The Police Failed To Put This Lake In The Subway

Ricki Lake got her way.

The talk-show host pleaded guilty Wednesday to participating in the $3,500 trashing of designer Karl Lagerfeld’s Manhattan offices during an anti-fur protest last November. She was sentenced to four days of community service at an AIDS charity.

Which is a lot better than what prosecutors wanted. They’d wanted her to clean subways.

The 27-year-old Lake and her husband, 29-year-old Robert Sussman, will work for God’s Love We Deliver, which provides meals to AIDS sufferers. She said she and Sussman wanted to work for God’s Love because “they do so much good for so many people.”

“I stick by my convictions,” Lake said in an interview. “I just wouldn’t do anything to get myself arrested again.”

Loose Talk

Maureen Reagan, daughter of ex-president Ronald Reagan, on her father’s battle with Alzheimer’s: “All the family members have their own way of dealing with it. There is nothing wrong with denial. Denial is highly underrated.”

A midget of a talent, he was a Giant of a quarterback

Phil Simms turns 39 today.

Antonio pulls a big ‘no mas’ with the media

Antonio Banderas has a news flash: He’s no longer going to be providing us with any news flashes. “I have said enough,” says the Spanish actor, whose love affair with Melanie Griffith has been plastered all over the supermarket tabloid covers. “I have been trying to be respectful to journalists. But my door is closed. My personal life from my mouth is no longer going to be open to discussion.”

Some people would change it to Que-don’t-come-bec

Just because it makes us smile, we decided to pass along David Letterman’s Top 10 Names for Quebec should it ever succeed in seceding from Canada: 10, Le Grand Faux Pas; 9, Lorne Greenland; 8, Rand McNally’s Worst Nightmare; 7, Sparky; 6, International House of Pancakes; 5, The Monkey on Maine’s Back; 4, Frenchylvania; 3, Canada 90210; 2, Parlez-Vousland; 1, Funkytown.

Well, not ALL the way back… yet

According to Paula Barbieri, her romance with O.J. Simpson is over. As the actress-model told Diane Sawyer on “PrimeTime Live” on Wednesday, she decided to end the relationship when Simpson, recently acquitted of murder, suggested that they pose together for money. “It was a realization for me that he was going to that lifestyle… that he used to have,” Barbieri said.

And Halloween was still four months away

In his forthcoming book, “Howard Stern’s ‘Miss America,”’ the radio personality talks of his meeting with Michael Jackson last June. “First of all, he has thick white makeup on, like Bozo, the… clown,” Stern wrote. “It’s so thick you feel like you could take a hunk of it off and stucco a wall. And his nose is wrapped like a mummy’s except at the tip. At the end of his nose the tape is unraveling, so it just sort of hangs.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster