Some viewers might think that the members of PBS's American Family (TIME, Feb. 26) were naive to let a television crew film their private life for months at a time. Pat Loud, the mother of the troupe, agreed. Out from behind her big sunglasses, she told Dick Cavett that she did not see "anything wrong with being naive. I see something really wrong with being sophisticated." Son Lance Loud, 21, tossing his hair and playing the homosexual heavy, said, "Sure I'm glad I did it-People call up and murmur things into the phone and then hang up." As for his mother, he said, without the film "she would've been left in the dark about a lot more things. I don't want her to grow up with too many illusions." Why had the family let itself be filmed? Said Lance: "It's like who wants to die in an airplane crash, when you can commit suicide?" How would they have done the film themselves? Father Bill Loud answered: "We would have done more of a Laugh-In type of thing." The publicity didn't impress much: "I'm very big in a liquor store and very big in a barbershop and that's about it...I think life will go on just like it's gone and we'll [be] the late movies and that's it."

Last December, after Chief Justice Warren Burger complained about the smokers on the Amtrak Metroliners between Washington and New York, cigars and pipes were prohibited in first-class cars. Pipe-puffing Senator Hugh Scott wrote to Non-Smoker Burger to ask him to rescind his request to Amtrak: "May it please the court," said Scott, he wanted a ruling "to the effect that pipe smokers may enjoy the use of the presently interdicted area for the indulgence of their contemplative addiction." Burger's answer to Scott has not been revealed.

Five years ago, hostile students at England's University of Dundee were brought around by their new rector's inauguration speech. And why not? "It is youth which has rediscovered love and humor as weapons of psychological warfare, which has endorsed biblical simplicity in the face of police dogs," said black-gowned Actor-Writer-Director Peter Ustinov. Recently when 300 of his charges tried to get him sacked after he failed to back them in a rent strike, Ustinov accused them of political chicanery, deceit and cynicism. "I sometimes see England as an enormous nest with lots of little birds all opening their mouths for a piece of the cake," said the tireder, wiser rector. When his term expires this year, he added, he will not run again.

Nightclubs are coming back. Couples are holding hands under candlelit tables and listening to songs they can hum along with. One good reason is fast-footed Singer-Dancer Joel Grey, 40, veteran of Cabaret, from both the stage version and the movie, for which he is up for an Oscar. Now he is back I in the kind of cabaret he says he likes ; best. Lugging a trunk studded with I stickers from his past Broadway hits I around the stage at the Waldorf, Joel clowns with the audience about his 30 years in show business: "I wasn't born in a trunk, but I might as well have been."

Tennessee Williams' new play Out Cry, "a fantasy of desperation and loneliness" acted out by a "crazy" brother and sister, is "fascinating," full of "echoes of echoes." So says Michael York, 30, and he should know because he is the brother in the show opening this week in Manhattan. York, who will soon be seen in the movie musical Lost Horizon, admits that Out Cry may not be a popular hit. One woman in the Washington try-out audience even nodded off. "You can sleep at home," she was reminded tartly by the man next to her. Wide awake, she took a good look and recognized Tennessee himself.

"I have always led my life this way: I leave before I'm left," announced Brigitte Bardot, who at 38 has had three husbands and more than her share of boy friends. This time she was talking to L'Express about leaving the screen. "I have been in the business for 20 years. If Don Juan is not my last film, it is my next to last." And after the last one? "I don't want to age badly, to be sad because I have a wrinkle or a white hair. So at 40 I am going to retire to a farm." At first she expects the neighboring farmers to say, "Look, BB has come to settle here." Then later..."There's Brigitte from the farm down the road going to do her shopping."

-While hurtling through space on his way to the moon, Astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell managed to keep his thoughts on earth. Or at least some of them. During four rest periods he concentrated on telepathically transmitting sequences of visual symbols to four psychically gifted people at home. Statisticians were impressed that 51 messages out of 200 got through; Mitchell was disappointed. Determined to learn how to do better, he is setting up a "coordinating and fund-raising center" in Palo Alto, Calif., to study the nature of consciousness. Mitchell says that he hopes to tap "the subjectivity of Eastern scholars in order to discover the secret of conscious energy."

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