t was a strange St. Patrick’s Day for the soldiers of the Fighting 69th.

They usually fill a city block when they muster outside for the parade. This year, they filled a fraction of a block. They usually take up several dozen pews at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the cardinal’s Mass. This year, they took up maybe 10.

They usually finish the parade by riding back to their armory with their M-16′s on a private subway, for a regimental cocktail. This year, the train and guns were there, but instead of drinking whiskey and Champagne, some of them drove to an Air Force base in New Jersey to retrieve the body of a comrade killed in Iraq.

“It’s adds to the – what would you call it? – the surrealness of the day,” Lt. John Salazar, a company commander, said. “Picking up a body on St. Patrick’s Day.” He shook his head.

The 69th Infantry – one of the oldest units in the New York National Guard – was created in 1851 and, according to legend, has missed only two St. Patrick’s Day parades in its history. For 150 years – more than half the parade’s 244-year stretch – its troops have marched up Fifth Avenue on March 17. And in most years, the private subway train has been there to take them back.

This year, however, was the first since World War II in which the unit has marched with soldiers in the field. Nearly 800 of its roughly 900 soldiers are serving in Iraq.

A plaque in the lobby of their armory, on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, commemorates the dead.

Civil War: 388
World War I: 900
World War II: 472
Iraq: 16

Capt. Martin Ortiz thought about those 16 as he marched. Their names were in his head – a macabre poem, of sorts: Baptiste. Reardon. Engeldrum. Urbina. Fisher. Irizarry. Babin. Bergeron. Comeaux. Fassbender. Frickey. Murphy. VonRonn. Kamolvathin. Obaji. Ali.

“Each one of those guys is a name,” he said, having just returned from a tour in Iraq. “But each name’s got a story.”

The 69th was founded as “the Irish Brigade,” but it is not wholly Irish anymore. You can still find Flynns and Kanes and O’Malleys, but more and more the dog tags read Rivera, Santiago or Singh.

The day started early, at 5 a.m. The men mustered at the armory. It was dark outside. A pair of bootblacks shined their boots.

Upstairs, the officers drank a toast of Jameson’s.

“Gentlemen, our job today is to make sure the tradition goes forward,” said Capt. Raphael Santiago, the commander. “A toast to our fallen soldiers.”

“Carry on!” came the answer. “May they rest in peace.”

Then they fell in, stepped out in formation and made a left at 26th Street. All the way up Madison Avenue, they called out military cadence.

“Here we go again
Same old stuff again
Marching down the avenue
Five more hours and we’ll be through.”

Or a little rougher:

“Yellow bird with a yellow bill
Sitting on my window sill
Lured him in with a piece of bread
Then I smashed his little head.”

A pause at 51st Street, behind St. Patrick’s, waiting for the Mass to begin. The talk, however, was less about parade routes or grand marshals and more about Ramadi and roadside bombs. One private told another about a home video made in Iraq that shows a Humvee practically blowing up.

“It’s supposed to be a fun day, but when you lose guys, it’s mixed,” said Sgt. William Gerke, who fought in Vietnam. “We still got a wake tonight, you know?”

Cardinal Edward Egan directed his sermon at the men. He called them “wonderful, gallant, courageous defenders of this nation.” He said they were “young Americans who heard a call.”

After Mass, they marched to 39th Street to pick up M-16′s and bayonets.

Except for the police horses and the sanitation men with brooms and shovels, the 69th was in the lead. The parade began and the firefighters of Ladder Company 45 applauded them. A police inspector, carrying a bullhorn, applauded them. Two drunk guys in “I’m With Stupid” T-shirts applauded them, too.

People shout, “We love you!” and “Thank you!” and “God bless the U.S.A.!” From the windows of the Pierre Hotel, a chef in whites and a toque flashes them a quick thumbs up.

The parade was done at 86th Street, and the soldiers walked in a narrow column, two by two, down the crowded street, their rifles slung across their backs. People stood aside and stared. Then clapped.

Then they headed down into the subway, waiting for the No. 6 train. It is a strange sight – loaded rifles in the station. At least they had removed their bayonets.

The dispatcher had summoned a train, but several shuddered by before they boarded. Finally, their ride arrived: a private subway train with the Irish and American flags.

“This is the one perk of the day,” said Cadet Adorian Lazar. “The 69th train.”

Back downtown, the detail fell in once again on 28th Street. They were marching toward the armory to celebrate with speeches and a drink.

Capt. Keith Jensen was not joining them, though. Specialist Azhar Ali died two weeks ago outside of Baghdad. Captain Jensen had the job of picking up his body.

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ORT McMURRAY, Alberta, March 13 – Forty below zero isn’t so bad once you get used to it. At least that was the message of a seminar at Keyano College called “We Love the Winters Here,” attended by 30 new immigrants from warm-blooded places like Venezuela and Nigeria, drawn here by the promise of hefty salaries in an oil boomtown.

Of course, the lecturers noted, there are some important things to remember about living in this sub-Arctic town where winters last eight long, blustery months.

For one thing, children must be taught that it is dangerous to stick their tongues on freezing metal poles. There are risks to warming up a car inside the garage, and there are ways to drive out of a skid on an icy road.

It is all part of life in what was once a God-forsaken cowboy outpost until several multinational oil companies ratcheted up their oil sands operations here in recent years. In two decades, the population has nearly doubled, to 60,000 from 35,000. There is a lot of money to be made here, especially with oil prices over $50 a barrel, plenty of high-paying jobs and a real estate boom, which have all helped make just about everyone, blue-collar workers included, feel prosperous.

