The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 63

i San JrunrforoExa Thursday, September 26, 1985 section I me out to the video game Cyra McFcddon 0 k-GC7d siTteoeMl ct-ceta fake Mike Heath on this wild is safe, throw in By D. Scott Apel 6PECIAL TO THE EXAMINER i (. JELL, SPORTS fans, the World Series is just around the corner. Soon the boys of summer will fade away FIRGT inniUG: The Littlo Lccsucrs Tiger Town (1985) 76 min. Walt Disney Home Video, $69.96.

Rated G. Veteran Detroit Tigers outfielder Billy Young (Roy Scheider), now in his final season, sees his dream of playing in the World Series slipping away. But the enthusiasm of a young fan rekindles his self-confidence. A double for Disney. The Kid from Left Field (1982) 99 min.

Time Life Video, $39.95. Rated G. Gary Coleman, a bat boy for the San Diego Padres, transforms the team from bums to heros when he passes on the advice of Jhis father (Robert Guil-laume), a washed-up ball player. A saccharine single. two stars, a double; and so on to a home run: a four-star winner.

All these titles are available in both V1IS and Beta formats, but the availability of many of them is limited. Even so, they're still easier to get ahold of than a Babe Ruth bubble gum card or tickets to the Se- ries. Play ball! Prcgcmo wcrm-up You can't even get to first base until you learn how to play the game. The following are among the best "how-to" tapes on the subject: Power Basics of Baseball (1985) 80 min. Video Associates, $29.95.

Dick Williams, manager of the San Diego Padres, acts as your coach for pitching, batting, fielding and base-running practice. Little League's How To Play Baseball by Video (1985) 90 min. Mas-tervision, $39.95. The title pretty much says it all. A series of lessons for the beginner.

Baseball Beginnings (1985) 60 min. Start Right Productions, $32.95. Aimed at the parent whose child asks for help, or the adult volunteer who wants to know how to coach youngsters. lo winter training camps, replaced on fields and TV screens by the gridiron giants. -i i 'y But what happens to those of us who jike our baseball all year round? Once again, home video goes to bat for us.

Although there are only a handful of baseball-related items available on video cassette very curious, considering it was once our national pastime Ihey cover all the bases. And there, are enough tapes available to put together a game program. I But, as the saying goes, you can't tell the players without a scorecard. So your friendly video sportscaster is prepared to present a play-by-play or tape-by-tape description and rating 0f our "video game." This is not an all-star lineup, to be sure; then again, hot every team is worthy of the pennant, either. A good film is called a "hit." We'll take this literally and rate these tapes accordingly: A one-star film is a single; SECOND INNING: A Double Play The Bad News Bears (1976) 102 min.

Paramount Home Video, $29.95. Rated G. Walter Matthau plays a grouchy coach who reluctantly runs herd over a rowdy group of Little Leaguers (including Tatum O'Neal). A fun-loving triple. Please see GAME, E-3 Shoe feetishism SKED WHAT she intended to do with all (X the money she won, a A New York lottery VI winner told reporters, "I'll probably go out and buy about 30 pairs of shoes." How crass, I thought.

How shallow-minded. If someone handed me a million, I'd write huge checks to Amnesty International and St. Anthony's Dining Room. I would, too, right after I bought myself 30 pairs of shoes. What 1 think of as "shoe feetishism" is a female passion, for the most part.

I know a few men who suffer from it who dress for hanging out at Hallidie Plaza, down to their ankles, and then slip into Bally loafers but it's my women friends who are the hard-core shoe junkies. Like me, they don't buy shoes because they need them, they buy them because where footgear is concerned, they have round heels. No one needs the high-heeled snake kickers I just brought home from I. Magnin, with the coy little bows on the vamp that evoke Minnie Mouse. Nor the ankle-strap numbers with the sadomasochistic overtones, the ones that should be worn with whips and restraints.

-Nor the purple suede cowboy boots an otherwise sensible friend in her late 70s bought herself, celebrating having lived to a rakish old age. No one, that is except the podiatrists who get rich straightening toes tangled in coils like cltuccine, chiropractors who specialize in women's spines and orthopedists who repair young girls when they fall off their wedgies. (And not always young girls. My literary agent, who's in her 40s, tripped over her clogs on a street in Greenwich Village recently and broke her knee.) The reason for this madness, says writer and cartoonist Miml iiliiiiiBii movie star Plain-spoken few -x iiiliiliilil Glenn i Close's elegance By Barbara Shulgasser EXAMINER FILM CRITIC derstated, elegant teal-blue, oversized sweater and gray linen skirt. Though in films and on television she seems crisp and no-nonsense, in person she has an endear- LENN CLOSE worries.

