In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Larry Hogan announced the postponement of the state’s primaries, including all the races for city office, from April 28 to June 2 in an effort to ensure voter safety and democratic integrity.

The special election for the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings’ seat will still be held April 28, but in a first for the state of Maryland, it will be conducted solely through mail-in ballots.

“It would endanger public health to allow thousands of people to assemble,” Hogan said at a Tuesday press conference explaining the decision to postpone the primary date.

Before the events that led to this change, Kweisi Mfume landed a decisive victory in the special Democratic primary election for Cummings’ seat back in February. But he realized he still had to educate voters as to what came next.

“The more we talked to people, the more people thought that it was all over,” Mfume says. “I had to explain that there’s a two-part process.”

The second part of that process comes in the form of a special general election. It’s here that things get a bit complicated. In addition to running as the Democratic nominee against Republican nominee Kimberly Klacik for the right to serve out the remainder of Cummings’ term, Mfume also filed to run in what was a same-day Democratic primary for the full two-year 7th Congressional District term.

Mfume—who, if victorious in April’s mail-in special election would be running as an incumbent in the June 2 primary—says that separating the two elections into two different dates helps eliminate some of the impending uncertainty that was bound to arise as April neared.

“There were still a lot of unanswered questions that the Board of Elections would have to answer,” he says. “It was confusion getting ready to manifest itself.”

Along with the postponement comes the challenge of carrying out a traditional campaign during a time when public organizing is prohibited.

“Politically and historically, it’s like Halley’s Comet,” Mfume says. “In previous instances of national emergencies, you had an idea of a physical enemy or threat. In this case, we can’t see the virus.”

In a political process where face-to-face connection is a crucial part of how campaigns operate, candidates and their teams have been forced to get creative in their messaging and outreach strategies.

“We are always strategizing for what we don’t know we have to deal with,” Mfume says. “You have to assume there will be certain times when campaign strategy will have to change. We’ve always moved along that way, so this adjustment is not something that has caused us to scratch our heads.”

Senator Jill P. Carter of Maryland’s 41st legislative district is one of Mfume’s challengers in the June 2 primary. Carter has just wrapped up a whirlwind state legislative session, and now faces the possibility of running against an incumbent. She says she supports the changing of the primary date, but acknowledges that it presents a unique set of challenges for her candidacy.

“If it were normal circumstances, I would say that it’s good for me because the entire time I was in the legislative session, I was unable to campaign at all,” Carter says. “[Prior to coronavirus], I thought the smartest thing to do would be to come back to Baltimore and host large gatherings and get people to volunteer and go and reach out to their groups.”

Meanwhile, Thiru Vignarajah, a former Maryland Deputy Attorney General who launched his campaign for mayor last April, says he supports the governor’s postponement decision, and believes that the new normal that coronavirus has forced us all into isn’t anything his team can’t handle. He and his staff have shifted to working from home, and are devising ways they can continue to build their network.

Both Vignarajah and Mfume say they are working on amping up their digital presences and exploring placing a bigger emphasis on more traditional means of campaigning, such as phone banks and email reach outs.

“This is a time when public health has to come before politics,” Vignarajah says. “Each campaign is going to have to adapt. My team has been running a marathon, and at mile 20, they’ve been told it’s a 32-mile race. Uncertainty is something every campaign is supposed to prepare for.”

Though all candidates are now faced with trying to win respective elections in an unprecedented time, one positive outcome of the current situation is that it gives local voters more time to decide who they want to lead the city forward.

“In a moment of crisis, we have a chance to come together as a community like never before,” Vignarajah says. “We have a chance to rebuild Baltimore in ways that previously were unimaginable. We should view this as not just a challenge, but an opportunity.”

Past Lives

South Broadway
August 5, 2016

“Look around, what do you see?” asks the top-hatted, cane-sporting guide of the 30 or so Charm City visitors gathered Friday evening at the foot of Broadway for The Original Fells Point Ghostwalk. “Friendly part of town, right? Pretzel place. Ice cream parlor. Young professionals . . . that’s a new phenomenon, however,” he adds, somewhat ominously. “This used to be a dangerous part of town. Pirates here would stick you in the gut for the coins in your pocket.”

Among the ghosts said to reside nearby is a 10-year-old girl who has appeared in the second-floor stockroom above Bertha’s restaurant. She has been spotted over the years by employees, says the guide, glancing from the window to where the crowd now stands—reputedly a mass burial site from an 18th-century yellow-fever outbreak that may have claimed her mother.

On Thames Street, the discussion turns to the former practice of shanghaiing young men into service aboard a ship—known as “crimping” in Baltimore. One such young man, who apparently didn’t survive his initial kidnapping, is said to haunt Leadbetters Tavern. The Ghostwalk includes a visit to the family cemetery of Fells Point founder William Fell, whose long dead ne’er-do-well son is reportedly sighted from time to time walking down narrow Shakespeare Street.

Naturally, the best tales blend fact and hard-to-fact-check anecdotes. Melissa Rowell, a former medical illustrator who launched the Ghostwalk tours, admits to being skeptical even as she did her initial research. “Then something strange happened,” she says. She’d bought a T-shirt from an older Cat’s Eye Pub bartender and not long afterward found herself back there and asked about him. “I described him to the woman working—that he kinda looked like Abraham Lincoln,” Rowell continues. “And so she points to a photograph behind the bar. I said, ‘Yes, that’s the guy I bought the T-shirt from.’

“She says, ‘Well, he worked here. Doesn’t anymore. He’s been dead eight years.’

“True story.”

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Skylight

Park Avenue
July 17, 2016

In Europe, stained-glass windows have been associated with Christianity and appreciated for their beauty since the Middle Ages. But there’s also historic—if not quite as old—stained-glass inside Bolton Hill’s Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. This Sunday morning, as part of Artscape’s slew of events, congregation member James Shuman is leading a post-service Breakfast With Tiffany tour of the Gothic-style, 1869-built church’s exquisite windows, which a glass art expert once described as “the finest collection of Tiffany windows in the country and quite possibly the world.”

Tiffany glass, Shuman notes, refers to the work of the prolific decorative artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of the famous luxury jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. The two largest windows at Brown Memorial measure 16 feet wide and stand three stories tall.

“These were made when there was no TV, no radio, and people came to church twice on Sunday and once during the week,” Shuman says. “They each preach a message.” The two biggest windows, which face each other, depict the annunciation to the shepherds and the heavenly city of Jerusalem, for example. From outside, however, the images in the windows appear, at best, in shadowy outlines.

“There was a boy, 8 to 10 years old, who made his mother bring him in 10 years ago,” Shuman recalls. “It gets a little rough a couple blocks west and there had been some shootings in the neighborhood around that time. He said he wanted to see the picture of the man holding the gun.

“What the image was,” Shuman explains, “was a seeker holding his arm outstretched with a cross.”

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Light Waves

South Linwood Avenue
August 5, 2016

On this warm Friday evening, the city pool at Patterson Park is playing the role of multipurpose gym, hosting the Robert L. Drake Jr. Middle School 17th Annual Science Fair, as a banner in the backdrop indicates. The move to the unusual venue, explains tonight’s emcee—an earnest educator named Miss Waters—is “due to an unfortunate ant colony incident.” But not really.

The bleachers here are actually packed for the award-winning performance art/synchronized swimming troupe Fluid Movement’s 15th project—Science Fair! The Water Ballet—which pays homage to the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and Nikola Tesla, as well as science fiction. The Inner Harbor’s breakthrough trash-eating device, Mr. Trash Wheel, also gets a big shout out with his own song and swim number. (The fictional middle school is an homage, too—named after a former city rec and parks lifeguard and scuba instructor who passed away in January.)

The highlight of the evening is probably the second of the six choreographed segments—“Reanimation: Brides and Monsters”—which starts with a dozen and a half ghoulish performers in waterproof zombie makeup and red and black suits dancing on the pool deck to “Monster Mash.” Soon enough, they’re falling into the water, kicking a routine to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

“The whole thing began in 1999, when I was working for the Patterson Park Community Development Corporation and looking for ways to promote the park, the usual concerts and things,” co-founder Valarie Perez-Schere says later. “Someone told me there was a woman [Trixie Burneston] who wanted to do water ballet at the pool. I said, ‘Shut the front door! Give me her number!’”

Star Struck

St. Paul Street
July 9, 2016

“Now don’t accuse me of putting in a slide,” Herman Heyn cracks, adjusting his telescope and tripod in front of the Chipotle in Charles Village as a middle-school girl peers in.

“Oh wow!” she squeals, which, after the half-million “looks” Heyn figures he’s offered over the past three decades, still makes the 85-year-old, street-corner astronomy busker smile. “The rings are so bright!”

The “rings”—billions of ice, dust, and rock particles circling Saturn—are so geometrically exquisite at 800 million miles away that it’s hard to believe one’s eyes. “I’ve been doing this 29 years. Same number it takes Saturn [hurtling at 21,000 miles per hour] to go once around the sun,” Heyn laughs. “And I’ve been accused of all kinds of tricks.”

A few minutes later, a retired Indian-born biologist who lives nearby takes a peek. “They’re perfect,” he gasps.

Tonight, Mars is “near” Saturn. Jupiter, meanwhile, sits to the right of the moon, which is half-lit in its current phase, with craters resembling a pockmarked sidewalk. Later, two 20-something researchers from the Johns Hopkins-based Space Telescope Science Institute—home to the Hubble—walk by. “Scientists we work with stare at data being downloaded on their computer all day long,” Joseph Long says. “They couldn’t even tell you when the planet they’re studying is visible.”

“Herman introduces the beauty and scale, which is visceral, to people. You feel it in your gut,” adds Brendan Hagan, who with Long has followed in Heyn’s footsteps, bringing “pop-up” telescope events to the Inner Harbor and downtown.

“Years ago, a woman stopped by and told me she’d just submitted her master’s thesis on Venus. And then admitted she’d never seen Venus directly,” Heyn recalls. “I said, ‘Would you like to?’”

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Death in Diorama

Cathedral Street
July 13, 2016

Frances Glessner Lee, considered the mother of forensic science, often wore all black and was nicknamed “the Tarantula” by her family.

“I would’ve loved to have met her,” Bruce Goldfarb, spokesman for Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, deadpans to the sold out crowd at a presentation about Lee’s famous miniature dioramas known as “the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.”

Goldfarb, in fact, is enthralled with Lee’s story and legacy, which he’s sharing tonight at The Maryland State Medical Society. Bright and born to a wealthy family, Lee was nonetheless discouraged from attending college. Instead, she became the first woman invited to join the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1943. Through a brother’s friend, she’d become intensely interested in early forensic science and eventually began the painstaking process of building intricate, true-to-life, dollhouse-size crime scenes where “unexplained” deaths—accidents, suicides, and murders—had taken place.

The purpose of the models—authentic down to hand-rolled cigarette butts that are half the size of a fingernail and filled with tobacco—is to teach detectives how to observe, record, and evaluate crime scenes. The whodunit answers are kept secret to protect the learning process.

The 18 studies, along with witness statements, were given to the Baltimore office in 1966 after Lee’s death. They continue to serve as a component of an acclaimed law enforcement seminar, but from time to time, visitors come by for a look as well.

“The other day two women stopped me and wanted to know the answer to one scene,” Goldfarb says. “I explained I wasn’t allowed to say and that it wasn’t really the point.

“As soon as I finished,” Goldfarb continues, “one woman turns to the other and says, ‘I think the husband did it.’”

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Laugh Out Loud

North Charles Street
July 16, 2016

“Whenever I go do shows in D.C. or in the county and I tell people I live in Baltimore City, everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, you must be so brave!’

“And, I’m like, ‘Yo, look at me, I’m wearing skinny pants and black, thick-framed glasses,” 27-year-old Umar Khan tells the LOL@Artscape crowd as it breaks into laughter at the second of the annual festival’s two nights of live comedy. “I live in a neighborhood with cupcake shops. I’m safe.”

