Face facts.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Summer 1997 and different faces

The theme song of the Summer of 1997 is "There's a Summer Face." Face/Off, not to be confused with Jim Carrey's Mask or another in Disney's deadly Mighty Ducks films, is a thriller in which good-guy FBI agent John Travolta goes undercover to find and disarm a bomb.

The Bureau's laser-surgery wizards, who earned their chops doing facelifts in Palm Springs, arrange to have Travolta don the fare of bad guy and bomb-maker Nicolas Cage.

After a preposterously successful radical facial peel and reattachment I could not watch, Travolta goes underground. His own face is preserved in a solution of lemon jello and then placed in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar on the back steps of headquarters. The comatose, faceless Nicolas Cage miraculously awakens, sees Travolta's visage and, though he would have preferred a different one -- Trent Lott? Michael Flatley? Camilla Parker Bowles, perhaps? -- he reluctantly makes do with John Revolta's. Face/Off, get it?

The other scary hit of the summer was The Many Faces of Andrew Cunanan. Cunanan didn't even have a face a mother could love. When questioned about her son, she tough-loved that he was nothing more than a high-priced gigolo. There's a slap in the face.

As the hysteria of the real-life summer thriller grew, everyone became a junior Patsy Cornwell crime-solver. I knew that as a BOBOLINK (Big Older Babe On Lesbian Income, No Kids), I was not in charm's way. Still, I felt less safe than ever.

First, the old "innocent until proven guilty" was tossed out the closet window with chilling ease.

Second, my suspicions that we five in a police-state verite were more than confirmed with each grainy videotape of the top of someone's bead at the newsstand, or of a stalled, blurred figure running out of view, caught on a parking-lot surveillance camera. Suspect or German Shepherd? We're waiting for the lab results. I've got to remember to wear lipstick...