The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 17

Wkt JPfiilatrelpfiiaKnquirer Section Compan ies facing computer crime. C3. Ann Landers C2 Comics C8 In Performance C4 Kids' Talk C2 On Music C5 Prime-Time TV Grid C6 Radio Highlights C7 Society C3 Theater Athol Fugard stars with Lisa Hamilton in his latest play. C4. Lifestyle Entertainment Tuesday October 31, 1995 CMjJIIL -II if -4 Review.

Exhibit They're back, by popular demand, our very old friends the dinosaurs. The Franklin Institute's ''Jurassic Park" show may be dated, but it comes sprinkled with Hollywood Stardust. A guide to day care: One mom's enterprise Spring Fashion Preview Versace challenges Karan in New York By Kathy Boccella INQUIRER STAFF WRITER The search was not going well. Sherrill Mosee was trying to find day care for her infant son so she could return to work. But other than the yellow pages, she did not know where to look.

"I didn't think it would be as difficult as it turned out to be. I thought there would be more information out there," said Mosee, 33, a former electrical engineer for Lockheed Martin in Philadelphia. After four months, she gave up and hired a nanny, resolving to help other parents in her predicament by writing a guidebook to day-care providers in the Philadelphia area. "A working parent can't spend all day on the phone looking for day care," she said. Born of her frustration is Who's Who in Child Care in the Delaware Valley, a comprehensive listing of more than 650 child-care providers that includes such pertinent information as hours of operation, staff ratio, programs, special requirements, meals that are provided, nearest hospital, whether the staff is trained in CPR and first aid, and, in some cases, fees.

The user-friendly guide includes a variety of day-care settings, from small family-run operations that take only three or four children to large centers that have several locations with more than 100 children in each. It also includes several nanny services, tips for choosing child care, centers that provide subsidized care, and articles on children's health. A warning: Mosee did not visit the See CHILD CARE on C3 I I1LIHIU KUHIM Ml Lni-' 'i ft By Roy H. Campbell INQUIRER FASHION WRITER NEW YORK Call it the clash of the international design titans. On one side: Gianni Versace, the Italian creator of sexy and extravagantly wrought threads that adorn the celebrated bodies of music and movie mega-stars such as Madonna, Elton John, Sly Stallone, Sting, Babyface and Sharon Stone.

On the other side: Donna Karan, the undisputed American queen of power dressing for women with big jobs and big bank accounts, whose clients include the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbra Streisand. The two major powers squared off as the U.S. collections got under way over the weekend. Their choice of weapons: bright, tight, and revealing clothes made for the very young and the super thin. Designers here will be previewing their spring '96 lines all week for retail buyers and the media, mostly with big theatrical productions in tents pitched at Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library.

Karan, considered by many to be the top U.S. designer, traditionally opens the American collections on a Sunday with a show for DKNY, her spectacularly successful youth-oriented line. But Versace, showing for the first time in America and looking to take no prisoners and increase his U.S. market share, made a preemptive strike; he mounted a bombastic show Saturday night for his secondary col-See FASHION on C5 I The Philadelphia Inquirer GERALD S. WILLIAMS Lr The brachiosaurus is a barrel of laughs.

Mar iama Jeihani gets a kick out of the movie's big plant-eater. Dino dominion Anne Bancroft stars in "Home for the Holidays. Pass another role to Anne Bancroft i it I "i I 1, I I km v.V.( ft. tm Jit from the American Museum of Natural History). Its organizing principle is a comparison of the magic of moviemaking with the wonders of paleontology a somewhat backhanded approach to teaching the science.

That said, it may not have been a bad idea to construct an exhibition capitalizing on the movie's popularity to use Hollywood entertainment to spur scientific curiosity and inquiry. In fact, it was a good enough idea to have occurred to more than one museum. Two years ago, while this exhibit was debuting in New York, Philadelphia had its own local offspring of the movie, called "Jurassic Park: The Science Behind the Story." Produced by the Academy of Natural Sciences, it mixed some exciting theatrical exhi-bitry with information on genetic technology, dinosaur behavior and chaos theorv. Both shows received scientific assistance from the Dinosaur Society, a group of dinosaur enthusiasts. What the Franklin Institute show has that the academy show lacked is the cooperation of Amblin Entertainment, the film's producers, who supplied actual movie props.

The best of these are, unsurprisingly, the dinosaur models themselves. After a lackluster introductory section that assures us that dinosaurs cannot, in fact, be cloned, we stumble into a series of dinosaur dioramas. Children will love these. Among the creatures on view are triceratops, the last of the horned dinosaurs; velociraptor, the uncannily intelligent predator, and brachio-See DINOSAURS on C7 By Julia M. Klein INQUIRER STAFF WRITER all it dinosaur deja vu.

It's hard to walk into a science museum these days without stumbling into yet another re-creation of tyrannosaurus rex. But it's not hard to understand why: Dinosaurs may resemble giant crocodiles; they may have close evolutionary links to modern-day birds. But what they are, in fact, are cash cows. Science museums like dinosaur exhibits because people especially very young people like dinosaurs. And there's no denying that dinosaurs are objects of wonder, from their long, unpronounceable names to their strange shapes, fearsome armor and jaws, and sheer size.

But at times we've transformed them into cuddly creatures, TiArfhnmoiic1y HnmpctirntpH iTitn stnffprl animals and lunchbox decorations. At one end of the spectrum of recent dinosaur exhibits are the austerely magnificent dinosaur halls at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, rich in actual fossil remains and scientifically cutting-edge. At the other is "The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park," a traveling exhibition pegged to the blockbuster Steven Spielberg movie (remember the movie?) that has finally wended its way from that same museum to our own Franklin Institute. It will be on view in the museum's Mandell Center until Jan. 15.

From the perspective of a dinosaur aficionado, there are many problems with this show not the legist of which is that it is dated. The second is its commercialism: It reads like an adver- X. --A By Bonnie Churchill ENTERTAINMENT NEWS SERVICE HOLLYWOOD Anne Bancroft smiled but declined any suggestion of ordering turkey as a sandwich or main entree. "While shooting Home for the Holidays," she recalled, "we filmed the family Thanksgiving dinner scenes for 10 consecutive days, and ate the festive meal 25 times. Now, even pumpkin pie is a turnoff." Jodie Foster produced and directed the Paramount movie (which opens Friday), in which Bancroft, as the fr.nily rcd Charles Durning; Holly Hunter and Cynthia Stevenson play her daughters, Robert Downey her son; and Geraldine Chaplin plays the loony sister, referred to as "Aunt Gladys." It becomes "chaos holidays," with the kids coming home not because they want to, but because it's tradition.

The Oscar- and Tony-winning actress has been on a roll. Bancroft, 64, has made two television specials and two movies back-to-back. She stars as Winona Ryder's aunt in How to Make an American Quilt, then Home for the Holidays. "The roles are light-years apart," she explained "In Quilt, I played a See BANCROFT on C7 Dinosaur-egg incubator, made for the movie, has the attention of the Davies family (from left): Harry, 8, Kathleen, 6, and father Bob, holding Bobby, 3. 1 fil ft p- tisement for the movie (now on videotape), as well as the new Michael Crich-ton sequel, The Lost World, and the movie of the sequel, due out in 1997.

The show offers visitors a bizarre though fairly well-labeled mix of levels of reality: movie props, se-cre-ations of movie props, casts of f)ssils, and some genuine fossils (most on loan Associated Press PAUL HURSCHMANN Donna Karan for DKNY pairs a 1 lemon cotton-siltt strapless tunic with pale lime pants..