Real Life vs. the Convention : New York: While the Democrats whoop and holler in the Garden, out in Queens it’s business as usual among the pushcarts of Roosevelt Avenue.

Even the sound and fury of the Democratic National Convention cannot make the great ship of New York change its course. Rather, it has cruised on this week with barely a swell while 40,000 people swarm Madison Square Garden wearing giant plastic credentials that make them look like dime-store mannequins.

New York, for its part, is showing there is something a thousand times more important--like real life.

Certainly along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, where pushcarts sell slices of avocado for a quarter on one block, Italian ices on another and Korean sandwiches on yet another, nobody cares whether Jerry Brown gets to speak or if two baby boomers can carry off a neo-Southern strategy. In New York, one in four residents is an immigrant--and although Democrats attempt to claim them as their own, numerous interviews along a boulevard of largely unbroken dreams make evident that many people think what is going on in the Garden has little to do with them.

For while the politicos debate whether this is really the Year of the Woman, Diane Prado, an Argentinian-born waitress at the Tasty Donut, is dragging herself from counter to counter because the baby has been up all night.

Prado, 39, can’t even remember if she has seen the convention on television. She only recalls the screen flashing and her other three children glued to it.

“I got to cook, I got to clean,” she says. “Me watch TV? Never.” She says the only way she knows “the Democratics” are in town is from her husband, a baker who works two blocks from the congested Garden.

In his 1949 essay “Here Is New York,” E. B. White wrote that the city has the ability “to absorb anything that comes along . . . without inflicting the event on its inhabitants, so that . . . the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.”

White considered such resilience praiseworthy. For someone like Diane Prado, it is a virtual necessity.

Which is not to say Prado is not political: She and her neighbors live the rhetoric of Democratic politics every day--work, family, taxes. It’s just that she doesn’t know where politicians get the idea that they express the highest aspirations of people’s lives.

“Politicians?” she says quizzically. “They are important if they mean good, I suppose. And they are important if they mean bad.”

But how these men can make life in Queens better seems remote to Prado. Can they can make things cleaner, the way it was when she first came here 20 years ago? “Even Roosevelt Avenue is more dirty,” she says.

Similarly, the presumption that the great concerns of Mimi Latalaya’s life are tied to the rituals occurring a 20-minute subway ride from her shop seem misplaced.

While the Democrats debate whether a platform plank should emphasize entrepreneurship or tax cuts, Latalaya, owner of Fish, Fish, Fish, waits for customers in virtual darkness to save electricity. Her concern is that tropical fish are a luxury in a neighborhood that can no longer afford even the necessities--and she has about 50 tanks of them idly swimming about, flashing their brilliant colors.

“I can’t pay rent for two months because so few people buy our fish now,” says Latalaya, who imports many varieties from her native Thailand. She looks mournfully at her 16-year-old daughter, Lada, who works after school every day in the store, then does homework and goes to sleep.

“No time for convention, no TV,” Latalaya says of Lada’s life. But she is also hopeful. “She is American-born, so when she’s older she will look at American politics.”

Still, it is hard to be completely oblivious of big events. And New York, with so many newspapers and television stations, is a particularly loud echo chamber.

For Giovanni Lido, however, it was a quiet afternoon in Moore Terrace, an oasis of weeping willow trees near Roosevelt Avenue strung with colorful lanterns, a boccie court and several cement tables of 25-cent rummy games. Instead of playing cards, Lido, a retired accountant who moved to the United States in 1955, was engaged in what, for him, passes as politics: He was reading about abortion in Epoca, an Italian glossy weekly.

Lido had caught part of former Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan’s keynote address on television Tuesday night, and he was impressed when she said that America has gotten to a stage where every single citizen must make up his or her mind to help solve its many problems.

“She spoke beautifully, and great oratory is the best part of politics,” says Lido.

But in general, politics isn’t for him. He tolerates conventions and is grateful to these thousands of zealous delegates for going through their rituals every four years, if that’s what it takes to find a good man to run the government. But really, he doesn’t understand what goes on. Nor does he care to.

“If they know already they want Clinton, why for a whole week do they come to New York and shout and sweat so much?” he asks in a way that indicates he may have an answer. “Maybe it is for the same reason I used to go back to Italy every year. I like to see the family and old friends and find out things. Maybe it’s like that.”

Back in the hustle of Roosevelt Avenue, a Korean grocery owner shouts above the rattling of the No. 7 train overhead that he has read a headline about the convention in a Korean newspaper but doesn’t have time for the details.

“The paper said some Koreans there,” he notes. Smiling, he adds, “They’ll take care of business. I’m doing all I can to take care of business here.”

Standing in front of the Korean Presbyterian Church a few blocks away, Maida Weisberg says she is, as White advised, conserving her soul from those people “in crazy outfits, with the hats, on television.”

“Clinton, Gore, Perot--whoever they pick will tell me he understands me,” says the 55-year-old native New Yorker. “But that’s not how I’ll pick who I vote for. I wouldn’t care if they all held their conventions at the senior center. I make up my mind by looking in their eyes on the televisions and seeing if I see an honest man.”

As she gazed at a street sign, Weisberg could not help but wonder what the man it was named for might have done for the people who live there now. “Roosevelt--now, he was an honest man. A rich man, but an honest one. Maybe the guy over there now--you know, Clinton--is an honest man. I’ll take a look in his eyes and let you know.”