News-Press from Fort Myers, Florida • Page 50

DearAbby Parent and Teen 2D Bridge 2D Horoscopes 4D Comics 7D TV Page 8D NEWS-PRESS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1989 HALLOWEEN 'QUEEN' DOCTOR'S IN Dr. Allan H. Bruckheim offers comments and advice about common medical concerns and problems every day in The Family Doctor2D Leona Helmsley, the self-described 'queen' of New York's Helmsley Palace and other hotels, may be a big hit on Halloween. The costume: a Leona wig, prison garb and a crown, says Paul Blum, owner of a Greenwich Village novelty shop. Helmsley, 69, is awaiting sentencing on convictions last month of evading $1.2 million in taxes.

can't be beat Nintendo just By DAVID INM AN Gannett News Service So you have a kid who plays Nintendo 24 hours a day. He dresses like Mario the Plumber, practices the home version of "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out" on his little sister and is better at "Pro-Am," a racing game, than you are behind the wheel of your Buick. Get ready. In the words of Al Jolson, you ain't seen nothln'yet. Coming this fall from the Nintendo videogame folks (and from folks who've paid big bucks for the Nintendo name) The Nintendo TV shows.

The movie. The cereal. (Excuse us. The "Nintendo Cereal The new hardware. The gift shops.

"And it isn't even peaking yet," says Larry Carlat, editor of Toy and Hobby World magazine. "That's pretty amazing in itself." LEUIS GRIZZARD Read between the headlines to find good news SOME MONTHS AGO, I asked readers to tell me what they liked and disliked about their newspapers. The response has been so overwhelming, my crack research team is still in the midst of sorting all the cards, letters and phone calls that came pouring in. A full report will be But even a brief examination of the responses unearthed what readers have been saying for ages about their newspapers: There's not enough good news. Wrote a man from Charlotte, "Isn't there anything good that ever happens in the news? Certainly there must be, but where is it in my newspaper?" Wrote a woman from Plainview, Texas: "I get up in the morning and read my newspaper.

After I'm finished, there are many times I'm so depressed I want to go back to bed. Where's some news that makes me feel better about the world in which I live?" I'm in complete agreement with such thoughts. They are killing one another in the Middle East In droves, drugs are chipping away at the fabric of our society, Pete Rose has been banned from baseball, and if we didn't have enough to worry about, there's radon gas that can seep into your house and kill you no matter how much oat bran you eat i There may be some hope, however. I finally saw a headline in a newspaper that, instead of dwelling completely on the negative, Included an accent on the positive. The headline appeared recently in the Atlanta Constitution.

The article was about three inmates who escaped the SpauldingCo. jail in Griffin, Ga. The inmates tore a commode out of a wall and crawled out of the hole that resulted. One of the escapees was caught soon after the break but at this writing the other two were still at large. That's the bad news.

The good news was that there were 23 other inmates in the jail who could have followed the three who escaped but chose not to. Said the headline in the Constitution: "Three Flee Spaulding Jail, but 23 Don't." It's certainly news that three inmates broke out of jail, but it may be even bigger news that 23 others had a chance to hit the air but didn't The headline writer realized this and came up with but 23 Don't," thus pointing out the positive side of a negative story. I'd like to see more headlines written in this manner. For example: "Chicago Alderman Found Guilty of Bribery, but Cubs Win." "Students Riot in Virginia Beach, but Stricken Airliner Lands Safely in Denver." "Bush War on Drugs Called Weak, but at Least Somebody Is Doing Something." "Jim Bakker Sobs at Trial, but It Probably Won't Do Him Any Good." "Pro Footballer Suspended for Drug Use, but Tommy Lasorda Doing Something About His Weight Problem." "Fighting Continues in Beirut, but Thousands Flee to Freedom in West Germany." "Loud Rock Music Threatens Teen-age Hearing, but Orange Hair on Decline in U.S High Schools." "AIDS Cases Growing, but Nobody Worries About Herpes Anymore." "Fergie Pregnant Again, but Rob Lowe Didn't Have Anything to Do with It." "Blacks March in Brooklyn, but Rev. Al Sharpton Not Invited." "Three Shot in Liquor Store Holdup, but Rain Ends Tomorrow." Good news: It's there.