But few Canadians from relatively balmy places like Vancouver and Toronto have the gumption to live in these frigid climes, so oil company recruiters are looking far and wide. Amazingly, they are finding plenty of hearty, well-trained and highly motivated people from places where 70 degrees Fahrenheit is considered chilly.

“What do you prefer,” asked Ligda Massicotte, 38, a lawyer who left the chaos of her native Venezuela four years ago. “A country where there is kidnapping, crime, revolution, political uncertainty or a country that is cold where you have to put a hat on?”

Nevertheless, Ms. Massicotte and her fellow English-language students at Keyano say the constant need to shovel snow and the short, dark days take some getting used to.

“When we first got here, my husband would say ‘Let’s go out,’ ” she recalled, “and I’d say, ‘Oh honey, we have to dress the kids, two socks on each, then the long underwear, then the long-sleeve shirts, then the snow suit, then the mittens, then the hats, then the scarves.’ Then as soon as you’re ready one of the kids would pooh, and you’d have to start all over again. We’d always be an hour late.”

Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez fired more than 5,000 employees at the state oil company after a failed general strike, has been particularly fertile recruiting ground for energy companies.

“When you are in Venezuela and you read the word ‘cold,’ you don’t really know what that word means,” said Cesar Mogollon, an electrical engineer with Suncor Energy who arrived from Venezuela in November.

“The first time I went out at minus 40 during a safety tour around the plant in early December, I was dying,” he said. “I felt pain in my nose and ears that went inside. I looked around at my colleagues and asked myself, ‘Do they have different blood than me?’ “

But Mr. Mogollon said that once he found that local supermarkets carried the white maize flour dough used to make arepas and empanadas, “I was O.K.” He and his wife have adjusted, he said, and his 9-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son are snow tubing and skiing with gusto.

At least 4,000 foreign-born immigrants now live in Fort McMurray, and the number is growing fast. Local supermarkets carry halvah from Saudi Arabia, mango nectar from Egypt, jarred yellow cherries from Guatemala, rice sticks from the Philippines and marinating sauces from South Africa. There are cultural organizations for Latinos, Hindus, Filipinos and Chinese. The first Islamic school opened last year.

Mushtaque Ahmed, a 54-year-old engineer at Syncrude Canada, who was born in Bangladesh, has worked previously in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He says that 10 families from Bangladesh arrived here in the last three years, and that they now get together to celebrate Bangladeshi holidays with potluck dinners that mix their native cooking with Canadian fare: typically roast turkey and assorted biryanis.

There has already been one marriage in the community, he said, and he is trying to persuade his brother-in-law to come here to open a Bangladeshi restaurant.

“I like the friendliness of the people here,” Mr. Ahmed said, although he admitted to one misgiving that has nothing to do with the weather: “I can get uncomfortable with what’s on television. There’s a lot of tolerance to things I am not accustomed to.”

Immigrants here, like immigrants everywhere, get homesick and cling to their native cultures.

Oswald Francis, a 52-year-old Jamaican-born bus driver, still wears a Jamaican flag on a bracelet and on a pin on his lapel. He came here for a three-week holiday in 1977 to visit friends, and never left, in large part because his wife thought this could be a good place to raise their two daughters.

“Canada is the best place in the world to live right now, and Fort McMurray is the best place in Canada to live because of the opportunities, the jobs, the money,” he said while shopping for a long-distance calling card in a multicultural supermarket. “As for the cold, I wouldn’t call it an adjustment. You never get used to it.”

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N the dim half-light of a Long Island garage, a handful of DeLoreans stand in darkened corners or suspended on hydraulic lifts, their trademark gull-wing doors ajar, their stainless-steel silver shells still ultramodern more than two decades after the DeLorean Motor Company went bust. Visible through a dusty window in the parking lot outside, perhaps 20 more DeLoreans, lined up and identical, sit waiting, like some surreal automotive dream.

This is P. J. Grady’s, a modest gray automotive garage tucked behind a used-car lot in West Sayville, N.Y. As the sign on its roof – DeLorean Motor Cars – indicates, the shop specializes in the repair and restoration of DeLoreans, the famous and doomed early-1980′s sports car created by John Z. DeLorean and featured in the “Back to the Future” movies.

It is estimated that around 9,200 DeLoreans were built in the car’s three years of production, 1981 through 1983, and that about 7,000 are left. Of those, a good number have passed through the hands of Rob Grady, P. J. Grady’s tall, thin, intensely focused owner, who has spent the past 20 years as one of the foremost of the world’s few DeLorean experts. DeLorean owners from Maine to Florida send him their cars, and in a small garage that was once part of his family’s General Motors dealership, Mr. Grady fixes engines, locates obscure parts, fabricates what he can’t find and restores long-neglected DeLoreans so they can turn heads once more.

For many years, P. J. Grady’s was about as profitable as an Edsel dealership, but that has changed. The teenagers who saw “Back to the Future” 20 years ago and were fascinated by the film’s time-traveling DeLorean are now grown and seeking out the low-sweeping coupe. At the same time, the car is approaching its 25th birthday, a benchmark in the collector market. Where once values hovered around $17,000, a restored DeLorean now runs close to $30,000.

“In the last five or six years the values have gone way up,” said James Espey, vice president of the DeLorean Motor Company in Houston, which bought the rights to the DeLorean brand and sells restored models. “The car is coming into its own.”

