All over America as the turkeys begin their last waddle toward their day of glory, football fans lay in their Turkey Day Classic supplies, new cooks begin their weeklong fret, and old cooks begin thinking of something new to do.

If there's one day in the year when "ordering in" should be forbidden, this is it: Thanksgiving. A child's memory of Ma calling up the local caterer just doesn't make it - what if that kid becomes a novelist? Or worse yet, a filmmaker?

Better to bite the bullet and wrestle the project to the table.

Should the man of the house feel that the outdoor grill is his baby, by all means let him at it. There's plenty of work for all in making the stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy (you have to buy a little chicken to make that if the turkey is grilled), and all the usual parts and attachments of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. One way to avoid total exhaustion is to assign different dishes to various family members or guests - preferably, things to be made in their own kitchens and transported.

Turkey on the Grill

A 12 to 14-pounder is the top weight for this treatment: Otherwise the grill cover won't close. Do some pre-measuring of your grill before selecting your bird to be sure it fits. Two days in advance wash the turkey inside and out in cold running water. Dry it well with a ton of paper towels. Rub it inside and out with the following "dry rub," which is less demanding than a brine.

Dry Marinade "Rub":

1 Tbsp. dried juniper berries
1 Tbsp. coarse salt
1 tsp. allspice berries
2 tsp. whole black peppercorns
6 fresh sage leaves or 3 dried
3 large cloves garlic, peeled and minced

Grind the first five ingredients in a spice mill or combine with the finely minced garlic. Rub your turkey inside with some of the mixture. Lift the skin away from the breast and as much of the thighs as possible and rub them well with more of the dry marinade. Rub the remainder over the inside of the wings, which should be punctured with a small knife so that they can absorb the "rub."

Put the turkey in a plastic bag, tie it closed, and put it in the fridge. Turn the bag over at least once a day - twice is better - for the next two days. Then blot it dry, rub the bird all over with softened butter, duck fat, or oil, fasten down the neck skin in back with a small skewer, snap the wings behind its back, push the legs up toward the body, and tie the bird's ankles together. Cover the wings with foil.

Do not stuff. With this fast-roasting method, the stuffing might never even get hot and you'd be risking salmonella - yes, even turkeys carry it. Never roast a turkey by any method that requires more than three hours to get it to 140 degrees F. - sitting around at low temperatures is an invitation to food poisoning. Those Holly Golightly tales of cooking with a hair dryer or steaming stuff in a dishwasher are faintly cute at best, more often lethal. (Smoking is a "whole 'nother" project, not discussed here - it takes about 10 to 12 hours.)

Remove the cooking grill and open the bottom and top vents. Put two foil pans, one inside the other, in the center of the coals rack and put briquette racks on either side of it. Half fill the foil pans with water. Put about 30 briquettes on either side of the drip pan and light them. When they are covered with a light ash, put the top cooking rack in place and put the turkey, breast side up, on it directly over the the drip pan. Brush well with melted butter or oil.

Cover and roast, adding six or eight coals to either side of the drip pan every hour to maintain approximately 325 degrees inside the grill. With most grills this is impossible to ascertain exactly, so just try to keep it at medium-hot and take care it doesn't brown too fast (tent with foil if this seems to be happening).

A 12-pound turkey will require between two and three hours (much depends on the outside air temp, the wind factor, the heat maintained by your grill, the score of the football game), and the only way to tell if the bird is done is with a meat thermometer. Insert it into the thickest part of the thigh and when it reads 170 degrees remove the turkey to a warm carving board and let rest in a warm (not hot) place for 15 to 20 minutes to let the juices settle.

All grilled turkeys have a thin line of pink just under the skin, which is a reaction of the meat pigment. It is not underdone. The ball joints of the turkey will be a bit pink too, even in hot-smoked turkey that's been on for 12 hours, but it is not underdone.

Turkey on a Gas Grill

Prepare the turkey as outlined above, or, if you prefer, simply stuff the breast and as much of the thigh as is reachable underneath the skin with a mixture of fresh parsley and fresh sage or tarragon, salt, pepper, and butter. Rub the bird well with oil or softened butter and salt well.

On a dual-burner grill: Preheat 10 minutes with ceramic or lava stones in place and the drip pan half-filled with water on one side of the grill. Turn the heat to medium and place the turkey on the other side of the grill and close the cover. Be sure there's one inch clearance between the turkey's breast and the grill lid. The thigh temperature should read 170 F. when the turkey is done. Check the bird, particularly in the beginning, to regulate the cooking - if you see the skin turning black, you know you've gone too far - turn right and go out for dinner.

A 12-pound unstuffed turkey should be done in about two hours. Let it rest 20 minutes before carving.

On a triple-burner grill: Preheat the grill for 10 minutes, then turn off the center burner. Lower the heat to medium on the front and back burners (if using ceramic rocks they should be in place before heating). Put the turkey, breast up, on the well-greased cooking grate. Close the lid and try to regulate the heat at about 325 to 350 degrees F.

