"To come home with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was for so long the biggest dream of my life," says Japanese-born Seiji Ozawa. On home turf at last with the orchestra, Maestro Ozawa enlivened the concert tour by ordering up a traditional, all-forks-barred banquet and decreeing: "Anyone who refuses to wear a kimono will not be invited." Delightedly, the eminent musicians swapped tails for robes. Then, they watched wide-eyed as their kinetic conductor swatted open a keg of sake with a lusty downbeat from a hammer. When the festivities were over, one veteran B.S.O. member opined: "We didn't have this kind of thing the last time we were here."

On camera, Actress Candice Bergen stood her ground against an Italian male chauvinist pig in Lina Wertmuller's The End of the World in Our Usual Bed, etc. Off camera, too, she has become a feminist. To prove it, Bergen, 31, joined Gloria Steinem and other members of the National Women's Political Caucus last week at a fund raiser for the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA, she told the audience, assures women in the U.S. "only the fundamental human rights." As for Italian women: "They've [just] gone from basic black to blue jeans and marching, from the Middle Ages to future shock. Italian men are in shock."

Could there be something Freudian about a painter who invites his mother to sit for a portrait not once but more than 1,000 times? Definitely, since the man is Lucian Freud, grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis. An exhibition of Lucian's works, including five oils of his mother Lucie, 82, will open in New York City's Davis & Long gallery on April 4. "My work is purely autobiographical. I work from people that interest me," explains Lucian, 55. The exhibit psyched up a London Sunday Times critic. "You can call it odd or art," he wrote after seeing Mom framed in a variety of poses. Among them (but of course): Lucie reclining on a couch.

His dad is an old hand at wooing audiences, and now Carey Peck, 28, is hoping to do the same with voters. Gregory's son was a political activist in the late '60s at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., campaigned for Carter and held down a job in the capital as legal counsel for a U.S. Senate subcommittee on education. But come November, Peck's good boy hopes to win a seat in Congress from his home state of California. When he needs counsel, the aspiring politician huddles with a formidable pair of campaign cochairmen: Father Gregory and former California Governor Pat Brown.

On the Record

Vera Stravinsky, Igor's widow, on celebrities: "People ask me about famous people. I always say I knew only one."

Midge Costanza, special assistant to President Carter, quieting a heckler who was disrupting her speech at a Queens, N.Y., Democratic club: "Don't mess with me. I know people in high places. I know Amy."

Muhammad Ali, signing an autograph for House Speaker Tip O'Neill at the 15th annual Democratic congressional dinner: "Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth."

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