It was long believed that DeLorean parts could not be found, so many cars were garaged, but Mr. Espey’s firm bought the entire DMC parts inventory – everything from body panels to nuts, bolts and washers. Mr. Espey estimates that the company has enough gull-wing doors to last 120 years at the current rate of use, and enough interior carpet to cover a football field twice over. This month, the company opened a second branch near Tampa, Fla. And two shops near Los Angeles, DeLorean Motor Center and DeLorean One, serve the West Coast as P. J. Grady’s serves the East.

Of the handful of DeLorean specialists, P. J. Grady’s is the oldest, going back to 1979, when Mr. Grady became one of the original DeLorean dealers. For the sum of $25,000 he received the right to sell the line’s one and only model, the DMC-12, and a poster of the car autographed by Mr. DeLorean, which still decorates his office, where Mr. Grady was joined on a recent afternoon by his wife, Debby, who handles the phone, and a DeLorean enthusiast named Mike Deluca.

Like many dealers, Mr. Grady signed up based on the reputation of Mr. DeLorean, who had been an engineering and marketing star at G.M. – in the early 1960′s he created the Pontiac GTO, which many consider the first muscle car – and left at the height of his career to challenge the Big Three automakers. But from the start, his company was besieged with problems, starting with too little money to work with and the fact that the car, priced at $25,000, made its debut in 1981 in one of the worst economies in recent memory. “The cars were never hot sellers,” Mr. Grady said.

Topping it off was Mr. DeLorean’s very public arrest in 1982 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, still a sore spot with DeLorean enthusiasts. (Mr. DeLorean was eventually acquitted; the prevailing sentiment among owners is that he was framed.) When the company filed for bankruptcy protection that year, Mr. Grady continued to honor his customers’ service warranties. Over time, he found himself doing more and more repair work on DeLoreans, until that was all he did.

Not surprisingly, he has developed an affection for the car, though it is a cool, dispassionate one, tempered by years of daily involvement. “It’s a good car,” he said simply.

Mr. Deluca, hovering nearby, said: “Rob is being modest. He’s completely dedicated. I was driving by once and it was Easter Sunday. It was freezing. Rob was out in the parking lot testing temperature sensors.”

IN a far corner of the garage, the P. J. Grady’s mechanic, Pat Tomasetti, stood in blue coveralls beneath a DeLorean on a hydraulic lift, draining oil and listening to NPR. Mr. Tomasetti has been repairing and restoring DeLoreans at P. J. Grady’s for 13 years and is accustomed to overenthusiastic fans of the car. He laughed as he recalled the time a Japanese man showed up with his family, saying he had flown to America to visit Disney World and P. J. Grady’s.

The DeLorean Mr. Tomasetti was working on had come in from Pennsylvania and was set to have its front fender replaced, among other repairs. Another DeLorean, its door crunched like a soda can, was in need of extensive body work. Outside, dozens more waited, a daunting workload for two men.

“I’d like another mechanic, but it’s hard keeping them,” Mr. Grady said. “Most guys don’t like doing restoration work. It’s dirty, and there’s also the repetition.”

People who spend time around garages tend to acquire a detailed know-how of car design and mechanics, but DeLorean experts take specialization to a refined level. Because of its unpainted stainless-steel body, the DMC-12 was available in only one color, silver. Its interior was black leather or gray leather, nothing else, and the car changed little over its brief production run.

So while the Corvette aficionado has a half-century of paint schemes, body types and fancy options to ponder, the DeLorean lover must be content with trivial changes – the radio antenna on the ’81 models is in the windshield, for example, while on the ’82 it is on the left rear quarter.

Pointing to a model whose license plate read BK2DFUTR, Mr. Grady proceeded to make the indistinguishable cars distinguishable. “We just got this one out of mothballs,” he said. “It sat for four years. The owner decided to sell it. It only has 11,000 miles.”

He continued: “That one over there was in a wreck. Needs a new door.” Then he walked over to a car covered in a soft blanket of dust. The passenger window was stuck halfway down, and the seat was given over to orphaned parts. Mr. Grady’s pupils widened, as if he were laying eyes on a DeLorean for the very first time. “This is the 530,” he said reverently. “It’s a Legend prototype, Twin Turbo. They only made three of these.”

The 530 is going to be restored as his own DeLorean, Mr. Grady said, just as soon as he finds the time. “Sometimes you get a little burned out,” he mused, reflecting on the vagaries of being a DeLorean expert. “Then something rejuvenates you.”

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IFTEEN-HUNDRED dollars, can I get fifteen-hundred dollars?” shouted the auctioneer, standing in a muddy field. Next to him a black buggy – the covered variety that, traditionally, an unmarried couple of opposite sexes did not share alone – sat on display, tilted toward the ground, ready for a buyer’s horse and harness.

Someone started the bidding, and the auctioneer moved into his singsong speed-talking, the words barely distinguishable, the numbers just slightly more so.

Crowded around the buggy were about 50 men, all dressed as he was, in black suits and straw hats, and groomed as he was, with beards and no mustaches. The pace – and the price – accelerated, breaking the $2,000 mark, then $2,500. The bidders dwindled to two, and the auctioneer turned to face them as the price increments dropped and the tension increased.

He called out, “$2,825.” A man with a wispy beard accepted with a barely perceptible nod. Then, “$2,850.” A moment’s hesitation, and then a thick-bearded man made the same slight nod. The price climbed to $2,900, then $3,000; at $3,025, the wispy-bearded man gave one slight shake of his head, yielding to his rival. Auctioneer and crowd moved to the next buggy.

