During Dog Days, Wacky Rules in N.Y.

Andrea Butler missed lunch a few days ago so that she could stand in a tub in front of Radio City Music Hall and scream bloody murder.

No, no. Ms. Butler is not a Manhattan weirdo. She is simply another New Yorker enjoying August in the big city--four warm weeks when the fat cats leave for vacation and the place goes sort of quietly wacky.

Only in August, for example, could a 29-year-old bank employee make a mini name for herself by imitating a screaming Janet Leigh from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie “Psycho.”

Butler’s high-pitched wail, which undoubtedly sent terror through the hearts of unsuspecting tourists several blocks away, made her the first winner of the “Psycho Silver Scream Contest” sponsored by Radio City. She won out over about 30 other screamers, including a few women who sounded as though they had operatic training and one man who carried a pie with fake fingers sticking out of the top.

“It was fun to just go out there and scream,” Butler said later of the event that earned her a trip for two to Florida.

How does the city that is never quite ordinary become particularly odd in August?

The rich and the hip are on vacation--often moving together like schools of bright and beautiful fish to the Vineyard, the Cape, the Hamptons or the hills of Tuscany. The psychiatrists and lawyers are gone, causing an increase in anxiety for some and a rush of relief for others. The publishing industry mostly closes its doors every Friday for long weekends of editing and rewriting and thinking, preferably on the beach.

Likewise, so many stockbrokers and Wall Street honchos go to the Hamptons for the weekend that some analysts have been wondering aloud whether such a trend is good for commerce. Recent dips in the market on Friday afternoon, they suggest, could be caused by brokers slipping out before the 4 p.m. bell.

Thus, for the 4-6 million people left behind, the city seems younger, easier, relatively honcho-less and boss-free. Restaurants that barely answer the phone in the winter have tables that are not near the kitchen door. Taxis stop in the rain for a fare. In general, for a few weeks, New York is about as peaceful as it ever gets.

“I love the city in August,” said public relations veteran Bobby Zarem. No ties. No lines. No early morning appointments. “It’s blissful.”

And yet, it’s still New York, the place that gets its fix from news and hype. It’s just that in August it has to settle for less news and more hype.

Macy’s, for example, gets plenty of ink and air time with its effort to break into the “Guinness Book of Records” with “The World’s Largest Assembly of Tap Dancers Ever to Dance a Single Routine.” The record (from last year) was 6,654 tappers. This year 6,676 people set the new standard.

A watch company sponsored a charity golf contest, with professional players chipping balls from the top of the triumphal arch over Washington Square down to a temporary green in the park without hitting dogs, children or some of the nation’s oldest beatniks. The event played big on CNN.

And a famous underwear concern launched a new line in August by sponsoring a bowling night in Greenwich Village with prizes for anybody who appeared in their skivvies.

About 300 people attended, most of them fully dressed and ready to enjoy the free food, booze and air-conditioning along with bowlers in briefs.

“I didn’t see too many women in BVDs,” chuckled Bill Lemon, co-owner of Bowlmor Lanes where the event went on from 8 p.m. to about 1 a.m. “But the guys who were doing the bowling for the company, well, the women on my staff were fighting to get a look. They were hunks.”

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If some events have to be planned, others in New York just seem to happen. Like the construction worker who tried to open his lunch box with a blowtorch and something inside blew up. (He was treated and released from a nearby clinic.)

Or the Brooklyn residents who went to their subway stop one morning recently and found that the escalator stairs had been stolen. The steps weighed about 3,200 pounds and were worth about $100,000.

Most subway-goers were grumpier than usual that day. Others found solace in the idea that even the thieves in New York go for the top billing. A few years ago, for example, two men were caught selling the Brooklyn Bridge, bit by bit, to a scrap metal operation.

For public figures, August can be a hot month politically. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, for example, has had to deal with gruesome allegations of police torture in a case that has galvanized the black community and occupied a press corps with little other real news.

But if he is reacting to events like that one, Giuliani is also making news of his own, like when he refused to go to Monday night’s inauguration of the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows. The mayor has said that he is stiffing the U.S. Open--this year and forever--because the United States Tennis Association had laced the city’s contract with “outrageous” and “stupid” provisions.

These provisions, Giuliani said, force the city to pay fines when jets fly over the stadium disrupting the hush and decorum and broadcasting of these matches.

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But others suggest that the real game here is not tennis, but politics. And they argue that the Republican mayor, who is up for reelection this fall, does not want any glory for a Democrat, especially his predecessor David N. Dinkins, who got the stadium construction underway and signed the tennis contract in 1993.

As Daily News columnist Mark Kriegel wrote Monday about Giuliani: “He could be a great mayor, if not for his relentless talent for the petty vendetta.”

Petty vendettas, however, are good August fare. An annual softball game between Hamptons artists and writers--Famous Artists and Famous Writers, mind you--brings a kind of mock contest that helps raise money for a local charity while producing just a shred of news.

A number of stars played in the event--Roy Scheider and Alec Baldwin on the artists’ side, George Plimpton and Ben Bradlee among the writers, who won. But word had spread that model Cindy Crawford was going to play and, when she didn’t show, some of the regulars began to grumble. She’ll never be invited again, one player groused. Another wondered, charitably, whether she’d actually been invited in the first place.

Back in New York City, gossip columnist Richard Johnson of the New York Post’s Page Six explained that business is slow and sometimes a little strange. When he tried to write about how Barbra Streisand was not getting married at a place on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, it became a hot item about how she might be getting married somewhere else.

“All these people picked it up, and everybody denied it, and I get blamed. I was trying to knock it down,” he laughed. “That’s the kind of wacky stuff that happens to me in August.”