A city schools’ psychologist by day, and proud resident of gentrifying Hampden—which he notes by taking a gentle swipe at his neighborhood’s charcuterie trend—the self-deprecating Khan is serving as host of Artscape’s comedy shows for the first time this year. “It was a really diverse crowd—young, old, black, white—which actually makes for a lot better show for a comedian,” Khan says afterward. “Telling jokes about white hipsters to white hipsters isn’t funny. There’s no tension.”

Several performances fall flat—the over-sharing 20-something female comic who’s more uncomfortably awkward than funny, and an orange-jump-suited ukulele singer-songwriter who sounds like country star Trace Adkins, for example. But most of the comics effectively play off their personas and the audience, cracking jokes about loved ones, race, drugs, and Baltimore—sometimes all at once.

Mike Smith, an animated, mid-30s newcomer to comedy, talks about urban life and family—in particular, a close relative who’s recently turned her life around.

“She used to be a crackhead and now she’s a vegan,” the basketball-jersey clad Smith says, rolling his eyes. “Now, she’s a real pain in the ass.”

Blast From the Past

May 8, 2016
33rd Street

Fifty years ago today, Frank Robinson launched a home run off Luis Tiant that not only cleared the left field wall but 50 rows of seats, landing in Memorial Stadium’s parking lot. The only HR ever knocked completely out of the park in the Orioles’ history on 33rd Street, the titanic shot was considered such a momentous feat that Robinson received a minute-long standing ovation, and a week later, a flag reading “HERE” was placed atop the bleachers to mark the spot where the ball sailed from the park.

Memorial Stadium, of course, was torn down after the team moved to Camden Yards. However, a popular rec field has since replaced it, with home plate and left field closely aligned to the old diamond’s configurations. So, on this windy afternoon, local resident Mark Melonas is hosting a second flag raising to commemorate the golden anniversary of Robinson’s epic blast. The replica “HERE” flag that Melonas commissioned is even made by the same company that produced the original.

“I wasn’t born yet in 1966, which was also Frank’s first year with the Orioles. But my dad, who was 17 then, told me how much he meant to Baltimore,” says Melonas, 41, a furniture maker. Robinson, later Major League Baseball’s first black manager, led the O’s to their first World Series title that same year, delivering a 410-foot homer in the series-clinching 1-0 win at Memorial Stadium.

“I was sitting in left field that day,” recalls Mark’s dad, Jim Melonas, now 67. “It flew two rows over my head.”

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Love of Country

May 15, 2016
Beason Street

The wooden trunk on the floor of this three-story, red-brick boarding house—once a way station for turn-of-the-century newcomers to America known as the Immigration House—reveals much of the building’s history.

Gold lettering on the trunk—one of the artifacts on exhibit at the new Baltimore Immigration Museum, which is hosting an open house this afternoon—reads “Bremen-Baltimore Sept. 25 Dampfer [steamship] Rhein.” It’s a telling inscription pointing to the historic Atlantic route that carried 1.2 million German and Eastern European immigrants to Locust Point between the Civil War and World War I.

Above the trunk, a black and white photograph shows a young man with a bushy mustache, a cap, and an overcoat sitting amid baggage shortly after arrival.

The culmination of years of work by Nicholas Fessenden, a former Friends School history teacher, and his wife, Brigitte, a German-born preservation expert, the budding museum documents Baltimore’s immigration saga, which has been largely overshadowed by New York’s Ellis Island. On this day, a steady stream of Locust Point residents stop by, as well as others interested in learning more about their city and possibly their family’s back-story.

“I’m German on my mother’s side,” says Frank Tewey, whose ancestors lived nearby. “My great-grandmother’s family told her, ‘Never marry a sailor, they all leave.’” But she did—another German immigrant named Gerhardt—and, indeed, he left, heading home to Deutschland to claim a small inheritance. He returned, however.

“My great-grandfather joined the German navy in order to come back and then jumped ship to be with my great-grandmother,” Tewey continues. “Good thing he did. One of their future children, my grandmother, had 63 grandkids when she died.”

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Love Shack

June 3, 2016
Hollins Street

Behind the DJ booth, a pair of turntables, and stacks of metal record suitcases, Fred Schneider digs through his 45-rpm collection, handing old-school vinyl selections to host Rob Macy. It’s cramped and hot, and the packed house inside the Lithuanian Hall is twisting and shouting to some of the best—and rarest—greasy rock and roll, Motown, R&B, funk, and soul ever made.

Macy concentrates momentarily as he lowers the needle onto “You’ve Got My Soul on Fire,” and then nods and grins as he lifts off his headphones. “This is sick,” he says, referring to Edwin Starr’s 1973 single.

By midnight, the air is so heavy with perspiration that women are lifting the matted hair from their necks and pinning it atop their head even as they keep moving. It’s mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, but more than a few Gen Xers have come to see Schneider, the famous party-chasing frontman for the new wave B-52s, who broke out in the late ’70s and early ’80s with hits like “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho.”

The vintage recordings behind the first-Friday-of-every-month Save Your Soul dance party—launched two decades ago—are both an homage to the music Schneider loved as a teenager and the organizing principle behind his retro, bouffant-sporting band.

“Word apparently got to Fred that Baltimore had one of the top soul dance parties on the East Coast,” Macy says. “So we invited him and he was game. He’d bought some records and he wanted a place to play ’em.”

As the evening turned to the wee hours of the morning, the 65-year-old singer, who doesn’t appear to have slowed much, hit the dance floor more and more.

“I was showing them all how to boogaloo and shing-a-ling,” says Schneider, who still manages to convey a certain intoxicating blend of Southern-influenced civility and randy mischievousness when he smiles.

“It helped that I was a little bit tipsy.”

No Sweat

Russell Street
April 30, 2016

On M&T Bank Stadium’s club level, Rohan Peyser just won his age group in a Madden 16 Xbox tournament for the right to play against an actual Baltimore Raven. “Take it easy on him, shorty,” a stadium staffer calls out to the tow-headed, 58-pound fourth-grader as 335-pound nose tackle Brandon Williams picks up a joystick and lowers himself into the chair next to Peyser. But if the 10-year-old is intimidated, he doesn’t show it. Late in the first quarter, however, Williams—who has obviously played some Xbox himself—directs a Justin Forsett avatar into the end zone, sending the massive lineman into a celebratory dance.

In the second half, Williams hands his controller over to the team’s larger-than-life winged mascot, Poe, and Peyser stages a game-winning comeback. “He was good,” Peyser says of Williams. “Poe’s a rookie.”

The Xbox tourney is just part of today’s Flock Festival, a combination open house and draft day fan party. Joe Flacco and Steve Smith Sr. are on hand for autographs, while former players, including Duane Starks, announce the team’s fourth-round selections on the field. Along with a variety of kids’ activities, two Maryland Zoo ravens are here, as well as WBAL and 98 Rock, which are broadcasting live.

The highlight is probably the locker-room tour, where the purple home jerseys of Williams, Terrell Suggs, Elvis Dumervil, etc., hang in silence. There’s a fever and reverence in the air—not unlike that at a religious shrine, as fans pose for photos.

“I don’t think they’d be as excited on a Sunday,” says a security guard, calmly reminding visitors they are not allowed to sit on the players’ wooden stools. “The smell.”

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Old New Age

North Charles Street
May 1, 2016

A passerby would likely miss the plain white door hidden a half-dozen steps above the renowned C. Grimaldi Gallery. The gold-stenciled lettering on the glass simply reads “The Theosophical Society” along with, curiously, a seven-digit phone number. You see, the small, nondoctrinaire, wisdom-seeking society, which promotes the study of philosophy, comparative religion, and metaphysics, has been here so long it predates area codes.

This afternoon, in fact, the organization—at its current location since 1929—celebrates the 100th anniversary of its chartering. Highlights today include a talk by Tim Boyd, the current president of the international Theosophical Society, and a presentation by archivist Janet Kerschner, who displays a 1939 photo of this very meeting room, sending members seated on folding chairs into convulsive laughter.

“Even the ferns are in the same place!”

The original Theosophical Society was formed in 1875 in New York City by Helena Blavatsky, a blue-eyed Russian spiritualist, Col. Henry Steel Olcott—an early American convert to Buddhism—and an Irish-born lawyer named William Quan Judge. In his address, Boyd credits the society for being among the first to introduce Eastern terms such as yoga, karma, and reincarnation into the Western lexicon. Kerschner traces theosophy’s Baltimore “boom” from the 1920s through the 1950s, which topped out at 73 members for the organization and included Sunday radio programs on WITH. Today, there are a little more than two dozen people—albeit an eclectic group of artists, retirees, ex-hippies, community organizers, and graduate students—on the chapter’s Listserv.

“I first came in 1971,” smiles Carl Hurwitz, a clinical psychologist with a gray pony tail. “We’ve been dying a slow death ever since that’s just taking a very long time.”

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Moving Parts

Boston Street
May 7, 2016

A giant orange squid pedals downhill and splashes into the water at the Canton boat launch, drawing big cheers from the overflowing crowds gathered on the grassy banks. The squid is soon followed by an Alexander Calder-themed “Mobile Mobile” and another human-powered amphibious vehicle named “Wheel of (Mis)fortune.” But then a giant unicorn—built and driven by Oakland Mills high school students atop mountain bikes—capsizes.

“It’s cold, it’s cold,” a boy bellows, pulling himself onto the dock.

Meanwhile, a girl on the team smiles and breaks into a short backstroke.

“This is our second year,” says Oakland Mills teacher Skip Yarn, referring to the 18th annual Kinetic Sculpture Race, the have-to-see-it-to-believe-it event presented by the American Visionary Art Museum. “But it’s the first time we attempted the water entry. On a positive note, our steering on land has improved quite a bit.”

More than mere whimsical art farce, the “race” is also equal parts endurance contest and engineering challenge. The 15-mile trek from Federal Hill to Southeast Baltimore and back doesn’t just offer a spin in the Inner Harbor, but requires traversing sand and mud pits at Patterson Park.

“This weighs about 4,000 pounds when the nine-person crew is aboard,” says David Hess, captain of a sea and street-worthy vessel coined “The Golden Eyedra.” “It’s made from an ’87 Suzuki Samurai, so it’s also got four-wheel drive. The frightening part is going downhill at 35 miles per hour.”

The Arbutus Middle School entry this year is a four-wheeled sculpture named “Monsters of the Middle School Brain.” The enormous papier mâché “brain,” sitting above the team of bicyclists, depicts the daily horrors of cafeteria lunches and school bathrooms, as well as subjects like bullying.

“Up through fifth grade, everything is easy,” says sixth-grader Tressa Salava, explaining the sculpture’s origin and theme. “Then all of a sudden, there’s all this homework and kids towering over you.

“Middle school is pretty terrifying.”

Water Works

Plainfield Road, Dundalk
April 2, 2016

It’s raining, but not enough to dissuade the volunteers, now pulling on ponchos along with hip waders. About 150 friends, neighbors, and students are gathering in John Long’s yard for the annual spring cleanup of historic Bread & Cheese Creek, which this morning means trying to avoid getting wet from above as well as below.

“Amazing turnout, isn’t it?” laughs the good-natured Long, loading metal signposts dug from the creek into a recycling cart. He launched the nonprofit Clean Bread & Cheese Creek in 2009 after purchasing his father-in-law’s bungalow-style house, which sits alongside the stream.

According to local lore, Bread & Cheese takes its name from the War of 1812’s Battle of North Point, when it served as a popular spot for soldiers to rest and eat their rations—although the true story behind the name isn’t clear. Not in dispute, however, is that the creek, adjacent to Merritt Boulevard shopping centers, had been a mess for decades.

Over the past seven years, Long’s army has pulled some 112 tons of trash from the 3.7-mile waterway, including 328 shopping carts, 429 tires, 92 bicycles, three bathtubs, a pool table, a seesaw, and an unopened bottle of Pepsi from 1986. Minnows, frogs, and even small snakes have since returned, notes volunteer George Fischer, whose school-age sons lend a hand during a final walk-through in the creek’s shallow waters.

