"There's something in you that craves expression, and it must come out," said Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, 71, explaining his late blooming career as a Capitol Records star. The Senator's first two LP exercises in throbbing recitative, Gallant Men and Man Is Not Alone, have sold 600,000 copies, and he has now finished cutting a third, in which he intones such golden oldies as A Visit from St. Nicholas and Silent Night while a 22-man orchestra and ten-man choir make moan in the background. As for that craving, it often finds outlet in his campaign to make the marigold the national flower, though Ev confessed that he had been nursing his thespian urgings for years, had in fact decided on a stage career when he was just a tad but "my mother wouldn't let me."

With a flick of one suety hip, the most sensational new basquetbolista in the hemisphere feinted his opponent out of his socks and drove in for the layup. Yes, fans, Fidel Castro, 39, has decided to add basketball to a list of athletic achievements that already includes a lifetime baseball batting average of 1.000. El Artillero (The Gunner, as he is called by any Havana paper with its wits about it) drilled in 40 points in his first try at basquetbol, graciously let it be known afterward that 1) no overall score was kept, and 2) his team won by seven points.

The maitre d' at San Francisco's Trader Vic's restaurant was about to shut down for the night when somebody came up and said: "There's a little girl outside asking for something to eat." It was a pretty cute surprise when he went out and found British Prima Ballerina Margot Fonteyn, 48, along with Partner Rudolf Nureyev, 28, and seven friends, all clamoring for some rum and Chinese goodies after a performance of the touring Royal Ballet. Two hours later, the merrymakers danced off into the night--and now it was the San Francisco police department's turn to be surprised. At 3 a.m. cops answered a call to turn off a noisy hippie party at a pad in Haight-Ashbury, chased the gang up to the rooftops, and beheld Rudi lying prone among the hippies on one roof, Dame Margot tucked away on an adjoining rooftop. That sort of ended the party, except for a trip to the station house, where Rudi screamed "You are all children!" as the photographers came swarming around--then back to work the next night, dancing Paradise Lost.

Despite vigorous denials by the Kennedy family, medical detectives have long suspected that John F. Kennedy suffered from Addison's disease, a gradual atrophy of the adrenal glands that in its milder stages can be contained by cortisone (which Kennedy took), but in more advanced cases can result in low resistance to infection, chronic backache and kidney failure. Now a University of Kansas pathologist, Dr. John Nichols, 46, has concluded in the A.M.A. Journal that Kennedy did have it, that an infection stemming from it almost killed him after his spinal operation in 1954. Nichols bases his conclusion on an article he came across in the November 1955 Archives of Surgery, in which J.F.K.'s surgeon, Dr. James A. Nicholas, describes his preparations for an "Addisonian crisis" in an unnamed 37-year-old man who underwent spinal surgery at Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery on Oct. 21, 1954--the same day and the same hospital where 37-year-old John Kennedy underwent the same operation.

It started off as a name for Beatle George Harrison's hairdo, became a discotheque, and will now exfoliate as a business empire. At least Sybil Burton Christopher, 38, major stockholder and drawing card of Manhattan's bon-ton discotheque Arthur, is making an Arthur franchise available to anyone with $50,000 and a suitably overcrowded location. Sybil expects to have spawned seven to ten little Arthurs within a year, will supply suggestions for layout and decor, publicity and the presence of such celebrities as herself and Friend Roddy McDowall at openings. No "small towns" need apply. Would-be Arthurians in Asbury Park, N.J. (pop. 17,800), and Buffalo (pop. 481,453) have already been turned down.

A veritable "enemy of Greek tourism," concluded Greece's ever-watchful military dictatorship when they heard some of the things Actress Melina Mercouri, 41, star of Broadway's Illya Darling, was saying about her homeland--like advising folks not to visit Greece until the soldiers go away. Therefore, Brigadier General Stylianos Patakos solemnly announced in Athens that the regime was stripping Melina of her Greek citizenship and all her property as well. "I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek," snorted Melina. "Patakos was born a fascist and will die a fascist. If he wants to make me a Joan of Arc, that is his privilege."

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