READY, SET...PLAY!

Summertime and the living is easy...back of my neck getting dirty and gritty...oooo macarena! Let's admit one thing right off the bat: summer has changed, and not just because we're no longer 11 years old and looking forward to three months' worth of unadulterated goofing off, give or take a summer-school session or a stint at an overly rigorous sleep-away camp making lanyards for The Man. Once upon a time, for kids and adults alike, the season's operative word was languor; today it's grosses. Because summer itself, like the movies to which the season lends its name as adjective, has got bigger, hypier, noisier, more aggressive. Formerly an interregnum, it is now an event, a three-month-long national happening with increasing numbers of people, places and things bidding for our attention and, more to the point, our income. For example: if recent trends hold, betwixt Memorial Day and Labor Day this year, Americans will spend more than $2 billion on movie tickets, take around 230 million trips and buy more than 200,000 tons of charcoal briquets. Given this leisure-time frenzy, we hope to simplify matters by offering an opinionated guide to the summer of '97's most alluring, most interesting possibilities, from movies to food to fashion to travel. Of course, there remains one year-to-year constant in any cool summer: peach ice cream, which, for our money, is, was and always will be the perfect two-in-one distillation of summer's pleasures.