For many of the youngest volunteers, however, the environmental aspect of the cleanup takes second place to the chance to muck and scavenge around in the creek.

“I found a BB gun, that was pretty cool,” says one local girl, drying her socks. “Last year, I found a car engine.”

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Sweet Memories

Harford Road
April 9, 2016

In the small waiting room inside the Wockenfuss Candies factory, visitors pull on hair nets as a video on a flat-screen TV explains how cocoa beans are extracted from football-shaped pods, which can grow close to a foot in length in Central America. “I can’t believe how big it is,” a middle-school boy says in admiration as he picks up one of the rough, leathery cocoa pods on hand. Ultimately, of course, the chocolate made from the beans inside those pods finds its way to Northeast Baltimore, arriving on 1,800-pound pallets in the form of 10-pound bars.

Today marks Wockenfuss’s fourth annual factory tour, drawing close to 2,000 chocolate lovers for a behind-the-scenes look at how liquid caramel gets drizzled over cashews and then broken into bite-size patties, for example.

Launched 101 years ago by Herman Wockenfuss, a Prussian immigrant, the company has expanded to nine retail locations between Baltimore and Ocean City, while also growing its shipping service. But it’s still a family-operated, locally owned enterprise, notes treasurer Janice Wockenfuss Motter, a fourth-generation staffer.

To her point, most people on the tour appear to either know one of the employees working this morning or recall when the factory was still located in nearby row houses.

“I ate Wockenfuss candy as a child, too,” says Gail DeNicolis as two women hand-dip marshmallows into a creamy vat of chocolate behind her. DeNicolis has worked here for nine years after a career in special education. “When I was 4 or 5, my aunt walked me to the original storefront on Belair Road at Easter. During the holidays, we get requests from all over the country from people who grew up in the area and want to send Wockenfuss chocolate and candy to their family. I know why: The taste reminds them of their childhood. Same as me.”

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Not Sitting Still

Pennsylvania Avenue
April 16, 2016

At Triangle Park, the narrow, grassy oasis between Pennsylvania and North Freemont avenues, the ninth annual No Boundaries Coalition block party is in full swing. Among other performers, two raucous local marching bands, New Twilighters and Baltimore Christian Warriors, are attracting appreciative crowds to the stage area. There’s also mosaic-making and face-painting for kids, as well as produce from the new community stand—Fresh at the Avenue—for sale.

Originally founded as the Boundary Block Party—named to highlight the geographical, racial, and economic divide between largely white, upscale Bolton Hill and Central West Baltimore—those early efforts eventually gave birth to the No Boundaries Coalition, which is also shuttling residents to the polls today for early primary voting.

To that end, just a little farther down Pennsylvania Avenue, pastor C.W. Harris is climbing onto the fire escape ladder alongside the Jubilee Arts building. The 66-year-old lifelong Sandtown resident isn’t climbing down, however, but up—to the top, where he promises to remain until 500 of his neighbors cast a ballot.

The roof of the three-story Jubilee Arts center—Harris founded the nonprofit—has been equipped with a tent and portable toilet, but little in terms of creature comforts.

“After what happened last year, a bunch of us [community activists] met right there,” Harris says, pointing across the way to St. Peter Claver Catholic Church. “Everybody said politicians don’t listen to the community because no one votes, but no one knew how to inspire more people to vote. Finally, I said, ‘Look, I’ll go up on the roof until people vote.’ I was willing to do anything. So, here I am.”

Postscript: After Harris’s five days on the roof, Sandtown turnout more than tripled from the previous election.

Living the Dream

West Camden Street
March 5, 2016

Glenn Murphy is first in line. Decked in sweats and sneakers, the former high school infielder pounds his mitt, lets out a whoop, and then bends down to field a half-dozen batted balls—all of which he scoops cleanly. The 56-year-old even handles a grounder up against the third base stands at Oriole Park, if a bit awkwardly. On this chilly afternoon, he may be the oldest of the more than 75 would-be ball boys or girls vying for a position, but there’s no typical candidate—schoolteachers, college students, and IT specialists are among those trying out.

The only requirement is you have to be at least 18. At $8 an hour, a love for the O’s is a given. “I had Jim Palmer’s rookie card,” says Murphy.

At the other end of the age spectrum is Annabelle Williams, whose all-time favorite Oriole is center fielder Adam Jones. “I’m only 17,” acknowledges Williams, who also wields a fine glove. “But I turn 18 before the season starts.”

The tryouts are brief. There’s an introduction to the judges, who include Orioles staff and CBS Radio personalities Rob Long, Greg Carpenter, and Reagan Warfield, and then the field test. “I used to have season tickets, so I’m super excited to be here,” says Matt Fouse, 31, a Charles Village artist, who waits for his shot in the dugout as friends of various contestants take photos from the stands. “I gave up the tickets after we had our daughter. My wife’s a night-shift nurse, but she said if I do get picked, we’ll figure things out so I can do this.”

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Repository

South Ellwood Avenue
February 12, 2016

About the same time Enoch Pratt Free Library CEO Carla Hayden welcomes visitors to the grand reopening of the Canton branch library, a young dad holding his daughter’s hand sheepishly slides in with an armful of children’s books. “We got them from another library, but you can return them to any branch, right?” he asks the woman behind the counter.

Opened in 1886—with Enoch Pratt himself in attendance—the Canton location is the last remaining branch of the original six libraries, but it had been closed for the past four years for renovations. Former Baltimore Sun columnist Russell Baker once described the cozy Canton branch as “a whimsical little cathedral, as it were, to the printed word.”

Among those on hand for the ribbon cutting is 95-year-old Mollie Katz Witow, who was born in Danzig to Jewish immigrants and came here often as a girl. She grew up above her father’s nearby grocery and butcher shop, regularly roller skating down Boston Street to the Can Company—when they still made tin cans there. After graduating from Goucher College, she entered into the Pratt’s librarian-training program.

“I remember I had to wait until I was 8 years old to get a library card,” she says with a smile. “The librarian’s name was Miss Gough, spelled the same as the street. She wore a voluminous black skirt, starched white blouse, and high-button shoes. The first book she gave me to read was called The Keeper of the Flame. It was about an American-Indian father who taught his son to leave little objects along a path so people would know to follow him.”

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Separation

Loch Raven Boulevard
February 27, 2016

Oh, Baltimore
Ain’t it hard just to live?
Just to live

The Difference, the musical duo of Curtis McGee and Malaika Aminata Clements, are singing a remix of Nina Simone’s hit “Baltimore” before this afternoon’s staged reading of Last House Standing at the packed Northwood Branch Library. It’s a play about the ill-fated East-West High way Expressway that became the “Road to Nowhere.” Ultimately, the project relocated more than 1,000 families and businesses in West Baltimore—a period several audience members still recall.

Written and directed by playwright Sheila Gaskins, Last House Standing is set in 1968 on a rowhouse stoop. The central protagonist is a teenager named Evelyn, who kisses her boyfriend for the first time only to realize he’s moving away because of the coming highway—and she is, too. There are a million financial and emotional issues to wrestle with as neighbors count the families that are already gone and those that remain.

At one point, Evelyn’s young cousin and pals run around as an Arabber plies his trade: “Strawberries, cantaloupes, watermelon, red to the rind”—all evidence of a close-knit community being torn apart. “Oh man, that takes me back,” says a man in the audience.

Though her divorced mother seems in denial that eviction is imminent, Evelyn gains strength after her grandmother appears in a dream to teach her about resilience. It’s a message reinforced in her nighttime vision by the tree in front of her house, which morphs into a defiant, branch-waving, Black Power activist preaching a deeply funny soliloquy about the shared “root shock” experiences endured by trees and African-African communities. The leafy London planetree—found all over Baltimore’s rowhouse neighborhoods—raps about bending, but not breaking in the face of oppression, ending with the chant: “No Justice, No Leaves!”

“You know,” laughs another older West Baltimore native, “I remember those trees, too.”

History Type

Key Highway
January 7, 2016

Sitting on a chair in front of a 7-foot-tall machine invented in 1884 called the linotype—literally “line of type”—Ray Loomis hits several keys, demonstrating how hot liquid metal forms molds for each letter.

“It was mechanical, before electricity, when gas lines and a steam engine— usually in the backyard—powered its operation,” says the 86-year-old Loomis, a printer with 72 years of experience. “It created the type that got taken over to the press, which is basically how things were printed for 80 years.”

More than 150 linotype and letterpress enthusiasts—many former printers and younger artists—are gathering inside the Baltimore Museum of Industry for an unveiling of the museum’s renovated linotype exhibit and a discussion around the machine, and its inventor, Ottmar Mergenthaler, that launched the previous Information Age.

A German watchmaker, Mergenthaler emigrated in 1872, arriving in Locust Point to join the U.S.’s burgeoning industrialization and, possibly, to avoid conscription into Otto von Bismarck’s army. “He was extraordinarily bright, making this complex machine out of mechanical parts when others struggled with similar efforts,” says Frank Romano, author of History of the Linotype Company. “His biggest problem was that he never stopped inventing it. He kept changing his mind, believing he could do better. Drove people crazy.”

Michael Ponton, a MICA graphic design major, renovated the exhibit, making tonight’s promotional flier from old linotype font. “I find inspiration in his story and accomplishments,” Ponton says. “My Bolton Hill apartment is on the street where Mergenthaler lived. I walk by his house on the way to my internship.”

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Beautiful Minds

Union Avenue
January 19, 2016

The sign taped to the glass door simply reads “Here!”—with a cartoon smiley face dashed across the page.

Due to overwhelming interest, tonight’s lecture by Johns Hopkins psychologist William Richards—whose book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience was recently published—has moved from Artifact Coffee to a larger space next door, where the entrance is tricky to find after hours.

“Bill is one of the O.G.’s [original gangsters] of psychedelic research,” chuckles Mike Margolies, 29, founder of the local group Psychedelic Seminars, which hosts conversations about the benefits—and risks—of hallucinogens. “He has been studying this since volunteering for a research study in 1963.”

That’s the same year that Harvard University terminated professor and LSD-advocate Timothy Leary, but Richards’s book is considered among the first serious academic accounts of the effects of psychedelic drugs on human biological processes, consciousness, and religious experiences. In fact, fliers here seek fresh volunteers for ongoing research around psychedelics and their effects on those suffering from depression and addiction.

“This [enlightenment experience] has been so elusive before,” Richards encouragingly tells the audience, which includes an organizer of Baltimore’s annual Mushroom City Art Festival. “For many years, the study of mystical states was limited to people in the dark carols of libraries. Even reading the works of ancient mystics in their original languages trying to get closer to what’s being expressed. And now, we have a technique, really, enabling many people to experience these things directly—in the present time—and say, ‘Oh, now I understand where Plato was coming from.’”

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Sisters of Hoop

York Road, Towson
January 29, 2016

Institute of Notre Dame guard Amber Knapper-Jones darts to the wing just in time to tip an opponent’s pass. Then, scooping up the loose ball, the diminutive senior dribbles the length of the floor, laying the ball off the backboard as she’s knocked down—sending Towson University’s packed SECU Arena into a frenzy.

On a night so frigid that walking through the parking lot feels like a brave endeavor, 3,400 fans are here for the 50th edition of “The Game”—the annual match between IND and Mercy—a pair of Catholic girls high schools not especially known for their hardwood prowess.

The first contest took place at the then-Baltimore Civic Center, as a school basketball fundraiser before a Bullets game, and was won by IND, 31-23, though IND now trails in the overall series. This evening, led by Knapper-Jones—her key steal capping a 9-0 run—and sophomore Ja’Lyn Armstrong, who scored 14 points, IND wins again.

A lot has changed over the years, including girls basketball, which once played by half-court rules. Other things seem eternal, such as Sister Hilde behind the IND souvenir table. Supervised by nuns at St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum for several years before receiving her own religious calling, she has spent 68 of her 83 years doing whatever needs doing at IND, including making a locker-room speech before “The Game” a few seasons back after a request from the coach.

“I told the girls, win or lose, they will always be No. 1 in God’s eye,” Sister Hilde says. “And I told them to keep their heads up, their hands out, and eyes on the ball and the player they should be guarding.”