The rest of America may be switching to eBay, but auctions still come in the old style in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, centered in Lancaster County in southeastern Pennsylvania. At this event on Feb. 19 in the tiny town of Honey Brook, buggies were not the only wares, and Amish men were not the only buyers. Thousands of new and used items ready for auction, from handmade furniture to groceries to livestock, spilled out of the town fire hall onto adjoining fields and under tents, while buyers from near and far – Amish, their close religious cousins the Mennonites and “outsiders,” or non-Amish locals and tourists – joined the search for good deals. It was the first of the 2005 mud sales.

Mud sales, named for the soggy ground of the season, have been a rite of spring in Lancaster County for 40 years. These days, they are usually organized, staffed and run entirely by local Amish and held from late February to early April, a time when farming work is slow. Nine were on this year’s schedule, held in various small towns. They have a specific purpose: to raise money for the local volunteer fire companies, vital institutions in a rural county dotted with traditional frame houses and wooden barns.

“We couldn’t make it financially without this mud sale, no way,” said Ken Jackson, Honey Brook’s fire chief, who, in contrast to his Amish neighbors, wore blue jeans and a baseball cap. The fire company makes about $30,000 from this one-day event, he said, its biggest fund-raiser of the year by far.

Previous mud sales helped the fire company, which has both Amish and non-Amish members, buy the new $400,000 fire engine that was displaced to make room for merchandise on mud sale day. (Because of their rules about motorized travel, the Amish cannot drive the fire truck. When alarms go out, they are ferried to the fires by designated non-Amish drivers.)

At any one time during the day at this Honey Brook sale, five or six auctions were going on at once. Amish buyers gathered around items like buggies or farm implements made to be pulled by horses. Outsiders dominated crowds bidding for curiosities like an antique beer sign or for handmade goods that Amish craftsmen and women had worked on for months in expectation of the sale: furniture, wooden swing sets, small craft items, quilts. In the clusters around items of interest to all, like axes, outdoor sheds and cases of cereal, Amish suits mixed with outsiders’ pastel jackets and Gore-Tex ski jackets in a blur of universal bargain hunting. Over the course of the day, about 3,500 people attended the sale, its organizers said.

Almost everything is sold on consignment from small local sellers, with the fire company keeping 8 to 10 percent of the proceeds and the contributor getting the rest. Nearly everything is auctioned, though there were a couple of flea market-style tables at Honey Brook. Auctioneers and staffers are all volunteers.

Besides their serious purpose, mud sales serve another function. They are festive community events – for the Amish, especially, a high point of the year’s social calendar. At Honey Brook, Amish children huddled together, squirming and giggling, dressed in miniature versions of their parents’ somber outfits – black suits or drab dresses. Clean-shaven teenage boys (the trademark beard is grown only after marriage) flirted with headscarf-clad girls who blushed and shied away. Families carried snugly wrapped babies, and old-timers sat around speaking in the German dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch.

At the food booths, Amish women twisted dough into pretzels, which came hot and drenched in butter, while men tended to fires, roasting whole pigs that ended up as delicious pork sandwiches.

“It’s definitely an event we get excited about after being cooped up all winter,” said a smiling 31-year-old Amish man as he directed visitors to the appropriate tents.

Only a couple of the Amish agreed to divulge their names. “It has to do with modesty,” explained a friendly, talkative 35-year-old man who works as a welder. “We don’t want our names in the paper, have a big deal made of our lives. We don’t want people treating us differently, even though we have a different lifestyle. But don’t get me wrong – we appreciate outsiders coming to these events.”

Things got under way around 8:30 a.m., with auctioneers standing at raised lecterns with microphone and gavel or down on the ground with portable microphone and speakers. Starting prices were at the discretion of the auctioneer, who sometimes began too high – $10, say, for a handmade wooden birdhouse – and then halved or quartered that to get a nibble. To bid, people held up numbered tickets obtained by registering. The winner took possession of the item right away and had to pay for it before leaving the sale. Successful bidders had seven days to remove large items. Cash, credit cards and in-state checks were all accepted.

Winning bidders took home all kinds of things: a wooden coat rack for $3, a box of Reese’s Puffs for $2, a fertilizer spreader for $7, a sledgehammer for $3.50, a big metal bell for $47, a leather horse harness for $400, a heifer (180 were up for auction) for $2,100.

For Dennis Shenk, a 50-year-old contractor from nearby Lancaster, the mud sales are something of a tradition, even though he is not Amish. His father used to bring him to the sales, he said, and today he comes for bargains on items he can use in his work.

Mary Ellen Stephens, a 29-year-old from Broomall, Pa., an hour’s drive away, was after furniture, toys, knickknacks and whatever other items caught her eye in the tents. She shows up, she said, “with trucks” and family members to drive them. (Not being Amish, she drives one herself.)

Are there good deals here? “Soooo good,” she said, offering as evidence the nugget that although swing sets where she lives can cost upward of $2,000, she had snagged one at a mud sale last year for $500. “Now I’m back for more stuff,” she said. “My husband told me if I come home with one more curio cabinet, he’d kick me out of the house.”

MANY outsiders came to buy an Amish specialty: handmade quilts. The quilts, which can each take two or more months to make, can start at $500 and go well over $1,000 in stores. But at the mud sale, huge quilts, 8 by 9 feet, were selling for half the store price or less. That’s such a good deal that Mary Jane Raupp and her husband, Heinie, drove five and a half hours from Cranberry Township, Pa., just north of Pittsburgh. They bought two.