Watch closely in the beginning, but don't keep opening the grill lid or too much heat will escape. Mop with melted butter if the skin seems dry, but the fat won't penetrate very far, which is the reason for first spreading herb butter between the skin and flesh. The turkey is done when the deepest part of the thigh reaches 170 degrees. As the heat in a gas grill is more constant and reliable than in a charcoal grill, a 12-pound turkey is fairly certain to reach that temperature in two hours.

Super worriers roast their birds to 180 or even 200 degrees, which dries them out. A large piece of meat continues to cook on residual heat for at least 15 minutes after it is removed from the heat source and normally reaches 180 in that time anyway.

Now isn't that perfect? Having the turkey cooked outside and the kitchen free for all the other fixings . . . don't worry, plenty of delicious aromas will fill the house from the stuffing and gravy and all the other umpteen things we add to our annual Super Feast.

A reading of "Eastville" by Ellen Lewis, directed by Guy Giarrizzo, will conclude the Bay Street Theatre's fall series of Sunday-morning play readings this weekend.

The play takes place in Eastville, an African American community in Sag Harbor that was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. It is here that Harriet Tubman, the play's central character, has fled after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Laws.

Ms. Lewis is a member of the African American Playwrights Unit of Playwrights Horizon. Another of her works, "The Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky," is under development as a musical for the American Music Theater Festival's next season.

She is the author also of "Urban Candles," "Let the Bidding Begin," and "Crab Cakes," among other plays.

Mr. Giarrizzo has directed at Circle Rep and at the Lab Theatre Company at Circle-in-the-Square Downtown. He recently directed the New York premiere of Marlane Meyer's "The Geography of Luck" at the Samuel Beckett Theatre.

Complimentary bagels and coffee will be served in the lobby before the show, which starts at 11 a.m. A question-and-answer period with the playwright, director, and cast will follow the reading.

Appalachian Clog

"Rock, Rhythm, and Romance," provided by the musicians and dancers of the Foot and Fiddle Dance Company, will be on the Bay Street stage on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Since 1981, Pat Cannon and her company have performed a creative blend of such traditional folk dance forms as Appalachian clogging, square dancing, tap, Western swing, and Irish step dancing - all tied together by their emphasis on the rhythmic use of the feet, a lively theatricality, and contemporary flair.

Tickets for both of the weekend's events are available from the theater's box office on Long Wharf.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Bay Street is offering two popular attractions that may sell out early: Karen Akers in cabaret on Friday, Nov. 29, and the Paper Bag Players, who will give two performances for children on Nov. 30.

The Internet is nothing if it is not about promise, and one promise that has received widespread attention is its potential for electronic banking. Wire fund transfers have been around for years, of course; big businesses, brokerage houses, and banks routinely shuttle billions of dollars across phone lines while half the world sleeps.

Now, the logic goes, this technology will trickle down to ordinary folks. Because some 40 million of us own PCs, we can bank from our keyboards.

Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Chem ical, and several other financial institutions are offering services that allow you to log on and pay creditors as diverse as your landlord and the dry cleaner. As with conventional bank cards, you have a PIN or password for security - supposedly, so nobody can forge "checks" even if they had access to your home PC.

The Big Pitch

You simply tell your computer whom to pay on the first of the month (or whenever the payment due is on your credit cards, for example), and the bank will debit your account. Not only do you get the extra float on your money, you no longer have to worry about the U.S. Postal Service slowing or misplacing a payment. Your electronic fund transfers can be made 24 hours a day, and they are "guaranteed."

The purveyors of all this advanced technology point to how much time and postage you'll save. In theory, home banking sounds wonderful to all of us who are fiscally challenged. When it comes to balancing a checkbook, plus or minus $100 is close enough for me.

When Chase Manhattan first introduced Spectrum in the early 1980s, it was a crashing failure. It attracted a scant 2,000 customers. Modems were slower, software was less sophisticated, and home PCs weren't as cheap, powerful, or ubiquitous as they are now.

More For Self-Serve

But that wasn't why it failed to gain a significant number of followers. What was wrong with the concept then is still what's wrong with checkless banking today. The banks want to shift the burden of labor to the customer, and then, under the guise of another "service," want the customer to pay for it.

The pitch is, put simply, "be your own teller for one low, low price." Imagine if you went to a service station that charged $19.95 for an oil change, or $24.95 if you want to do it yourself. That's what's happening with banking in cyberspace.

Banks have used the same marketing tactics with automated teller service. At A.T.M.s, however, you're getting tangible benefits. You can bank at any hour, get cash, the lines are generally shorter than they are inside the bank, and you never have to deal with surly or slow tellers who follow the the same rigid schedules as the machines. And most A.T.M. transactions are free or reasonably priced. It's a fair deal for both the bank and its customers. They save labor costs; we save time.

Does Not Compute

Banking in cyberspace, however, does not compute. I made an informal study of at least four large banks or financial services companies. The charges for home banking run somewhere between $9.95 a month up to $15 a month with certain restrictions (of course).

