Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire was once a lone loper on his way to the Capitol. These days, however, nearly half the Senate is running in office. The freshman Republican class are avid members of the shin-splint generation, and six of them suited up one morning at sunrise to puff on the mall. Despite a wind-chill factor of 0DEG, Wyoming's Senator Alan Simpson, 47, Virginia's John Warner, 51, New Hampshire's Gordon Humphrey, 38, Minnesota's David Durenberger, 44, South Dakota's Larry Pressler, 36, and Iowa's Roger Jepsen, 50, enjoyed their informal caucus. Says Simpson: "It clears away the fog."

Any day now, the songs of John Denver may be heard along the Great Wall. When the country-and-western singer performed at the Kennedy Center gala for Teng Hsiao-p'ing, he won a new fan and the Vice Premier's autograph.

Perhaps this was because the lyrics to --" Denver's hit, Take Me Home, Country Roads, were printed in Chinese on the program. No wonder, since one of the lines goes, "Drivin' down the road I get a feelin'/ That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday." When it came time to head home himself, Teng found some gifts loaded onto his plane at Seattle: 100 copies of Denver's latest album, courtesy of the star.

Syracuse U. was an intellectual's academe, recalls Novelist Joyce Carol Gates ('60), but the sorority system, well, that was an intellectual's animal house. Reminiscing in the Paris Review, Alumna Gates speaks with horror of her days as a Phi Mu: "The asininity of 'secret ceremonies'; the moronic emphasis upon 'activities' totally unrelated to--in fact antithetical to--intellectual exploration." There was also "the aping of the worst American traits--boosterism, Godfearing-ism, smug ignorance, a craven worship of conformity." Grist for the Gates mill? Never. "To even care about such adolescent nonsense one would have to have the sensitivity of a John O'Hara, who seems to have taken it all seriously." But not while he was in college; O'Hara never got that far.

His three-year-old son Sage wanted to see his old man on the Muppet Show, so Sylvester Stallone, 32, got himself invited, playing a gladiator vs. a Muppet lion. Besides, it was a way to live out his own childhood fantasy. "Ever since I was eight, I've wanted to be a gladiator," says the hero of Rocky. "Usually, when I have a fantasy, I make a movie. This saved me from 22 weeks of moviemaking." Probably a good thing, considering Stallone's last two films, F.I.S.T. and Paradise Alley.

On the Record

Art Buchwald, humor columnist, on Coca-Cola's Chinese franchise: "I don't mind 800 million Chinese drinking a bottle a day, but I don't want them to bring back the empties."

Eubie Blake, composer, at 96: "I'll just keep going until that man says seven, eight, nine, ten, you're out."

Kenneth Gibson, mayor of Newark, on so-called nuisance taxes: "I call them sin taxes, you know, on cigarettes, liquor, gambling. The reason they can pass sin taxes is that the sinners aren't organized. How many drinkers are organized?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.