What are George Washington's new false teeth made from? Hippopotamus tusks set in pink sealing wax.

What's the name of the song that Robert Burns has just written? It's called Auld Lang Syne.

Where are they planning to move the national capital? Many places are being urged, including Philadelphia, Peach Bottom, Pa., and even some empty farm lands along the Potomac.

But for the moment--that moment being Sept. 26, 1789--the capital is New York, and so this week Mayor Abraham Beame and the editors of TIME are inviting some 200 notables from the worlds of politics and publishing to a party at the mayor's 18th century residence, Gracie Mansion. The purpose: to celebrate the publication this week of TIME'S second special Bicentennial issue, "The New Nation," with George Washington on the cover.

Like last year's special issue on July 4, 1776, the George Washington issue is written entirely as though TIME reporters and writers had been covering the news of Sept. 26, 1789. What's so special about that week? A lot. It was the week in which Congress passed the Bill of Rights. Washington finished naming his first Cabinet, as well as the first Supreme Court. France was catching fire, with new reports on the fall of the Bastille. But TIME does not limit itself to politics. In September of 1789, Mozart has just been commissioned to write a comic opera (Cost Fan Tutte), and TIME'S Books section reviews a new book of poems, Songs of Innocence, by a young Englishman named William Blake.

Our 1776 issue, with 6 million copies distributed, is now a collector's item. It used TIME'S unique newsmagazine method to bring alive the start of the Bicentennial story. In 1789, we show how it all came out.

Not many writers are called away from a cover story by the awards committee of the Overseas Press Club of America. That happened to Associate Editor Mayo Mohs, who had to leave his typewriter, put on a dinner jacket and get to Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel where he was presented with the Madeline Dale Ross Award for writing "which demonstrates a concern for humanity"--specifically his cover story "Saints Among Us" (TIME, Dec. 29). He was soon back in his office writing this week's cover story on the divided Roman Catholic Church in America. A committed Catholic from St. Paul, Mohs graduated from Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he later received an M.A. in political science. "I've been observing turns in Catholic thinking for more than 30 years," says Mohs. "I'm not too worried about the crisis now because out of it will come a more mature and humanly free church."

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