Intuit, which publishes the phenomenally popular Quicken money management software, charges between 35 cents and 50 cents a check, depending on volume. As with shopping for a loan, the gimmicks and free-month teasers made it difficult to discern which was the best deal. The banks will give you the software. At Citibank, bank personnel recently handed out applications and diskettes to people waiting on line.

Though the charges are hardly excessive, electronic banking seems to be attractive to households who pay a large number of bills each month. Depending on what service you use, it will cost roughly 50 cents a check for the typical household. Subtract the postage and you're still paying 18 cents a check.

Mythical Advantage

I've met one customer who swears by on-line banking (using Intuit's clearinghouse); he finds it well worth the monthly fee to pay his creditors exactly when he wants. But his advantage is mostly myth. He still needs a cash machine if he wants to buy a newspaper or get heels put on his shoes.

All he's doing is saving time stamping and licking envelopes. Electronic banking makes him au courant in today's techno-society. It makes him feel better.

The reality is this. In all but a few cases, keeping your money in a checking account until the last possible moment doesn't pay. How much can a person with a middle-class income save even with an interest-bearing checking account? We're talking pennies.

Inevitable Errors

Unless you're moving the kind of numbers around that American Express does every month, your savings on the float won't amount to anything. On-line banking is for high rollers only, and those folks don't type.

Then there's the last sticky matter of electronic security and disputes over bank errors. As you might expect, on-line banking applications have no shortage of fine print. If it hasn't happened already, sooner or later someone's direct-deposit paycheck will end up in someone else's checking account in Singapore. It will happen either by glitch or by greed.

If "Phiber Optik" and other 20-something hackers can explore NYNEX's mainframe computers or download credit card numbers, it won't take long before a budding Willy Sutton begins breaking into our checking accounts via a short jaunt on the Info Highway. (I can imagine what he'll say when he's indicted: "Because that's where the money is!")

Back To The Mattress

The red tape on a single mix-up will cancel out all the time you saved in a year of electronic banking. On two occasions, Chase automated tellers shortchanged me for $20. The first time, I complained, filled out a form, waited a month, and finally received a letter saying, in essence, the machine paid the money out and it was my loss.

The second time, I got so angry I swore I'd move to another bank if they didn't cover my loss. (They did.) Unless it's a matter of direct fraud or theft, the burden of proof for any losses incurred with cyberspace transactions will undoubtedly be on me and you.

If you don't believe this, read the receipt from an A.T.M. There is a reason they say "record" of your transaction and not "receipt."

On-line banking is an outstanding advance in technology. The idea of a "cashless society" is very appealing to many of us. But so far, it's not much of a deal. In fact, it almost makes one want to put his or her money in a mattress. It's still easier to extract a $20 bill hidden in a piece of foam than it is from a hard drive.

Doug Garr, a writer who divides his time between East Hampton and New York, has been using computers since the first Apple II was released. He is a frequent contributor to "Guestwords."

Montauk provided the genesis of "Jaws" for Steven Spielberg by way of the author Peter Benchley, a sometime customer of the white-shark hunter and charter boat captain Frank Mundus.

Now another chapter out of Montauk's colorful past - the much more serious story of the slave ship Amistad - is about to get the Spielberg treatment.

The tale of the schooner Amistad is a scriptwriter's dream: a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas and a courtroom drama played out at the highest level, the U.S. Supreme Court.

The story should make one of the great movies, especially in Mr. Spielberg's hands.

Off Culloden Point

In August of 1839, the schooner, with 49 African mutineers and two Cuban prisoners on board, dropped anchor off Culloden Point, her sails in tatters, her hull encrusted with barnacles.

A day before, off the South Shore of Long Island, it had dawned on the Africans, natives of Sierra Leone, that they had not been sailing for weeks toward their homeland as the Cubans had led them to believe.

The Amistad's captain was long gone, dead at the hands of a young man called Cinque, the leader of the mutiny. He and his shipmates had been among hundreds of African people captured months before and chained between decks, cheek to jowl, to make the long trip to Cuba to be sold. They were then transferred to the Amistad for the journey to the Cuban port of Guanaja.

Mutiny And Death

The captives might have lived out their days in slavery had it not been for two things. One was a joke made by the ship's cook. The other was Cinque's spirit and lust for freedom.

En route to Guanaja, the Africans asked the cook what was to happen to them. The cook replied in jest that they were to be killed and eaten. They believed him. That very night they mutinied, killing the captain, the cook, and other crew members with large cane knives seized from the ship's cargo.

The Cubans, Don Jose Ruiz and Don Pedro Montez, who were accompanying their new slaves on the voyage, were spared, in order that they could pilot the ship back to Sierra Leone.

North By Night

Technically, the importation of slaves into Spanish colonies was illegal, by virtue of an 1820 treaty between Spain and Great Britain. To get around the law, papers had been drawn making Cinque and the others domestic servants.

