The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 21

Dear Abby, C3 Theaters, C5 The Post TUESDAY, APRIL 15. 1986 SECTION Typecasting Runs Actor Down jaW- 1 MB The Dirt BiHe Kid nosti 5 i. i 1 i 2 --m 4 A'' TOM ERVIN Staff Photographer Miss Gillian goes through paces in studio Goodbye Miss Gillian After three decades of teaching ballet in Boynton Beach, instructor is taking a spin at something new. Peter Billingsley, of 'A Christmas stars in new movie 'The Dirt Bike Kid' By Kathryn Buxton Staff Writer The one thing Peter Billingsley hates most about the movie industry is being typecast. "There have been some parts that I've lost because I looked too young or too short," says the young actor whose sixth feature film The Dirt Bike Kid is playing in area theaters.

"But the only thing I hate is being typecast as the brainy kid. I'm pretty smart. But I'm no brain." Still Billingsley is philosophical about the problem. "I guess my glasses are sort of my trademark, and they kind of lend to giving people that view of me." Considering his youth, Billingsley has worked with a long and weighty roster of co-stars Burt Reynolds, Geraldine Page, Teri Garr, Darren McGavin, Beverly D'Angelo, Tony Danza and Lindsey Wagner. His list of feature film credits, too, is impressive: Paternity (1981), Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), Ever I See You Again (1978), and Death Valley (1982).

Yet, audiences remember Billingsley best as the precocious young hero of humorist Jean Shepherd's hilarious A Christmas Story (1983). Negotiations are ongoing for a sequel to that sleeper hit. In The Dirt Bike Kid, he plays Jack Simmons, a dirt bike enthusiast who has never been able to afford a vehicle of his own until one day he spends his mother's last $50 meant to buy the family food on a beat up bike that turns out to have magical powers. The story is, says Billingsley, "a lot like Jack in the Beanstalk" but with a "twist" to it. Billingsley began his acting career in commercials when he was only 2 Vz and achieved notoriety as "Messy Marvin" in a series of eight Hershey syrup ads.

Lately, television has taken up much of his time; he has appeared on Highway to Heaven, Punky Brewster and completed Pecos Bill for Shelley Duvall's fairy tale series on cable television. He also has been busy in the public arena, serving as national spokesman for NASA's Young Astronaut Program. He hosted Scott McAuliffe's third-grade class the January day Scott's mother Christa died in the Challenger explosion. "It was sad. We didn't know anything until the speaker made an announcement." Nevertheless, Billingsley thinks civilian participation in the space program should continue and looks forward to the day when he might be able to travel in space.

"I think that it's great. I myself would like to go into space, not as an astronaut but as a civilian. I don't Turn to KID, C2 'Bike' Pleasant Mythical Ride Movie Review didn't seem fair to ask me to give up my work and go there. So we have arranged a very nice compromise. "I would like to remain involved.

I play piano for classes and recitals. I still teach master (highly advanced) classes here, and I have master classes in England. When I'm not there, they carry on without me. And I teach at various boarding schools there. I still go to class just about every day.

When you've done it as long as I have, you can't just give it up like that. "I'm also writing a book on teaching," she says, and adds that she has no idea when it will be ready for publication. "The gestation period it's really an ongoing thing. You just have to keep working on it until you get it just exactly the-way you want to say it. The thing is there are a lot of books on teaching students who want to be professional, but there aren't any books on teaching students who come only once a week.

If you're teaching students who aren't going to make a career of it, there's an entirely different way of going about it. It's quite a different psychology." Miss Gillian came to Florida from England 30 years ago. In that time, she has trained young and old, rich and poor, female and male. She is not a frustrated danseuse. Her training was always geared toward education rather than performance.

Some of the students, those who come for the grueling classes every day, have an eye toward a professional career, either on the stage or in the studio. Others come once or twice a week for the physical training, the discipline, the grace and the sheer joy of the dance. They range in age from 2 Vz years up. Some of them are Turn to DANCE, C2 By Judi Grove Staff Writer The door knocker is a G-clef. So are Miss Gillian's gold earrings.

And the wedding rings that she and her husband Richard Davis wear are decorated with delicate G-clef s. It will come as no surprise then that Miss Gillian and Mr. Davis are musically inclined. She is a dance teacher and composer. He is a musicologist.

They met when he came to Florida on assignment. But that's only a fraction of the story. Miss Gillian, so known all her professional life by the thousands of students who have passed through the portals of her Boynton Beach dance studio over the past three decades, is retiring. Or, maybe not. Evolving might be a more accurate word.

