The Italian stallion is back with his South Philly rabbit punches. In Rocky II--Redemption, our hero, played once again by Sylvester Stallone, challenges Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), the boxer who beat him in Part 1, to a rematch. Preparing to film the final fight scenes at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Sly, as his friends call him, worked out so long and hard that he had to be given oxygen and vitamin B-12 shots between takes. "Every muscle feels like it's been torn from the bone," grunted Stallone. "Yesterday I thought for the first time in my life I was gonna die. And you know something? I wanted to die." Even so, it may be worth it. If the film's title is any indication, Rocky just might jab his way to the championship.

It was strictly allegro con brio as Pianist Vladimir Horowitz celebrated his 74th birthday by hustling to the floor of a Manhattan discotheque. "Sometimes when a performer gets older, he sees only older people in the audience, but I see only young people and that's why I like to go to discos," says Horowitz, who wears earplugs to keep the volume down. Usually Horowitz watches the action from the sidelines, but birthdays are something else. "That was my first gift for my birthday, to be able to dance like that," he gloated, after stomping away with Wife Wanda. "As my father-in-law Arturo Toscanini used to say," he recalled, " 'You can't be serious 24 hours a day. You have to take half an hour or an hour a day to be childish.' "

Out: Hamilton Jordan, Dr. Peter Bourne, Mr. and Mrs. Bert Lance and Barry Jagoda. In: Jerry Rafshoon, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Blumenthal and Mr. and Mrs. James Earl Carter III. That is a partial list of those who did and did not make it into this year's The Green Book, Washington's suede-covered guide to the up and climbing. Getting into The Green Book requires that you not at present be divorced or separated, "unpleasantly notorious," or missing from the recommended list of entries sent over from the White House. The socially savvy staff of the manual add and subtract names right up until the last minute, and were glad that there was still time to delete the Washington socialite who died in a suspicious fire. Says the publisher with a sigh of relief: "It is awful to have someone who may have been murdered still listed in the book."

The Paper Lion roars again, only this time Author George Plimpton is into fireworks, not football. For four years, professional Mittyman Plimpton has dreamed of orchestrating an international exhibition of fireworks, and last week he finally gave it a crack in Manhattan's Central Park. Plimpton's pyrotechnics featured music and 3 1/2 minutes of displays from each of seven nations. "The Chinese firecrackers were vast chrysanthemum bursts. The Italians were all noise," says he by way of review. Why is he so hot on fireworks? Says Plimpton, who is now working on a book about the world of contemporary tennis as seen through the eyes of oldtimers: "As an artist and a writer, the idea of putting a torch to something is completely satisfactory."

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