In reality, Ruiz had bought Cinque and other African men for $450 each. Montez bought three girls, aged eight to 13.

After the mutiny, knowing that Cinque could not read the compass, Montez surreptitiously steered the Amistad north and west by night, in hope of rescue.

On Aug. 20, 1839, a New York City pilot boat came alongside the schooner. The Cubans were sent below. One of the Mendi, Banna, who spoke a little English, asked if they were off the coast of Africa.

On The Beach

Having comprehended the truth, they turned east. Cinque ordered the helmsman to steer for a light, which turned out to be the Montauk Lighthouse. The appearance of rocks caused Amistad to navigate around the Point. She finally dropped anchor off Culloden.

Members of the ship's party wandered toward Montauk village on the south shore of Fort Pond Bay, some wearing only handkerchiefs as breechclouts, others wrapped in blankets. They needed food, and held up Spanish gold coins in payment.

The next morning, a party of Sag Harbor men led by Captain Henry Green found the Africans on the beach, cooking. Banna asked the local men if they had rum.

No rum, but a bottle of gin, yes, which was sold to the newcomers.

The Africans next asked if there were slaves in this country. No, came the response. Were there any Spaniards, then? No again, at which point Cinque led his comrades in joyous shouts and whistles.

The celebration, however, was short-lived. A Government brig came upon the anchored Amistad, boarded her, and, finding Africans armed with cane knives, took the schooner at gunpoint and placed her crew in irons. The slave owners Ruiz and Montez were freed.

If the journey of the Amistad mutineers had been strange and arduous from Africa to Montauk, their journey through the courts of pre-Civil War public opinion and of law, would be tribulation of a different type - and not only for the Africans.

This latter saga began in Hartford, where the Amistad was taken to be claimed as salvage by the Sag Harbor party in Admiralty Court there. A highly publicized trial followed, and in the end the local court rejected Captain Green's claim. The next question was what to do with the mutineers.

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Spanish Government demanded the return of the African "property," and President Martin Van Buren pulled out all the stops to accommodate the Spaniards.

A Bridgehampton man, Henry P. Hedges, who was studying at Yale Law School, attended the first trial. While obviously taking the side of his friend Captain Green, Mr. Hedges later wrote of Cinque:

Cinque In Court

"He had been squatted on his marrow bones on the floor, apparently a dull, ignorant heathen. As question after question poured in upon him, closer and hotter, he gradually rose. The sense of injustice, of wrong, wreaked upon him and his people; of his absolute right to break all bonds and battle for freedom, overpowered him."

"I see him now, hesitation overcome by the storm of feeling; indignation animating every feature; the loftiest scorn beaming from his massive brow . . . I never heard his eloquence surpassed, although uttered in words not understood."

The defense attorney, Roger Baldwin of Connecticut, demanded a writ of habeas corpus in an attempt to force the court either to try the Africans for murder or release them. Accused murderers, he reasoned, would have to be considered people, not property, with corresponding rights.

Van Buren Appeals

The question was too hot for Associate Justice Smith Thompson, who denied the writ, saying that while he opposed slavery, it was the law of the land. He passed the case along to a district court.

There, Justice Andrew Judson, caught between Van Buren's politics and a wave of public sympathy for the Africans, decided the Amistad mutineers had been kidnapped, were thus not slaves, and should go free.

Amazingly, the U.S. Government appealed the decision. In February of 1841, the Van Buren Administration, insisting the Africans be returned to Cuba as stolen property even though slavery was illegal there, took the case to the Supreme Court - where five Justices, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, were or had been slave-owners.

Free At Last

The Africans were kept in jail while the case proceeded, but with a cult following beyond the bars. Dramatizations of the court proceedings toured the country, as did wax figures of the Africans. Money for the defense was raised by growing ranks of abolitionists.

Cinque was a hero to some, a murdering slave to others.

In the end, none other than John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, then 73, made an eloquent argument against the Federal Government on behalf of Cinque and his compatriots. The Court ruled they should "be declared free, and be dismissed from the custody of the Court, and go without delay."

A Bible given by the Africans as thanks to Adams, then a Congressman, was stolen earlier this month from the Adams National Historic Site in Boston.

Historic Import

Some historians say the Amistad affair split Van Buren's Democratic Party, which lost the next election. If the Civil War was fought to decide the question of slavery, then there is little question that the case - America's first celebrated paroxysm over slavery, race, and human rights - played an important role.

The Amistad's story will be Mr. Spielberg's first directing role for DreamWorks, his new production company. One of his partners in DreamWorks is David Geffen, who, like Mr. Spielberg, has a house in East Hampton. (The third partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, does not, or at least not yet.)

The script was developed by the writers David Franzoni and Steven Zaillian, the latter having written the script for Mr. Spielberg's "Schind ler's List."

Production is expected to begin in February, with locations in Los Angeles, New England, and the Caribbean.

In Athens in 1981, the artist Jessie Wood had a critically acclaimed show of paintings of the Aegean island of Spetsai, where she and her husband, Clem Wood, lived for four years.

