Northwest Herald from Woodstock, Illinois • Page 96

Page 20 SIDETRACKS NORTHWEST HERALD Friday, October 31 1997 MUJU.EIW I fir Views Take my life, please! Does your life bite? Do you dream of swapping everything with somebody else? Robert E. Pagani does. You may have seen Bob, 45, standing outside the White House dressed like George Washington. He's a pitchman for the Political Americana memorabilia store. He also orks in the shop's stockroom.

You need to know these things, I- 3 I ttttll 1 ft 1 4 because if you swap lives with him, that's what you'll be doing. You can read all about it on his Web site: Wdnt to Trade Lives? Let's see. You'll live in a two-bedroom garden apartment in Northern Virginia. "It's a total mess," says Bob. '0 Linton Weeks the navigator TEAMING UP CD-ROM game forces to make the interactive film DVD and to theaters.

AP photo pioneer Rob Landeros (left) and director David Wheeler joined 'Tender Loving Care." The movie is being released this fall on (Mimi families E-mail between campus, home connects loved ones You'll have a brown-haired girlfriend, Chrissy Hight, 42, who is the office manager for a small publishing firm in Dale City, Va. "It's kind of weird," Hight says, "but Bob's weird. It fits him "Everybody'd like to have a better life," Chrissy adds. She suffers from congestive heart failure. "None of us has health insurance," Chrissy says, "so that's kind of rough.

Bob's always unhappy about that." Chrissy also has an 1 1 -year-old daughter. You'll drive a Ford Festiva and on Sundays, if it's a total life swap, you'll go for a long ride with Chrissy, the way Bob used to. In fact, Bob says, "It's sort of along the Ikes of hitting the lottery." Not exactly, Bob. But we get your drift. You're talking total, complete, radical, immediate change here.

And a tricorn hat to go with it. Over the years, Bob's been a disc jockey and a baseball-park security guard. He likes his present job, "but it's a dead end." He says he watches civil servants walk past the White House every day and he imagines being one of them with a pen CD-ROM Review Hoping to challenge Disney, rival Hollywood studios have been investing hundreds of millions of dollars animation divisions: Warner produced "Space Jam" last year. The first feature film from Fox Animation Studios, which media mogul Rupert Murdoch built around Disney-trained Don Bluth, arrives in theaters next month. It's a musical adventure called "Anastasia." Taking its cue from the Disney marketing mode, Fox Inter- active (www.foxinteractive.com) is simultaneously releasing a computer entertainment spinoff.

"Anastasia: Adventures With Pooka and Bartok," designed for children ages 6 to 10. The player guides Anya and her puppy, Pooka, from St. Petersburg to Pans, through 60 European backgrounds from the film, solving puzzles and problems and playing games along the way. The goal of the graphic adventure is to help the last surviving member of the murdered Romanov family meet her grandmother, the Dowager Empress of Russia, and to prove her royal identity. Meg Ryan is the voice of Anya, in the film and the game.

CD-ROM for Macintosh Video Game Review Imagine ancient Greece as a lot like Southern California "with better architecture and no traffic." That's the kind of irreverence that marks Here's Adventures a delightfully comic adventure from LucasArts for PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Here mixes all the best ele- ments of PC and console game play to create an expenence that's tough to beat. Players assume the role df either the strongman Hercules, the archer Atlanta or the would-be hero Jason and set out to rescue Persephone, the goddess of spring, from the clutches of Hades, the god of the underworld. Action unfolds in a cartoonish environment loaded with all sorts of hilariously anachronistic friends and enemies. For instance, gyro salesman dot courses teeming with pistol-packing wood nymphs.

Play itself is fairly standard jump-run-kick-punch stuff, but the depth of environments, the variety of weapons and the quality of the story make Here's Adventures a real kick. -The Associated Press By JACQUELINE SALMON The Washington Post A ebecca Cole didn't talk to I I her parents much when I j- she lived at home with I I them in Arlington. Va. "She was the kind of kid who would come in the house and go up to her room and turn on the stereo," her father recalled. But since she went off to Colby College in Maine last month.

Cole has been sharing with them details of her life as a freshman what she thinks of her classes, the difficulties of making new friends and how much she misses home. Much to their surprise, her parents hear from their 1 8-year-old daughter several times a day. It may sound strange, the Coles say, but there's no doubt that e-mail has made them a closer family. "I can ask her questions that she would never answer in person, but she'll sit down and e-mail," said Steve Cole, 47, who, in turn, has e-mailed his daughter about the personalities he deals with at the office. "The kind of communication we have now certainly is much richer than we had when we were face to face." His daughter agrees.

"We talk about more stuff now that I'm not she said. By now, most parents who send a son or daughter off to college know all about the availability of e-mail on campus. What many of them don't expect is that their children will become frequent and- There are no statistics on how many students are sending e-mail home. But college administrators say it happens routinely, and e-mailing how-to has become part of the standard information to parents for many colleges. Convenience surely is one reason for the constant online exchanges A student can contact home at 2 a.m., and parents can respond at 7 a.m., without the disruption of anyone's schedule.

E-mail also is less inhibiting than the telephone for many, according specialists. "People will be a lot more creative and open on e-mail and do a lot more self-disclosure, for better or worse, than face to face or on the telephone," said Barry Wellman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. "You can pour your heart out on the screen. You're not actually seeing or hearing the other person react, and so you let more of it out." For the most part, getting e-mail from home is good for the college freshman's psyche, said Janette B. Benson, an associate professor of psychology who started an e-mail course at the University of Denver that incoming freshman and their parents can take together.

"It provides students with at least some sense of stability in some aspect of their life while they're forging new identities," she said. But, she adds, college students, although they may not want to admit it, still need to hear a loved voice the telephone. "I can ask her questions that she would never answer in person, but she'll sit down and. e-mail." Steve Cole Parent enthusiastic e-mail correspondents. Othello Richards, a freshman at Brigham Young University in Utah, started using e-mail after a collect phone call he made to his parents in Alexandria, cost $1 00.

Now, he e-mails them every day, updating them on his classes and track practices. He even described the all-nighter he pulled in the engineering lab to finish a paper. He also uses e-mail to help his younger brother with German lessons. Sue Unger, of Rockville, a public librarian who gives seminars on the Internet, said that for all her computer literacy, she had no idea how much she and her daughter would, use e-mail. She, and her husband, Alan, assumed Sarah, a junior at the University of Rochester in New York, would rely mostly on the telephone.

"We knew that she might e-mail, but we didn't realize she'd e-mail quite so often," said Unger, 53. More than 7 million of the nation's 9 million students at four-year colleges use e-mail regularly, according to nXTLink, a Ne -York-based market research firm. sion and a health plan and the opportunity to provide for the ones they love. Bob's job gives him a lot of time to think. One month ago he had an epiphany.

"I just got frustrated with my own life," he says. "And I thought maybe somebody else could do better with it." If you talk to him, you'll believe that he's sincere. "Where does it say you can't swap places with somebody?" Bob asks. "As long as you don't misrepresent yourself. I'm not talking about changing just lives." The idea smacks of an Eddie Murphy vehicle or Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper" or some Disney movie plot -withatechno-twist GETTING THEKE http:www.geocities.comsouth-beachpalms9133 Linton Weeks is a Washington Post columnist and can be reached at rffrmf.