But a good price doesn’t always mean the highest quality – especially when it comes to quilts. “People don’t sell their best quilts at the mud sales,” said Hannah Stoltzfoos, a 68-year-old Old Order Amish woman who has operated her shop, Hannah’s Quilts & Crafts, just outside Lancaster, Pa., since 1972 and occasionally sells her handmade creations at mud sales as well. “Everyone knows the quilts there won’t fetch a high price.” But to the untrained eye, the mud sale quilts are still beautiful.

Besides, some people are just after a deal – and the rush of adrenaline that comes with bidding. “I had to go head to head with my uncle once,” Mrs. Stephens said. “I beat him.”

Mud Sales Information

Mud sales in Pennsylvania Dutch Country take place from the end of February through the beginning of April, usually on Saturdays. Other fund-raising auctions occur throughout the year. Call (800) 723-8824 or consult www.padutchcountry.com for updates and travel information. Here are some mud sales still scheduled this season:

SATURDAY Bart Township Fire Company, Route 896, Georgetown, (717) 786-3348 (about six miles southeast of Strasburg), starting at 8:30 a.m. Wood and aluminum siding, windows, doors, bifold doors, paneling, bathtubs and lumber.

MARCH 26 Gap Fire Company, 802 Pequea Avenue, Gap, (717) 442-9549, starting at 8 a.m. Quilts, crafts, dry goods and groceries.

APRIL 9 Rawlinsville Fire Company, 33 Martic Heights Drive, Holtwood, (717) 284-3023, starting at 8:30 a.m. Quilts, horses, crafts, building materials, lawn equipment and furniture.

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HE meeting of the Broadway chapter of the Monty Python fan club officially came to order – or to be exact, came to disorder – last night at the Shubert Theater with the opening of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” a resplendently silly new musical.

Favorite routines first created by that surreal British comedy team for the 1975 movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” were performed with an attention to detail found among obsessive history buffs who re-enact Civil War battles on weekends. Python songs were sung with the giggly glee of naughty Boy Scouts around a campfire. And festive decorations were provided in the form of medieval cartoon costumes and scenery helpfully described in the show as “very expensive.”

It seems safe to say that such a good time is being had by so many people (including the cast) at the Shubert Theater that this fitful, eager celebration of inanity will find a large and lucrative audience among those who value the virtues of shrewd idiocy, artful tackiness and wide-eyed impiety. That includes most school-age children as well as grown-ups who feel they are never more themselves than when they are in touch with the nerdy, nose-thumbing 12-year-olds who reside within.

“Spamalot,” which is directed (improbably enough) by that venerable master of slickness Mike Nichols, is the latest entry in the expanding Broadway genre of scrapbook musical theater. Such ventures, which include flesh-and-blood versions of Disney cartoons and jukebox karaoke shows like “Mamma Mia!,” reconstruct elements from much-loved cultural phenomena with wide fan bases. Only rarely do these productions match, much less surpass, the appeal of what inspired them. Generally, they simply serve as colorful aides-mémoire for the pop group, television show or movie to which they pay tribute. Within this category, “Spamalot” ranks high, right up there with (try not to wince, Pythonites) the sweetly moronic “Mamma Mia!,” which repackages the disco hits of Abba into a comfy singalong frolic.

This means it is possible for theatergoers who are not Python devotees to enjoy themselves at “Spamalot,” which has a book and lyrics by Eric Idle (an original Python) and music by John Du Prez and Mr. Idle. It would seem unchivalrous not to share in at least some of the pleasure that is being experienced by a cast that includes Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, David Hyde Pierce and a toothsome devourer of scenery named Sara Ramirez.

Still, the uninitiated may be bewildered when laughs arrive even before a scene gets under way. The mere appearance of a figure in a certain costume (say, a headpiece with ram’s horns) or the utterance of a single word (i.e., “ni”) is enough to provoke anticipatory guffaws among the cognoscenti. Punch lines come to seem almost irrelevant.

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was the first film feature from a troupe that revolutionized sketch comedy. First seen on British television in 1969 with the series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” this group of Oxbridge-erudite young Brits (John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Mr. Idle) and one American soul mate (Terry Gilliam) combined the anarchy of the Marx Brothers with a rarefied British spirit of absurdity and a straight-faced irreverence regarding all sacred cows. “The Holy Grail” stayed true to the formula of the Python television series, channeling the troupe’s vision of a disjointed world of colliding sensibilities and cultural references into a retelling of the myth of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Much of the joy of “The Holy Grail” lies in its imaginative use of its low budget, turning limited locations and homemade props into a comment on the bogusness of cinematic authenticity. And the cast peerlessly delivered its fatuous material with unconditional sincerity.

The moviemaker’s self-consciousness that infused “The Holy Grail” has been reconceived in theatrical terms for “Spamalot.” (Tim Hatley’s deliriously artificial sets and costumes bring to mind a collaboration between a cynical Las Vegas resort designer and a stoned class committee for a junior-senior prom.) So the fractured tale of the quest of King Arthur (Mr. Curry) and his ditsy knights for the Holy Grail has been woven into another quest: that of bringing the king and his entourage to the enchanted land called Broadway.

This expressed goal makes “Spamalot” a two-tiered operation. On the one hand there is the dutiful acting out of the movie’s most famous set pieces (the killer-rabbit scene, the bring-out-your-dead scene, the taunting Frenchman scene, etc.). On the other hand, and (surprisingly) it’s the friskier hand, the show spoofs classic song-and-dance extravaganzas, suggesting what the satiric revue “Forbidden Broadway” might be like if it had an $11 million budget.

