A SUPERSTAR CALLED SWEETPEA

Charleston (S.C.) teendom, 19807 Best friend #1 Lara Lee is the Total Woman, with big ""bazooms"" and enthusiasm galore. Best friend #2 Rachael goes in for art and ballet and college boys--except when she pairs up with black tennis aspirant Ben. As for 16-year-old Elizabeth, she's ""merely your average, ordinary Superstar waiting to be discovered."" Plotwise, that's more or less what happens: Elizabeth overhears a classmate say he needs a girl vocalist, gets a turndown from her parents, tries out anyhow, makes the grade, and--drawing Lara Lee and Rachael into the ""Big Deception""--gives her all to singing with the band (about which we hear virtually nothing). But not only do her grades, her tennis, and her disposition suffer, she runs the risk of losing super-eligible Gary, who's too upright to be told why she's tied up so much. Then one night when Lara Lee can't pick her up after a gig, Elizabeth has a set-to with distasteful, adoring Lamar (he presses, she overreacts) and a follow-up fight with Lara Lee. The singing, she decides, has to go--for now. But the plot-line is little more than an armature on which to hang aspects of teen life: the three girls' very different sets of parents (none judged harshly); Elizabeth and Rachel's constant fear that Lara Lee and steady Skeebo will forget themselves; the particulars of a hair-setting session, a church roller disco party, an Atlanta shopping spree, etc. As in teen romances of the Forties and Fifties, life is coterminous with social life--with the difference of the career vs. romance conflict and the total lack, in the romances, of any emotional conviction.