"I'm more like a girl of 64," protested Britain's grande dame of the theater, Actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. Actually, Dame Sybil had just turned 90, and all Britain was helping her to celebrate. The post office arranged special deliveries every half-hour to handle the flood of greetings, and at London's Haymarket Theater an all-star cast, including Margaret Leighton, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Dame Edith Evans, Wendy Miller, Sir Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield, Peter Ustinov and Lord Olivier offered their talents in tribute. As for Dame Sybil, who had begun acting in 1904 and was chosen by George Bernard Shaw in 1924 to play the title role in Saint Joan, she confided: "I would rather have been a pianist than anything else, but I wasn't good enough. Standards are much lower in the theater."

Pressing ever upward in his military career, Britain's Prince Charles checked in for a brief refresher course at the Yeovilton Royal Naval Air Station. With his aviation wings already earned in air force and navy planes ranging from singleengine, two-seater training craft to more advanced jets, the Prince was ready for something new. In the co-pilot seat of a Wessex helicopter, he flashed a thumbs-up sign and with a rather wan look of determination clattered aloft. Afterward he went off to the R.A.F. flying school at Cranwell, where he graduated last year, and where he now plans to polish up his technique in various fixed-wing aircraft. Future projects: conquering the seas via minesweeper and frigate, and then, probably, his first command.

"It's too bad that the State Department only has money to send us to our enemies, and not to our friends," said Ballet Director George Balanchine after a five-week tour of the Soviet Union and Poland with his New York City Ballet. Looking back, Balanchine decided he preferred the warm, close-up Polish audiences to the cool, distant Soviet variety. "Soviet theaters were not theaters, just vast congress halls with the audiences well out of sight." Impressed by Polish enthusiasm, Balanchine gave the Polish Ballet a present: an autographed piece of linoleum used by his company to cover the variable stage floors they danced on. The pleased Poles promptly sliced out the autograph and hung it in the Polish Ballet School for inspiration.

When Actress-Dancer Ann-Margret toppled off a 20-ft. stage set in a Lake Tahoe hotel seven weeks ago, it seemed her notably beautiful face might be scarred, her dancing ability impaired. But you can't keep a trouper down. While Husband Roger Smith autographed her cast, Ann-Margret announced through the wires holding together her fractured jaw that she will return to work at Las Vegas International Hotel a few days after Thanksgiving. The damage, though painful, turned out to be fatal for neither life, looks nor career.

The White House has been, often as not, a doghouse, according to the Ladies' Home Journal. The November issue contains a lengthy report on canine activity under the mastership of Presidents since 1951. Dog Lover Traphes L. Bryant, retired kennel keeper of the White House, reports that presidential pups have relieved themselves on carpets, Calder sculptures and on one memorable occasion, Jacqueline Kennedy. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Weimaraner infuriated her short-tempered master by chasing his golf balls. John F. Kennedy soothed himself during the Cuban missile crisis by taking time out to pet his daughter Caroline's Welsh terrier Charlie. Dog-lovingest President: Lyndon B. Johnson, who allowed one of his dogs to sleep in his bed and adored a white collie named Blanco, despite the fact that he was so vicious he had to be kept tranquilized. L.B.J. was so distraught over the death of Old Beagle that he had him cremated, then kept the ashes in a box on top of the refrigerator.

In The Bronx, a thousand or so people gathered to hear a talk by British Novelist-Scientist C.P. Snow. As they might have suspected, Lord Snow expounded on one of his pet subjects: genetics. "Men are equal in death," said Snow. "They are not born equal." It is nonsense, he continued, to think humans are born as blank sheets of paper to be filled in by parents, teachers and circumstances. After talking, Snow sipped tea, nibbled sandwiches, and allowed that he is very fond of the U.S. "I like the enormous intelligence of the people, the astonishing variety of virtue and skill. The top echelons of Leicester wouldn't compare with the top echelons of, say, Akron, Ohio."

"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul," announced Norman Mailer in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley. While Mailer waxed outrageous and his audience enthusiastically heckled, someone tossed a burning jockstrap onto the stage and a prancing pair of Gay Liberationists got themselves busted. Despite the racket. Mailer held forth on his subject: "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation." In the process he dropped such nuggets as "Richard Nixon walks like a puppet with strings controlled by a hand within his own head," "Most women have just started to think in the last two or three years," "McGovern is the only man who is morally superior to me." Finally Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."

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