Female Form

January 9, 2016
Cathedral Street

“A labor of love,” says Jillian Storms, leading a tour through the detailed exhibit she has curated, “Early Women of Architecture in Maryland,” at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Shedding light on a dozen pioneering women whose groundbreaking careers spanned from the 1920s through the 1960s, the exhibit includes portraits, biographies chronicling the steadfastness of their ambitions, and notable accomplishments—such as interior design at the National Academy of Sciences in D.C.—as well as copies of their original drawings and renderings.

Among those profiled: German-born Poldi Hirsch, whose family fled the Holocaust before she went on to study architecture in Switzerland. She later emigrated with her husband, settling in Havre de Grace where she designed a still-standing midcentury office building in which her husband began his medical practice.

Also included are Katherine Cutler Ficken and Rose Isabel Greely, the first licensed female architects in Maryland and Washington, and a reproduction of a Maryland Society of Registered Architects letter to Ficken. Dated May 2, 1938, the note advises that while she was “certainly eligible” to attend the organization’s annual dinner and meeting, as the only women in the society, she should check with her “good father” regarding the propriety of her attendance.

“We had a lot of trouble tracking her down,” Storms says. “She’d adopted a 4-month-old son when she was 45, but she died in 1968 of cancer when he was 11. Our college research assistant was ready to give up when we finally found him. It turned out he’d kept a photo album of her work, including that letter, all these years.”

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Day Dream

January 18, 2016
East Pratt Street

“Mom, it feels like we’ve been here all day,” a girl with braids and glasses says, tugging her mother’s arm, not so much in protest, but in amazement at the full slate of MLK Day activities at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.

At the moment, they’re heading into the museum’s first-floor community space for a reading of The Meeting, a play about a fictional get-together between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, with local photographer Devin Allen’s wall-sized photos of last year’s Baltimore Uprising serving as backdrop. Other events offered today include screenings of the documentary films, Citizen King, The March, and MLK: The Assassination Tapes, as well as access to the current feature exhibition, “Ruth Starr Rose (1887-1965): Revelations of African American Life in Maryland and the World,” and the museum’s 8th Annual High School Juried Art Show. There’s also drop-in, MLK Day-themed arts and crafts for kids.

Depicting the civil rights leaders’ differing philosophies but shared sense of urgency and mutual respect, The Meeting draws a standing-room crowd—and this is the play’s second presentation this afternoon. Afterward, Larkis Webber, who portrays Malcolm X, and Doug Goldman, who plays King, join Morgan State University professor David Terry for an audience discussion, much of it centering on the influence of the two leaders’ childhood, religious, and regional influences. “I’ve been living this [stuff] for 51 years,” Goldman says at one point. “In the 1970s, I was bused to Hampstead Hill Junior High in Canton. If you missed the bus after school, you ran through Patterson Park until you got to a safe neighborhood.”

“As a Christian, I’m with Rev. King,” adds a woman at the end. “But as a mother, if someone hurt one of my children, then I’m with Malcolm. I’ll ask for forgiveness later.”

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The Flock

January 2, 2016
Conkling Street

“I grew up in Fells Point when this neighborhood was called ‘Little Poland’,” says Anthony Monczewski, 70, the grandson of a Polish immigrant butcher, as he steps inside Holy Rosary Church. “They still celebrate Mass here in Polish.”

Dedicated in 1928, the massive Romanesque shrine includes two-story stained-glass windows, marble altars weighing a collective 49 tons, and a 3,000-pipe, mahogany-encased organ. Monczewski’s visit to his childhood church this Saturday is part of the second East Baltimore Christmas Church Tour and one of seven stops celebrating historic parishes while their holiday decorations remain in full swing.

The morning begins with pastries and coffee at the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which celebrated its first Mass in Highlandtown in 1873. Also included: Our Lady of Pompei in “little” Little Italy, St. Leo the Great in Little Italy, St. Casimir and St. Brigid in Canton, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary at Patterson Park.

Inside Our Lady of Pompei, a gorgeous 1923 church built for Italian immigrants and known for its illuminated statue of Mary, pastor Luigi Esposito smiles as he recalls an early sermon. “Father Lou” recently celebrated 50 years of service to the parish, although the Naples native admits to the group that he occasionally stumbled in his Sunday homilies as a young priest. “I was trying to express the idea of the shepherd helping a lost sheep back into the sheepfold—a very common Christian metaphor.

“Well, the Italian word for sheepfold is ovile, so I figured the English word was the one that sounded closest,” he says, laughing, “and told the congregation that we must each help the lost sheep into the oven.”

Graceland

December 5, 2015
Hollins Street

The walls in the upstairs Jungle Room are draped in velvet leopard print, matching the snug dresses on a few of the bouffant-sporting women hitting the dance floor as Rob Kilgore belts out a cover of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” one of the King of Rock and Roll’s early hits:

“Well lawdy, lawdy, lawdy
Miss Clawdy Girl,
you sure look good to me . . .”

There are all kinds of bands inside the packed Lithuanian Hall, covering nearly the entirety of Elvis Presley’s blues/country/rockabilly catalog on three floors. There are also enough Elvis impersonators—this is the 22nd annual Night of 100 Elvises, after all—to match every incarnation (Young Elvis, Comeback Elvis, U.S. Army Private Elvis, Bloated Elvis, etc.) of the singer several times over. Although, sometimes it’s difficult to tell the fans dressed up in homage to their idol apart from the professional tribute artists.

All through the night—which benefits Johns Hopkins Children’s Center—there are hula girls performing on the main theater stage, a nod to the icon’s Blue Hawaii period. Downstairs, near the Viva Las Vegas Lounge, the King’s Kitchen Menu features Elvis-inspired favorites, including, naturally, fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

“I have older sisters; I was weaned on Elvis,” says Kilgore. “In fact, in 1972, I visited a girlfriend in Memphis and went to Graceland with her. Elvis was asleep—it was 2:30 in the afternoon—so we couldn’t go in the house. His uncle Vester gave us a tour of the grounds in Elvis’s Ford Bronco instead.”

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Ola Belle

December 2, 2015
Falls Road

Caleb Stine, dressed in work boots and a plaid shirt, puts down his guitar for a moment, picks up a fiddle, and begins tapping his toes. “I learned how to play this tune from a recording by a Kentucky fiddler named Art Stamper,” Stine tells the three-dozen bluegrass fans squeezed into The Ivy Bookshop for his informal performance and a reading by Tim Newby from his new book, Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and Its Legacy.

Newby recounts the story of legendary singer and banjo player Ola Belle Reed, the Ashe County, NC, transplant who helped introduce Southern mountain music, first to rural Maryland and then to Baltimore. Ola, brother Alex Campbell, and husband “Bud” Reed built a stage at their New River Ranch in Rising Sun that would eventually host Loretta Lynn, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, the Carter Family, and Johnny Cash.

In fact, as Newby says, the term “bluegrass”—to distinguish the new, faster, more intricate musical genre from traditional country or simpler “hillbilly” music—is first found in print in 1957 on the liner notes to American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style, recorded by Mike Seeger in Baltimore. “The music changed some when it moved to the city,” says Newby. “It’s great today to see the Charm City Folk & Bluegrass Festival, which keeps growing, and a new generation of musicians picking up on that legacy.”

“I knew Baltimore was the birthplace of painted screens and Formstone, I didn’t know it was the home of bluegrass,” laughs store co-owner Ed Berlin as he hands commemorative mugs to Newby and Stine. “I do know something, however, about the family-owned company, Homer Laughlin, over 100 years old, that makes these pottery cups: Their clay comes from the Ohio River area—same place that music comes from.”

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Points of Light

December 1, 2015
Riverside Drive

Driving past jersey barriers and heavy rail tracks, dozens of families—many including a member who spent his or her working life down here—eventually reach a warehouse terminal at the southeast end of Sparrows Point. The property is largely desolate now, and certainly it is compared to Bethlehem Steel’s glory days on “the Point.” But one tradition of the shuttered plant continues—the lighting of the “Star of Bethlehem.”

Handcrafted in 1978 by local steelworkers, the 1.5-ton star spans some 28 feet. It shone from atop the mill’s massive, 320-foot-high “L” blast furnace until the huge steel plant was demolished in January 2015, but was saved by the site’s new owners, Tradepoint Atlantic. Its placement high on a warehouse this evening is temporary until a permanent home is found, Tradepoint Atlantic CEO Michael Moore explains to the crowd, who are reminiscing over coffee and donuts before the countdown.

“I thought I’d come down and see a few friends,” says Virgil Hare, watching the lighting of the star, which is visible from the Key Bridge, with his friend and sister. “I started working for Bethlehem Steel after graduating from Dundalk High School in 1965—45 years—probably 55, if you count all the overtime,” he laughs.

Moore talks about the star, created when hope still remained for an already declining steel industry, symbolizing his company’s hopes for attracting new businesses to the 3,100-acre grounds.

Hare would like to see that, too, of course. He also acknowledges lingering frustration over the steel industry’s demise, in part, at least, from foreign competition. “I remember when that star was made,” Hare says. “From angled iron—‘Canada’—stamped right on it.”

Drinking Buddies

Bank Street
November 7, 2015

For 10 years, the annual Highlandtown Basement Bar Tour has been paying homage to the social gatherings that started out decades ago in the neighborhood’s fully stocked, wood-paneled basement bars. Although, truth be told, these soirées have now largely moved into the living rooms and backyards of the rowhouses here.

Guided by a handy map, residents walk, drink, mingle—and repeat—over the course of four hours with encouragement from well-stocked fridges, kegerators, iced tubs of Natty Boh, and retro mini-bars. “In Stockholm, where I’m from, people in apartments pass each other in the hallway, but never talk,” says a Swedish transplant living on Claremont Street with her boyfriend. “On this block, everyone wants to know each other’s life story.”

Altogether, seven rowhomes, two art galleries, one pizzeria, two actual bars, one organic market, one Italian market, and one former Moose Lodge have opened their doors—and liquor cabinets—to the tour.

“Best $20 I ever spent,” jokes Andy Dahl, coordinator of neighborhood programs for the Southeast Community Development Corporation, after sampling homemade pork barbecue at one stop. Along the way, he crosses paths with an old friend bicycling through the neighborhood—who, naturally, slides into the tour. Other surprises include an accordionist at one home, and fig trees and grapevine trellises in a couple of the small backyards in the neighborhood’s old Italian section.

“There are two Roman stone masons from the neighborhood who enter the Highlandtown Wine Festival each year—both named Dominic,” explains a longtime resident. “Very competitive. In business, winemaking—everything. They even steal each other’s customers, but still they remain good friends. If one wins the red wine competition, I think the judges almost feel obligated to give the other a white wine ribbon.”

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Hammer Time

Binney Street
October 20, 2015

The checkout line stretches nearly the length of Canton Ace Hardware, with women—and it’s all women here tonight—patiently waiting to pay for light fixtures, caulk and caulking guns, air filters, and brass plumbing supplies.

Meanwhile, past the lumber section, a DeWalt representative offers a hands-on, cordless power drill and driver demo. That’s followed by a packed mini-workshop on home toilet repair by a Fluidmaster rep—all part of the store’s 2nd Annual Ladies’ Night, which has attracted some 250 women. No doubt, many have been lured by the 20 percent discounts and complimentary wine and cheese, but just as many appear intent on learning how to tackle a specific DIY project or, more generally, improve their overall handywoman skills.

“My father got me started,” says Janis Girven, a computer consultant. “A home inspector left a dishwasher repair guide at our house and my dad said, ‘Janis, you can follow directions, right? Can you fix this leak?’ And I did. When the [repair] kit I bought came with the wrong size gasket, I went to the auto store, got another one, cut it to the right size.”

Canton Ace Hardware, it should be noted, is one of three local stores, among 11 in the region, run by a female-owned cooperative. Of course, customers have no idea that’s the case, acknowledges Courtney Belew, the co-op’s marketing manager.