The vignettes lifted straight from the movie have an ersatz quality, in the way of secondhand jokes that are funnier in their original context. Broadway performance demands an exaggeration that doesn’t always jibe with the unblinking earnestness of the Python style. (The interpolated song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” loses the shock appeal it had when it was first sung, by a chorus of men nailed to crucifixes, in another Python movie, “Life of Brian.”)

That said, Mr. Azaria (part of the brilliant team of voices behind “The Simpsons” cartoon series) plies his sterling mimetic skills to evoke exactly such fabled figures from the film as the towering Knight of Ni (he wears stilts), the inept warlock known as Tim the Enchanter and the nasty French Taunter who specializes in English-baiting insults. (Mr. Azaria’s main role, by the way, is Lancelot, who finds happiness when he discovers his inner Peter Allen.)

Mr. Curry, of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” is the best of the cast at translating classic Python style into a musical-comedy idiom. His stalwart, plummy-voiced Arthur wears a smile as inflexible as armor, and it deflects any suggestion that this manly king is in on the show’s jokes.

Christopher Sieber – who, like most of the cast, plays an assortment of roles – is delightful as a Sir Galahad who tosses his blond tresses as if he were auditioning for a Clairol commercial. And Mr. Hyde Pierce (famous as the neurotic Niles on the sitcom “Frasier”) appears to be having such a fine time that it seems impolite to observe that he is not a natural for this material. Still, in the role of the cowardly Sir Robin, he brings a genial Rex Harrison-style dapperness to a patter number about the importance of including Jews in any Broadway show.

The moments when “Spamalot” rises into the ether are those in which it pays homage – à la “The Producers” – to other kinds of Broadway musicals, with bobble-headed nods to the Vegas revue thrown in. The “Knights of the Round Table” number that introduces the swinging pleasure palace called Camelot is a deliciously cheesy, cheesecake-laden floor show, with Arthur morphing into a Rat Pack-style master of ceremonies. (Casey Nicholaw is the choreographer.)

But the tastiest satiric juice is provided by Ms. Ramirez, who plays Arthur’s buxom but ethereal love interest, the Lady of the Lake. Whether warmly overseeing her (yes) Laker girls as they cheer the knights, mangling a soul ballad “American Idol”-style or working the stage like Liza at Caesars Palace, Ms. Ramirez knows how to send up vintage performance styles until they go into orbit. The evening’s high point involves Ms. Ramirez and Mr. Sieber floating on stage in a boat, illuminated by a newly descended chandelier.

Music of the night, indeed. But what turns this fanged tribute to “The Phantom of the Opera” into more than a one-joke routine is the song, a cunning deconstruction of the repetitive, voice-taxing Andrew Lloyd Webber method titled “The Song That Goes Like This.” “Spamalot” also cheerfully invokes the gleaming anthems of hope from shows like “Man of La Mancha” and the camp, pelvis-pumping chorus of “The Boy From Oz.”

Do these disparate elements hang together in any truly compelling way? Not really. That “Spamalot” is the best new musical to open on Broadway this season is inarguable, but that’s not saying much. The show is amusing, agreeable, forgettable – a better-than-usual embodiment of the musical for theatergoers who just want to be reminded now and then of a few of their favorite things.

‘Monty Python’s Spamalot’

Book and lyrics by Eric Idle; music by John Du Prez and Mr. Idle. Inspired by the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Directed by Mike Nichols; choreography by Casey Nicholaw; sets and costumes by Tim Hatley; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; sound by Acme Sound Partners; hair and wigs by David Brian Brown; special effects by Gregory Meeh; projection design by Elaine J. McCarthy; music director/vocal arrangements, Todd Ellison; orchestrations by Larry Hochman; music arrangements by Glen Kelly; music coordinator, Michael Keller; associate producers, Randi Grossman and Tisch/Avnet Financial. Presented by Boyett Ostar Productions, the Shubert Organization, Arielle Tepper, Stephanie McClelland/Lawrence Horowitz, Elan V. McAllister/Allan S. Gordon, Independent Presenters Network, Roy Furman, GRS Associates, Jam Theatricals, TGA Entertainment and Clear Channel Entertainment. At the Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

WITH: David Hyde Pierce (Sir Robin, Guard 1 and Brother Maynard), Tim Curry (King Arthur), Hank Azaria (Sir Lancelot, the French Taunter, Knight of Ni and Tim the Enchanter), Christopher Sieber (Sir Dennis Galahad, the Black Knight and Prince Herbert’s Father), Michael McGrath (Mayor, Patsy and Guard 2), Steve Rosen (Dennis’s Mother, Sir Bedevere and Concorde), Christian Borle (Historian, Not Dead Fred, French Guard, Minstrel and Prince Herbert) and Sara Ramirez (the Lady of the Lake).

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he night before his Army unit was to meet to fly to Iraq, Pvt. Brandon Hughey, 19, simply left. He drove all night from Texas to Indiana, and on from there, with help from a Vietnam veteran he had met on the Internet, to disappear in Canada.

In Georgia, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, 40, whose family ties to military service stretch back to the American Revolution, filed for conscientious-objector status and learned that he will face a court-martial in May for failing to report to his unit when it left for a second stint in Iraq.

One by one, a trickle of soldiers and marines – some just back from duty in Iraq, others facing a trip there soon – are seeking ways out.

