The lights went off inside the windowless, cinder-block room, and the television screen began to glow, filled with the grainy images of a Department of Defense video.

To Caroline, the cinder-block room was reminiscent of other, long-ago rooms at Harvard or Radcliffe: clothes thrown about, stacks of books and magazines, stale cooking smells from the kitchen.

Gruden, Jaworski, and the rest of the crew filed into a cinder-block room in the bowels of the stadium, where they interviewed various Patriots.

Mr. Koite and some of his 17 siblings (his father had four wives) live in cinder-block rooms all around.

Under "wake," an old man huddles on a sofa in a cinder-block room, alone with a pigeon, a coffin and a jumble of a shrine to the dead.

"They're working with Right to Play in a school with no electricity, 80 kids in a tiny, little cinder-block room," Cheek said.

He mailed Lolli pictures of himself sitting in his cinder-block room on his Ninja Turtle sheets.

The cinder-block room went dead as a tomb.

The two young women keep their cinder-block room tidy, decorated with magazine layouts of models and Hollywood stars.