SOUP ON WHEELS

Yet another installment in Peck's churned-out tales of Soup and Rob in corny old Vermont. This time, school nurse Miss Borland has decided to stage a New Orleans-style Mardi Gras with costume prizes. Soup and Rob expect to take firs! prize together as a mule, but when they find that Miss Borland and her new boyfriend have the same idea, they paint stripes on their flour sacks and go as a zebra. But, says narrator Rob, with a barrel over the sacks, a shoebox on Soup's head, and a piano wire tail, ""what we looked like was probably a traveling dump."" The inevitable climactic crash comes here when the boys, in costume and on roller skates for the first time, enter the contest at a runaway downhill clip and plow smack into the Borland-boyfriend mule. With Rob's sweetie Norma Jean pairing off for first prize with the smooth, Southern new boy in town, that's about it for this round, folks.