She wouldn't dream of giving up teaching. But she did sell her studio recently and will make some alterations in her professional life to accommodate her marriage, which is just three years old. Her personal life, which now includes homes on two continents, is too time consuming to allow her to keep up teaching ballet classes all day every day. Her international lifestyle often takes her across the ocean for months at a time. She and her husband share a conventional home in Boynton Beach, but their home in England is a centuries-old farm complex, with the living quarters in two enormous oast towers where hops were cured when the property was a working farm.

The couple travel back and forth between homes regularly. "It may seem to be a terribly extravagant lifestyle, but it didn't seem fair to ask my husband to give up what he's been doing and come here, and it By Kathryn Buxton Staff Writtr It's love at first sight when Jack Simmons sees the beat up old Yamaha out at the track. So he trades his BMX bike and his mom's grocery nioney for it and rides home. Only then does Jack discover not only that the bike can fly, but also that it has a mind of its own. The Dirt Bike Kid, about Jack and his adventures with the precocious motor bike, is a clumsy but fun movie that will please the youngest audiences.

Peter Billingsley (The Christmas Story) plays Jack, a kid with an active imagination and little common sense. He daydreams about one day owning a sleek, red dirt bike, but as long as his mother (Anne Bloom) remains unemployed, his dream is an impossibility. One day, his mom sends him out to buy groceries with the family's last J50. That's when Jack first sees his dream bike. Eventually the bike helps Jack save the town from greedy Mr.

Hodgkins (Stuart Pankin), the bank president who wants to foreclose on the local hotdog starTd where Jack and his friends like to hang out. The Dirt Bike Kid has a lot of spunk and energy. There are some problems, most of them caused by the film's budget limitations including some sloppy camera work (Although the movie was filmed in Texas, a couple of curiously composed aerial shots show Jack and his bike flying over Los Angeles). There are also a couple of bad words that slip into the dialogue, all of them are uttered by the villainous Hodgkins. Billingsley, as the smart young hero, and Pankin, as the egocentric bad guy, give their all to this simple fable.

And screenwriters David Brandes and Lewis Colick have chocked the plot full of fun twists and turns from magic and baseball to food fights and bicycle chases where the kids outsmart everyone including the police. That's enough action to keep the story rolling even over the rough spots to make an old-fashioned and fun Saturday matinee. if V2 Worthwhile THE DIRT BIKE KID Children's fable about a boy who is helped by a magical dirt bike. Credits: With Peter Billingsley, Stuart Pankin, Anne Bloom, Patrick Collins. Directed by Hoite C.

Caston. Screenplay by David Brandes and Lewis Colick. Produced by Julie Corman. Rated PG: Crude language. Now Playing: Martin Downs Village, Village Green.

This Gallon Jug Runneth Over With Great Monetary Expectations If a neighbor ever comes over to borrow a cup of pennies, just give him $5. I hannsn rr knnw that's how much a CUD of pennies is worth because I scooped up that amount from my l-ganon coome jdi aim counted them. Rioht now. I have about a auart of pennies Ron Wiggins 1 I didn't count my nickels, dimes and quarters, but just to guess, I a say mey came tn annthpr S20. I keeD them on my dresser, A gallon of pennies (representing about $80) weighs approximately 40 pounds.

A gallon of gold weighs about 150 pounds. An ounce of gold costs $3.40. A pound of gold (16 ounces times $340 is worth about $5,000 today. Yes, I know that for some obscure reason gold is 12 ounces to the pound, but for this exercise we will pretend it's 16 ounces. At $5,000 a pound, 150 pounds of gold (1 gallon) is worth $750,000.

You are now rich. Don't worry about deflation because gold doesn't deflate. Since the Middle Ages, an ounce of gold has been worth a tailor-made suit. If, years from now, a suit costs $1,000. rest assured that every ounce of your gold will be worth about the same amount.

But for now, if your neighbor comes over to borrow a cup of gold, tell him to give you $47,000 and you'll pick him up some at the store. Even as you rejoiced to see your silver (plated) coins displace pennies, you will note with ever increasing satisfaction as the decades zip by that your jar is filling with gold. And the more gold in your jar, the more frequently you top off your silver and buy even more gold. By your 80th or 90th birthday, you'll be running to the gold exchange every four or five years to buy more gold. Of course, the amount you buy will be less and less until finally, you're buying grams and then grains, but the frequency of your buys will keep the excitement at a fever pitch.

The day will finally come when you have a gallon of gold reposing on your dresser! You're probably asking yourself how many ounces and how much money in terms of today's gold prices that would represent. Better you should ask me. ve made some calculations. Convert the pennies into dimes and repeat. The cycles will come more and more quickly as the proportion of "silver" money increases.

