The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 33

3Tfie JPfiilaklpfiiailttquirer Section Fashion The last round of the international spring designer previews is under wav in Connie Chung returns to network TV. D6. Ann Landers D2 Comics D8 Consumer Reports D2 In Performance D4 Newsmakers D2 Personal Briefing D3 Prime-Time TV Grid D6 Radio Highlights D7 New YorkDZ, Lifestyle ddf Entertainment Tuesday, November 4, 1997 Philadelphia Online: http:www.phillynews.com Thestin E-mail From Colorado Roads that could drive you round the bend of memory By Gwen Florlo Ft' INQUIRER STAFF WRITER V- 'MA fith all due respect to my daughter's eighth-grade English teacher, she made a jtf i J' I Frank McCourt got a squeeze last Tuesday from U.S. Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith at Limerick University. x-: ft mm hi I i I i Ik I 4 (h 1 1 (f i if.

Frank McCourt, author of 'Angela's Ashes," is being honored in his hometown of Limerick. But some locals have their Irish up about McCourt's recollection of grinding poverty in the city's "lanes." wrong turn when she gave Peggy a on an essay last year. It was about a drive we took up Pikes Peak, and it went, in part, like this: Gwen was immensely frightened. The wind and rain were attacking them, trying to swallow the car and its passengers. The rain came down in blinding sheets the wind roared like an angry lion and yanked the car around.

The wheels were slippery and the road was on the edge of a cliff. "How does rain swallow a car?" was the snippy comment, written in hot-pink ink, in the margin. "The analogy is confusing." Obviously, Mrs. um, the English teacher has never driven in Colorado's mountains. Neither had not much, when shortly after moving here in 1996 1 decided that a trip up Pikes Peak would be a fun outing for Peggy and her brother, Sean.

Now, I grew up in Delaware, whose highest point is 442 feet above sea level. Pikes Peak is 14,110 feet. Driving is different here something I didn't appreciate until 1 tried it. Let's just say that, when it came to road trips through the mountains, Peg's description was sorely understated. Immensely frightened? Hah.

We're talking a two-lane, sleet-slushed gravel road, with big fat campers coming at us, crowding us toward the edge. The drop went down hundreds of feet. There were no guardrails. No guardrails! Have I mentioned yet that I'm scared of heights? Dave Fraser shook his head at the thought of people like me. "You flat-landers," he said.

"You fly into Colorado, rent a car and head into the mountains." All too often, he said, we steer right into trouble. In his 20 years as a maintenance manager for 9,200 miles of state highway, Fraser has come across more than his share of folks who get only about halfway up a mountain pass before stopping in white-knuckled panic. "I've actually found them parked See COLORADO on D10 ollections of dying babies, starving children and cruelly indifferent neighbors and kin. "It's good, but it isn't all right. You know it was overdone," said Eric Lynch, who grew up with McCourt on the poor "lanes" of Limerick and was a classmate with him at the Leamy National School.

"But that's what a writer does," added Lynch, who remains a close friend. The book's "forensic evidence, so to speak, doesn't add up," said Jimmy Woulfe, deputy editor of the Limerick Leader newspaper. Still, Woulfe added, that should not "cloud the reality this was a magnificent piece of literature." Not all of the criticism has been that polite. One Limerick resident, Paddy Malone, a childhood friend of McCourt's actor-brother Malachy McCourt, ripped the book into five pieces and threw it on the floor in front of McCourt when the author was here last summer for a book signing. More recently, threatening letters were received by Limerick University officials after they announced their plans to honor McCourt.

Extra security in the form of two beefy security guards in plaid sport coats was in evidence last Tuesday when McCourt received his honorary degree. McCourt dismisses the book's criticisms with firm scorn. See LIMERICK on D3 By Fawn Vrazo INQUIRER STAFF WRITER LIMERICK, Ireland Frank McCourt is back in Limerick, the city whose poverty he depicted so vividly in his best-selling memoir Angela's Ashes. It has not been the easiest of homecomings. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author cried last week on the stage at the beautiful new Limerick University, He was both overwhelmed and in a state of disbelief: The poor kid from Limerick's slums was wearing a cap and gown, receiving an honorary doctorate as the city's highest officials applauded him.

