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FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2000 E3 LOS ANGELES TIMES Thoughtful Teens Populate Young Writer's Coming-of-Age Tale tm the sentimental, "I love my parents." Although the narrator's total inability to do math is linked to his partial paralysis from birth, his near-flunking grades in German are more of a surprise, for his affinity to literature is clear. The scene in which he reads "The Old Man and the Sea," weeping, to his fellow runaways on a train to Munich might strain credulity among cynical American readers. We're supposed to believe that a group of boys headed for a strip joint are moved to tears by Hemingway's tale of a washed-up fisherman? "So what's literature?" Lebert has his fictional alter-ego ask. And his answer is typically corny, but the sort of corn some readers will eat up: "Literature is where you read a book and feel you could put a little mark under every line because it's true." Not every line of "Crazy" rings true, but with standards like these, Lebert's career should be an interesting one to watch. boarding school gang of five do their damnedest to milk the most from their time on Earth even when confined to the restrictive Castle Neuseelen, or New Souls Boarding School.

can sleep all I want when I'm Idead," one boy rationalizes about their nightly high jinks. "Doing nothing would be boring," another comments. "You have to drink life," their ringleader, Janosch, says. "You can never do enough insane things." They don't miss an opportunity for adventure, always following the teenage Grail of sex, excitement and acceptance especially acceptance. Crazy is their buzzword for anything that is exciting.

What is refreshing about this boarding school novel is that Lebert's newfound buddies, although misfits all one "a slave to candy," one orphaned, one a silent bed-wetter are not the cruel monsters of the British genre, including the belling. It's about adolescents trying to find answers to some big questions "So what's friendship?" "Why did God make girls anyhow? Why are they so sexy?" "What are we supposed to know? That we know nothing?" and being repeatedly taken aback by the realization that it's all "too complicated" and "too big" to fully understand. Written in the first person, present tense for maximum immediacy and directness, "Crazy" is a quick read composed mainly of dialogue. It bears superficial resemblances to two other novels of adolescent incarceration J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Susannah Kaysen's "Girl, Interrupted" as well as Sue Town-send's hilarious sendup of adolescent male preoccupations, "The Adrian Mole Diaries." At its best, Lebert's slim wisp of a book is moving and funny, but it is often marred by creeping sentimentality and cloying pseudo-profundity.

nasties at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. They are actually somewhat kind and thoughtful to each other: Janosch repeatedly tells Benni, the narrator, not to get all worked up about his disability, and even carries him on his back for some of their long nocturnal treks up dormitory fire escapes and down train station platforms. The most surprising aspect of "Crazy" is the narrator's touching attachment to his parents a stance few self-respecting American adolescents would admit to so boldly in print. Walking into his new school, he not only holds his father's hand, but also confesses, "I think I'm going to miss him. Sure, we've fought a lot, but after a tough day at school, he was always the first with a smile for me." When Benni and his friends run away to Munich one night, Benni worries about his mother's certain anguish at the news of their disappearance.

"Doesn't matter where I am," he says, flirting unabashedly with GALA OPENING PARTY Thursday May 4th, 7pm LECTURE SERIES May 5th-7th GALA PARTY LECTURE INFORMATION i mm it By HELLER MCALPIN SPECIAL TO THE TIMES CRAZY A Novel By Benjamin Lebert Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Alfred A. Knopf, 176 pages, $17.95 Here's a bulletin from the trenches of teenagehood, a German bestseller by and about 16-year-old Benjamin Lebert, a self-proclaimed who flunks out of four schools before being sent away to boarding school so his parents can fight and separate in peace. On one level, "Crazy" is a novel about typical boarding school antics smoking, drinking and sneaking into the girls' dorm with Pink Floyd singing "We don't need no education" in the background. But Lebert has a philosophical bent, and "Crazy" is more about searching than re Stylist Continued from El shrewish hair of Courtney Love. In Los Angeles, where Hershber-ger counts Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder among her regulars, her name is on the door of a new Zenlike salon complete with a pool with floating gardenias, burning candles and loads of blond wood.

