"I'm getting a little long in the tooth to be an ingenue," says Kathryn Crosby, 44. But Bing's widow finds acting a catharsis. "Twenty-four hours a day sounds about right," says Crosby, who made a dozen or so films before her marriage in 1957. This week she sets out on a nationwide, 65-city roadshow tour of the two-character Broadway hit Same Time, Next Year. Her role: Doris, a faithful adultress who for more than two decades has an annual meeting with the same lover. "If Betsy Palmer gets tired of playing Doris on Broadway, I'm available at the end of April," Crosby quips. If not, she hopes to get another role in London's West End. Is she scared? Well, yes, but that's nothing new. Says she: "Standing beside Bing Crosby on a stage with a microphone could make one a little nervous."

Clowning around with a few fey blades, Dorothy Hamill

can't help kicking up her skates in glee. "I love it," she bubbles about her stint with the Ice Capades. "Competition is just you and the record and the judges' marks," the Olympic gold-medal winner explains. "But an ice show is for entertainment, lots of glitter and fairy tale and fantasy." When her glitter days are over, Dorothy hopes to teach skating to blind and handicapped youngsters. "If they're blind, you hold their hand," she says. "Soon they're skating just like anyone else." Well, not like Dorothy.

Having a backyard ski slope gives Susan Blakely (The Towering Inferno) a lift. Installed in the driveway of her Los Angeles home, the fake flakes on her port-a-slope enable the model-turned-actress to prepare for her new movie role as a ballet skier. Susan, 28, is taking lessons in 360DEG turns and crossovers. The script of the film, Free Style, is "heavy and touching," she says. It is about a world champion ballet skier who feels she is past her prime, too old to ski. Her age: 23.

His appearance, wrote scribes of the era, was "cadaverous," and there was something so supernatural about 19th century Violin Virtuoso Nicolo Paganini "that one looked for a glimpse of a cloven hoof or an angel's wing." Onstage, the maestro would often contort his body into bizarre stances. His tours de force, like playing a pizzicato accompaniment with his left hand while bowing with his right, prompted audiences to whisper that Paganini was in league with the devil. But alas, he was merely mortal, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The violinist, writes Dr. Myron Schoenfeld of Scarsdale, N.Y., probably suffered from a disease called Marfan's syndrome. The signs: elastic joints and long fingers with "an extraordinary range of motion."

The diagnosis, says Schoenfeld, also explains the most devilish part of the Paganini puzzle: how he could perform so dazzlingly without ever being known to practice.

On the Record

Julian Bond, who hopes to give up his seat in the Georgia state legislature and become a television commentator, on possible compensation: "I was pleased with what Miss Walters got."

Red Auerbach, president of the Boston Celtics, explaining why it took him so long to replace Coach Tom Heinsohn (with Tom Sanders): "I love the guy. I've known him 20 years, and he still sells me insurance."

Edwin Newman, NBC news commentator, arguing that television reporters inject themselves too much into interviews: "We ought in some sense to encourage thought. I'm saying we ought to make an effort to shut up."

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