By Guy D. Garcia

She was riding a downtown subway in Manhattan at 3 a.m. on Christmas night when a photographer asked her to pose for a picture. Thus began the modeling career of Lisa Sliwa, national director of the Guardian Angels civilian vigilante group and wife of Angels Founder Curtis Sliwa, 30. Newly signed by the Zoli agency, the Chicago-bred, 5-ft. 9-in., 125-Ib. brunette, who says she is 25, still plans to spend her nights riding the city's trains with her husband and thinks her new occupation can help the old. "Most women believe modeling is more feminine than patrolling the subways, so I'll be able to relate to them better," explains Sliwa. "You don't have to be a gorilla to defend yourself, and you don't have to be a Nerf-brain to be a model." Nor to figure out that a $2,000-a-day modeling fee can buy a lot of subway tokens.

Boy George, move over.

Joe Namath, 40, the sexy quarterback turned actor who raised eyebrows ten years ago by donning pantyhose for a TV commercial, has again dropped his pants, so to speak. Last week at a casino in Atlantic City, N.J., he opened in Sugar, a musical stage adaptation of the 1959 movie Some Like It Hot. Despite his previous experience with nylons, however, Broadway Joe found dressing like a broad a definite drag. "I tore the first three pair of fishnet stockings I put on," said Namath. He plays Josephine, the saxophone player who poses as a woman in an all-girl band to avoid the Mob and falls in love with Sugar Kane, an all-woman girl played on film by Marilyn Monroe. The show has been doing well, but Namath will pass on a longer run. Come the end of this month, he pledges, "it will be out of pantyhose, into football socks." Wasting no time, on the morning after his closing performance, Namath will be in Connecticut to open a youngsters' football camp he has helped run for the past five years.

"I love this city. I loved living here and being so close to the seat of power, being part of the political system." It is not hard to guess that the city is Washington, D.C., but the identity of the speaker might come as a surprise to those who thought of Rosalynn Carter, 56, as a down-home sort of woman who was never comfortable with the insider preening and cosseting that embroider life in the nation's capital. In town last week to see old friends and attend a signing party for her new book, First Lady from Plains (which will be excerpted in PEOPLE magazine next week), Carter acknowledged, "The social scene is a very important part of political Washington, and we probably should have got involved. But even if Jimmy were ever to come back here, I don't think he would do it differently. It's just not part of his makeup." Perhaps it is part of hers, to judge from her warmth and ease on the book-party circuit. As she wrote at the end of her memoirs, "I would be out there campaigning right now if Jimmy would run again. I miss the world of politics."

During the voting season even pols with a champagne taste find that joining the boys for a little beer and bowling at a place like Milwaukee's Serb Hall makes for a good image and a nice folksy photo opportunity. So it was that last week Vice President George Bush, 59, dropped by for a few frames while visiting the city for a Republican campaign rally. Bush energetically rolled his first ball--and proceeded to follow it, face first, down the alley. "Mr. Vice President, do you bowl?" catcalled one onlooker. "Can't you tell?" said Mr. Bush, who obviously has something else in mind when he talks about first-strike capability. Bush was proud, though, that foul or no, the ball did catch nine pins. He managed to roll his second ball without a pratfall, but failed to convert the spare.

On the Record

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the U.S.: "Watching this recent campaign has made me a born-again monarchist."

Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, on the size of Government spending: "A billion seconds ago it was 1951. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive and walking in Galilee. A billion hours ago no one walked on two feet on earth. And a billion dollars ago was 10.3 hours in Washington, D.C."

--By Guy D. Garcia