All we have to do is look for it. Lewis Grizzard is a syndicated columnist 'Roseanne' man has a big secret Gannett News Service "Roseanne" co-star John Goodman is keeping secret the actual date of his wedding next month, but some 650 people must know. That's how many guests he'll have when he weds Anna Elizabeth Hartzog. The cuddly Goodman had Annabeth as he calls her on his arm for Emmy festivities and they were obviously smitten. They smooched and danced cozily at the post-award bash.

He recently spent his vacation with her in her hometown, New Orleans. Hartzog, 21, is busily making arrangements for next month's nuptials, but when the honeymoon's over she wants to complete her studies in drama and communications when she moves to L.A. Goodman, joking about how he met his brunette lady love, said, "It was a mail-order thing. It's like brine shrimp or sea monkeys." Here's the latest on the Nintendo front: More equipment. Recent Introductions to the Nintendo line include a 160 Nintendo Power Set with Power Pad.

The pad is a red, white and blue mat with 12 foot-sized buttons. By stepping on a button, you play the system, using your body instead of your hands. TV shows. "Captain The Game Master" airs at 9 a.m. Saturdays on NBC.

It's about a boy who finds himself inside a Nintendo game, which allows him to fight with and against various game characters. Movies. This Christmas, Fred Savage (Kevin on TV's "The Wonder will star in "The Wizard" as a "Will Nintendo finish on top this year? There's little doubt about it," Carlat said. "They're shooting for $2.5 billion in sales." At least two companies are trying to challenge Nintendo's headlock on the market, but they're trying it just as the company's ABC Mark Linn-Baker (top) and Bronson Pinchot of "Perfect Strangers" make a cameo appearance on the premiere of "Family Matters." i Jv. A ft! US There are Nintendo Entertainment Systems, as they're called, in 19 million homes.

It's the top-selling toy in America, according to Toy and Hobby World. The NES is a small gray box that plays cartridges of games like "Super Mario Brothers" and its sequel, which feature Mario and Luigi. They are two squatty guys in overalls who try to save a princess trapped in a castle, the moral being, presumably, that a plumber can be as heroic as some knight any day of the week. The NES alone sells in the $100 range. Game cartridges there are more than 100 go for about $50 each.

About 50 million cartridges are expected to be sold this year. Last year Nintendo reported $1.7 billion in U.S. sales. By February of this year, sales had already passed $1.4 billion, up 47.1 percent from the same period a year earlier. Analysts say Nintendo Co.

a Japanese company that made nothing but playing cards until about 10 years ago, controls 75 percent of the American high-tech toy market. Alt "Family Matters" premieres at 8:30 tonight on ABC (channels 26 and 40; cable channels 6, 7 and 10). precocious kids the Winslows' teen-age son and daughter and Harriette's sister's tyke. The sister also is there and now mama. What fun and frolic! Payton-France has the same kind of acerbic, snippy humor that Maria Gibbs' Florence used to have on "The Jeff ersons." But she's a wise woman because she runs the house and holds it intact.

Reginald VelJohnson's Carl looks like a beach ball with a smiley face. He bounds about the sitcom in the kind of upbeat frenzy that quickly grows irritating. Rosetta LeNoire's mother-in-law is sweetly grandmotherly to the kids and rather curt with the adults. You'd like to kick her rear. Telma Hopkins, once a part of Dawn, the backup group for singer Tony Orlando, is the sister who wants to be a writer.

And there are the obligatory kids sassy and "cute." As worn-out, copycat and comfy as the sitcom is, it will probably be a marginal winner. Who knows why, but these familiar family shows always seem to hang around. The competition is the second half of CBS' new "Snoops" and the second half of NBC's new "Baywatch." It's a freshman face-off. kid who makes it to the finals of a Nintendo contest and heals rifts within his family in the process. There's also an animated Mario Brothers movie planned for 1990.

