him on the right wrist with an iron bar outside his hotel. Now the orchestra's directors have decided that "the time has come for a change . . . because of the paramount demands of freedom of art." So, presumably, Wagner and Strauss will now be heard in Israel--unless someone in charge heeds the sort of threat that came in last week: "We will not for give the destroyers of our people. Don't put us to a test."

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