LAST NIGHT, I went to a friend's house in Newton, Massachusetts and drank beer and ate lasagne and watched the Miss America Beauty Pageant and the third game of the Stanley Cup finals.

This is what you do when your exams are all over with.

This is what you do when your flight is four days away.

This is what you do when you don't have anything to do:

You go to a friend's house in Newton, Massachusetts and eat lasagne and drink beer and watch the Miss America Beauty Pageant and the third game of the Stanley Cup finals.

About the lasagne: It was cold. Leftovers. The very best kind.

About the beer: Miller. In a can. "The Champagne of Beers."

About the Miss America pageant: Well, all right...

The theme was "Americana" or something like that and the girls all dressed in skintight silver shake-your-stuff suits for a toe-tapping salute to George M. Cohan and for the evening gown competition each semi-finalist was escorted in a knockout dress beneath an archway of uplifted Naval Academy sabers and the cadets lucky enough to accompany the lovely ladies wore Good Humor Man ice-cream suits and Remedial Math dropjaw smiles like a bunch of meatheaded Varsity fullbacks strutting arm-in-arm with prospective Homecoming Queens and for the swimsuit competition the camera played fly-on-the-wall in the semi-finalists dressing room and a Miss America of yesteryear wandered from girl-to-girl like a queenbee in a honeycomb and the small-talk turned to silly superstitions.

"I keep a rabbit's foot!" Miss Somewhere said.

"I keep a small rock my boyfriend gave me!" Miss Somewhere Else said.

"My good luck charm is my family and they're all in the audience right now!" beamed Miss Illinois, throwing a high-intensity smile at the camera and giving her silky-as-corn-flax mane a confident toss over her naked left shoulder.

Of course no one stood a chance against Miss Texas. Who sat with the quiet assurance of a Born Champion in the corner of the dressing room. Who never once reached for the rouge nor deigned to muss her hair. Who kept her pretty hands folded in her tea-and-cookies lap and looked at the camera with the half-lidded eyes of a well-fed, well-bred, fine-tuned Siamese.

But these are the things you think of and write when Love has been beamed via-satellite to your friend's living room and the best you can do is consider graduate school in Texas or maybe lean over to, like, lick the TV screen.

But from the sublime to the sublime: The third game of the Stanley Cup finals.