ATLANTA — It was Monday, the first night of the convention. Andrea Dukakis was standing in the family box in the convention hall, next to her grandmother, Euterpe. They looked out on the packed hall, and all they could see in every direction were signs and banners that read “Dukakis,” “Dukakis,” “Dukakis.”

“It struck us both for the first time what was happening,” says Andrea. “I turned to my grandmother, and she said, ‘You know, it just hit me. Your father — my son — could be the next president of the United States.”‘

For 16 months, the entire family of Michael and Kitty Dukakis — their children, Andrea, Kara and John and his wife, Lisa; Michael’s mother, Euterpe; Kitty’s father, Harry Ellis Dickson; and Kitty’s sister and brother-in-law, Jinny and Al Peters — had been working toward that moment. Yet, now that it is here, it has taken all of them by surprise.

“We’re still pinching ourselves,” says Lisa.

“The only way we could get through this was to take it one day at a time,” says Andrea, “and just not think ahead.”

The Dukakises are a lot like the family down the block. The mother works, and she’s been divorced. She’s had a problem with diet pills. The son dropped out of school and has taken his time finding himself. The daughters have more jeans in their closet than dresses. But for four days in Atlanta, they became the objects of the most intense scrutiny imaginable. Here, in exclusive interviews with The Chicago Tribune, members of the Dukakis family tell how they coped with a most unusual week.

KITTY DUKAKIS

Something happened to Kitty Dukakis in Atlanta. She got glamorous. The old wash-and-wear hairdo was replaced by curls that could have been coiffed by Nancy Reagan’s Beverly Hills hairdresser. And then there’s the color. Preconvention it was reddish. Convention week, it was red. And then there’s her wardrobe: She came South with two suitcases full of brightly colored silk dresses and jackets.

As she was getting dressed one night to go to the convention hall, her husband asked her if that was a new dress she was wearing.

“No,” she told him, with a straight face.

If it were up to Kitty Dukakis, she might have stayed in Atlanta. Why leave? In Atlanta she had four bathrooms just for her and Michael. At home in Brookline, she shares 1 1/2 baths with Michael and her two daughters.

And there were other things she enjoyed about life in the Presidential Suite. The Jacuzzi and the sauna, to mention just a couple.

“The Jacuzzi is fun, and I’ve been in the sauna a couple of times,” Kitty says. “This place is huge. We’ve been having family dinners here,” she says, referring to the 60-foot living room.

This was Kitty Dukakis’ second convention. The first one she attended was the 1968 convention in Chicago. “What a comparison,” she says, laughing. This time she finds it “a little overwhelming — make that a lot overwhelming” the way all the motorcades are for her. The pace is so intense that she has a hard time winding down at night. “I haven’t really been able to sleep. I’m up all the time,” she says. “When the kids get too excited, I tell them to take deep breaths.”

Her days have been filled. She has met with state delegations. She told the Minnesota group that the state was very special to her because “six years ago on July 14 I entered Hazelden Clinic (to kick a 26-year drug addiction) and I began a new life.” She got a standing ovation.

She has met with special-interest groups. Her first public appearance was a bagel breakfast for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. All the Jewish delegates had received invitations by phone the night before. As one delegate from New York said, “(The Dukakis campaign) has a problem. They want all the Jews to know she’s Jewish, but they don’t want anyone else to know.” One of her aides says, “She may be a Jew in the White House, but we don’t want her to be the Jew in the White House.”

She has attended luncheons, including one in her honor where she was called everything from “the embodiment of the best of the American spirit” to “sexy and mysterious.” She’s done interviews and had coffee with Diane Sawyer. The Dukakis campaign is considering having her appear on 60 Minutes, so this was a get-to-know-each-other chat with Sawyer. Kitty asked Sawyer about her recent marriage to Mike Nichols, and Sawyer asked her about her work with Cambodian refugees.

As much as Kitty has been shuffled around, she has asserted herself from time to time. She insisted that she and Michael ride over to the convention hall alone Thursday night. When asked what last-minute advice she had for him, she said, “I just want to tell him I love him.”

HARRY DICKSON

“He used to be known as my son-in-law; now I’m known as his father-in- law,” says Harry Ellis Dickson, 79, the irrepressible father of Kitty Dukakis.

As a former violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and associate conductor of the Boston Pops, he’s had plenty of limelight in his life. But as he says, his role in Atlanta is strictly as “the father of the bride.” And Kitty wanted to make sure he looked the part. “She wanted to know what clothes I was bringing. She’s been threatening to clean out my closet. She’s always saying, ‘Where did you get that shirt?”‘

His job at the convention is addressing delegations, leading the Atlanta Symphony in a musical tribute to his daughter and meeting with senior-citizen groups.