Michel Deon, a member of the Academie Francaise, wrote of her work: "Here are the houses, windows, rooftops that we Spetsiotes had stopped seeing . . . Jessie Wood reintroduces us to their hidden beauty, artless mystery, mute tragedy, and simple pleasures."

"Curiously, this world seems uninhabited . . . Its life is secret and interior . . . With access only to facades, we are free to imagine, behind the closed doors and windows, the people we cannot see."

Plane Geometry

Recently Ms. Wood took a visitor on a tour of her old Bridgehampton farmhouse and one of its barns, now a guest cottage for her eight children and stepchildren and their offspring.

In contrast to the colorful Greek artifacts and fabrics decorating the cottage, her paintings seem to stare out blankly: the opaque squares of white-washed walls, the flat black and pastel rectangles of doors and windows closed against the dazzling light.

We may note a row of terra-cotta roof tiles here, a trapezoid of cobalt sky there, or a ribbon of cobblestone street. But mostly these canvases are about the plane geometry of white walls standing in the sun.

"The last thing I wanted to do was paint cute little Aegean houses," Ms. Wood said of her austere works.

The Light Of Spetsai

"Spetsai isn't a touristy island like Mykonos or Hydra. It's a place Athenian families summer with their children, that's almost deserted in winter, inhabited only by fishermen and the odd assortment of marine biologists and renegade sailors who moor their boats in its sheltered harbor."

Determined to experience a winter on the seven-by-four-mile island, the Woods holed up one year without once visiting the mainland. "We got to know the local people and went to a lot of weddings," she said. "Over the years, I really sort of painted that whole island."

"A hommage to Spetsai in particular, Jessie Wood's show is also a hommage to the insular architecture of the Aegean Sea," Mr. Deon wrote. "The light in the islands redeems everything, explains everything."

"The light is everywhere there, creating those blinding, abstract facades," the artist said. "Here on Long Island, it's all mists and fog."

International Liaisons

Ms. Wood was born in Paris to a French mother, the glamorous socialite and prizewinning author Louise de Vilmorin, and Henry Leigh-Hunt, an American businessman who was her first husband.

International liaisons run in the family: her grandparents met on a cruise up the Nile. "A mutual history of horticulture brought them together," Ms. Wood said. The Vilmorin family had earlier standardized the common carrot and then made a fortune in wheat.

Her paternal grandfather, a global adventurer, was the president of Ames Agricultural College in Iowa at age 29 and later the founder of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. After losing all his money, he spearheaded an effort to build railroads in China and pioneered gold-mining in Korea.

Then came the voyage up the Nile, during which he noted that the Sudan had the perfect climate for growing cotton. He established plantations there and made another fortune.

Prewar Paris

The oldest of three daughters, Ms. Wood grew up in Paris in her mother's glittering circle of artists and intellectuals. Jean Cocteau was a friend, as were the King of Spain, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Marcel Achard, Orson Welles, Rene Clair, and Charlie Chaplin.

In 1933, the great French novelist and art historian Andre Malraux encouraged Madame de Vilmorin to write. Her first novel was published a year later, followed by stories, poems, and more novels, three of which were made into films.

This scintillating life was interrupted by World War II and the German occupation of Paris. Since French citizenship derives from the mother, the Leigh-Hunt daughters were considered French and forbidden by the Nazis to leave the country.

Art And Architecture

However, in 1941, Mr. Leigh-Hunt, then head of the trust department of the National City Bank in Paris, managed to smuggle his family out through Spain and Portugal to America. They lived in California.

The children attended school in Santa Barbara, and all but Ms. Wood returned to Paris right after the war. She went to Vassar, where she majored in art history with an emphasis - not surprisingly - on architecture; structural elements pervade her work.

After marriage to a Texas oilman which produced four sons but ended in divorce, Ms. Wood and her children moved back to Paris in 1961, where she worked in the American Embassy.

Expatriates

Three years later she married the scriptwriter Clem Wood. They had met at Vassar 15 years earlier on her first and only blind date, during which a Justice of the Peace whom they visited to settle a traffic ticket mistook them for eloping lovers and, a bit prematurely, prepared to marry them on the spot.

The couple settled in Paris, palling around with such American expatriates as James and Gloria Jones and Irwin and Marian Shaw. The European film makers Rene Clement, Volker Schlondorff, Roger Vadim, and particularly the late Louis Malle, were also close friends.

Fortunately, Mr. Wood spoke flawless French, although, said his wife, with an atrocious American accent. "At least he will never be mistaken for a spy," Madame de Vilmorin observed pointedly.

South Fork Residents

Eventually summers in Spetsai and winters in Paris began to seem rootless, especially to Mr. Wood. The couple returned to America in 1977 to visit the critically ill Mr. Jones in Sagaponack. Two years later they spent the summer with William Gaddis and Muriel Murphy in Wainscott and rented their house for the winter.

