Vagabond

San Diego Charger punter Bryan Wagner suspects that most Steeler fans attending Sunday's AFC championship game in Pittsburgh have forgotten about the last time he played at Three Rivers Stadium. At least, he hopes they have. If not, he can deal with it. Wagner, a former NCAA Division II All-American at Cal State Northridge, will laugh along with his one-time tormentors. He has been through too much in his on-again, off-again NFL career to let the memory of Sept.

The shantytown pokes out through the brush and the tall grass of a dusty riverbed, an old squatters camp swollen over the years by hard luck and hard times into Ventura County's largest homeless community. It stretches more than two miles up the Ventura River, unfolding in a collection of plywood shacks and nylon tents, housing as many as 200 people.

What would homosexuality be, without its penumbra of covert locations? The genius of George Chauncey's "Gay New York" is its respect for vanished bathhouses, tearooms and saloons where gays cruised and commingled; its respect for homosexualities of the street corner, pier and park--all those lost, aromatic rendezvous.

After all these years, Hugo Perez has come to know something about El Salvador. He has learned that even though he has left his native country, it has not left him. The same with his adopted nation, the United States. Even as he repeatedly left, he could not stay away. When the U.S. national soccer team played the national team of El Salvador this month, it symbolized for Perez a collision of his past and present. It gave Perez, 30, an opportunity to reflect on his career as a soccer vagabond.

Valentine's Day comes with a bonus this year. Thanks to Presidents Day on Feb. 15, the holiday falls in the middle of a three-day weekend, a happenstance likely to inspire a boom in romantic retreating. With an eye toward that weekend--and toward any other getaway opportunity in weeks or months to come--the Chicago-based travel newsletter Passport has some ideas. So do I. Me first.

Once one of Los Angeles' premiere art theaters, the mid-city Vagabond on Wilshire Boulevard near Carondelet Street has in recent years been host to nostalgic Hollywood double features and even a long-running 3-D festival. Many have tried to revive the Vagabond, but Ron Lockyer and Eric Nelson, who have been operating the theater since Oct. 1, have a better chance than their predecessors.

What about Bob? There simply is no getting rid of this guy. The Kansas City Chiefs took Bob Gagliano in the 12th round of the NFL draft in 1981, and 11 years later he returns with the potential to haunt them as the San Diego Chargers' starting quarterback in Sunday's regular-season opener in San Diego. "I'll bet the Chiefs have thought about that a little bit," said Les Miller, former Kansas City director of player personnel.

The Russ Meyer Film Festival, which opened Sunday at the Vagabond, continues tonight with the hilarious "Mudhoney" (1966). Unspoiled by either sadism or obscenity, this 1966 expose of love among poor whites is the perfect dirty movie and a flawless piece of camp (probably on purpose). No one projects heterosexual male sex fantasies with greater gusto and resolute dedication than Meyer, who at heart is a puritan and who has always been a bigger tease than any burlesque queen.

Tom Lewis was waiting. He had been expecting this. He loped across the coaches' office at St. John Bosco High School and switched off the television. "Oprah" would have to wait, it was time to talk--again. "I knew this was coming. It was just a matter of when," Lewis said. The inevitable was Lewis coaching basketball, not playing it. He is an assistant coach for the Braves, another interesting twist in an already interesting story.

At first glance, Alejandro Colunga appears the quintessential '90s bohemian. With his thin mustache, monk-style haircut, red ascot, blue jeans and black boots, he looks every inch the elegant cosmopolitan. As someone who spends as much time in Rajasthan, a northern province in India, as he does in Bahia, Brazil, or New York City, Colunga has refined an aura of hip languor. It's as though he knows the world and all that's in it, perhaps too well.