Insists

Finally released after spending half of his life in prison, and still he had to wait. So Christopher Boyce hung around the prison parking lot, rubbernecking, taking in the fresh air around Sheridan, Ore., unsure what to make of freedom. A half hour went by before the big Suburban at last came lumbering up the driveway, carrying his father, a former FBI agent, and his mother, once a Catholic nun.

Joe Paterno shifts uncomfortably on the couch of his office at Penn State University and makes a confession about his holier-than-thou image. "It scares the heck out of me," booms the hallowed football coach. "Because I know I'm not that clean. Nobody is that clean." "I don't want to appear to be any more than I am," says Paterno, now speaking in a near whisper. "And that's a good, hard-working coach who is a decent guy, a family guy, who doesn't want to cheat." "I lose my temper sometimes.

REMEMBERING HER DAYS AS A young girl--"No one would have accused me of being a happy child"--Leslie Abramson has an enduring memory of her favorite means of escape. After school, at the corner luncheonette, she'd buy button candies and chocolate marshmallow twists (two for a nickel) and spend hours at the comic-book racks, reading. Mad magazine was good for a giggle. But it was the spooky stuff, the horror comics like "Tales From the Crypt," that she really loved. And hated, too.

When Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" premiered last December, the action-filled film set against the backdrop of the Maya empire launched the career of a young Texan named Rudy Youngblood. In interviews plugging the movie, Youngblood, who plays the film's central character, Jaguar Paw, routinely discussed his Indian ancestry and his connections to three American tribes.

SHE MADE a name for herself in the '90s with movies like "A League of Their Own" and "Tank Girl," but Lori Petty likes to say she was an accidental movie star. Moving to New York at age 18, she worked as a waitress in between auditions and slept on friends' couches, at the YMCA, or, on occasion, in Central Park. "It was so comfortable it was like home," Petty recalls as she sits at a deck cafe overlooking the Santa Monica beach, her big blue eyes and cropped hair rendering her immediately recognizable to "Point Break" fans sitting nearby.

"If I'm a scholar, I'm an amateur," says Stephen Mitchell, the soft-spoken translator of Rainer Maria Rilke and the book of Job as well as "Gilgamesh," the "Bhagavad Gita" and his all-time favorite, the "Tao Te Ching" -- "that marvel of lucidity and grace, the classic manual on the art of living." The Tao is Mitchell's deep well, his Ganges. His 1988 translation has sold more than half a million copies.

On the wall in the Pasadena headquarters of the Goldstar ticket service is a concert poster from a decade ago, framed with the will call list showing the names of every Goldstar customer who bought tickets to the show. Both of them. There were just two customers for the first event the fledgling ticket company offered, a dramatic contrast with the 3 million who are now Goldstar members. Many of them are drawn by the 50% discount that Goldstar Events Inc. routinely offers on tickets to rock and pop concerts, plays, traveling circuses, Dodgers and Angels baseball games and other sporting and live entertainment events.

Video game heroine Lara Croft is an adrenaline junkie unafraid of getting bloody. But in Germany, the buxom starlet of the "Tomb Raider" series doesn't bleed -- even if she's being mauled by a tiger. Although the $25-billion video game industry is global, the games themselves aren't. They reflect the distinct cultures and traditions of different markets, and game publishers carefully tweak their titles to tone down offensive material.

For Jung Joon, the moment of truth arrives for his clients as they slip into the casket and he pounds the lid in place with a wooden hammer. Insights arise, he says, as they are confronted with total, claustrophobic darkness, left alone to weigh their regrets and ponder eternity. Jung, a slight 39-year-old with an undertaker's blue suit and a preacher's demeanor, is a resolute counselor on the ever-after who welcomes clients with the invitation, "OK, today let's get close to death."

In the predawn darkness, the floodlit cathedral looms like a snow-covered mountain over this poor neighborhood. Inside, 15,000 faithful have been waiting for two hours, but they show no sign of fatigue. They are expecting their Moses. Suddenly, a pudgy preacher in a brown suit strides up the marble stairs to the altar, a golden tree trunk. Thousands of worshipers break into chest-heaving sobs. Others furiously wave white handkerchiefs and cry "Glory to Christ!" Samuel Joaquin has arrived.