At the suggestion of the late Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, the Woods bought their present farmhouse in 1981. "It was falling down, but very cozy," Ms. Wood remembered. "Clem was smitten, while I was appalled by the amount of work, and heat, it needed."

Ms. Wood had continued to paint throughout the globe-trotting years, selling her work in Paris and Athens. Now she settled down to tackle the South Fork and its famous light.

In A New Light

Her canvases changed, the blazing whites replaced by the heavy greens of potato fields and the dun of winter marshes. The intense Mediterranean blues paled into silver, and human habitations vanished. Ducks and birds found their way into her new landscapes, which she showed at the Elaine Benson Gallery.

"I go into nature and do drawings and take extensive notes on something that catches my eye," she said. "It's always a geometric shape, the way a spit of land slides into the water like a crocodile, the arch of a bridge against the sky. Then I do the actual painting in my studio."

For a time, after her husband died of cancer two years ago, she stopped painting. "It used to be such fun," she said. "We worked together, he downstairs in his den and I upstairs in the attic."

"He was in charge of lunch, and called me when it was ready. It was hard to get started again; I kept waiting for him to call."

Minimal Abstracts

With the help of the artist Whitney Hansen, who coaxed her into her own studio, Ms. Wood got back to work. "Once you start, it has its own life," she said.

She showed recent watercolor-gouaches at the Benson last spring for the first time since her husband's death.

"I was pleased with what I did," she said. "They were very abstract landscapes that used only three colors: red, yellow, and blue, for example, or ocher, blue, and green, or, in fall, brown. They're simple, and minimal; I'm against being too literal."

Ms. Wood gazed out her kitchen window at the sun reflecting through the yellow leaves of a maple tree.

"I also enjoy gardening," she said - her garden is well known - "and just doing nothing. I like to sit here, and look at the pretty light."

Pierre Salinger's dramatic announcement earlier this month that he had proof of a "friendly fire" attack on TWA Flight 800 has been discredited, but in its wake, unfortunately, many newspapers and magazines took the opportunity to do some Internet-bashing.

The former presidential press secretary, speaking before a French audience that may have included relatives of doomed passengers, held up a document purportedly offering evidence that U.S. Navy planes had been deployed on maneuvers off the south shore of eastern Long Island at the time Flight 800 went down. It was a missile fired from one of the planes that hit the aircraft, Mr. Salinger said, breaking it in half. Afterward, he maintained, a cover-up took place at the highest levels of government.

An alert CNN reporter was the first to suspect that Mr. Salinger's mysterious document might in fact be a copy of a message that had begun circulating among World Wide Web news groups within days of the tragedy. When confronted with a duplicate, Mr. Salinger was nonplussed. "That's it," he said. "Where did you get it?"

When the source became known - or, rather, the source's chosen means of dissemination - a media storm broke. Oddly, it broke not so much over the head of Mr. Salinger, but over the Web itself. A case not of kill the messenger, but kill his horse.

The TWA document proved, said critics, that the Internet was the haunt of conspiracy theorists, not to mention gun freaks, religious extremists, militiamen, Satanists, and cults of every kind, a place where wives could be induced by smooth-spoken strangers to leave their husbands and imprisoned pedophiles could circulate the names and photographs of unsuspecting children.

All of which is true. It also is true that this new medium is a window on the world for the ill and housebound, a voice for the deaf and mute, an unparalleled exchange for scholars, a bottomless barrel of fun and games for young and old, and a font of information on just about any subject you can think of.

It can also be, quite literally, a lifesaver, as a Scotsman who had a heart attack while playing chess on the Web can attest. His opponent called the local police for help - from Australia.

Here on the South Fork, the possibilities of the World Wide Web and the Internet are just beginning to attract real attention. It would be a pity if misguided antipathy were allowed to interfere.

It is hard to believe that the seemingly endless number of hours logged by administrators in the two-year-long tuition dispute between the East Hampton and Springs School Districts has yet to yield results.

Even more difficult to understand is why the Springs School Board refuses to accept the proposed new contract's terms, which call for a 3-percent increase in tuition for this year. Springs, along with the Montauk, Amagansett, Wainscott, and Sagaponack Districts, which send students to East Hampton's middle and/or high schools, already is paying 5.8 percent more this year than last, according to the contract now in force.

The 3-percent rise is part of a five-year plan devised by Edward J. Milliken, Superintendent of the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, at the request of the districts. It is not his first try, and apparently won't be his last.

Springs is lobbying to have no increase this year, with a five-year deal that would allow a 3-percent hike for the 2000-2001 academic year. The BOCES plan, which East Hampton has accepted even though it would reduce its income this year, carries a 0-percent increase in the fifth year. East Hampton, which is correct in saying it has to charge all of the districts equally, has calculated that it would lose $1 million in compounded dollars under the terms Springs has proposed.

Montauk, too, and Amagansett have declined the BOCES proposal, preferring to wait 90 days until an ongoing study is completed of the impacts of consolidating the districts and/or setting up a centralized high school district. The relevance of that study to the tuition issue is questionable, and a three-month delay seems little more than avoidance.

