For $10, would you rather have your kids gaze at a computer-generated Scooby Doo bounding around in a "high concept" Hollywood franchise film … or would you prefer they learn to appreciate and enjoy the experience of a live theatrical performance?

It's not easy sharing history. For the Queens Museum of Art, this means sharing its permanent home with the revered memory of the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs.

Life with children is no cabaret. But New York moms Harriet Berkowitz, Dana Covey, Lisa Golden and Amy Mandelbaum could argue otherwise. The quartet serves collectively as lyricist, voice, and matronly spirit of Momsense, the musical comedy review now in its second year.

It's not uncommon for a pair of similar news stories to touch off a frenzy of reporting, giving the public the unnerving feeling of an epidemic in progress.

Ethnic diversity is a little like art — you can acknowledge it or you can ignore it. But if you're the Queens Museum of Art, and your institution sits in the shadow of a grand symbol of diversity like the 1964 World's Fair Unisphere, you're very likely going to recognize and embrace cultural differences without any trepidation.

Films enjoy — or suffer from — a distinction no other technology or art does: The idea that audiences understand them inside out. Seeing moving images as frequently as we do in movie theaters, on television, through video games and through our computers, we've come to feel something like homegrown experts. As media critics frequently point out, moving images are everywhere, and their effect, as the pictures from September 11 recently reminded us, are as potent as ever.

New York is show biz, and kids with an interest in working in the theater couldn't possibly ask to live in a more appropriate place. The big marquees are back on 42nd Street just the way they used to be; Times Square is as glaringly exhibitionistic as it's ever been; and despite the economic bump on the head delivered by September 11, live theater is still the mainstay of the city's creative life — from the Winter Garden, to the tiniest theaters in the East Village, to Shakespeare in the Park.

Museum for African Art set to open temporary facility September 20