From Here To Fraternity

In one of those unpredictable synapse leaps that goad the memory to make a chance associations and end up inspiring a little pop culture epiphany, it struck me last week that two actors I'd been enjoying on TV these days -- Tim Matheson's bitter, nefarious vice president on ''The West Wing'' and Peter Riegert's smug, corrupt State Assemblyman Zellman on ''The Sopranos'' -- first dented our collective consciousness in the same movie: 1978's ''National Lampoon's Animal House.''

This touchstone of gross out humor, the almost innocent precursor to much cruder stuff like ''American Pie'' and ''Tomcats,'' featured slimmer, youthful versions of Matheson and Riegert as best friends Otter and Boon, smirking preppies at Faber College who abet John Belushi's Bluto Blutarski in the disruptive anarchy of fraternity life.

In their very first scene together, costar Karen Allen refers sarcastically to Otter and Boon as ''well known homosexuals'' -- a politically incorrect gibe that's really just meant to suggest what similar minded cohorts in mayhem they are. In fact, Boon is in love with Allen's Katie, and in a scene that echoes 1967's ''The Graduate,'' Otter succumbs to the silk stockinged temptations of an older woman (Verna Bloom), the wife of the college dean (the blown gasket John Vernon).

The thing is, take their ''Animal House'' characters and age them, and you can easily see that Otter and Boon might end up like the characters Matheson and Riegert now play on television. What is Otter but a thwarted, power hungry guy like the ''West Wing'''s Vice President John Hoynes, grown only more cynical? And Boon, with his slimy innuendoes and sly glances, is just a couple of decades away from being the sort of politician who'd make deals with a kingpin like Tony Soprano, and even ruthlessly arrange, as he did two weeks ago, to have an African American cop (Charles S. Dutton) demoted for having the temerity to give Tony a speeding ticket.

Over the years, Matheson and Riegert have had their share of sensitive guy roles, and this past Oscar race, Riegert even directed a short film called ''By Courier'' that snagged a nomination. But, as my stream of consciousness association suggests, the power of pop culture is strong: As sure as college students since 1978 have chanted ''Toga! Toga!'' in hommage to Belushi's ''Animal House'' mantra, and as surely as ''House'' was a prime source of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon mythos (boy, does he look happily goofy here), so can I never see fine actors like Matheson and Riegert without thinking of the naughty boy roles that helped sustain their careers into middle age.

Sorry, guys.

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