DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9711020263

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL

                                            LENGTH:   53 lines

A WEEKEND OF TREATS FOR THE EARS AND EYES

Don't tell me there ain't things to do around here of a weekend.

Halloween, I greeted 38 trick or treaters; then, after they faded witch-like into the night, raced to the Norfolk Little Theatre for the opening of ``They're Playing Our Song,'' a delightful musical.

Saturday, I joined the end of a line reaching halfway around the Chrysler Museum of Art for a book sale. All three events were diverting.

The goal for Halloween is to buy ample candy but not so much that you're eating the surplus in July. Only a handful remains in a huge blue bowl.

A young lady, about 8, took one for herself, another for her brother, then asked, ``May he have two?''

The brown Lab got as much attention as the treats. He figured it was staged for him.

What spurred my dash to the play was critic Montague Gammon's remark that the female vocalist, Heather Renken, ``is one of the best finds to hit the local stages in years.'' And she is.

Just sumptuous.

Renken and the male lead, Michael Skoraszewski, are a good team. This season's witty ``They're Playing My Song'' by Neil Simon with music by Marvin Hamlisch is far stronger than the stodgy musical ``I Do, I Do'' in which the two starred last year.

I enjoyed the pair hugely Friday. As to why, I'll let Gammon explain in his review this week, in the Norfolk Compass. He was there. I heard him laughing.

There's a matinee today at 2:30 at the Norfolk Little Theatre on Claremont Avenue in Ghent. It will play Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the next three weekends.

Tickets are $12 for adults; $9 for senior citizens, full-time students, and enlisted military personnel; and $7 for children under 12. For information call 627-8551.

The Chrysler Museum book sale was packed from the moment it opened until it closed at 4 p.m.

In two hours I found 12 books, totaling $4.95. Among them was ``The Voice of Bugle Ann'' by MacKinlay Kantor about a lean, soft-eyed hound who bays as if she has a bugle in her throat.

For her sake, her 82-year-old owner shoots a mean-spirited neighbor and goes to the state pen for nearly four years.

About as absurdly sentimental as a book can be, it brought tears to my eyes at 14 and again Saturday at 76. It cost 10 cents.

One could have stayed all day, ranging among the thousands of selections and watching the hundreds of book addicts thronging the great court as if they were in a plaza.

When people are poring over books, lost to everything else around them, they are vulnerable, at their most fascinating.

It gladdened one's heart to see that in this age of suffocating television, so many are still drawn to the printed word.

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