“When I worked on the floor,” says the petite, bespectacled Belew, “older men, especially, would occasionally ask me if they could speak to a man about a certain tool
or kitchen repair job. I’d simply smile, ‘I can help you.’”

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Talking Heads

North Charles Street
November 13, 2015

In keeping with the Charm City Fringe Festival’s quirky nature, online tickets to the “#txtshow” came with an email reminder about charging your smartphone. Also, a warning about possibly profane language. Then, arriving at Station North’s Mercury Theater, guests receive not programs, but login directions to the show’s live Twitter feed. There’s no play this evening; instead, a staged reading by performance artist Brian Feldman of the audience’s—and this is key—anonymous real-time tweets.

The show starts hesitantly. There’s a tweet quoting from Star Wars, followed by one about a penguin driving a spaceship. Then, a reference to Batman, followed by random existential queries and responses. Any chance of a dialogue or a narrative forming from the 140-characters-or-less tweets—a road trip story gets sidetracked—explodes for good when two young women, clearly imbibing, join in. Soon, the back and forth turns scattershot, with off-the-wall tweets about the smell outside the theater, ducks, and sex.

The best part, however, is when audience members begin “intervening” in the relationships of other audience members:

Oh, so you haven’t put a ring on it yet, eh? . . . How you doin?

Which, of course, sends the first-row couple in question bursting into laughter.

It’s all absurdist fodder for Feldman, who occasionally gestures directly toward the small crowd while reading a tweet and, at other times, sings some of the missives.

“I asked an actor if he considered the show ‘improv.’ He thought it was,” Feldman says. “I don’t think so. Improv is based on ‘Yes, and . . .’ —meaning, you must follow the other person’s lead.” Feldman laughingly notes the #txtshow’s chaotic nature. “This always becomes, ‘No, but . . .’”

Swimmingly

Swann Drive
October 11, 2015

Near Liberty Heights Avenue’s Shaarei Tfiloh synagogue, built 94 years ago by Jewish immigrants, Eli Pousson leads off Baltimore Heritage’s Black and Jewish Civil Rights bike tour of the city’s once Jewish—now largely African-American—west-side neighborhoods. While American Jews overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights movement, Pousson notes that, in Baltimore, it was a complicated relationship at times.

Pousson highlights the migration of the city’s Jewish population from its East Baltimore tenement roots to the Druid Hill Park area and finally, to Park Heights, Mt. Washington, and Pikesville. Jews, Pousson points out, were also victims of Baltimore’s notorious segregated housing laws—one reason they moved to the then-empty western city suburbs.

The ride passes the home of Abram Hutzler, who launched the family’s iconic downtown department store—segregated like others—as well as that of Walter Sondheim, who oversaw the desegregation of the public schools in 1954, and the former residence of Clarence and Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the first couple of Baltimore’s Civil Rights movement.

There’s also a stop at “public pool No. 2,” once designated for Druid Hill Park’s “colored” patrons—the only outdoor pool then available to them. Young white and Jewish progressives protested the park’s segregated tennis policies in 1948, organizing an interracial tennis match, but the park’s two pools remained separate until 1956. Later, in disrepair for decades, the pool—lifeguard chairs intact—was filled with dirt and grass and turned into a memorial landscape by artist Joyce Scott.

“Black kids are still three times as likely to be drowning victims—a direct result of discrimination. There was no place for their great-grandparents to swim and that legacy has been passed down through generations,” chimes in pediatrician/bicyclist Dr. Ralph Brown. “I harp on that with everyone—have you gotten them swimming lessons yet?”

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See A Little Light

Key Highway
September 30, 2015

Of the three Christian virtues—faith, hope, and charity—“hope is the most elusive quality,” says Rebecca Hoffberger, founder of American Visionary Art Museum, as she addresses the preview audience for the museum’s 20th anniversary installation, The Big Hope Show.

Many of the exhibition’s 25-plus self-taught artists are survivors of deep wounds and terrible personal ordeals, including childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, and blindness. Their works include everything from a small totem pole to scrapbooks to an anti-war painting about a Hiroshima survivor.

During a tour, artist Dan Patrell talks about losing his wife to ovarian cancer and the stained-glass mosaic he created while grieving. Their teenage daughter chose the “healing” stones used in the panel’s windows and Patrell embedded a Morse code message—“love is forever”—in the work’s sunrays. He also mixed his wife’s ashes into the mosaic’s grout. “I broke down when I finished,” he says, choking up. “But they were happy tears.”

Nearby, Romaine Samworth sits in a wheelchair beneath her colorful papier mâché sculptures, which include a young couple dancing, farm animals at play, and a regatta on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Samworth, 94, lost her sight from a reaction to a smallpox vaccine at age 8, but the sculptures are remarkable in their detail, shape, and whimsy. “I loved my crayons and picture books as a child, and I cried when I lost my sight. I was devastated,” says Samworth, who grew up on a Pennsylvania farm. “When I started to sculpt in the 1970s and 1980s, it was as if I were bringing those images to life. I could ‘see’ again in my mind.”

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Bowl for Dollars

Pulaski Highway
October 11, 2015

“These kids crowbar it, don’t they?” says Dundalk-native Danny Wiseman as a teenager from Great Barrington, MA, rips another big hook for a strike at Wiseman’s fourth annual Youth Scholarship Tournament. A PBA Hall of Famer, Wiseman won his first title in 1990 at 22. (Incidentally, it was at Woodlawn’s Fair Lanes Open, with ABC’s Chris Schenkel making the call and Frank Robinson—yes, that Frank Robinson—in the house cheering.)

But today, he’s hustling all over Middle River’s AMF Country Club Lanes, trying to keep his tournament—which started at 8 a.m. and won’t end for almost 12 hours—rolling. More than 150 bowlers are competing, including many top Mid-Atlantic youth, vying for $24,259 in scholarship money. The sport has changed since he was growing up, Wiseman acknowledges, but remains popular and competitive—especially among today’s college-bound students.

In fact, one of Wiseman’s protégés here, Perry Hall’s Bryanna Leyen, has already been offered scholarships from Vanderbilt and Fairleigh Dickinson universities.

Wiseman, who began bowling duckpins with his sister and father when he was five—later walking to the old Dundalk Fair Lanes Bowling Center every day after school—never attended college. Before reaching the pro ranks, he hustled games in Northeast D.C. “When I was 18, 19, making maybe $1,000 a night on Fridays and Saturdays,” he recalls with a laugh. “You’d bowl all night. I remember a few mornings driving home at 6 a.m. That’s actually how one of my first [professional] sponsors learned about me.”

Wheel of Time

August 15, 2015
North Market Street, Frederick

“My strategy is to stay on the far right and not die,” says 58-year-old Nick Ackermann, smiling beneath a bushy mustache and protective headgear that resembles a brimless pith helmet.

Nearby, two-dozen-plus fellow penny-farthing enthusiasts—many, like Ackermann, in tweed and knickers—climb atop 4-foot tall bicycles, preparing for the 4th annual Frederick Clustered Spires High Wheel Race, the only U.S. competition of its kind. Fittingly, a barbershop quartet performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” just prior to the blast of the starter’s horn, which sends the riders scurrying around the .4-mile circuit, ringed with 5,000 spectators.

Proving Ackermann’s point about the danger inherent in navigating a race while mounted on turn-of-the-century-style bikes, there’s a pretty good crash two-thirds of the way through the event.

Ultimately, Angela Long, a senior V.P., mom of two, and avid cyclist, racing in heels no less (“The extra inches to help me climb up,” she says) takes the women’s competition. And Eric Cameron, an Air Force biomedical engineer and runner, takes the men’s title, falling just a lap short of the one-hour course record. A novice who just turned 42, Cameron watched last year from a local pub and jumped at the chance to compete when a friend’s husband, who owns a high-wheeler, suffered an injury this summer.

“I guess now we’ll have to buy him one,” his wife Jill says, standing next to him afterward. “Maybe for his birthday.”

“Or my mid-life crisis,” says Cameron, still breathing hard.

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String Theory

July 25, 2015
Eastern Avenue

“Does anybody know what ukulele means in Hawaiian?” Victoria Vox asks the packed beginner’s workshop at the Creative Alliance. Several hands shoot up. “Jumping flea—that’s right,” says Vox, explaining how 19th-century Hawaiians marveled at the quick fingerboarding of migrant Portuguese sugar-cane workers on their native country’s compact instrument. Which, of course, Hawaiians soon made their own, substituting catgut for traditional steel strings. “I’m pretty sure they just got tired of the cuts and blood from those steel strings,” laughs Vox.

The host of the all-day, second annual Charm City Ukulele Festival, Vox, a Baltimore transplant who has graced the cover of Ukulele magazine and tours extensively, is leading three of the seven uke classes—there’s also a Hula workshop—and performing at tonight’s show.

Other ukulelists this evening include Hawaiian-native Glen Hirabayashi, who performs regularly in the region with The Aloha Boys, and Louisa Hall, a Northern Virginia-based songwriter who often infuses her cheerful strumming and pleasing tenor with darker lyrics. Her set includes numbers such as “Irrational Fears,” “Internet Love Song”—a disturbing chronicle of online dating experiences—and “Missed Connections,” an upbeat tune in which she stalks a stranger getting off the D.C. Metro.

“I was attracted to the ukulele because it’s portable fun, but I get creepy and obsessive, too,” Hall says, adding that her musical training consists mostly of singing in the car and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. “I often describe myself as ‘aggressively jolly.’”

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Tiny Love Songs

August 9, 2015
Belair Road

The volunteer-run Natural History Society of Maryland, which is hard to miss given the replica dinosaur out front, has its unusual collection of taxidermied wildlife, pressed butterflies, and sea turtle skulls on public display this afternoon. But today’s main attraction is a presentation by entomologist Cathy Stragar called Summer’s Singing Insects, about the katydids, crickets, and cicadas that make up the season’s outdoor chorus.

Stragar, who works at the Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab at the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, explains that many insects make music by a process known as stridulation—or rubbing body parts together at incredibly fast speeds. A male cricket, for example, uses one wing as a plane and the other as a scraper/bow, playing to attract female partners.

Cicadas, however, use a different method, popping an abdominal noisemaker called a tymbal, which can produce sounds over 100 decibels. “Males close their ears to literally prevent them from going deaf,” she says.

Some grasshoppers, on the other hand, emit supersonic sounds that humans can’t hear.

As part of the lecture, the first in a bimonthly series at the Natural History Society, Stragar plays recordings of crickets and cicadas. She notes the local varieties of each as the small but rapt audience nods in recognition of certain familiar chirps and whistles.

“Recently, Jurassic-era cricket sounds were re-created,” Stragar continues, adding that paleontologists have reconstructed the fossil wing structures of the modern crickets’ ancestors. “These tell us a lot about what the world sounded like during that period,” she says, hitting the play button on her laptop. “These are 165-million-year-old songs.”

Land of the Free

June 25, 2015
Koppers Street

“Brazil, Burma, Cameroon . . . ,” Greg Collett, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services district director, calls out 26 countries in alphabetical order until 39 would-be citizens are on their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has already made some opening remarks, noting the difficult time Baltimore has been through recently, informing those about to become Americans that the strength and resiliency they’ve already demonstrated will be needed. After a brief history of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” those standing are asked to place their right hands over their hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Following a videotaped welcome from President Barack Obama, the newly naturalized U.S. citizens—surrounded by family and dressed in their holiday best—burst into spontaneous cheers, waving the tiny flags they’ve been given over their heads. A few are moved to tears. “I’m very happy after all these years,” says Maria Suarez, a Peruvian immigrant and mother, who was separated for years from her husband. “Triste [sad],” she says of that time, breaking into Spanish and smiling while wiping the corners of her eyes. “Many difficult nights.” Nearby, in a camouflage uniform, Mexican-born Haroldo Palma receives high-fives from U.S. Army buddies.

Upfront, Oyindamola Ikujuni, a vivacious Nigerian-born mother of three, is celebrating both her citizenship and her 36th birthday today. Asked what she likes most about America, she beams. “The freedom,” she says. “And the roads.”