“I’ve met with so many senior citizens during the campaign that Michael says I carried Florida for him.”

Dickson was the parent that both Kitty and her younger sister, Jinny, turned to with their problems. Their mother, Jane Goldberg Dickson, who died in 1977, was the stricter, more demanding parent.

“She was the shyest, most private person you could imagine,” says Dickson. “I don’t think she’d even be here. She used to call Michael at the State House and urge him to resign. She thought he was too fine to be in politics.”

He’s still extremely close to both his daughters. “If we don’t talk for a day, one calls the other and says, ‘What’s the matter?”‘

Dickson likes to pretend he’s not overwhelmed by what’s going on. “My granddaughter, Betsy (Betsy Shain, 23, is Jinny’s daughter), said to me, ‘Poppa, can you sleep?’ I said, ‘Of course, I can sleep.’ But I’m really as excited as the rest of them. I just haven’t realized the enormity of it yet.”

As much as each member of the family keeps his own schedule during convention week, they all check in to see how they’re holding up.

“I saw Kitty at breakfast and I said, ‘I’ll call you later.’ She said, ‘Daddy, you’ll never be able to get in touch with me.’ I said, ‘Kitty, I’m your father, I’ll find you. Don’t forget you’re still my little girl.”‘

EUTERPE DUKAKIS

Euterpe Boukis Dukakis has learned the first rule of politics: Sleep when you can. As a reporter is shown into her suite for an interview, she’s sitting up in her chair sound asleep. But she wakes in a flash, alert and lively. Just two months away from 85, she’s in remarkable condition. “We have to slow her down,” says a campaign aide. “She’d like to go all day.” She’s slim and stylish in a hot-pink T-shirt dress.

“Kitty suggested I get some new things. She knows I hate to shop,” she says.

Euterpe, who was born in Greece, came to this country at 9 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bates College, is the first one to admit she had no idea her son might grow up to be president.

“I did know he would be a leader, though,” she says. “He always had those qualities, ever since he was a very little boy. His playmates used to wait for him to make decisions.”

She says he was “very easy to bring up. He was never rebellious. He was always too busy with school, athletics, the band, the orchestra, heading the student council. He was a good son. He still is. He always keeps in touch with me. I hear from him every other day, no matter where he is. Before the campaign, we used to get together every Sunday for dinner. Michael would cook. He’d try out some new recipe — fish or chicken.”

Conventions are always awash with rumors, but there is one specific rumor that Euterpe would like to put to rest once and for all: That is that she and her husband refused to give Michael an allowance.

“That’s just not true,” she says. “When Stelian (Michael’s older brother, who died in 1972 in a traffic accident) started high school, my husband said to him, ‘We should talk about an allowance.’ But Stelian said, ‘What do I need money for? You take me to school. I walk home. Mother buys me my clothes. And I have a paper route. I don’t need any money.’ And Michael always went along with whatever Stelian did.”

Euterpe has always been interested in politics. “When I stood in that convention hall, I was reminded of all the conventions I’d listened to on the radio and watched on television. But this was the real thing. It’s hard to believe it, but yet there it is. Just as real as it can be.”

She is a no-nonsense woman. When a reporter asks her if she’ll be taking home a “Dukakis for President” poster as a souvenir, she asks, “What do you think I am? A college sophomore?”

JOHN AND LISA DUKAKIS

As John Dukakis speeds through Atlanta between meetings with the Missouri delegation and the Massachusetts delegation, his car passes a car carrying his sister, Andrea. She gives him a thumbs up and waves wildly.

John 30, acknowledged as the family’s most likely next politician, has the most active role at the convention of the three children. He’s working the floor every night, meeting with delegates — “I’m very pleased to be here. This week I’m very pleased to be anywhere in Atlanta” — glad-handing people who carry Instamatics and “mercifully don’t ask a lot of probing questions,” and playing the role of First Son.

“When we’re in the family box at the hall, we’re all aware that we’d better be on our best behavior. We can’t get away with anything.”

In addition, he’s also his father’s confidant. He’s the one who advises him on everything from keeping his hair out of his eyes to what to include in his acceptance speech. “My dad has an odd role here,” says John. “As the candidate, he traditionally doesn’t do a lot. He’s kind of like the bride. He stays out of the way until the wedding.”

He and Lisa, 32, who is expecting a child in January, worked the South together during the primary campaign. At the convention, they try to meet for an hour every afternoon, although sometimes it turns out to be more like 10 minutes. “At least we get to take off our shoes,” says Lisa, who had some morning sickness the other day and has learned to eat breakfast before she hits the road.

