The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 40

SEC. 1 The Beacon Journal Friday April 16, 1999 ArtssL iviri Robert Altman has another film winner Roger Ebert calls Cookie's Fortune the acclaimed director's "sunniest film," gives it four stars. E8 Focus on Home and Garden fill! Bslc Good night's sleep depends on right sheets Whether you prefer jersey or flannel, the choice is in your hands BY JUDY HAMMOND Knunl Kidder Newspapers It's twilight The cat has nestled into its favorite pillow and the sandman has sprinkled his magic dust Sleep tugs at the Fancy structures with lots of options replace old-style swings for children urn I 1 in nil JUS mi i 'M corners of your mind. It's time to turn down the lamp and ease your weary self between the sheets. Are they the bedsheets of your dreams? Does it really matter whether you are lulled to sleep on pima cotton, flannel or jersey knit Alexander Julian sheets? Those who are in the bedsheet business say it does.

Drifting off to the Land of Nod on a cloud of soft sheets can make a difference on how you spend the next day, say the bedding experts from Coming Home, a See Sheets, Page E3 MATT DETRICHBeacon Journal Spencer Lightfoot, 6, hangs from the rings while neighbor Morgan Wells, also 6, plays at left. Spencer's parents, Brad Lightfoot and Loraine Frank-Lightfoot, keep an eye on the kids from the swing on the gazebo. I iiir i XT 1 By Mary Beth breckenridge Beacon Journal staff writer Spencer and Alexandrea Lightfoot's yard is missing just one thing: an excuse for being bored. The wood play structure in the Lightfoot children's West Akron yard has just about everything else a kid could wish for. There are swings and rings, a rope ladder and a climbing wall, a twisting tube slide, a teeter totter and a tire swing.

There's even a gazebo with a porch swing for their parents, Brad Lightfoot and Loraine Frank-Lightfoot It's a far cry from the metal swing sets that used to be the neighborhood kid magnets. Play structures have become more elaborate than ever. The typical combination of elevated fort, swings and sliding board now has options like periscopes, simulated-rock climbing walls, spiral slides, tick-tack-toe boards and "talk tubes" that are glorified version of tin cans and strings. "It's going to make you the most popular kid in the neighborhood," says Jerry Varga of Playground World, a Northeast Ohio distributor of Rainbow Play Systems. The company has a sales office in Medina County's Sharon Township.

The redwood sets that Varga's company sells are right out of a kid's dreams. They can be as simple as a tent-topped clubhouse with a slide or as complex as a multilevel warren of hideaways connected by climbing tubes and surrounded by swings, slides and other play equipment The structures are meant to be flexible, so families can choose the options they want and add on later if they wish, Varga says. Forts are available at various heights to suit different agility levels and climbing skills. He says the sets start at $699 installed, with the average initial sale about $2,500. "WeVe sold $10,000 sets before," he says.

Lucky kids. Kits at $5004600 For those with more earthbound budgets and do-it-yourself tendencies, the components for building play structures are generally available at home centers and lumberyards. Hardware for a particular feature comes packaged with the instructions for building it and a list of lumber required. Bill Garner of Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse in Montrose says the average Swing 'N' Slide system it sells averages around $500 to $600, including lumber. Brad Lightfoot, an engineer, wasn't satisfied just with the kits.

He took the ideas he saw in them and designed his own play structure, which ties into a gazebo he built using a plan he got from a home center. It took a weekend I iJv4 Kids need soft landing inplay area Kids fall It's pretty much an inevitable reality of an active childhood. That's why it's especially important that their playground equipment provide as safe a play environment as possible. Even your most stern safety lectures might not prevent Junior from tumbling off the monkey bars, but you can make sure he lands on something soft and doesn't run into anything dangerous on the way down, says play environment designer Jean Schappet Proper surfacing that covers a big enough area is an essential playground safety feature, say both Schappet and Donna Thompson, director of the National Program for Playground Safety at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Obviously concrete and asphalt are poor choices for playground surfaces, but perhaps surprisingly, so is grass.

"Grass is not appropriate. You don't know what's underneath it," Thompson says. Grass also wears out under well-used play equipment, she notes, and the packed dirt that's left is too hard to cushion falls. Experts recommends using loose-fill material such as wood chips, sand, pea gravel or shredded rubber. Although the appropriate depth depends on the type of material and height of the equipment, the program generally recommends 12 inches of uncompressed material for equipment up to 8 feet high.