Cereal. In May Ralston-Purina introduced its Nintendo Cereal System. Each box contains two bags of cereal, one bag of four-grained citrus-flavored Mario Brothers-shaped edibles, and one bag of berry-flavored Zelda-shaped ones. Stuff. By Christmas expect "World of Nintendo" showrooms in chain stores such as mart and Sears.

They'll sell Nintendo ice cream, se-quined jackets, underwear, lunchboxes and linens. prof ile is rising higher than ever. NEC Home Electronics and Sega of America are each introducing home-videogame systems this fall that boast superior See NINTENDO, page 6D Parenting style, not mom work, is what counts ByDIANNEAPRILE Gannett News Service When Wally Cleaver came home with a on his report card, nobody blamed it on June's being a housewife. When the Beav swiped a candy bar from his friend's locker, Ward never worried that his misbehavior was due to June's not bringing in a paycheck. But 30-odd years later, full-time homemakers like June are no longer the norm.

Most schoolchildren have mothers with outside jobs. And researchers have documented every nuance of emotional and academic behavior among the kids of those working mothers noting each social slip-up or slide of a grade and linking it to their mothers' job status. To some of the experts who gathered in New Orleans last month for the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, this continuing trend is unfair. Too much attention is being paid to a mother's employment particularly the number of hours she works they said. Not enough is paid to the role that a father's work plays in a family, or to the powerful effects of other factors such as parenting sty les on the development of children in two-paycheck families.

Voice of authority For example, several major papers including the latest results of a 20-year, continuing California study showed that children benefit most when parents are "authoritative." These parents balance control with freedom and confrontation with support rather than being either permissive or rigidly authoritarian. The studies suggest that this parenting style is a key to helping children develop socially, emotionally and academically. And, in at least one study, working mothers (part-timers and full-timers) were substantially more likely than unemployed mothers to be authoritative. Another key to a child's well-being is his parents' commitment to parenting not only the time and energy they devote to it, but the level to which they identify with and find meaning in the role. Inastudyof236 mothers of preschoolers, University of California psychologist Ellen Greenberger found no link between a mother's job status and her commitment to parenting.

Some other psychologists, including Karen Bogenschneider of the University of Wisconsin, suggest that the overall picture may be clouded, too, by studies that only search for the ways a mother's work damages children and marriages. "An awful lot of energy is being expended on this search for negative effects and we are using a finer and finer sieve to find them," she said. For example, Bogenschneider's own study of 1 0,000 adolescent boys and girls confirmed earlier research showing that middle-class and upper-middle-class boys whose mothers work full time get lower grades than those with moms who work part time or not at all. That sounds pretty dramatic until you realize how "modest" the difference in grades is among these boys one-fifth to one-third of a letter grade, or the difference between a B-minus and a C-plus, according to Bogenschneider. The good news for working mothers is that many new studies indicate that children like theirs actually are doing better in every arena than previous data showed.

See MOM, page 6D "Family Matters," a new sitcom in "The Cosby Show" vein, stars (from left) Telma Hopkins, Rosetta Le Noire, Reginald VelJohnson and JoMarie Payton-France. ftwMw Fact that premise is worn makes 'Matters' worse "Nasty" cop show 5D By LANE CROCKETT Gannett News Service ABC's new "Family Matters" sitcom might as well be called "The Cosby Show II." It's into cloning. There are unabashed similarities in the construction of the family, as well as situations. JoMarie Payton-France, the elevator operator on the network's "Perfect Strangers," has her wmmmmmam own show now. RFVIEW Viewers are treated to her Harriette Winslow's laughter-filled, warm household.

No kidding, that's what the publicity says. "Family Matters" makes its debut at 8:30 tonight Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker, stars of "Perfect Strangers," make a brief appearance to get "Family Matters" going. They don't do much, but, hey, they're personalities, right? The first episode is called "The Mama Who Came to Dinner." Surprisingly, it's really about a mama who did just that. She's Harriette's mother-in-law, whom the heroine has asked to live with the family. Harriette's chubby hubby, Carl, is not thrilled because mama will want to put him on a diet and then take over the household.

Harriette doesn't believe that, but she learns. The household also has three 33: fit-.