She 5a 4 shouldn't, but she does. Though she has a face with all the lush sensuality loss cooperative. "A lot of times I'm certain that I'm not what I seem to be, but, after all, you can't walk into a room and become a quivering mass of whatever. "Sometimes you wonder if all the actors who behave weirdly or dress funny arc more talented than you are." But Close rejects this theory. "I really believe that actors are just people who, if they're good, recognize the fact that they're part of the human pool." Her honesty would elicit proteciivene in a barracuda Nevertheless, to find a spouse, she waded into another section of the pool.

One year ago, she "6obcr ly" dipped a toe into matrimony, marrying New York businessman and man-about-town James Marias, "Jim had a second career as a single man in New York," she says, explaining that he was a sought af of velvet, she talks about herself as if she were a dowd, a pig's knuckle still attached to its original owner. And she worries that she lacks a flair for fashion. She thinks the rea-. son may be that she was not taught the ins and outs of recreational shopping. "All the kids hang out at malls.

Trying on lipstick. When I was growing up, I never thought of shopping as entertainment." To fill this critical chasm in her cultural education, she has consulted with clothing designers. During her trip to San Francisco this week, her look was restrained, streamlined and calm. The plain fact is that it doesn't what Close wears. With her slate-blue eyes, square ivory teeth, wispy blond hair and freckles, she is beautiful but unprepossessing, so- phisticated but girlish, self-assured but with a quick laugh and a self-deprecating smile.

Her giddiness and warmth is uncontainable, even when camouflaged by an un ter extra man at some of New York's fancier dinner parties. "He did the circuit for 12 years, lie actually wore out a dinner jack ing giggle, Perhaps it's an actor's trick of gaining a stranger's confidence or just God's gift to an unusually earnest woman, but there's something about her honesty that would elicit protectiveness in even the most heartless barracuda of a journalist. "I sometimes feci I should be more difficult, less accommodating," she says of her overwhelming courteousncss. "But I'd have to be self-conscious to accomplish that. I think about it a lot.

"I'm really just as crazy as anybody else, underneath. I just have this very together face." She muses that it might do her good to appear to be less rational, less intelligent, et. When I heard that, I was horri fied. I've never known anyone who wore out a dinner jacket." Many of Close's friends are ac tors, so when it was first suggested she and Marias meet some two ExaminerBob Mcleod years before their eventual con rontation, she rejected the offer. "1 Actress Glenn Close is a three-time Academy Award nominee Please see CLOSE, E-5 1 Ci Reliving different (MWIIIWHI III Will UlllWIimiUIII.

Hlllll.lHlllll".i MM UII.MW 1 bombing of Marines Historian recounts Dcirut trcgsdy Pond, in her funny book, "Shoes Never Lie," is that "Shoes are totems of Disembodied Lust." While you can opt for embodied lust instead, in the form of a man, he'll lie to you sooner or later, believe it. Perfect black pumps won't. They'll just cozy up to your feet, making you ecstatically happy until the charge bill comes in. My i shoe collector friends and I agree that Pond is onto something. She's lucid on another home truth.

When you shop for shoes, "You don't have to take off your clothes. You don't have to suffer the humiliation of seeing your pasty while flesh in a three-way mirror. Even if you're fat, one thing always fits: shoes." Or, as in my -case, even if you're thin and the dress that looks great on the hanger makes you look like an ironing board. There you sit, Pond continues, and someone kneels at your feet, "all the better if it's a man." You can buy the shoes prof fcrcd or choose not to buy them. "You may ponder, calculate, coordinate, agonize, all from your throne.

AH shopping should be like this. Life in general should be like this." Indeed it should. I hate shopping for clothes so much, I order mine from catalogs or schlcpp around in threadbare garments that I've owned for 20 years. 1 may look like a bag lady, but I don't have to face those full-length mirrors or saleswomen so painfully chic themselves, they make me feel like urban blight Anyway, bag ladies don't wear overpriced Minnie Mouse shoes. I didn't either, for a decade.

