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"Five Women Wearing the Same Dress" is a character-driven comedy. That means the plot is as thin as water. Not necessarily a bad thing. The women populating Alan Ball's play are colorful and curious, the kind you can watch even when nothing much happens. The little hub for these tattered Southern belles is the wedding of a bride that none of them can stand. All five are bridesmaids, stuck in the same ugly dress and in varying degrees of lousy lives.

Unlike most men, Studs Terkel is not merely the sum of his parts. He is also the sum of his tapes. Tens of thousands of hours of interviews have gone into his best-selling books on 20th century American life and his provocative Chicago radio interview program--all collected on hundreds of reels. Now, at age 85, Terkel has decided to mend his pack-rat ways and dump the tapes on someone else.

Talk is cheap this holiday season. LCI International Inc. is letting customers call anywhere in the world on Christmas Day for a penny a minute for up to 30 minutes. The same rate applies New Year's Day and six other holidays throughout the year. MCI Communications Corp. is slashing rates 44% for its "Friends and Family" members for calls today. Sprint Corp. customers who pay a dime a minute on nights and weekends will get the same rate all day Christmas and Jan. 1.

Funny thing about coffeehouses. They serve up liquid refreshments meant to pump you up, but in a setting designed to mellow you out. "Caffeine High," care of the Write/Act company at The Kindness of Strangers coffeehouse, is a lot more mellow than pumped up. Scattered and self-conscious as only coffeehouse culture can be, director Jan Marlyn Reesman's show is a little bit of acoustic rock (from Not Dead Yet!

The airwaves are abuzz with the sound of talk, talk and more talk. For veterans Oprah and Geraldo and their many daytime TV disciples (we've lost count), that's hundreds of wardrobe changes a week. And as they parade up and down the aisles, their clothes come under as much scrutiny as their outrageous guests (most of whom deserve to be zinged for the tacky, dingy clothes they wear while basking in their 15 minutes of fame).

In the five years she has run Donna M. Green & Associates--which sells promotional corporate gifts--founder Donna Green has learned the value of bold self-promotion, the advantage of maintaining a part-time job while getting her company off the ground and the benefit of persistence. Green was interviewed by Karen Kaplan. * I'm a very in-your-face person. I'm very good at schmoozing. That's really important because my company is based on advertising and promotion.

angle - n. part of a story line in a wrestling melodrama, in or out of the ring. "The 1-2-3 Kid's injuries were only an angle." blade - v. to cut oneself with a razor. booker - n. the person who plans story lines, angles and the outcomes of matches. crimson mask - n. what a wrestler wears when a blade job produces too much "juice." "Stigmatoid blades so often you gotta wonder if he don't like that crimson mask." finishing move - n. a wrestler's trademark move, often a match-ender.

The conversation at a back table in a local restaurant shifts from the lunacy of giving O.J. Simpson house guest Kato Kaelin his own radio talk show to the wonders of quantum consciousness. The dozen or so men and women who have gathered for a weekly luncheon are a diverse group, ranging from the president of a magic club who whimsically declares himself "President of the Pacific Ocean" to a retired engineer who studied under Nobel laureates in Switzerland.