Soldiers, their advocates and lawyers who specialize in military law say they have watched a few service members try ever more unlikely and desperate routes: taking drugs in the hope that they will be kept home after positive urine tests, for example; or seeking psychological or medical reasons to be declared nondeployable, including last-minute pregnancies. Specialist Marquise J. Roberts is accused of asking a relative in Philadelphia to shoot him in the leg so he would not have to return to war.

A bullet to the leg, Specialist Roberts, of Hinesville, Ga., told the police, seemed his best chance. “I was scared,” he said, according to a police report on the December shooting. “I didn’t want to go back to Iraq and leave my family. I felt that my chain of command didn’t care about the safety of the troops. I just know that I wasn’t going to make it back.”

Department of Defense officials say they have seen no increase in those counted as deserters since the war in Iraq began. Since October 2002, about 6,000 soldiers have abandoned their posts for at least 30 days and been counted as deserters. (A soldier who eventually returns to his unit is still counted as a deserter for the year.) The Marine Corps, which takes a snapshot of how many marines are missing at a given point in time, reported about 1,300 deserters in December, some of whom disappeared last year and others years earlier. The figures, Pentagon officials said, suggest that the deserter ranks have actually shrunk since the years just before Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, many things have changed since then, including the seriousness of deserting during a time of war.

Many of the tactics also defy simple categories like official desertion.

“There are a lot of people, many more than normal, who are trying to get out now,” said Sgt. First Class Tom Ogden, just before he left for a second trip to Iraq with his Army aviation unit from Fort Carson, Colo. He said he had seen fellow soldiers in recent months who seemed intent on failing drug tests because they believed they would be held back if only their tests “came back hot,” while others claimed bad backs and necks, with the same hope.

“I’ll tell you what,” Sergeant Ogden said, “they’re coming up with what they consider some creative ways to do it now.”

In the fall of 2003, Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of Miami, in the Florida National Guard, was among the first to announce he was refusing to return to Iraq and filing for conscientious-objector status. A year ago, Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, a South Dakotan, vanished from his post only to reappear in Canada, his family in tow.

Word of such cases spread among soldiers. Some reacted with disgust, accusing their colleagues of cowardice: how could they let down other soldiers in a time of war, when, unlike the draftees of the Vietnam War, they had all volunteered? Others, though, say the cases made them think more about their ambivalence.

“What I’ve seen is that soldiers are more afraid to make a stand for themselves than they are to go into combat,” said Sergeant Mejia, who was released in February after nearly nine months of confinement at Fort Sill, Okla., for desertion. “Until I took a stand, I was really going against my own conscience. I was so afraid to be called a coward.”

In the months since his case, more organized efforts have arisen.

A group of former soldiers who succeeded in achieving conscientious-objector status has created a Web site, www.peace-out.com, showing people how to apply. The site reported 3,000 hits the first day.

In Canada, residents banded together to help American soldiers who arrive there, supplying money, food and rooms. Michelle Robidoux, a leader of the War Resisters Support Campaign, said members were lobbying Canadian officials to grant the soldiers refugee status.

These soldiers come from all different towns, all over the country, but their reasons for wanting out echo one another. Some described grisly scenes from their first deployments to Iraq. One soldier said he saw a wounded, weeping Iraqi child whom no one would help; another said he watched as another soldier set fire to wild dogs just to pass time. Others said they had simply realized that they did not believe in war, or at least not in this war.

“It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” Private Hughey said. He said he enlisted at 17 from his home in San Angelo, Tex., because a recruiter promised that the military would buy him the education his father could not afford. He said he had tried to push aside little doubts he had, even back in basic training, but realized as his unit prepared to leave Fort Hood, Tex., for Iraq last March that he could not go.

“There are people who would want to hang me for this,” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. “The thing is, yes, I did sign up for this. And, when I did, I had this vision that I’d be a good guy and defend my country. But killing people for something I don’t believe in just to fulfill a contract just didn’t seem right to me either.”

At a base in Germany, Specialist Blake Lemoine, 23, who served in Iraq last year, sent his chain of command a letter this year, announcing all the reasons he should be allowed to quit: the Army conflicts with his religious beliefs and rituals; he and his wife are not monogamous, counter to military policy; he is bisexual. In February, Army officials brought court-martial charges, accusing him of refusing to perform his assigned duties.

Army officials have said the number of people searching for escape routes is relatively small and no different from that of the past.

“There will always be some people who do this sort of thing, but I haven’t seen any evidence at all of a trend,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman. “There are more people that we hear about volunteering to be deployed, who want to go and serve. Remember, these are all volunteers.”

Although available Pentagon records date back only a few years, they show a rise in applications for conscientious-objector status. In 2002, 31 soldiers and marines applied, compared with 92 in 2003. As of November, the latest month for which records were available, 75 soldiers and marines had applied in 2004. Of the 75 applications, 34 were approved, 41 turned down.

That path, though, can be slow and complex. Military rules require that a service member show that he has developed a true moral, ethical or religious opposition to all war.

Sergeant Benderman applied in December, days before his unit shipped to Iraq without him.

His conscientious-objector application is being processed, but so far, one military official has recommended against its approval, he said. He faces a general court-martial on charges of desertion and missing his unit’s deployment. He could face penalties as severe as seven years in confinement, forfeiture of all pay, reduction in rank and a dishonorable discharge.

“Everybody wants to put you in a little box, wants you to have some grand epiphany and bolts in the sky when it comes to this,” Sergeant Benderman said recently. “But it’s not that way. Here’s what happened: I spent six months over there, and I came back and thought about it. What I know is that it’s inhumane. It’s turning 18-year-old men and women into soulless people.”

