It wasn't her usual gig, but Lena Home, 55, got turned on to Sesame Street by her grandchildren. There she was, reassuring Kermit the frog and singing Kermit's favorite song, It's Not That Easy Being Green, which is all about having green skin. "It's a highly personal song to me," she explained. "It is the same for me as it is for Kermit."

There were 2,000 people, sure. The real draw, however, at Ethel Kennedy's 15th annual Pet Show at Hickory Hill was the fauna--everything from dogs to two worms that were entered as twins. "We want to keep politics out of this show," said Ringmaster Art Buchwald, but there was a slip-up in the Unusual Pet category. Two "Watergate bugs" got a blue ribbon. A chameleon named Richard Nixon took second prize.

Like a lot of other performers, Sonny and Cher Bono are at loose ends because of the TV writers' strike in Hollywood. But the long-and-short-of-it pair are having a good time hopping from nightclub to concert. They scotch all rumors that their marriage is cracking up. "Who'd get custody of all our Indian and Italian jokes?" cracked Cher.

Princess Anne can be an absolute darling, but "she has imperious moods when that pendulous Windsor lower lip droops and the arrogance of centuries emerges." Her Royal Highness was taking a drubbing from Punch, the British humor magazine, which wished she would let go with a "bit of divilment." As it is, Anne shares a chilling trait with Elizabeth: "She has her mother's look, which can freeze at 20 paces."

With his dance-tired feet stuffed into a pair of worn and obviously comfortable shoes, Rudolf Nureyev--perhaps the world's greatest danseur noble --accepted the annual Dance Magazine award in Manhattan. His speech was hardly audible, a sentence thanking the people who had helped him since he fled the U.S.S.R. During those twelve years in the West, Rudolf has performed mostly with the Royal Ballet, and is now touring with the National Ballet of Canada. Except for old friends like Dancer Erik Bruhn and Actress Monique Van Vooren, his life is a solo.

What a circus! And all to help actors in trouble. For the Union des Artistes in Paris, Actress Elsa Martinelli, wearing black opera hose, ran a couple of baby chimps through their paces. Dressed up as a bunny, Singer Jane Birkin popped out of a cake and walked a tightrope. The hit of the evening was a pie-throwing skit written by Director Claude Chabrol and starring Actor Marcello Mastroianni. Marcello then scrubbed himself down and returned for the 3 a.m. finale when the whole company dished up a giant vat of steaming spaghetti for the audience.

Amid the justified huzzahs for the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism (Watergate and all that), other Pulitzers were too easily overlooked. Emphatically not to be ignored were Robert Coles and Eudora Welty, the psychiatrist and the novelist, who had both written, at least in part, about the South: Coles with Volumes II and III of Children in Crisis, which describes his work with sharecroppers, migrant workers and ghetto children, and Welty with her short novel The Optimist's Daughter. Two younger writers were also among the prizewinners: Frances FitzGerald, 32, for Fire in the Lake, a study of American involvement in Viet Nam, and Jason Miller, 34, for his play about a middle-aged basketball team, That Championship Season.

"I've worked with the best kids in the nation," said Francis Donahue, who is retiring after 50 years as business director of the Yale Daily News. The kids --the likes of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. and National Review Editor William F. Buckley Jr.--have collected $80,000 to buy Donahue an annuity. Who was the most impressive chairman of the News during his half century? "Buckley, hands down," says Donahue. "He'd always throw out ads to run anti-Buckley letters."

She is a 55-year-old frump having an embarrassing amount of trouble hanging on to her husband, played by Henry Fonda. What to do? Why, radical plastic surgery, of course, from head to toe. Even after all that, however, Hank will still have none of her. That's the story line for Ash Wednesday, just filmed in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. A bit sad but not very credible, since the wife is played by Elizabeth Taylor, who looks lovelier than ever as she emerges from her bandages.

George C. Scott, the crusty actor who turned down an Oscar two years before Marlon Brando did, does not seem to have much use for humans. In the movie of Robert Merle's political thriller The Day of the Dolphin, Scott is the scientist who becomes very friendly with a pair of Tursiops truncatus, the bottle-nosed mammals that may be the closest animal to man in intelligence. The scientist manages to get Bi and Fa, the cetaceans in his charge, to talk English, but what they tell him, alas, would be enough to confirm Scott's worst fears about man.

Germany watchers have noted four waves of postwar preoccupations: money, gluttony, sex and travel. Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Heinrich Boell, 55, hopes there will be a fifth: "Relaxation and meditation. I've never met a relaxed German." Visiting the U.S., where his latest novel, Group Portrait with Lady, has just been published, Boell discussed the adversity of prosperity that exists throughout the West: "Having things we don't need can be a very bad thing." Boell would like to see the Germans become more like Americans. "I admire your selfcriticism, notably with Watergate. In the 2,000 years of German history, there is only now a moment of democracy."

The small, stooped, gnomelike figure working in his bare feet was French Artist Jean Dubuffet, 71. He was putting the last touches on his Coucou Bazar, an art-dance event using his own brightly colored cutouts, which will be presented along with his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. "I'm satisfied. Who else at my age can say he is satisfied?" Dubuffet chirruped. Moreover, he likes Manhattan, especially Wall Street, where one of his sculptures has been installed. Said he, relaxed as could be: "It is the solar plexus of the world. It is the heart where the blood comes from. There is a high madness, a delirium because of the tension."

"I'm sure glad to see you; it was nice of you to come," the midget said to the cardinal. Terence Cardinal Cooke, the only American member of a commission created by Pope Paul VI for "people on the move," was celebrating his first Mass for the Ringling Bros, and Barnum and Bailey circus in Madison Square Garden. "How blessed you are," Cooke said to the assembled animal trainers, jugglers, clowns and workmen, "to spend your lives dedicated to a profession that makes people smile."

"I'm a creature of the Tube," said Carol Burnett, 38, arriving in New York to collect her award from the Friars Club as Entertainer of the Year. Weren't her naughty-lady movie takeoffs risque? "Not compared with those dirty soap operas. We're G-rated compared to daytime TV." Does she have a second career in mind? "I should say a stunt woman in stag movies. But I'd really like to be a schoolteacher for kids, six to eight. They haven't heard all my jokes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.