LESSONS IN SURVIVAL

A winsome California divorcÇe's devastatingly normal life is blown sky-high with the news that her bank-robber parents, who donated half of each withdrawal to charity, are finally getting out of prison. Not that Blue Erhardt's life is all that normal to begin with. A biology teacher, she's preoccupied with the swarming micro-organisms living and dead to whom she's constantly comparing herself; she's carried off to a lovemaking session with her ex-husband Lewis in handcuffs and reaches orgasm amid reveries of dust mites. But things change for good, or bad, when a judge knocks a year off the sentences of her parents, Harold and Naomi Henderson, and turns them loose on Blue. Reporters besiege her; would-be agent Rush Poundstone schemes to sign her to a movie contract; and the ``Counterculture Bonnie and Clyde,'' pausing only long enough to tell her that it was her fault they got arrested 20 years ago, promptly set off on a new rash of robberies. Despite the news that Blue hasn't visited her parents in ten years, ever since Naomi refused to accept parole—and motherhood- -to serve out her husband's term, Dunaway (Borrowed Lives, 1992, etc.) seems determined to keep the couple in the background, as if skirting a subject too delicate to broach directly; by their fifth new-and- improved holdup (now they're using live ammunition), Blue's taken off for The Bend, an Arizona resort whose quixotic paterfamilias, Thomas Q, she plans to interview for her dissertation in religious studies, and long before a climactic fire and (still another) bank job bring her story to an end, that story's taken a backseat to a string of increasingly gnomic revelations about life. Like what? Like ``Love is part of our survival technique...If we don't accept that, we become extinct.'' Blue's a lot more fun when she's playing hooky from herself.