Among some desperate soldiers, the process of applying for conscientious objector may seem as remote a possibility as leaving for Canada.

In his interview with the police, Specialist Roberts said that his wife, worried about his imminent return to Iraq, had suggested a shooting: “She said, ‘Why don’t you do what everyone else is doing?’ She meant for me to try to find some way out of it.”

A hearing is scheduled for next week. The rest of his unit, meanwhile, is in Iraq.

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. P. Morgan Chase, which sold billions of dollars in WorldCom bonds to the public about a year before the company filed for bankruptcy, agreed yesterday to pay $2 billion to settle investors’ claims that it did not conduct adequate investigation into the financial condition of WorldCom before the securities were sold.

The bank reached its settlement with Alan G. Hevesi, comptroller of New York and trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the lead plaintiff representing investors who lost money when WorldCom collapsed in 2002.

If the court approves the settlement, the amount recovered in the suit will exceed $6 billion – almost twice the previous record of $3.18 billion paid by Cendant and its accounting firm to settle a securities class action related to a fraud that occurred at the company in 1998.

The $6 billion recovered by Mr. Hevesi and his lawyers is also unusual because it amounts to more than half the damages sought by the fund on behalf of the investors it represented. Typically investors receive pennies on the dollar when they file suits against bankrupt companies. Under the terms of an agreement approved by the court, the hundreds of thousands of investors – both large and small, including mutual funds, insurance companies and individuals – will receive 94.5 percent of the money recovered in the suit. The rest will go to the lawyers.

Jury selection in the WorldCom civil trial was scheduled to begin today – just two days after WorldCom’s former chief executive, Bernard J. Ebbers, was found guilty of fraud – in federal court in lower Manhattan, putting pressure on Morgan Chase to settle the case. It is the last of the 17 WorldCom banks to reach a settlement, and it had argued that it appropriately relied on financial statements vetted by WorldCom’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, and that it could not have spotted the $11 billion accounting fraud that felled the company.

William B. Harrison Jr., chief executive of J. P. Morgan Chase, said in a statement: “Given recent developments, we made a decision to settle rather than risk the uncertainty of a trial.” The bank said it expected to take a charge to earnings of $900 million in the first quarter of this year in connection with the settlement. The bank neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

The board of J. P. Morgan Chase met on Tuesday to discuss a possible settlement with WorldCom investors, according to a person briefed on the meeting. During those discussions, the news came that Mr. Ebbers had been found guilty.

But a more important turning point in the case came last December when Denise Cote, the federal judge overseeing the WorldCom litigation, wrote an opinion noting that the prospectus in the 2001 bond offering was false and misleading and that the banks would therefore have to prove to a jury that they had conducted appropriate due diligence before selling WorldCom securities to the public.

“Underwriters perform a different function from auditors,” the judge wrote. “They have special access to information about an issuer at a critical time in the issuer’s corporate life, at a time it is seeking to raise capital. The public relies on the underwriter to obtain and verify relevant information and then make sure that essential facts are disclosed.”

Judge Cote’s opinion represented a new legal perspective and was a blow to the banks that were defendants in the case. Soon, they began to approach Mr. Hevesi’s lawyers about settlements.

“This settlement makes it unlikely that the due diligence responsibilities of underwriters as articulated by Judge Cote will be overruled in this case,” said Lewis D. Lowenfels, an authority on securities law at Tolins & Lowenfels in New York. “As a result her opinion will stand as an important precedent in the future.”

But J. P. Morgan Chase remained a holdout even as Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and other WorldCom banks struck deals with Mr. Hevesi in the last two weeks. As the other banks dropped out, Morgan’s potential liability to an unfavorable jury verdict grew substantially. The bank was a co-manager in both the 2000 and the 2001 offerings; it sold roughly a third of the securities offered to investors.

On Monday, Judge Cote issued another ruling that put J. P. Morgan Chase at even greater peril if it chose to go to trial. Addressing the bank’s objections to the previous settlements, the judge suggested that the $5.1 billion in damages that the bank viewed as its maximum exposure, based on the amount of WorldCom bonds it sold, could actually be larger. That drove the bank to the bargaining table, according to two people briefed on the matter.

J. P. Morgan Chase had a chance to settle with Mr. Hevesi last year for $1.4 billion. That opportunity came in May, when Citigroup, WorldCom’s other lead bank, struck its own deal with the fund and paid $2.575 billion. But Morgan chose not to deal.

The decision was costly. The $2 billion J. P. Morgan agreed to pay yesterday amounts to a 45 percent premium to the settlement formula used by Citigroup when it settled. The $2 billion is tax deductible.

The bondholders in the case had sought a total of $9 billion in damages. Of the $6 billion recovered from the banks, $5 billion will go to bond investors and $1 billion will go to holders of WorldCom stock. The $5 billion recovered for bondholders is 56 percent of the amount sought by the plaintiffs in the case.

As a result of yesterday’s settlement, defendants remaining in the case include Arthur Andersen, WorldCom’s auditor, and 12 former WorldCom directors. Jury selection has been postponed until March 24.

Sean Coffey, a lawyer at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, one of the two firms representing Mr. Hevesi, said: “We are retooling our approach to focus on the only player in the WorldCom drama that was specifically paid to make sure WorldCom’s books were kept accurately – Arthur Andersen.”

Arthur Andersen no longer functions as an accounting firm, after it was convicted of obstructing investigators in the Enron case, but it is still a legal entity and plaintiffs believe it has significant assets.