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Signs of Life

June 18, 2015
Key Highway

“I run a lot, and the first time I turned down Bond Street and saw the Bond Street Wharf sign, I was blown away by the scale and color,” says Samantha Redles, at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, explaining the inspiration for her pop-up exhibition, Not Yet Lost! The Art of Maryland Sign Painters. “I knew there was a person who did that, who was behind that sign.”

The three-story, BOND STREET WHARF lettering—integrated into the former warehouse’s architecture and reappointed brick—was painted in 2008 by Brendon Brandon, whose efforts over the past half-century include other historic renovations, like the E.J. Codd building, also in Fells Point. As part of the exhibit here, organized by Redles for her Maryland Institute College of Art Curatorial Practice thesis, there’s also a screening tonight of the 2013 documentary Sign Painters, which recounts the craft’s heyday and unsung mid-century practitioners before the mass adoption of vinyl lettering.

“It’s definitely viewed as blue-collar, but it offered the chance to be creative and work with your hands,” says Redles, whose show highlights six Maryland painters, including Clifford Olson. His best-known work included the whimsical Cloud Mattress mural on the company’s former Guilford Avenue factory, since gone condo. Restored and visible from I-83, the painting depicts a woman lying alone in bed in a negligee and curlers, levitating above the city at night.

As a 14-year-old in 1934, armed with his paintbrushes, Olson had hopped a freight train out of his Nebraska hometown, ultimately landing in Baltimore. “Dad didn’t quit until he was 76, after a stroke,” his son Ole says later. “Worked all those years on swinging scaffolding without a safety line, shoveling snow off in the winter. I helped him sometimes in high school. He’d tell me, ‘You’ll be fine. Hold onto the brush.’”

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Business as Usual

July 11, 2015
East 31st Street

Like the ephemera sitting in the front windows—the papier-mâché bunny and evil clown dolls, the used hardcover on tiny surrealism and ’80s vinyl from Afrika Bambaataa—Normal’s Books & Records wasn’t expected to survive the digital revolution, let alone celebrate its silver anniversary. But crowded among the teetering stacks of books and bric-a-brac this afternoon, a real clown named Norma plays a kazoo as a young dad with dreadlocks tries to corral his son and two men peruse albums and recall Left Bank Jazz Society shows at Baltimore’s old Famous Ballroom. At the same time, in the store’s backroom performance space, called the Red Room—which is blue, of course—an a cappella Sacred Harp choir is following a raucous noise band to the floor.

The shop’s motto, co-owner Rupert Wondolowski notes, has always been “everything from the obscure to the indispensable.” Its name comes from paid study work several of the early store founders did with the Baltimore Psychiatric Research Center—where control subjects in schizophrenia investigations were referred to as “normals.”

“We started two doors down in a smaller space, but not a lot else has changed,” Wondolowski says. “We did sell vintage bikes and clothes, but ran out of room for that. The first year, it’s true, John Waters bought a bike here. This was before iPhones, so I don’t have a picture, but in my mind, I can still see him wobbling off down the street in ragged glory.”

Homeward Bound

Eastern Avenue
June 13, 2015

“Feel how soft this bird is,” says Dave Glorioso, handing a pigeon to a slightly nervous young girl outside at the annual Maryland Traditions Folklife Festival. “Go ahead. You can let him go, too. He’ll find his way home.”

Glorioso, 63, has been raising racing pigeons—also known as homing pigeons—for four decades, keeping a couple hundred birds behind his house in Lansdowne. With his son, Fish, he’s brought about 50 birds here.

Big races start as far away as Georgia, with the birds’ speed calculated by how long their return flight takes. “Nobody really knows how they do it,” Glorioso says. “I think it has something to do with the sun. On cloudy days, it takes them longer.”

Pigeon racing used to be very popular in Baltimore, Glorioso continues. “Men would work in the factories, give the little money they made to their wives, and then go in the backyard and fool around with their birds,” he says. “The women may not have been crazy about the hobby, but at least they knew their husband wasn’t down the street at the bar.”

When on form, the birds can make it back from, say, a race in North Carolina faster than Glorioso can in his pickup. Once, he pulled into his driveway after a six-hour trip—only to find them already there, waiting in the coop. “It’s estimated they flap those little arms a million times during a 500-mile flight,” he says. “I’m dead tired after driving that far. Of course, they’re dead tired, too.”

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Windows Into Life

Gough Street
June 13, 2015

“By 1950, there were more than 100,000 painted screens in Baltimore,” explains Amanda Smit-Peters, a manager with the nonprofit Southeast Community Development Corporation, during the midday, “painted-screen” walking tour of Southeast Baltimore. Discussing the craft’s current revival in Highlandtown and the neighborhood’s immigrant roots, she notes that nearby Butchers Hill was largely settled by Germans, and the painted-screen phenomenon itself—the peculiar, row-house folk art of those pre-air conditioning days—was started by a Czech grocer named William Oktavec. She also points to a screen painting down the street depicting the nearby Ukrainian church’s iconic golden domes.

And, actually, a good number of the recent screen paintings here pay homage to Baltimore’s unofficial mascot “Mr. Boh,” whose very name is a nod to the Central European Bohemians who also established roots here.

At one stop, a newer Salvadoran immigrant steps out from his row house to describe how the brightly colored rural scene on his window screen depicts the village where he grew up. Not far away, at the century-old DiPasquale’s Italian Marketplace, there’s a freshly painted door-screen portrait of Al Capone—fedora and blue suit—holding a bag of fruit, vegetables, and bread. The future mobster, it turns out, once worked in the building as a bookkeeper for another Italian family. “He was 19 or 20 then,” Joe DiPasquale says. “It was before his promotion.”

Capone, of course, later landed in Chicago, and then federal prison. He returned to Baltimore upon his release, however, to seek treatment for syphilis at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “It’s a small world,” DiPasquale says. “We get a lot of our lunch orders from Hopkins.”

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Hon Speak

West 36th Street
June 14, 2015

Accompanied by a bald, mutton-chopped Elvis impersonator in a blue polyester jumpsuit, the 10 finalists at the 22nd Annual Baltimore’s Best Hon Contest take the stage one at a time for the talent portion of the show. Variously jitterbugging, hula hooping, and skateboarding across the platform, the surprisingly diverse group channels the working-class fashions and towering beehives of Charm City past, later blowing kisses and tossing Berger cookies to the adoring crowd on The Avenue in Hampden.

Most of the women perform ballads expressing their deep affection for their boyfriends, their football team, and their town. However, the eventual winning “hon”—Nikki Bass, an Aberdeen Proving Ground scientist by day—demonstrates how she helps her Department of Defense colleagues understand her “Bawlmerese” dialect.

It’s worth noting that Bass, who grew up in Parkville, is also the first multiracial Best Hon. “Moms of the brown girls, the Latina, African-American, and Asian little girls entered in the [earlier] Miss Honette contest brought their daughters up to me and my mom,” she says later.

Utilizing a classroom periodic table, Bass literally spells out “Bawlmer” for the crowd, employing element symbols. “Ba, for example, is for barium,” she begins. “As in, ‘It’s best to barium flower seeds after Mother’s Day, hon.’” Donning safety goggles to protect her eyes “from all the Aqua Net” on stage, she continues: “W is for tungsten, as in, ‘You better make sure every pin is tungsten all the way, hon, otherwise that hairdo won’t hold together.’”

Beauty Marks

West Pratt Street
April 11, 2015

Mötley Crüe’s glam metal hit, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” blares as the Miss Tattooed Baltimore pageant gets underway at the 8th Annual Tattoo Arts Convention. Twenty contestants, a pleasingly diverse group in terms of age, ethnicity, size, and shape—not to mention personal style—take the stage in everything from neon bikinis and low-cut, gothic gowns to hip retro dresses their grandmothers may have worn.

As amateur paparazzi snap away, the crowd, many sipping cans of Natty Boh, cheer for friends and loved ones—including two parents wildly rooting for their heavily tattooed and pierced twentysomething daughter. “Why wouldn’t we support her?” says Dad. “She’s in college. She’s doing great.”

After rounds based on tattoo quality and quantity, and then overall beauty presentation, the women, whose careers vary from arts education to firefighting, talk a little about themselves. Ultimately, beautician and mom Valerie Stanovich, 26, channeling an edgy, pin-up “Norma Jean” look in cowgirl boots and red-and-white-checked top—while rocking full-sleeve arm, thigh, and neck tattoos—is named the winner. Stanovich, who also runs a small company called Vintage Veils, plans to volunteer with Brides Against Breast Cancer during her reign and will make various local appearances, including emceeing HonFest’s mustache contest. Along with $1,500 in prizes, she also receives a tiara, of course, to wear for the year—though not last year’s winner, Lindsey Crozier’s, sparkling headpiece.

“Oh no,” Crozier says with a smile after placing the jeweled crown atop Stanovich’s done-up, brunette locks, in accordance with traditional pageant practice. “This is a different one. I get to keep mine.”

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Life Cycles

Maryland Avenue
May 3, 2015

Baskets of clothes sit atop washing machines inside the packed house at the Spincycle laundromat in lower Remington. Many people here have come intending to do laundry, naturally, but others have come to catch a pop-up music and art exhibition called “Love on the Line: Dirty Laundry.” Some have come to do both.

“We encouraged everyone to bring quarters and a load to wash,” chuckles Melani Douglass, founder of the traveling Family Arts Museum, which is presenting the exhibition. The idea, explains Douglass, who earned a master’s degree in curatorial practice this spring from Maryland Institute College of Art, is “to celebrate the ancient forms, everyday rituals, prescriptions, and tonics for getting the stains out of laundry and life.”

Surrounded by decorated mannequins, poet Femi the DriFish reads beneath colorful portraits, hung with clothespins, painted by artist Pierre Bennu. There’s also Brazilian dance and a performance by vocalist Jasmine Pope of J. Pope and Funk Friday. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” she sings, a nod to the still reverberating Freddie Gray protests.

Nearby, the show’s “domestic artist in residence,” Ms. Penny, who works at Spincycle, cleans and folds clothes, as a volunteer collects “recipes” for removing stains of both the fiber and emotional variety. “Sometimes all you need is a gentle wash, other times you need bleach. And sometimes, you need a professional,” she says.

“You can also learn a lot about people from their laundry,” adds Adonna Nissi, a member of the all-ages Baltimore Girls collective, with a smile. “You might see a middle-aged woman doing her wash, or a mom doing her kid’s clothes, and assume you know everything about their situation. Then, you’ll see her pulling out a sexy pair of underwear and you realize, ‘Oh, she’s got something going on.’”

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Rainbow Warriors

North Charles Street
May 31, 2015

The nearly 40-year-old Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Baltimore (GLCCB) moved into the Waxter Center last year, so it’s appropriate that Baltimore Heritage’s LGBTQ Walking Tour begins here. Beyond the neighborhood’s gay bars and restaurants, Mt. Vernon has long been home to gay-friendly institutions, activist Richard Oloizia notes, including the Waxter Center, which since 1991 has hosted the Chesapeake Squares—Baltimore’s gay-friendly square-dance club—and the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which first screened John Waters’s notorious Pink Flamingos.

Across the street, Oloizia points out the old apartment of John Stuban, the founder of ACT UP Baltimore, who died of AIDS in 1994, and then Leon’s, a gay bar since 1957, which for decades maintained a second, hidden entrance through the straight restaurant located behind it.

At Mount Vernon Place, Oloizia recalls the city’s first “pride” marches and retired college professor Shirley Parry tells of the local lesbian women who founded the Bryn Mawr School for girls and secured the rights of women to attend The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The 90-minute tour ends near the Hippo, the popular disco that’s set to become a CVS, and the row house where Gertrude Stein lived when she attended Hopkins. Kate Drabinski, a University of Maryland Baltimore County gender and women’s studies lecturer, says Stein faced misogyny at med school, which she wasn’t great at—she was a writer, after all—but that this is where she first fell in love with a woman and suffered her first heartbreak. “She lived down the street there, but please don’t go knock on the door because other people live there now, and that would be awkward,” Drabinski cautions. “From experience.”