"It was very hard to get through that," McCourt said after the ceremony. The return home, which has McCourt staying in Limerick for two weeks as writer-in-residence at the university, has been difficult in other ways as well. Around this west Ireland city, there are those who love Angela's Ashes and those who hate Angela's Ashes and many who love it but feel its compelling tale of excruciating Limerick hardship in the 1930s and '40s was an exaggeration that goes somewhat beyond the truth. McCourt has come in for criticism and re-evaluation here, and not only from boosters whose civic pride has been wounded by his searing rec For The Inquirer TIM SHAFFER McCourt at his home in Milford, last spring, after his book won the Pulitzer Prize. Review: Music Oil IVIUSiC By Tom Moon f)l Twain's 'Come on Over' a mighty inviting album r.

f- 'c' By Dan DeLuca INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Step aside, Garth. Come on Over, released today by country-pop-rocker Shania Twain, confirms the impression made by the Canadian bombshell's The Woman in Me, which sold over 10 million copies. Just as Oklahoma everyman Garth Brooks led the way down the middle of the road and elevated country's fortunes with the posse of male hat acts that followed, Twain whose first name is pronounced shuh-NYE- Associated Press DOUG KANTER Members of England's popular, raunchy girl group are (from left) Victoria "Posh Spice" Aadams, Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell, Melanie "Scary Spice" Brown, Emma "Baby Spice" Burton and Melanie "Sporty Spice" Chisholm. A lot of flavor without much substance uh is the most explosive of the genre's late-'90s female luminaries, not to mention the biggest star in contemporary country. Twain's collaboration with her producer-husband, Robert "Mutt" Lange, could hardly be more commercially successful than The Woman in Me.

The 1995 release yielded eight hits and is the biggest-selling album ever by a female country artist. But their tandem works even more effectively on Come on Over (Mercury The Twain-Lange formula is at once completely mainstream and, by country standards, genuinely radical. As the '90s have worn on, Nashville execs have recognized that women are the principle buyers of country CDs and have developed their rosters accordingly. Male stars tend toward the beefcake Billy Ray Cyrus, John Michael Montgomery and Clay Walker. Distaff successes, on the other hand, are artists such as Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless and Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose songs address contemporary women's concerns.

Twain combines the approaches. With soft-core videos and Baywatch-worthy photography from John Derek, she gives the guys something See TWAIN on D4 Spice Girls' new album exults in "girl power," but the music is just feeble dance-pop. to the status they so openly crave is simply to present a "radical" appearance, toss out a few slogans, put down the inevitable leering guys and stride confidently forward with a smile for the cameras. Theirs is a curious triumph of doublethink. They can talk all day about girl power, but the Girls present little evidence of it in the music.

(Individually and collectively, their voices are downright feeble at times even apologetic.) They celebrate attitude, yet their songs have See SPICE on D5 install themselves as icons and to give their girl-power marketing mantra the status of a "movement." That's oil in the past, legends built to last But she's got something new She's a power girl in a '90s world And she knows just what to do. Judging from the rest of Spiceworld (Virgin Vi), in stores today, what that Power Girl does is way less significant than the impression she makes. It's as though Posh, Baby, Ginger, Scary and Sporty Spice have decided the quickest route The most curious bit of fluff on Spiceworld, the second album from England's enormously popular Spice Girls, is the kitschy big-band track "Lady Is a Vamp" that closes the album. Determined to right the wrongs of Rodgers and Hart's "The Lady Is a Tramp," these five overexposed theme Barbies attempt their version of scatting as they advise that the woman of today is "a vixen, not a tramp," then gratuitously name-drop Elvis, Jackie and Norma Jean. It's a transparent attempt to The third album by the hot country-pop-rocker Shania Twain hits the stores today.

if.