Frivolous shoes for women, especially the high-heeled variety, were regarded as incompatible -with feminism. You were supposed to clomp around in the kind considered politically correct, meaning ugly: Birkenstocks, maybe, or those lumpen clogs that put my agent on crutches. You knew your feet were proclaiming "Equal Pay for Equal Work" when they looked as if you'd left the shoes behind in the store and walked out wearing the boxes. Not wanting to be out of step, 1 toed the ideological line for a while Then I reverted to Mimi Pond's view on the subject. "What appeal is there to a shoe whose only selling point is comfort?" This is a writer after my own heart and after my own arches.

She understands the depths of my sole. She knows that woman can't live on tread alone. As for political correctness, who says stamping out Margie Mar wearing Schiaparelli earrings, bracelet and belt buckle Examiner Cfalg Let Eric Hammel interviewed hundreds of Marines who were in Beirut 1M8 1 ByEdvinsBeitiks OF THE EXAMINER STAFF Story and illustrations by Gladys Perint Palmer EXAMINER FASHION WRITER WHEN DESIGNER Margie Mar's sister opened a bed and breakfast inn on the -corner of Lombard and last December, there was a small, empty store next to the breakfast room. So Margie a fine arts major from Fresno installed her treasured vintage buckles, leathers, feathers and sewing machine and opened a shop. officer with the 12th Marine District, remembered the bombing, too.

He was with a battalion that landed in Beirut on a night when shells fell close by the runway, three weeks after the truck bomb flattened Marine headquarters. His unit was stationed near the headquarters building, Hudson explained, "And the pillars were still lying there, along with parts of uniforms and parts of bodies fingers pieces of camouflage. It left a lasting impression with us, a constant reminder of what could happen. "To us, it was a matter of survival," he said. "We were trying to stay alive, trying to hang in there while we waited for orders to pull out" Hammel, a military historian who interviewed hundreds of Marines stationed in Beirut, said the breakdown in security around the barracks cost the careers of two senior Marine officers.

But final blame for the American deaths belongs in the higher reaches of gov ernment, he added. "I think the welfare of (close to) 260 guys in green was put well behind, well behind, the political aspirations of the administration," he said. Hammel acknowledged that President Reagan came out with a statement accepting full responsibility for the deaths, but added that' it had little effect on the aftermath, as two Marine officers bore the brunt of the blame. There's more than enough blame to go around for the disaster, explained Hammel, beginning in the summer of 1382, after Marines were first brought in to oversee the evacuation of Americans. Once that operation was over, Marines returned to Beirut to help evacuate PLO military units, Including Yasser Ar-.

afat's entourage. "It was a way for everybody to save face," said Hammel, but there was "also an implied slap at the Please see MARINES, E-8 SEEING PHOTOS OF people trapped under collapsed buildings and broken rubble in Mexico City brings back another picture to Eric Hammel a picture of bodies being pulled from the ruins of the Marine barracks in Beirut Oct 23, 1983. Hammel is the author of "The Root" Olarcourt, Brace, Jovanich, an in-depth look at the Marine mission in Ibanon that was published last month. Earlier this week, he spoke to a group of officers and sergeants from the 12lh Marine Corps District on Treasure Island, outlining the tragedy of that bombing. As many as 200 Marines were killed instantly in the Beirut explosion, said Hammel, and the final death toll was set at 241 the most Marines killed at one time, in one place, since World War IL CapL Chuck Hudson, 26, a supply paste clips and neon-colored gloves predictable souvenir merchandise.

Margie's favorites are the old buckles she found at the Marin Flea Market. "1 could only afford $500!" So they're running out. The first time I tried to meet hat-and-accessory designer My-rone was on Sacramento I pressed a nose against her marvelous but always locked shop. Next, I visited her at a wonderful house in the swirling mists of Sea Cliff. Then, last week, she moved into a sunny Please see FASHION E-3, "It's not Chestnut It's not Union," she points out (It's 1688 Lombard.) "My customers are hotel guests, and they're quite surprised." Tourist gift shops generally don't carry Schiaparelli buckles, bracelets, earrings; one-of-a-kind belts made on the spot from Italian rhino-embossed 1 lambskin; shredded, knitted silk sexism in our time somehow depends on dressing as if we all accessories.

Nor are Airican ana Egyptian beads, fur hats, vintage lived in Berkeley? i4 Art A 1 A i jXJifXk-J. Jk. a ,4, AV ,1, .1. 4. 11 A.