The surfacing material also needs to cover the entire use zone, which is an unobstructed area bigger than the See SAFE, Page E3 V'-. rsV ft Tips of the week for spring plants Here are some timely tips: Term of the week: Photosynthesis. This is the wonderful process by which plant leaves synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide, water and the energy from the sun. Do not remove the leaves of bulb plants after flowering; leave them as long as possible, until they eventually brown. These leaves are photosynthesizing, producing the food to replenish the bulb for next spring's growth.

Plants of the week: Wildflowers. Head for park trails this weekend as trilliums, trout lilies, anemones, spring beauties, cut-leaved toothworts, violets and many more grace the woodland scene. Lawn concerns: Zoysiagrass sounds like a great lawn in the garden magazines, but it will be brown for more than seven months a year in Northeast Ohio, not what most of us consider ideal for a lawn. It is also difficult to eradicate if you go to the expense of planting it and then change your mind. Similarly, gypsum is often hailed as a way to break up clay soil, but this is true only in sodic soils of Idaho and Montana, not here in Ohio.

Warning: Even on warm and sunny days, it is still way too early to plant tender vegetable and flower seedlings. They need to wait until after hard frosts are no longer expected, within the next three or four weeks. JIM CHATFIELD lMmi mm Wm iH. I to build the gazebo, fort and swing set, Spencer he says, and part of another weekend to Lightfoot, 6, complete some of the finishing touches. and sister Alexandrea, 7, spin on the tire swing at their West Akron home.

"Then to keep it interesting for the kids, we've added something every year," he says. The result is a playland See SWING, Page E3 Drew Carey takes the cake 'Life' is odd, but good, too By Roger Ebert Universal Press Syndicate Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence age more than 50 years in Life, the story of two New Yorkers who spend their adult lives on a Mississippi prison farm because of some very bad luck. It's an odd, strange film a sentimental comedy with a backdrop of racism and I kept thinking of Life Is "Every year is like a battle," he said. "Every sweeps is like a battle. There's no such thing as just resting on your laurels The first time you do that is when you start to fail.

I never, ever feel comfortable." So he gets into seemingly every detail of his sitcom, from writing to whether the set has enough equipment He keeps wanting to dazzle the audience, including with a lOOth-episode musical number, Brotherhood of Man from the Broadway show How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. This summer, he will also take the title role in the TV Beautiful, anotner turn mat skirts the edge of despair. Life Is Beautiful avoids it through comic inspiration, and Life by Warner Bros. By R. D.

heldenfels Beacon Journal television writer HOLLYWOOD: At close to 12:30 am yesterday, with a last burst of applause from spectators and participants alike, the bone-tired cast and crew of The Drew Carey Show wrapped up the last episode of its fourth season. It had been a landmark day because the episode, airing May 26, was also the series' 100th. Top executives from ABC, which airs Carey's Cleveland-set comedy, and Warner which produces the show, had been on hand to sing the show's praises. During a mid-afternoon break on Stage 17 of the Warner lot, a cake bearing Carey's caricatured likeness was cut, with news camera crews on hand to record the moment There were gifts for Carey, too; he proudly showed off a brown, embossed binder from his agents, which held almost every Cleveland Browns trading card from 1958 to the present All that underscored how important Carey has Cleveland native Drew Carey and cast members of The Drew Carey Show cut a cake Wednesday in celebration of the TV sitcom's 100th episode. never quite admitting how painful its characters' lives must really have been.

The movie is ribald, funny and sometimes sweet, and very well acted by Murphy, Lawrence and a strong supporting cast And yet the more you think about it, the more peculiar it seems. Murphy created the original story line, and Ted Demme (The Ref) follows his lead; the result is a Sis ODD, Page E4 musical Geppetto. He has a deal to host 22 more episodes of improvisational comedy series Whose Line Is It Anyway? although "I have the easiest job on Whose Line. I show up, I read the cards. There's no stress to do that" And, he said, "Right now we're planning to do a See Carey, Page E4 become.

Both he and series co-creator Bruce Hel-ford talked about running another four years. At the same time, though, Carey worried that somehow all the success will slip away, that "NBC's going to put World's Sexiest Commercials on and take away our audience.".