It's called Sally Hershberger at John Frieda, the analogy, according to Hershberger, being "kind of like Tom Ford and Gucci." The bicoastal Hershberger is what she calls "a visiting hairdresser" at the John Frieda salon in New York, where a couple of weeks ago she "performed" dozens of haircuts on the likes of Natasha Richardson and Love. She also worked her magical scissors on some regular folks who are enchanted enough by the cutter's panache to dole out her going rate: $400 a haircut. Hershberger got her start at 18 in California, when her mom, Virginia, gave her marching orders. "She said, 'You have to do she recalls. "I didn't know what I wanted to do.

When you're 18, it's much more about going out and having fun, and she didn't care what I did as long as it was something." Cutting hair was not her first choice. "I really did not want to be a hairdresser. I always liked fashion, though," says the stylist, who favors clean-lined designer clothes: Gucci leather pants, Prada platforms and a Jil Sander top. "And someone said, 'Oh, you should go to beauty She ended up working under Arthur Johns, the then-big deal of the hair world. An early assignment to tour with Olivia Newton-John propelled her career.

"The notoriety happened right away," says Hershberger. "Newton-John was like Madonna then, and I was like, 'Oh, this is fun, you fly around the But I kept thinking this was a temporary thing. Then in the early '80s I met Herb Ritts. He was it in photography then. We hooked up, and I get interested in doing photography." She took a hiatus from the hairdressing business for a few years to pursue a career in the field, but, she says, "I kept getting calls to do hair, and it was very tempting." Today she is the executive style director for the John Frieda company.

Her alliance with Frieda who is perhaps best known for his 310.423 a Benot For Women's Gum Or Cedars-Sinai Mfjiical Osm 310.455.2886 Organized By The Antiques Dealers Associahon Of California Managed by Caskey-Lees Los Angeles Times Archives. Call today. 1-800-788-8804 Orlogontolatimes.comarchives SHOW HOURS Friday Saturday 11AM-8PM Sunday 11am-5pm-No admittance aftci DAILY ADMISSION $15 include) catalogue NT SHOW INFORMATION j1 tivf.Mf benjamin lebert "Crazy" takes its epigram from Georges Simenon: "We are all potentially characters in a novel with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full." Lebert and his product Frizz-Ease, roundly thought of as nothing short of a miracle for unmanageable, frizzy hair seemed fated. Ten years before her agent (yes, mega-hairdressers have agents these days) suggested she meet him to talk business, their paths crossed in an ashram in India. "I was there talking about giving up hairdressing," says Hershberger, who calls meditation her "medicine." A few years ago, the two created a product for blonds who color their hair to use in that in-between stage when the color becomes brassy or washed-out-looking.

"We found an agent that would counteract the changes without ruining the hair," says Hershberger. Sheer Blonde has won many fans among the unnaturally fair-haired set. Though the stylist says she is enjoying the business these days, she is not completely comfortable with her celebrity status. "I don't want to be the one that everybody writes about every week," she says. "I'm just trying to be normal" which may explain her publicist's protective demeanor.

She is, however, aggressively seeking success, and part of this, she explains, is teaching the people who work for her how to put f' 1 Enter a 111 out a Hershberger-worthy haircut. "I train my assistants on my own hair and I torture them," she says. "I'll vouch for that," says Mark Anthony Townsend, one of her assistants in New York who now works at J.F. Lazartigue, a Madison Avenue salon where his cuts go for $160. "I've cut her hair several times just pouring sweat.

She's very tough and very technical, but great person to learn from." Underneath it all, Hershberger is realistic. "I know that not everybody can afford $400 for a haircut." And even if they could, Hershberger maxes out at eight a day. "And I don't want someone walking around with some insane cut that doesn't look good on them. I wouldn't do it, because it represents me." Her style for the stars, if there is one particular one, she says, "is glowy and fresh a little sexy, but not in a Playboy way, in an androgynous way. Men and women die over Jane and die over Meg their hair appeals to both sexes." But there is one thing you won't get from Hershberger, even if you've got the bucks for one of her haircuts: idle chatter.

"I hate when people talk when they are cutting my hair. I'm a quiet cutter, because I'm focusing." A. Spring Special full of job Plus, you of smiles, in top luxury Walk where Explore the In the warm plenty of PRiAfG Mi SPECIAL 1 TV 1 a trip to Thailand In the Los Angeles Times Classified Edition. It's the biggest Classified section of the season, opportunities, real estate listings, car sales and more! can enter to win a deluxe trip to amazing Thailand, the land The prize includes airfare, private tours and accommodations hotels. kings have ruled in Bangkok's mile-square Grand Palace.

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