Springs has no choice but to be cautious about tuition increases. Its taxpayers have turned down proposed annual budgets more than once and the possibility of its sending Springs students elsewhere for high school or building its own is at best remote. But the East Hampton School Board has a responsibility to its voters, too, and cannot agree to terms it believes are subsidies for the other districts.

There is a real chance that a centralized high school district - which would give the so-called sending districts a direct voice in budgets and taxation - will be created before long. For now, though, those most responsible for continuing the stalemate should back off and get on with the business of education.

The current show at the Sag Harbor Picture Gallery, "Native American Photography and the Legacy of Edward S. Curtis," has one drawback - it could be three times the size. It sucks you in, fills your mind full of ideas, and leaves you hungry for more.

This small gallery has had consistently interesting shows since it opened, and it would be great if it would invite these young Native Americans back for another go-round.

Edward S. Curtis is regarded as the greatest photographer of the American Indian. Between 1898 and 1928, in an effort to document what he perceived as a "vanishing race," he made over 40,000 negatives of 80 Indian tribes. A number of his original photogravures can be seen here, contrasted with photos of some of the same tribes taken nearly 100 years later.

Acculturation Theme

In a wonderful portrait by Curtis of an old man wearing a string of amber beads and silver jewelry called "The Story of the Washita," one can see every detail of the handmade chamois jacket with its fine bead embroidery.

On the opposite wall is an equally stirring 1991 portrait by David Neel of Agnes Alfred of the Nangis tribe, the deeply lined face almost a twin of the 1927 portrait. But in this picture the intricate pattern on her clothes is made in modern sequins and pearlized plastic buttons.

Acculturation is the theme that runs through the show. Mr. Neel's other print, "Self-Portrait With Chief Charlie Swanson," shows an old man wearing traditional robes and a wary expression. Next to him on a bench sits the photographer, camera in hand, his features similar but more cynical, dressed in a white T-shirt with a gaudy Indian pattern on the front.

Spare And Elegant

More subtle is Dorothy Grandbois's seven-frame portrait of Tom Toslino, possibly an antecedent. In the first frame he is in tribal costume with long hair and earrings. The second frame shows him after he had been enrolled in a boarding school, transformed into a mock European in a tight-fitting Victorian suit and close-cropped hair. The subsequent computer-enhanced frames show this second portrait gradually fading.

The work is spare, elegant, and absolutely on target emotionally. Ms. Grandbois is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of North Dakota Chippewa.

Lee Marmon of Laguna Pueblo has some fine portraits, as does John Lukas, whose "Treaty Meetings, Rosebud Reservation," is a joy. On the left an out-of-focus face smokes a cigarette while center frame another old man shields his eyes with a meshed Panama hat against the sun, casting an intricate pattern across his face.

Mr. Lukas manages to say a hell of a lot with his simple, laconic shots - "Oglala, South Dakota" is just a photo of a wood stove, but its sad enamelware and cracked, unwashed tiles speak loudly of joylessness and lack of hope.

In the witty "Odd House," two wooden privies marked in rough black letters "Men" and "Women" stand at the extreme edges of the frame. Between them, on the horizon, rises a mountain. But it's not so distant as the gap between those two little huts. Nice show. More please.

Robert Denny may be the duck flying in the opposite direction, but he has set out to alleviate a serious problem plaguing some local homeowners.

The chairman of East Hampton's Edward Cook Insurance Agency, Mr. Denny has decided to make a major commitment to a business that many big players are hurrying to get out of - writing homeowners insurance on water-bound Long Island.

The veteran insurance man has set up a new division, Capital Mutual, to handle what he hopes may be as much as 15 to 20 percent of the market that such giants as Aetna and Allstate have backed away from in the past four years.

The latest carriers to abandon the field are Nationwide and Geico, both of which have recently announced cutbacks in homeowners policies in New York State.

Scary Projections

The insurance crunch on the East Coast, particularly for homeowners living within a mile of water, began in 1992, soon after Hurricane Andrew decimated areas of south Florida.

Several small insurers went broke. Some companies "didn't know what they were writing in Florida," said Mr. Denny. Among more solid risks, they had insured a plethora of prefabricated trailers and houses built "cheaper and lesser."

Afterward, said the insurance man, major companies tried to limit future losses by building computer "catastrophe" models that projected hurricane exposure in coastal areas. These simulations, he said, were not just "inaccurate" but "worse than a worst-case situation." They scared "both insurers and reinsurers."

Mr. Denny, who is an adviser to the National Flood Insurance Program - the Federally subsidized flood insurance that is not included in homeowners' policies - said he had learned "exactly how damage occurs" during major storms.

Locally, he said, most claims stem from wind damage - downed trees, broken windows, and such - "God's way of cleaning up the place." Building codes east of the Shinnecock Canal are stringent, said Mr. Denny, and the result is that "houses are well built and maintained."

