Take a hike: Hmmm. Alan Dine is about to start a 500-mile bicycle ride from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska:

        “It's hilly, and the roads aren't so great. It gets down to 30 or so at night, but we'll camp in pup tents. Sounds like fun.”

        Huh?

        Dine is joining 2,000 other bikers for Alaska AIDS VaccineRide to raise money for AIDS vaccine research. Each biker raises $3,400 for the privilege.

        They'll do 90 miles a day for six days on a ride that “is not about the past . . . It is to ensure a future for our children, nieces and nephews.”

        Dine, 50, married, father of one and an infectious diseases researcher, has been in training most of the summer and wondering if the ride plus sleeping in the wilderness “will put my aging bike and body to the test.”

        He thinks not.

        Hats off: Whew, Gus Miller's list of high-profile clients just keeps growing and growing. Miller, recall, is the venerable hat maker who owns Batsakes Hat Shop.newly located at Sixth and Vine Sts.

        Already the cap maestro's client list includes former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, comedian Bill Cosby and opera star Luciano Pavarotti.

        Add another one: W. That would be President George W. Bush: “It's a cowboy hat, but it was the wrong size. The White House told me 7î, so that's what I made and sent off two weeks ago.

        “But he's a 7 1/2, just like his father. I'm going to re-do it when I get home.”

        When he gets home? Like he's going to keep the president waiting? “I'm going to Europe, to a little village in Greece to see my brother. I'll do the hat when I get back.”

        Miller also plans to invite the president in for a shoe shine in those well-worn chairs that have held stars and presidents: “I'll have him sit in the one his father didn't sit in. Then when I retire, maybe in 50 years (he's 68), I'll send the chairs to Washington.”

        High kicks: So what, you were wondering, is Northern Kentuckian Betty Dammert doing kicking her heels up on New York's Sixth Avenue?

        Dancing at a Rockette's reunion, that's what. Dammert was a 1955 Rockette (“We made $70 a week and danced four shows a day”) and later a dancer at the old Beverly Hills Supper Club, where she met husband Wayne, a banquet captain and later author of Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire (Turner Publishing; $21.95).

        Wellsir, come Wednesday, she'll join 100 other alums, plus the current crop of Rockettes, in New York, where the city is closing Sixth Avenue so the troupe can do its high-kick number up and down the street.

        Occasion is the opening of ticket sales for the 2001 Christmas show (one of the troupes is here Dec. 14-30 at the Aronoff) at Radio City Music Hall, but the real beauty of it, Dammert says, “is the reunion. We've done a few, and one's more fun than the next. We could do this all year. They put us all up at the Hilton, so you can imagine what kind of partying goes on.”

        Uh, yeah.

        Contact Jim Knippenberg by phone: 768-8513; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: knipenquirer@yahoo.com.

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