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BEAUTY AND THE BABE
America's going to the dolls. The proof: our consuming passion for Cabbage Patch, above, and our ongoing love affair with Barbie, 1959's dream girl, left, partying with her '80s descendants. Even as this bevy of Barbies celebrates the lady's twenty-fifth birthday, Cabbage Patch, born yesterday, threatens to usurp her role as this country's premiere plastic playmate. What's CP got that a fashion queen lacks? A pedigree (CP comes with adoption papers), a face only a kid could love, and innocence—a quality that would make Barbie's hair frizz. Legends have sprouted from less.

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PILLAGING SOCIETY
Satire is deadly serious, but George W. S. Trow proves it can be elegant as well. His first collection of pieces, Bullies, ranged from a loopy indictment of the Rock Crit Establishment to a brilliant apologia for style; his second, Within the Context of No Context, turned sociology on its head. Together they set the standard for a whole generation of humorists who have struggled in vain to meet it. The City in the Mist, Trow's just-published first novel, is a funny, feral account of New York society, mannered yet street smart—from the gutter to the stars.

KEEPING UP TRADITION
Leave it to La MaMa of us all, Ellen Stewart, the empress of avant-garde theater (seated center in inset), to throw open her stage to the oldest traditions. With Cecile Guidote-Alvarez of the Philippines (behind Stewart), she reeled in folk artists from the four corners of the globe this season for a conference at the United Nations and three performances at Manhattan's La MaMa. Aboriginal Ainus from Japan (including the hair-raisers above), Nigerian percussionists who played on sacred stones, dancers and musicians from India, Brazil, Curaçao, Malaysia, Congo—in all, thirty-three nations represented. "We had Basarwas—you can't say Bushmen, it's rude—from Botswana," says La MaMa. "But I couldn't get the Bambinga—they don't like to be called Pygmies—this year. Don't worry, though, I will."

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JUST ANOTHER BOY GENIUS?
When Peter Sellars talks theater, he flails his hands and chortles like a cocky choirboy. At twenty-six the artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company is in a class with Orson Welles and Robert Wilson-he doesn't have a stale idea in his head. In 1980, when he was an enfant terrible, he drew national attention with his space-age production of Handel's Orlando at Harvard. This year he tossed blues and Beethoven into Shakespeare's Pericles, and in May at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis he's settings Gorky's Summerfolk to Gershwin. Future plans? He sees The Magic Flute in Lower Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty as the Queen of the Night. "The opera's about the founding of America," he declares, eyes glowing.

JUST ANOTHER PRETTY FACE?
The jury's still out on Rob Lowe, the comeliest of all those rising young movie actors who party together and jog together and wait for stardom together. Rob's been in The Outsiders and Class; he isn't yet as successful as his running partner Tom Cruise or pals Sean Penn and Matthew Broderick. But then Rob's only nineteen. And he's busy. He's using his bedroom eyes and naughty-boy sensuality to play an American hustler in Oxford Blues, which has just finished filming in England. And his new movie, The Hotel New Hampshire, opens next month. "Maybe instead of being one among many," he says, "The Hotel New Hampshire will make me the one."