Finally, you will have a jar filled to the brim with nothing but nickels and dimes and quarters. Care to guess how much money this will represent? Call it $900 give or take a few bucks. Now what? Roll your silver coins and buy gold. At today's price of $340 per ounce, you could buy a little under 3 ounces of gold. Put those 3 ounces of gold into your now empty jar.

Believe me, there will be plenty of room for your loose change now. In a few years, you'll again have a gallon of silver piled on top of your paltry but exceedingly valuable gold pieces. Buy more gold, put it into the jar with the other, and repeat the process. and at the end of the day, I throw my loose change into the jar in keeping wun my gei- rich-slow plan. You, too, can get rich slow.

Here's how it works. You keep throwing your loose change into the gallon jar until it's full. When that happens, you'll have roughly $70 in pennies and an indeterminate amount of money in dimes, nickels and quarters. Well, you could determine it by counting them, but that's too much bother at this stage of the game. Leave the nickels and dimes and quarters where they are and, after rolling your pennies, exchange them at the bank for dimes.

Pour the dimes back into the jar. Continue throwing in your loose change until once again you have a gallon of change, most of which will be pennies. Young Solzhenitsyn Proves Worthy of Orchestra A5Wi.trtt'S TRENDNOTES PALM BEACH FESTIVAL Music Review; arrivals or departures, changes In temperatures or telephone messages. As computerized products become more user-friendly, people become comfortable with the idea that technology can make work and play a little easier. The blending of high tech and a comfortable lifestyle is, at present, expensive.

No longer "futuristic," these computerized home-control systems Smart children and smart stock-i brokers are desirable. But smart homes? Growing in demand and availability, "smart homes" allow owners to control lights, appliances, heat and security with a computer system hooked up through home wiring, the TV set and the telephone. Installed into either an existing house or built into a new ono, the devices can be programmed will drop in price. By Bob Brink Staff wrifar The Soviet Emigre Orchestra treated a fairly sizable audience at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach last night to a charming concert of classical and baroque fare in its second outing for the Palm Beach Festival. And piano soloist Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a question mark considering his age of only 13 years, rose to the occasion and turned in a fine performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.

2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19. A special bit of charm was the authenticity in which Haydn's Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp Minor (Farewell) was handled. Lazar Gosman, the orchestra's director, concert-master and founder, announced that Haydn had performed this piece with catidlcs, which were extinguished one by one as the musicians left the stage.

It was the last piece his Leningrad Chamber Orchestra had per- to respond to chosen to solo with the orchestra mainly because of his father, but such a suspicion proved ill-founded. Though his playing lacked a vigor of attack that a more experienced musician might offer, he played with elegance and faultless accuracy, the right hand running through the rapid scalar passages of the outer movements with every note distinct. And he played the slow middle movement with thoughlfulness and poise, though his boyishness and absence of pretension were obvious in his bows after finishing the work. His trills in this and the first movement were artfully executed. The orchestra was too small to give this piece the full-bodied sound that was called for, but made up for it with abundant precision, exact balance and musical phrasing.

The orchestra will present different programs tonight and Thursday. Soloists are violinist Erick Friedman and pianist Bella Davldovich. -C -i lar vein. The ensemble of about 20 pieces showed spirit, highlighted by sharp accents, which was tempered with the utmost restraint to present insightful contrasts. In this the other works on the program, razor--sharp precision and airtight cohesion prevailed.

For the Haydn and Beethoven works, the orchestra's regular membership of 13 strings, nine of them emigres from the Soviet Union, was augmented by seven wind players from the new Palm Beach Sinfon-ietta, including David Gray, a former principal hornist for the London Symphony. The winds acquitted themselves admirably and with seeming aplomb. Solzhenitsyn is the son of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet author who was exiled from his homeland in 1973 and lives with his family in Vermont. Speculation before the concert concerned whether yj'ung Ignat was SW AW tormed before he left the Soviet Union for the United States, and had special meaning for him. Roses were used in lieu of candles, and the piece ended touchingly with Gosman alone on stage.

Haydn had structured the work to serve his employer, Prince Nikolaus, with a hint. The prince had been extending his stay at the lonely Es-terhaza Castle, and the musicians, who were there without their families, wanted to go home to Vienna. It worked; the prince ended his and their stay. Gosman's playing was fastidious and the orchestra followed in a simi TH Ntlabllt GfOuo. WMh'nflton, 0 0 John Naiabm Maoalrandi.

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