Working Girls

Key Highway

March 15, 2015

“It was a serious time for everybody, and I took my job very seriously,” Grace Henninger tells the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s packed auditorium, describing how she helped build B-26 bombers at the Glenn L. Martin Company factory during World War II. “I learned right away that if you were working the rivet gun, that bracket had to be held very tight. Very little re-work had to be done on my end,” the fit, blue-eyed 90-year-old says in a North Carolina drawl. “I loved my United States of America.”

At its peak, the Middle River aviation manufacturer employed 55,000 workers—one-third young women like Henninger and fellow panelist Elsie Arnold, the Rosie the Riveter Association’s Baltimore Chapter president. Raised on a 500-acre farm, Henninger had followed an aunt to Charm City. Starting at 19, Arnold worked at Glenn L. Martin for two-and-a-half years, saving for nursing school. “The boys had left for war and the women took over,” smiles Arnold, who went on to a 40-year career at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. “But we didn’t think of ourselves as pioneers.”

Later, Henninger recalls meeting her future husband, home on leave, while shopping at the Essex A&P. They married six weeks later—almost 70 years ago. After his discharge, they bought a four-room house initially intended as temporary housing for plant workers in Victory Villa, a development where the streets were given names like Fuselage Avenue and Altimeter Court. “There were extensive renovations over the years, and we raised our five children in that house,” says Henninger, who also worked on the assembly line at Westinghouse for 20 years after her children had grown. “My husband Jim died in 1999 from colon cancer from the asbestos at Bethlehem Steel. I still live in that house.”

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Birthday Blues

South Durham Street

April 10, 2015

In an open garage, accompanied by her quartet, Baltimore’s Rhonda Robinson, in heels and pearls—gold flower tucked in her hair—belts out the song most associated with the legendary jazz singer who grew up in this cramped alley.

“Lady sings the blues
She tells her side, nothing to hide

Now the world will know

Just what the blues is all about”

Up at the corner, there’s a beautiful, towering, three-story-high mural of a full-throated Billie Holiday—her back turned away, appropriately, from her difficult childhood home—singing out to Upper Fells Point and far beyond. The painting by artist James Eichelberger is so perfectly executed that the century-old building’s narrow drainpipe has been seamlessly transformed into a throwback standing microphone. And today, with a block party commemorating her 100th birthday, Holiday’s music pulls passersby down the alley where she grew up. “It’s bouncing off the row houses and going up the street,” says Ian Craig, who lives above the garage where Robinson is performing. “People are walking past, hearing the music, and joining in.”

Long run-down, Holiday’s childhood alley has been reborn since the local improvement association won a $30,000 PNC Transformative Art Prize to create a tribute to “Lady Day.” So far, five murals, a mosaic, and 11 painted screens pay homage to the singer, and, coinciding with her birthday, neighbors have hosted tours this week. “You hear that voice once, and you never forget,” says Leo Arreaza, 46, who now lives in Baltimore, but is from Caracas. “I’m from Venezuela, and when I was a kid my parents played her records all the time.”

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No Silent Spring

Eutaw Street

April 29, 2015

As leadoff man Alejandro De Aza steps to the plate, the unmistakable, and on this day, wholly surprising sound of the Orioles’ rallying cry echoes through Camden Yards. For the first time in major league history, there isn’t a single fan at a game. Not officially, anyway. This afternoon’s contest is closed to the public following protests in the wake of 25-year-old Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. However, two-dozen vociferous fans are stealing glimpses of the action outside the center-field gates, letting the Orioles know they’re not quite alone.

“Give me an ‘O,’ Give me an ‘R’ . . . “

In fact, the strange thing is not what isn’t heard, but what is—everything. When a White Sox batsman hits a hard grounder to O’s second baseman Rey Navarro, the ball can literally be heard smacking into gloves around the infield for an inning ending, 4-5-3 double play. Players can be heard calling for fly balls and clapping from the bench.

During the pregame press conference, O’s manager Buck Showalter had joked about umps catching the normally unheard “sweet nothings” emanating from the dugout. Afterward, he jokes again about the starting pitcher hearing the bullpen phone ringing. But when asked what advice he has for Baltimore’s young black men, Showalter strikes a serious tone. “I’ve never been black, okay? So I don’t know,” he begins. “I can’t put myself there. I’ve never faced the challenges that they face. . . . It’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, ‘Well, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this?’ . . . You have never been black, okay? So just slow down a little bit.”

The Anxious Years

February 14, 2015

Hickory Avenue

Standing next to a photo of his 15-year-old self proudly displaying a “Science Olympiad” ribbon, Adam Ruben recalls his relationship with his high-school girlfriend, “Jenny.” “Today is the 20th anniversary of the first time I touched a boob,” Ruben tells the crowd attending tonight’s “Mortified Baltimore” Doomed Valentines show at Hampden’s Gallery 788. From there, however, his story takes a scary turn.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” Jenny wrote him before he left for camp in 1995. “I would seriously die for you.” Later, in obsessive anger, she dug her nails so hard into the back of his hands that scars remain to this day. “She was a little controlling,” deadpans Ruben, a molecular biologist, who also courageously reads the letters he wrote to Jenny from camp.

Told through old mash notes, diaries, and even one pre-teen romantic novel that doesn’t quite understand how sex works, “Mortified” is part of a national storytelling project that offers adults the opportunity to share their most embarrassing childhood and teenage writings.

There’s bad poetry, journal reflections from a Tyra Banks devotee, and letters from an earnest, confused, homosexual-denying Christian college freshman. “I call them the
Footloose years—no drinking, no smoking, no dancing,” laughs Mike Boyd, now 50. His college missives, sent to his best friend, who is in attendance, recount getting “punked out” for a Go-Go’s concert and the thrill of catching a production of Anything Goes, the musical starring Ethel Merman. “Re-reading these letters,” Boyd cracks, “I was never going to ‘pray the gay away.'”

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Only Way

February 22, 2015

Timonium

With a rebounding economy and falling gas prices, some 20,000 outdoors-oriented vacationers are expected at the 50th Annual RV Show at the Maryland State Fairgrounds, the East Coast’s largest retail show. “My father started the business 43 years ago after our first vacation in a camper,” says Greg Merkel, owner of Leo’s Vacation Center in Gambrills. “After that, we went everywhere: Ocean City, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware. The favorite was the ‘Roller Coaster Capital of the World,’ Cedar Point in Ohio.”

Along with the massive vehicles filling the fairgrounds’ exhibition halls, dozens of Mid-Atlantic campgrounds are represented—most of them familiar to Ruby Harbaugh, who bought her first recreational vehicle with her husband in 1968. Since then, she’s bought nine more, all from Charlie’s RV and Camping Center in Randallstown, where the energetic 81-year-old also works.

“I’ve got a 36-foot Itasca motorhome with an 8.1 Chevy Vortec engine, workhorse chassis, and five-speed Allison transmission,” says the petite, blue-eyed grandma. “Drove 1,088 miles in two days over the Ozark Mountains last summer. Just me behind the wheel. I’ve been to Disney World 42 times, and I’ll go this year. Don’t know where else, yet.”

“My husband died in 2009 and had been in a home for six years when I bought this last RV,” says Harbaugh, whose license plate reads, ‘ONLY WAY.’

“He told me, ‘You keep on going, Ruby. You always were a better a driver than me anyhow.'”

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No Small Deaths

March 1, 2015
Wicomico Street

Pigtown’s Allied Binding Company, where they still bind real books, hosts tonight’s “Diorama-rama” competition—a celebration of old-school storytelling in a box—hosted by the local arts group Wonder Commons. The theme is “Notable Last Moments,” with judges including Jaime Kauffman, program director with nonprofit Art with a Heart, and Bruce Goldfarb, an expert on the Maryland Chief Medical Examiner’s Office’s renowned Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death dioramas.

“One goal with Wonder Commons,” explains organizer Robert Marbury, author of Taxidermy Art: A Rogue’s Guide, “is to get people who are non-artists to make things.” That said, genuinely talented folks are here, like Jim Doran, who specializes in making tiny dioramas in iPod cases and kitchen spoons.

Among the entries is an homage to just-departed Leonard Nimoy, featuring an anime figurine of Star Trek’s Spock falling through strobe lights inside a parking cone to the “Final Frontier.” Best in Show goes to game developer Shawn Cook for “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,” featuring a watercolor painted boat swaying between a dozen waves, enhanced by bottom-of-the-sea LED lighting—all inside a six-inch box.

Meanwhile, the Cornell Prize, named for surrealist assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, goes to writer Zoë Nardo, for “The Wire,” which plays not off the acclaimed HBO series, but The Flying Wallendas. Her two-foot-tall cardboard frame depicts Baltimore’s harbor, its row-house neighborhoods, and a high wire strung from the iconic “Domino Sugars” sign in Locust Point to the neon Mr. Boh in Canton. An accompanying poem tells the tale of the diorama’s thrill-seeking protagonist—only her tutu and legs visible after a headfirst fall into the water:

“Halfway through she slipped and messed up the plan.

She never made it to the one-eyed man.”

Those Days

January 30, 2015
South High Street

In the upstairs cabaret lounge at Germano’s in Little Italy, author Rafael Alvarez is reading a short story he wrote years ago about a retired burlesque dancer named Jean Honus, a platinum blonde who billed herself as the Jean Harlow of The Block and stripped until she was 56.

But the headliner on this Friday night is Margo Christie, who recently penned These Days, a novel inspired by her own experiences dancing on The Block in the late 1970s and ’80s. Amid clinking glasses and applause, accompanied by jazz guitarist Michael Joseph Harris, the redheaded Christie takes the floor in a vintage, sequined lace gown and feather boa. Her only concession to aging: reading glasses.

Among the passages she shares is an anecdote about the long summers on The Block, the slowest time of the year, she quickly learned. “August on The Block dragged by hot and sleepy. . . . Lenny [the bar manager] said men took their families on vacation during the summer, but will be back with an appetite for some real fun in September.”

A Denver transit bus driver for the past 14 years, she has enjoyed returning home to promote her book, which received an Amazon Breakthrough Novel award. “I’ve been having great fun, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been in a newspaper,” she says with a wry smile. “[Between dancing stints ] I worked at the Mustang Inn and the East Baltimore Guide once named me the best-looking barmaid in Highlandtown. Of course, I was 17 then. Most of the barmaids in Highlandtown were over 50.”

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Pie Crush

January 31, 2015
West Pratt Street

The only thing more exciting than an actual ballgame might be Orioles FanFest at the Baltimore Convention Center. It’s still months until Opening Day, but manager Buck Showalter is here chatting with fans. Chris Davis and Manny Machado are signing tons of autographs. Nearby, the O’s bird is stirring up trouble and posing for photos. There are batting cages, a speed gun to measure your fastball, and even vendors hawking Esskay franks.

Among the highlights is a “Know Your Teammate” segment at the packed fan forum—a kind of Newlywed Game in which Orioles players are tested on how well they know each other—followed by some real mayhem with fans volunteering to get “pied” on stage by the O’s Adam Jones, per tradition.

After Jones smashes several fans who’ve won their Dangerously Delicious pieings via a social-media contest, including one lumberjackish fan who receives a double-whammy of chocolate cream, the colorful center fielder seeks volunteers from the audience. Asking for older people in the crowd, in order to avoid having to slam a pie into the face of one of the children pressing the stage, Jones reluctantly ends up pieing a Towson great-grandmother. “He asked me, ‘Are you sure?'” says lifelong fan Pat Shaw, 77, later. “I said, ‘Show no mercy, Adam.’ But he was gentle.”

Shaw then chooses the next participant, excited 13-year-old Eryka Milanicz (wearing, naturally, an official Jones jersey), to receive the last pie in the face.

Happily pulling banana-cream pie from her hair afterward, Eryka reveals that she has a poster of No. 10 on her bedroom wall. “He doesn’t know,” she smiles, “but he’s secretly my boyfriend.”

