The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 60

SECTIOI" Eats and a vocal treat Gladys Knight (right) is in town to sing a few songs and sell a little chicken. She i il has just opened a restaurant in Midtown and will perform Saturday at Chastain 1 Park. See article, G2 CjOHN ROSEMOND, G2 CCOMICS, G7 4" i The Atlanta Journal-Constitution CELESTINE SIBLEY By Amy Frazier STAFF WRITER ATLANTA STEPS UP TO THE DANCE I FLOOR AS THE BIG-BAND SOUND I 1 fU MAKES ABIG -fr-TCT C. COMEBACK he lights go down, and couples take to the dance floor as Ella Fitzgerald scats over the speakers. Lounge," its own swing night It caters to a slightly older crowd than the Masquerade, drawing from 75 to 150 people in their late 20s and 30s to dance, said Beatrice, who handles public relations for the club and goes by one name.

Twice a month, Tongue Groove brings in live bands with that old-style charm for the dancers. What if you can't dance? Unlike with many modern- day dances, you can't fake it. There are actual steps that must be followed to a if you want to look good on the dance floor. That's why both clubs offer an hour of free dance instruction when their doors open at 8:30 p.m. City Lights, a dance studio based in Doraville, provides the lessons.

Kurt Azaroff teaches beginners some basic moves every Sunday at the Masquerade. Most come in knowing little, more than how to do the mac- arena and shuffle their feet But after getting tangled up a few Men in white, with button-down shirts and suspenders, twirl women in cap-sleeved dresses. The old black-and-white movie "Sun Valley Serenade," with a young Milton Berle, flickers on a video screen. If it sounds like a mixer at a retirement center, think again. It's "Swing Sunday" at the Masquerade, an Atlanta twenty-something hot spot better known for its nights of rock and alternative music.

Every Sunday the club is transformed into a 1940s dance hall, with nearly 200 young people showing up to dance the single-time swing, jitterbug and fox trot. Shannon Wilson, 18, of Jones-boro has gone every Sunday for the past month. Lc Humility a trait that's admirable in a gardener If there is anything I admire in a rj garden writer, it's humility. The great Christopher Lloyd, an English garden-1 er, won my heart years ago by admit-. ting that there are some things that are beyond his ken.

Vita Sackville-West was by no means meaching and self-effacing, but if you read her faithfully, you know there have been times when she fell flat on her face in constructing her famous gardens. Our own Virgil Adams is such a writer. I always look up Virgil's col- umn in the GEMC magazine, just to be heartened and restored by his cons', fessions of failure. oc This time it's tomatoes. 01 A few years ago, some friends and I dropped in on Virgil at his home near.

Jefferson. We landed there at time, a spectacularly lucky bit of tim-" ing. I The women in the household were canning the bounty from their fabu-1 bus garden, but they took time out to serve up a marvelous vegetable meal, the kind that spells summertime in the South large quantities of iced tea and hot cornbread to back up bowls and platters of fresh vegetables. Virgil took that tack that all gardenia ers take. His patch wasn't quite up to snuff that day.

If we had only been there a couple of weeks earlier I Well, we thought his garden splen-; did, and we had reason to admire the "5 tomatoes, because Virgil filled our car with lovely, luscious ripe ones before i' we left. "It's nice to dance with some times trying to spin their partners, they begin to catch on. By the end of the night, almost everyone is twirling and dipping. Azaroff, 28, said the young crowd doesn't surprise him. "We've entertained ourselves with the eras of the '70s and '80s," he said.

"The question was, 'Where do we go There's something about the '40s that's real interesting the clothes, the dances, the music." Georgia Tech graduate students Bill Healy and Karen Emanuel took a dance class at The question was, 'Where do we go There's something about the '40s that's real interesting the clothes, the dances, the music one and not have them groping you," she said of the differences between today's dances and those of her grandparents. Wilson has tried all of today's dance scenes, from country line dancing to retro disco. But it's swing that caught her attention. After seeing it in movies such as Disney's "Swing Kids" and the recently released "Swingers," she had to try it herself. "The draw is that it's not normal to us," she said.

Wilson calls swing something "new," but folks in their 40s and 50s have been boogieing at clubs like Johnny's Hideaway in Atlanta for years. Wilson and i i i RICH MAHAN Staff Tech. They love the dances because they're different. "It's just more active," Emanuel explained. "You get to an age where you don't want to go to a bar anymore and just sit around.

Besides, it's cheaper in the long run because you don't have time to drink. You're too busy dancing." I Healy, her dance partner, said he feels more comfortable with the formulated dancing than the anything-goes dances of today. "There are set steps, so you don't have to make anything up. Besides, we need structure we're engineering students," he said laughing. Swing Sunday regular Wilson said it took only a few visits to the club before she got the moves down.

She has several tips for those who want to try this new but old pastime: "Wear shoes with a leather sole they slide better. And if you're a cute guy, come on out. The girls almost always outnumber the guys." others are jumping on the bandwagon after seeing the swing culture portrayed in recent music and films. For the past 21 weeks, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a modern swing band, have been on Billboard's Top 100 chart. College students as far away as Athens are driving to Atlanta to shake their tail feathers.

Even the Internet has sites devoted to this rage. The Masquerade started its swing nights five months ago, and several hundred people from across the metro area pour in every Sunday, said Howie Stepp, the club's Sunday disc jockey. Stepp said he has friends in California who say swing has had a presence on the West Coast for about seven years. "We're just slower catching on," he said. Atlanta is catching on now, though.

