But as long as trains keep runnin'

a restless man I'll be,

and there're a few more lonesome

cities

that I've yet to see.

Versifier Rod McKuen, 41, has returned to the kind of drifting blue-collar work that he used to do before he hit the treacle trail in 1966 with Stanyan Street and made his first million. To research a book he plans to write about "what people are doing in America," Rod is back driving cabs, grooming horses, baking cookies and selling ice cream in the streets. Hardly anybody has recognized him so far. But when Rod was pumping gas at a station recently in Miami, a woman drew up in a blue compact and gasped: "You can't be." "I'm not," agreed Rod. "I didn't think so," she said, and drove away in a happy daze.

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Come next New Year's Day, there will be no more elegant Joe Alsop prose three times a week to infuriate, invigorate and inspire newspaper readers. Last week Joe, 63, announced that he will stop writing his 37-year-old syndicated column and work on a two-volume book on art collecting and taste. To those who deplored the loss of a literate conservative--if sometimes outrageous--columnist, Joe was testy: "I'm an old New Dealer," he said. "I've been for progressive legislation all my life." Then he added: "But I've been hard-headed on foreign affairs," alluding to his superhawk loyalist stand on Viet Nam and President Nixon. None of the fire--or ire--has left Joe's writing since the death earlier this year of his younger brother and former partner Stewart. Still, Alsop admits that he is tired. "The reporter's trade is for young men," he said. "The great Americans of the postwar period," he wrote in a column announcing his retirement, "were the leaders I followed. Theirs were the ideas I shared (and still share). But all that is over now ... and we have to find new bearings." Later he offered a typically gloomy prognosis for the future of print journalism: "The written word is going out."

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It was sort of a floating court of the Medici. When the steamer Renaissance began a leisurely 14-day croisiere de musique off the Cote d'Azur, it had on board a classic boatload of cash and culture. Some 200 music lovers paid up to $4,500 to glide around the Mediterranean to the personal accompaniment of the likes of Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Violinist Alexander Schneider, Flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and Dancer Rudi Nureyev. Each day the geniuses would entertain the guests. Rostropovich, who left Russia on a two-year visa last May, was the star both on and off stage. He hammed it up on the ship's piano clad in a bathrobe, and when the ship arrived in Istanbul, he went ashore and bought a load of toy instruments, passed them out to his fellow musicians and only then agreed to conduct Haydn's Toy Symphony.

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A wasp may look at Wallis. It was a warm afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne so the Duchess of Windsor, 78, decided to sit and read in her garden. But no sooner had the footman brought her a modest tea tray ("You can never be too thin or too rich," Wallis once explained), than she heard the threatening buzz of a hymenopterous insect. The duchess first waved a regal arm, then tried fending it off with a brisk slap of her napkin. Next she took the end of her stole and essayed a steady backhanded slash. Finally, she had to resort to that vulgar necessity, insect spray. With the offending wasp shot down in fumes, Wallis went back to her book. And peeping Photographer Roland Schoor, who had captured this piquant moment, picked up his camera and buzzed off.

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Rome's once dolce, now dolorosa vita was never like this. To honor visiting Italian President Giovanni Leone and his sleekly chic wife Vittoria, President Jerry Ford threw his third big party in six weeks. After dinner, he opened the dancing by briskly foxtrotting Vittoria round the floor while some mapless Marines played April in Paris. "Molto bene!" cried Vittoria, delivering a favorable verdict on Jerry's dancing. "He says he doesn't deserve all the credit," she confided, "and that his wife taught him." Ford had already told the Leones about his other sport, swimming, and during a tour of the White House, he showed them where his new swimming pool will be--right on the site of the kennels where Lyndon Johnson kept his beagles.

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