Capital Mutual, he said flatly, has "no restrictions near the water." Coverage is available through what Mr. Denny called "individualized underwriting," which takes into account the type of house, its age and elevation, and what body of water it is near.

The cost depends upon all these factors and more.

Newly Capitalized

Mr. Denny's new company, said its president, is a cooperative venture modeled on a New Jersey firm called Proformance, which reportedly writes about $30 million a year in premiums. The business was organized, Mr. Denny said, under the same umbrella as Proformance: the National Atlantic Holding Company.

After it was established, Mr. Denny sought agents statewide to invest in the purchase of the 100-year-old Capital Mutual Insurance Company of Sand Lake, N.Y., near Albany. Capital Mutual, he said, was in need of a cash infusion - its surplus, a critical asset, was nearly depleted.

With new capital of $2 million from National Atlantic, and with about 20 agents ("50 other agents are interested") putting up something over $1.5 million, Capital Mutual's new management was up and running by mid-October.

Other than Cook, the company has only three agents on Long Island, in Islip, Valley Stream, and Port Washington.

"We want to build franchise value in a loosely defined area," Mr. Denny explained, an approach far different from firms like Hartford and Aetna, which have more than 150 agents on Long Island alone.

The agent/owners serve on the firm's underwriting and claims committees. A "peer review" committee is authorized to expel an agent for lack of professional behavior, such as misrepresenting the condition of a property or a prospect's claims history.

Passing On Savings

It is that claims history that often makes the difference in being accepted or rejected for insurance. Insurance premiums are designed to cover "the big claims" such as fire and storm damage, explained the company president.

Companies look back over a prospect's three-to-five-year history and try to avoid writing policies for those who file repeated small claims, he said. Those policyholders generally end up having to pay higher premiums.

Indeed, Mr. Denny recommended that homeowners maintain a minimum $1,000 deductible for property insurance and avoid filing claims for less than that amount.

Capital Mutual will be "competitive," said Mr. Denny, adding that the company expects to save on costs and pass the savings on to customers, who should find themselves paying lower premiums.

Larger companies have layers of bureaucracy, big offices, and marketing expenses, he said, which Capital does not.

Also, said Mr. Denny, because of its relationship with its parent holding company, Capital Mutual has been able to negotiate a "more reasonably priced" reinsurance package.

Right now, the company has a C-plus rating from Best's, the most respected insurance rater. The rating has a lot to do with the company's available surplus, and it will take time for the new management to establish a better risk record and thereby bring it up.

Another concern that ranks insurance carriers, Demotech, has awarded Capital Mutual an A rating.

Capitol Mutual's policies have been accepted for second mortgages. The Federal Government is among those second lenders, which include FANNIE MAE (the Federal National Mortgage Association), among others, said Mr. Denny.

Like most companies, Capital Mutual will aim to provide a full complement of "personal" insurance to its client, including coverage, besides homeowners, for automobiles, boats, jewelry, rental property, and excess liability.

"The best deal is a package deal," said the insurance man. The Edward Cook Agency claims to write some 5,000 personal-insurance policies on the East End.

AMAGANSETT

Peacock to Edward Kipper and Shawn Peacock, Pepperidge Lane, $370,500.

Allen to Allan Haag Sr. and Allan Haag, Marine Boulevard, $1,550,000.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

Gilbert to Haldun Ozcan, Noyac Path, $392,500.

Longtruce Realty Corp. to Glenn Gruman, Montauk Highway, $185,500.

Schmoozies L.P. to Montauk Corp., Montauk Highway, $1,075,000.

Gertz to Jonathan and Bonnie Gray, Job's Lane, $747,000.

Osborn to Sagg Fields Dev. Corp., Montauk Highway, $850,000.

EAST HAMPTON

Gordon to Robert and Laura Villani, Mill Hill Lane, $395,000.

OCI Mtg. Corp. to Senior Peer Corp., Stokes Court, $172,000.

Blumenstein to Goodfriend Land & Dev. Corp., Goodfriend Drive, $250,000.

Deichert to David Brown, Toilsome Lane, $265,000.

Shore Retreats Inc. to Scott and Joan Branche, Amagansett Drive East, $150,500.

Griffenberg to W. Deering and Eleanor, Kenneth, and Michele Yardley, Pantigo Road, $665,000.

Newmann (referee) to OCI Mtg. Corp., Stokes Court, $173,500.

MONTAUK

Gliedman to Daniel and Joyce Schoenheimer and Linda Mc Curdy, Surfside Avenue, $165,000.

Meberg to Judith and Thomas Hamill, Gates Avenue, $225,000.

NORTHWEST

Richman to Jeffrey Weisman and Maria Stefanidu, Milina Drive, $700,000.

SAG HARBOR

Loewenberg to Victor Rugg, Jermain Avenue, $237,500.

SAGAPONACK

Linder to Salomon and Ellen Bitton, Erica's Lane, $315,000.

WAINSCOTT

Edinger to Leonard and Vivian Kanter, Wainscott-Northwest Road, $395,000.