SHOW BUSINESS

She Knows What She Means

When Barbra Streisand talks, she gets lost in the trackless deserts of her burgeoning vocabulary. "Creativity is like a part of perversion," she will begin, "like a thing that goes inward for emotion, not responsively, because intellect is bad for what I do." Such thoughts always bring her to a helpless "Know what I mean?" And no one ever does. But when she sings, everyone knows exactly what she means; even with a banal song, she can hush a room as if she really had something worth saying.

Last week at Manhattan's Blue Angel, she squirmed onto a stool and let her coltish legs dangle, ankles flapping. She twisted bony fingers through her hair and blessed her audience with a tired smile. Then she sang--and at the first note, her voice erased all the gawkiness.

Only 20 and a singer for barely three years, Barbra seldom hits a note on pitch, but she slides into tune with such grace that her quavers often sound intended.

She closes her show with a slow version of Happy Days Are Here Again that lends the song an ambivalent sorrow only a very wise girl could dream up.

COMEDIANS His Own Boswell

Woody Allen is a new, 27-year-old comedian whose monologues tumble with wild improbabilities.

He talks about people who perspire audibly; and he knows others who make opium out of the poppies sold by veterans.

He calls himself a "latent heterosexual" and says he has an intense desire to return to the womb--"anybody's." His father, he remembers, once worked in a factory but was replaced by a small gadget. His mother, he says, bought one.

These jokes come out as segments of nervous, elliptical stories. The man who tells them is a flatheaded, redheaded le mur with closely bitten fingernails and a sports jacket. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.