She's laughing. She's not joking. Says her husband later: "She's scared to death." She doesn't know what it's like to live with the mayor, or be the mayor's wife, or how their lives will change.

A mayor's wife, unlike that of a president, doesn't have to dwell in the spotlight. Midge Rendell, a federal judge with a high profile of her own, has been the most visible spouse in recent history, accompanying the mayor to myriad civic and social events. But many past mayors' wives, such as Carmella Rizzo, Pat Green and Velma Goode (who did lend her name as honorary co-chair to many charity events), retained their privacy.

The role is basically up to each spouse to define. Both Connie Katz and Naomi M. Post, the wife of Democratic candidate John F. Street, are more gracious, yet profess to be shier, than their husbands.

Connie Katz shares many interests with her husband: children, education, their Jewish faith, politics. Maybe not golf. Definitely not golf. But their approach toward life diverges.

"The basic difference between us is that he's the big-picture guy and I worry about the details," she says, sitting in her large West Mount Airy home with its landscaped grounds and sizable pool, where everything matches and not a thing appears out of place. "It's not that he doesn't seek information, but he's much more content and settled in his decisions."

Eight years into their marriage, a family had hardly been discussed. Out of the blue, he says, "Wouldn't it be nice to have five children?"

Gulp. "I thought we'd have 2.25 children like everyone else," she says, in her green-and-white kitchen studded with the kids' artwork, "although children are my favorite people."

In no time at all, they had four - two girls, two boys, in alternating succession. Lauren is a freshman at Tufts; Philip, Elizabeth and Ben attend three different private schools, a scheduling nightmare for most parents that she dismisses with a shrug. She's an inveterate volunteer at all of them.

Equipped with a master's degree in education from Temple, Katz was a research evaluator for the National Council on Alcoholism but quit for motherhood. Since the children were born, she's been running the household, the soccer calendar, the synagogue activities.

And managing the checkbook, after he failed.

Her husband, the municipal development consultant, had trouble balancing the family finances. "He'd round off numbers, wouldn't add the pennies. We'd be off $200 each month when $200 was a lot," she says, laughing. Again, it was the big picture versus the little details.

"When we go campaigning together" - something she enjoys and has been doing more in the waning weeks before the Nov. 2 election - "he'll work the room and I'm so bad because I'd rather sit and chat with each person."

Constance Hackel was born in Cleveland, one of three children. Her father, a pathologist originally from Bangor, Maine, moved the family to Durham, N.C., for a post at Duke when she was 10. She took ballet, then modern dance. Though her mother grew up Orthodox, Connie grew up with little Jewish education. She was one of two Jews in her high school class, which voted her homecoming queen. Her deep involvement with the faith came when she married Katz, who grew up in a more observant household, at the age of 22 in her parents' backyard.

She is a warm woman given to casual clothes, no makeup and a somewhat formal home with its peach walls, antiques and no family room. The house is spotless. She does the housework herself. Friends joke that the house has a self-cleaning kitchen.

"She always had this wisdom, even as a child. She always had this competence. I could go anywhere if Connie was going, and my mother was very strict," says Fran Spector Atkins, her friend since second grade, a choreographer and dance teacher in Carmel, Calif. ("Our story is like The Turning Point without the cattiness," Atkins says.)

"When nobody else was getting married, she got married," says longtime friend Ruth Pinkenson Feldman. "She was a grownup early. She knew what she was doing." Wedding photos reveal Katz looking decidedly Amish, with a beard but no moustache, and his bride with long hair and a comfortable dress. They look both of the period yet mature for their years.

"She's so connected to what she does and has appropriate expectations that she doesn't worry like the rest of us," says Feldman, an authority on early childhood. "She gets things done. It's always the solution that's the issue, not the problem. We all call her Sam's secret weapon."

Katz does not sit on the prominent boards where the wives of so many civic leaders perch, providing bold type and serious inkage in the society column. Instead, she works for her children's schools and, until the campaign, was so active at the Germantown Jewish Center's gift shop that it took four women to assume her schedule. She loathes getting dressed up. "We joke that she'll wear the same purple running suit every day," Feldman says.

"I'm a shy person," says Katz, but she will find few takers. A shy person does not invite a stranger into her home for an entire morning. Her husband concurs: "She's totally outgoing. She's the warmest person I know."

The Katzes spend Friday nights at home invariably eating the same Shabbat meal: roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, snap peas or asparagus, apple pie. He makes the morning coffee. She's been in the same Monday night bridge group for 25 years. For exercise, when she has the time, she takes a walk in the woods or stretches while she's on the phone with a friend. She makes her husband turn off the cell phone at Ben's soccer games. On Saturdays, when they used to have free Saturdays, the couple preferred to spend time with their children. Vacations have always been to her mother's mountain home in North Carolina. A date is a movie and dinner at McNally's, a Chestnut Hill tavern. But they do make a big fuss about big birthdays, though she has yet to figure out what they will do when they turn 50 (he on Dec. 28, she on Jan. 15). The first time she ever voted Republican was for her husband in the 1991 mayoral primary.

She enjoys the campaign - her mother has come in to help for the final stretch - but winning isn't something she can visualize. "If we win," she will say in conversation to her husband.

"When we win," he will counter.

The campaign, she argues, is preferable to the life they led when her husband was at Public Financial Management Inc. For much of 18 years, before he left in 1994, Sam Katz was traveling three or four days every week. He would often return home at 10 p.m., then be on the computer for three hours. Connie Katz is more interested in people, and the details of his old job were of little interest to her compared with politics, which she likes. During the campaign, even though he works 15-hour days, his days are shorter. "This is easier," she says. "And how many people can make a major change in their life at this age?"

It's been better for the family. And all their children have loved it.

"I have a very relaxed attitude. I don't spend a lot of time projecting into the future. I don't know how to fantasize about what will happen," she says. "If he were to lose, there would be part of me that would be relieved. And if he won, there would be all of me that would be totally excited," she says, warming her hands around a coffee cup. "No matter what the outcome, our life will pick up from a different point. You don't go back to the place where you are."

TOMORROW: Naomi Post Street.