Food for the Dukakises tends to be half a sandwich here, half a sandwich there. “We all try to meet for lunch back at the hotel,” Lisa says. “We call in our orders before we get there so the food will be waiting — mostly turkey sandwiches, cheeseburgers and fries. Everybody is ravenous.”

“Room service takes so long, I think the Secret Service must be tasting our food before we get it,” John says.

John and Lisa switched rooms at the last minute and missed out on the fruit baskets and candy that the hotel sent the other members of the family. They haven’t even gotten the sneakers that Converse promised them. John says he was “out of the loop” when the family was discussing clothes, and picked out a seersucker suit — “a good Southern suit” — all by himself.

If John does wind up in politics, he will have taken a very long, roundabout road to get there. He dropped out of Brown University after one year to be an actor. A four-week job on Jaws II turned into a seven-year career. He had roles on Taxi, Hart to Hart, Little House on the Prairie, and played one of Mallory’s boyfriends on Family Ties.

“I made a living,” says John. “I’m very proud that I could do something and not have my father’s name be a factor in my success or failure. That was important to me. It gave me a chance to establish my identity away from my father and politics.”

Yet now that John has proved he can do something on his own, he’s ready to try politics. He’s planning on getting his undergraduate degree and making a life for himself with his wife and baby.

“One of the things I loved about Lisa was that she was totally unimpressed with my relatives — not with them, but with who they are. I’m going to be like any other young father. The baby isn’t going to be named Michael or John. I want the baby to have his own name. Lisa and I want to get on with our lives, which are not going to be determined by whether my father wins or loses.”

JINNY AND DR. AL PETERS

Jinny Peters should be used to all this. She got her first taste of what it might be like to be the sister of a very important person when Michael Dukakis was elected governor of Massachusetts.

“Michael was ready to make his acceptance speech, and as Kitty was going up to the podium, she shoved her purse and her makeup and her hairbrush and mirror at me. I said to her, ‘Who do you think you are? The first lady?’ Little did I know.”

Kitty’s not carrying her own makeup and hairbrush these days. She’s got a full-time hairdresser and a full-time makeup artist with her in Atlanta. She called Jinny one morning and said, “If you want your hair and makeup done, come on over to my suite.”

“I went over,” says Jinny, “and there was Michael in his boxers.”

According to Jinny and Al Peters, Michael Dukakis is Michael Dukakis, even in the midst of his own convention. “He’s just a steady rock of a guy,” says Al. “He doesn’t show his emotions. He doesn’t like change.”

“… although I think he did get some new suits,” continues Jinny, “but he’d really be happier wearing his old ones. He likes familiar things. He can’t understand why people build additions onto their houses. My dad has a house in the Berkshires, and Kitty and I wanted him to put in a pool. Mike thought that was crazy.”

When asked what she would remember about the convention, Jinny says, “What am I going to remember? You mean, what am I going to forget?”

ANDREA AND KARA DUKAKIS

Andrea, 22, and Kara, 19, have come a long way. They used to hate politics. Their grandfather says they used to run away from photographers, “as if they were thieves. I remember when Michael lost his re-election as governor. I heard Kara on the phone. She called one of her friends, and she was crying and she said, ‘Daddy lost.’ I said, ‘Why are you so unhappy? You hated all the publicity.’ She said, ‘Poppa, I was just getting used to it.”‘

By 1988, they’re old pros. They planned their wardrobes with their mother, borrowing heavily from her closet, and decided on some rules: no slacks, no bare legs and no loud prints. They coordinated their Thursday-night wardrobes so no one would clash.

When it comes to interviews, they’ll answer all questions except one: Do you have a boyfriend? They both give the same answer to that one. “I plead the Fifth.”

Kara, who just finished her first year at Brown University, had an unusual assignment last year. In her education course she was asked to draft a letter to one of the presidential candidates — guess which one she chose — and explain her views on education to him. “My ideas turned out to be a lot like my father’s,” she says.

She is the more outgoing of the two. The convention delights her, and she gets a kick out of walking around wearing a button with a picture of her mother on it.

Andrea, 22, who graduated from Princeton in 1987, spent this summer as an editorial assistant at Woman’s Day magazine. But before that, she was active in her father’s campaign, spending six months in Iowa. She’s not afraid to give her father advice.

Neither Kara nor Andrea had been to a convention before this one, so neither one knew what to expect. But both agree, if you’re going to go to a convention, this is the way to do it.