Two months ago, the popular Buckhead club Tongue Groove started "Ultra If you just want to hear some swing and big-band tunes, check out WREK- FM (9 1 1 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Saturday for "De Soto," a program devoted to the sounds of the 1 940s. WRFG-FM's (89.3) "Plain Old Horizons" plays a mixture of big band, classical, jazz and swing from 3 to 5 Now comes Mr. Adams telling us that he simply doesn't know how to grow tomatoes. He has tried everything and is a child of failure.

He has planted, pruned, staked, wire-caged, watered, sprayed and prayed. "My tomatoes have had early blight, late blight, three or four kinds of wilt, blossom end rot, tobacco mosaic, anthracnose and several maladies that I couldn't diagnose," he writes. Well, if Virgil, a product of the University of Georgia Extension Service, can't diagnose a tomato's ailment, I'm not even going to try. When I go out in the morning with a little jar of paint remover to drown the beetles, I invoke Virgil's name. I say, "Take that for eating my roses! Just stay away from my tomatoes! I'll call Mr.

Adams on you!" Since I have only three tomato plants, it may be presumptuous of me to raise the question at all, but two of my tomatoes have reached sandwich size and are turning yellow. Any minute, I expect them to be gloriously red and pickable. I think Virgil would say that two perfect tomatoes are as good as a garden full if you happen to need only two perfect tomatoes. His piece in the little electric service magazine is illustrated by a picture of a wire cage of tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. And he gets around to admitting what I already knew, that good year or bad year, flood or drought, disease or health, he always has tomatoes to eat, to can, to share.

Humility in a garden writer is all right if he manages to tell you what you need to know about planting and Virgil does. He favors deep digging, and a sunny location close to the house "for easy watering, picking, walking around, inspecting, admiring and showing off to fellow gardeners." And he lists interesting and probably reliable varieties. Now I have forgotten what variety is the parent of my two beautiful ripening tomatoes. I picked Better Boy p.m. on Sundays.

MORE FOR PC USERS Here's a sampling of some of the swingin places in the Atlanta area that play big-band, swing and cocktail music: Johnny's Hideaway: Intermittent selections, 1 1 :30 am. to 4 am. daily. No cover. 377 1 Roswell Road.

404-233-8026. Masquerade: Swing Sundays start at 8 p.m. $2 cover. 695 North Ave. 404-577-8 1 78.

Ritz-Carlton Buckhead: Fridays and Saturdays starting at 9 p.m. No cover. 3434 Peachtree Road. 404-237-2700. Tongue Groove: Ultra Lounge on Thursdays starting at 8 p.m.

$5 cover. 3055 Peachtree 404-261-2325. Swing Time Magazine: The U.S. Swing Dance Server. httpv7www.cs.cornell.edulnfoPeopleaswin SwingDancingswingdancing.html West Coast SwingAmerica (an Atlanta swing club): http:www.CYberati.nety mharvey Prison drama a grim look at life on inside ByDrewJubera TV CRITIC Sex, drugs, violence, race, the mob, an underground economy, a Byzantine social structure ust days after TVs ruling politburo agreed to upgrade network warning labels, cable's HBO debuts the bluntest, "Oz" Grade: II :30 p.m.

Saturday HBO (998305) Rating the TV ratings With most TV networks in agreement on a revised ratings system, Vice President Al Gore declared Thursday the day "America's parents have won back their living room." A recent survey suggests, however, that many parents don't understand the existing rat- ings system. And some Atlanta families say they don't use them anyway. TV critic Phil -Kloer analyzes the ratings ruckus, and local viewers comment. See articles, G5 Channel Surfer goes to LA. The upcoming TV season's syndicated shows take the spotlight as SrUv Channel Surfer checks out Quincy tones' new fi ti 1 is i i everything that exists outside Oz's walls turns chillingly stark when set in miniature within them.

The most relatable character for the more law-abiding cable watchers among us will be a skinny, four-eyed lawyer named Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), who is dropped into Oz after drunkenly driving his car into a girl and killing her. Viewing prison life through Bcecher's wolf-bait eyes is like watching a "Scared Straight" video. You'll vow never to rob most grimly mature drama on TV. "Oz" is the perversely ironic title of this prison-set series (it's the inmates' nickname for Oswald Maximum Security Prison), and its otherworldly connotations are frighten-ingly apt. This eight-episode series (it moves to 11:30 p.m.

Mondays after Saturday's premiere), created by "Homicide: Life on the Street" duo Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson, plays like an unsparing dramatization of an HBO behind-the-scenes prison documentary. A terrific cast, which includes Terry Kinney (head of an Oz experimental unit known with equal irony as Emerald City), Rita Moreno, B.D. Wong and Ernie Hudson, portrays the demented parallel universe lived in by ba guys stuck in a bad situation. plants at the greenhouse across the river, and Millard Lamanac, of the husband-and-wife team that runs. the place, suggested that I try one of his favorites.

I got mixed up in setting them out. But any tomato plant that has two ripening and a dozen coming on gets my vote. How about it, Mr. Adams? iriihaMM AjUm 3- Martha Stewart un- if ft u5Tcheon etiquette. another bank.

Whether you'll vow to return to this creepily realized world-within-a-world week after week is something else a sentence you'll have to impose on yourself. HBO The excellent cast includes Ernie Hudson as the warden. See column, G4 days, Wednesdays and Fridays in Living and Sundafo in Dixie Living..