CB Radio Freak C.W. McCall (writer of the 1976 bestselling single Convoy) and Actor Kris Kristofferson share the same handle: "Rubber Duck." Kristofferson's, however, is strictly for the movies. As a rough-talking trucker in Convoy, Sam Peckinpah's new film, inspired by McCall's record, Kristofferson leads 100 fellow truckers in a madcap chase --with 20 or so police cars in pursuit. Up in the cab with "Rubber Duck" is his new girl, played by Actress Ali MacGraw, who is making her first movie since The Getaway in 1973. The longhaired Cliffie of Love Story even got a special hairdo for the film. So when the wind comes whipping across the highway, Ali manages to keep every curl of her new bob in place.

Separate but equal it is for Sonny and Cher on their first tour together since their divorce in 1975. The pair got double billing at Long Island's Westbury Music Fair last week, but they booked into different hotels. Sonny had his girl friend Susie Coelho in tow, and Cher, newly separated from Husband Gregg Allman, brought along the little ones, Chastity Bono, 8, and nine-month-old Elijah Blue Allman. "The show," says Cher, who glittered onstage in her beaded finery, "is just songs and some patter and the same old Sonny and Cher."

Folk Singer Joan Baez and Carlos Santana and his Latin rock band had a captive audience last week. The occasion: a concert they gave at California's Soledad prison set up by Rock Impresario Bill Graham. The 600 prisoners who curled up on the grass of a playing field were not shortchanged. Baez, 36, sang songs like Raze the Prisons Down and passed out carnations. She then danced with a few prisoners and invited "two brothers" to come play with the band. After the final note, Baez said farewell by yelling loud and clear: "I hope you get out of here soon."

"I didn't know how to swim. I was very poor on the parallel bars, and my phys.-ed. class came at the damn wrong hour." The reluctant athlete is Philosopher Mortimer Adler, 74, whose aversion to compulsory exercise cost him a B.A. degree from Columbia even though he completed the rest of the curriculum in three years and ranked first in his class. Last week Columbia tried to make things right, if not logical, with the author of How to Read a Book by awarding him its Graduate Faculties Alumni Award for Excellence. Adler accepted benignly, noting later that his difficulties with the college had provided him with a chapter title for his autobiography: "Dropout." He also revealed that he finally learned to swim--when someone told him that it was as easy as humming.

For 20 years Richard Dreyfuss has been hoping for a Shakespearean role, but now that he finally has the chance to play Richard III, he has to do the king as a queen. In Neil Simon's new film The Goodbye Girl, Dreyfuss is cast as an aspiring actor ordered by his wacky director to play Richard as gay. "I'll be getting a lot of phone calls from irate history professors," says Dreyfuss. But he is enjoying his role. Says he: "It's a happy movie. It has no Jaws or Midnight Cowboy in it. It's nice and it's funny and people kiss each other."

It was supposed to be her first routine medical checkup as First Lady, but Rosalynn Carter learned some unpleasant news at Bethesda Naval Hospital: she had a suspicious lump in her breast. With characteristic directness, Rosalynn, 49, wanted an immediate answer as to how serious it was. Captain William Fouty, the surgeon who directed the removal of Betty Ford's cancerous right breast, ordered the lump removed, under a local anesthetic. The laboratory report showed the growth to be benign, and Rosalynn headed happily home. The next morning, word came that the First Lady was "in great spirits." She even took her regular Spanish lesson and popped over to the Kennedy Center to attend a lecture on the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler --just as though nothing whatsoever had happened to her.

Those two rakish characters with derbies and cane are not refugees from a ragtime show but Jimmy Carter's good ole boys Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. When Rolling Stone Reporter Joe Klein suggested that Ham and Jody dress up like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for a May 19 article on "The White House Whiz Kids," the pair figured, why not? Photographer Annie Leibovitz picked up some odds and ends from a costume shop and the final ensemble wound up looking more like a cross between Butch Cassidy and The Sting. Says Leibovitz: "They were slickin' up for their pictures like country boys going to the city." But when she tried to get the President's men to pose in white ties, top hats and tails, they balked. The down-home Carter hands harrumphed that such a picture would not fit their image.

"A veneration of grossness and fatness," says Feminist Author Kate Millett (Sexual Politics) of the Amazonian anatomies she has sculpted out of papier-mache, chicken wire and liquid cement. Kate's nine-foot sculptures, titled Naked Ladies, go on display next week at the Los Angeles Woman's Building. "I don't know where they came from," muses Millett, 42, who has been sculpting for 18 years. "I guess I just wanted to play around." Among the sculptures: a giant woman pushing a shopping cart, a housewife watching the soaps and chatting on the phone, and a seductive figure lounging on a mattress "a la Molly Bloom," as the artist says. Molly & Co. are up for sale, and Millett hopes that they will be just the thing for a backyard sculpture garden.

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