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Beautiful Minds

February 1, 2015
Key Highway

From start to finish, the discoveries of the presenters at the American Visionary Art Museum conference, The Human Guide to Our Creative Brain, are almost too far-fetched to fathom. Keynote speaker Martine Rothblatt, for example, explains how she created Sirius XM Radio after an epiphany about satellite transmission while visiting the Seychelles, then later entered the domain of bioscience, developing a breakthrough treatment for her daughter’s life-threatening pulmonary hypertension.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Thomas McNear discusses becoming the first member of the Army’s Stargate Project—an effort to investigate psychic practices with potential military applications and the inspiration for the George Clooney film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Other neuroscientists, biochemists, and anatomists present research into the effect of light on astronauts; the evolution of the human smile; and biofield therapies, such as reiki.

Then there’s Jason Padgett, a self-described former “goof”—a photo shows off the mullet he once rocked—who acquired savant mathematical ability after a concussion following an attack outside a karaoke bar. He literally sees shapes in the world around him as equations now.

Still amazed by his newfound insights, Padgett recounts telling another audience not too long ago that he’d come to the realization that the angles in stealth aircraft must be prime numbers like 89 and 101 degrees, which he believes would make them harder to detect by radar. Later, he got a phone call from someone claiming to be from the National Security Agency. “The person says to me, ‘You know what you said about stealth aircraft? Well, don’t tell anyone else.’

“I don’t know if that person was from the NSA, but I called them back and asked if I was right,” he continues. “They said, ‘We can’t tell you that.'”

Historical Notes

January 19, 2015

Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard

“I won’t be doing a lot of twirling,” says Dunbar High School drum major Martuise Montgomery, a silver baton tucked into the nook of his elbow as he rubs his hands together before the start of the 15th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parade. “I’m afraid I’ll drop it. I’m freezing, but it’s important to be here. We’re marching to honor Dr. King’s marches.”

Despite the chill, deep crowds line the 10-block route and, moments later, Martuise kick-starts the trombones and trumpets with pumps of his baton. Their first number, “Wade into the Water,” is an old Negro spiritual, which Harriet Tubman used as a reminder to escaping slaves to get off the trail to prevent dogs from tracking their scents. Nearly 70 groups follow Dunbar’s lead, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Baltimore Chapter 9th and 10th Calvary Association on horseback, and neighborhood marching bands like the Westsiders and Baltimore Go-Getters.

Among the songs blasting today is Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.”

“Many of our kids know that song, but don’t know that Stevie Wonder wrote it in 1980 because of the backlash against making Dr. King’s birthday a holiday,” says Charles Funn, Dunbar’s band director. “That song swayed public opinion. I’m not just a music teacher,” Funn adds, standing next to Martuise, who eventually worked up a sweat with his high stepping, as the band gathers near their bus afterward. “I was about their age when Dr. King was shot. I try to be a history teacher, too.”

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Dark Places

January 19, 2015
West Fayette Street

Laura Fabian places three red roses at Edgar Allan Poe’s memorial on what would be the macabre poet’s 206th birthday. “One for each person buried,” she says, a telltale smile alluding to the discomforting weirdness that remains the hallmark of the writer’s mysterious work—and life. “That’s Poe, his cousin/wife Virginia, and his aunt/mother-in-law Maria.”

Per tradition, there’s also a reading this afternoon of a few of Poe’s despairing poems, including “Alone,” by local actor Tony Tsendeas, dressed, appropriately, in black from head to toe.

“My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone.”

Following the readings, Poe House curator emeritus Jeff Jerome and this year’s honored guest, Victoria Price, daughter of legendary horror movie villain Vincent Price, lay a rose-filled wreath on the grave, a birthday custom dating back to the 1920s. Afterward, Price tells the gathering that her father, who starred in numerous Poe-inspired films, particularly loved his poems, which naturally suited her father’s rare combination of gifts—a mellifluous voice and intimidating 6-foot-4 presence.

In fact, Jerome adds, Vincent Price deserves great credit for bringing Poe’s works to wider notice with his 1960’s films. He also notes that the actor visited Poe’s memorial and the catacombs beneath Westminster Hall in 1977. “He was in a show at the Morris Mechanic and this was before the renovations here,” Jerome explains. “At one point, when we’re down in the catacombs, which were even darker and creepier than they are now, I felt him grab my arm and pull me toward him.

‘I don’t like it in here,’ he whispers.

“And what did I blurt out [in reply]? ‘Oh, you big baby.'”

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Cat Power

January 25, 2015
York Road

There’s a kangaroo and a monkey inside the Maryland State Fairgrounds’ Cow Palace, but most animals at the packed World of Pets Expo appear to be domesticated. Filled with folks who’ve brought their own dogs for a look-see, the three-day show features parrot-training demos, pet CPR workshops, canine “good citizen” tests, and a talk on animal hospice care. There are rabbits and alpacas as well as booths for pet portraits and, believe it or not, a rat rescue operation. Highlights today include the “Gerbil Olympics,” the dog long-jumping finals, championship pure-breed shows, and the 7th Annual Household Pet Cat Show.

Thirty-two felines are entered in the household pet competition, a sort of beauty contest for the every-cat, where Norma Anderson, 75, an American Cat Fanciers Association judge, checks their cleanliness, paws, and coats on a tiny, well-lit stage. She also engages each cat, petting them, and offering toys and a climbing post. The scoring is fairly subjective. “Whatever cat I enjoy the most,” says Anderson, who has 13 of her own.

Most contestants are tabbies of various hues, but there’s also a hairless sphynx that resembles ET and a British shorthair named Earl Grey. “He likes tea,” volunteers his owner. Of course, the cats generally appear uninterested. Ultimately, a tabby named Johnny Rotten, who, unlike his punk-rock namesake, is exceedingly cuddly, wins first place. “The outgoing cats win because most cats aren’t that way,” says Anderson. “Dogs love everyone. With cats, you have to earn their trust and affection, which is harder, but it’s also why people like them. You know what they say, ‘Dogs have owners and cats have staffs.'”

Cargo Vessels

Dunmanway

December 23, 2014

Amid the Christmas decorations, tree, and lights, sit hundreds of gift-wrapped shoeboxes, stacked along the walls of the cramped Stella Maris Seafarers’ Center in Dundalk. Sent by local churches, schools, and charities, and filled with toothpaste, shaving cream, gloves, and scarves—as well as pens and stationery for writing home—some 1,500 presents will be delivered by volunteers to seamen docked at the Port of Baltimore this season.

“The sailors come from all over the developing world: Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, former Soviet bloc countries, most working on eight- to 10-month contracts,” says Monsignor John FitzGerald, who oversees the center, a mission of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. “It’s a lonely life. They miss holidays, the births of children, and funerals of parents.”

Part logistics hub, chapel—FitzGerald celebrates Mass in four languages—and Internet cafe, the center provides services to 12,000 seafarers a year, many of whom e-mail and Skype with family from its computers. Volunteer van drivers also offer seamen, often in dock for only 12 hours, the chance to refill prescriptions at pharmacies and, like the visiting Chinese seafarers today, to shop for themselves or loved ones at their favorite American stores like Walmart and Best Buy.

“Everything in the U.S., you can buy in China. Bose headphones, UGG boots, and iPhone 6, but it costs a lot more. [An] iPhone 6—$150 more,” says Jianteng Li, 36, in heavly accented English as his mates pose for photos in front of the center’s Christmas tree, still apparently an exotic religious artifact in a country that remains officially atheist.

“My wife e-mailed me,” Li shrugs and smiles. “She wants UGGs. Two pairs.”

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King for a Day

South Linwood Avenue

December 30, 2014

There is free ice skating here later for kids participating in Baltimore’s 75th Annual Doll Show, but right now they’re busy playing with their favorite dolls—the term is applied broadly—and looking forward to the contest. It’s a beauty pageant of sorts for toys, and the rules are simple: entrants must be 14 or under and may only enter one doll in one category—such as foreign, antique, best stuffed, action figure, or most unusual. “The judges ask the kids questions about their doll, which is great, because they get to talk about something they love and be taken seriously,” says Trish Jefferson, who’s been coming since 1957 and is watching her granddaughter run around the rec room inside the Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro Family Skating Center.

One 5-year-old enters her obviously well loved, worn, stuffed panda, which she’s had, she explains, since meeting Tai Shan, a giant panda, at the National Zoo.

“How old is your panda?”

“One-hundred and thirty,” responds the girl, not missing a beat.

After the category winners receive their ribbons, two overall winners are named the show’s official King and Queen. Along with trophies, they’re handed authentic-looking crowns and seated in a throne for pictures. “Queen” Kimore Spencer, 12, won for her vintage, box-kept, African-American Barbie. Edward Clark, 11, won both “most unusual” and “King” honors for his dead baby shark, preserved in a jar. “A friend of my father’s brought it from Florida,” he says, proudly, noting it’s a blacktip shark as he points out the telltale fin markings.

Afterwards, in line for skates, he adjusts the crown still atop his head.

“I’ve never ice-skated before,” he admits, “but I’m not taking this off.”

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Hampden’s Ball

34th Street

January 1, 2015

“Somebody get me the time,” pleads 58-year-old Bob Hosier, pacing in his row-house living room in a diaper, bonnet, and bib. Surrounded by friends and family—including an actual baby whose diaper is being changed on the sofa—Hosier is nervously trying to sync the televised New Year’s Eve ball-drop in Times Square with the light-post ball-drop he’s been rigging up in front of his house for the past two and a half decades.

“It takes 22 seconds for our ball to drop,” explains Hosier, who, along with starting the audacious holiday-decorating phenomenon known as the “Miracle on 34th Street,” appears each year as “Baby New Year” at midnight to anxious throngs. “If it took a full minute, I’d need a 60-foot pole and the city wouldn’t go for that.”

Just before the climatic moment, Hosier kisses his wife and daughter, and then, as fireworks fly, he opens his front door to wild applause, popping champagne as he waves to the crowd.

“There he is!”

“Hey, Baby New Year!”

“Oh, that’s one sexy diaper!”

Fortified by 100-proof Old Grand-Dad, Hosier mingles with members of the fawning, and, for the most part, only mildly intoxicated crowd, who offer toasts and kisses, rub his belly for luck, and pose for delirious selfies.

“You know,” says an onlooker to his girlfriend, “waiting for him to come out of his house every year, it’s like he’s our version of Punxsutawney Phil.”

“The difference,” his date smiles, scanning the beefy, nearly naked Hosier, “is just a little less hair.”

Time of the Season

November 1, 2014
Cockeysville

On a damp Saturday, the morning after Halloween, two-dozen hearty folks and curious kids squeeze inside the warmth of Valley View Farms’s garden center for the annual fall harvest “Great Pumpkin Seed Count.” For weeks, a couple thousand visitors have sized up their biggest pumpkin ever, a 1,725-pounder named “Gourdzilla,” writing down guesses at the number of seeds in the behemoth. At stake: a first place $300 gift certificate to Valley View, which, with its exotic squashes—plus other vegetables, herbs, trees, shrubs, and perennials—has become something of a holiday destination.

Delivered by truck from “up the river” and the size of a small car, the pumpkin’s walls are roughly a foot thick. In northern states, similar gargantuan gourds are carved into canoes for fall boat races.

Valley View’s seed count goes back 25 years now, beginning with a relatively smallish 755-pounder. “Breeding,” says retail greenhouse manager Carrie Engel, explaining the explosion in Sumo-like squash. “People ask, but we’re obligated to return all the seeds back to the grower.”

Counting duties actually don’t take long: This year’s total is 373, just below average. Although novice predictions go upward of seven figures, two years ago only a single seed was found. The disappointment today—other than that the winner isn’t on hand and will be notified by phone—is that “Gourdzilla” didn’t make it here, either, “over-ripening” a few days ago. “Where’s the giant pumpkin?” one downcast child asks Engel. “Oh, I am afraid we had to cut him open before he went bad. He’s out back now,” she says reassuringly, “resting in pieces.”

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First Role Model

November 3, 2014
North Gay Street

Hours before Michelle Obama’s appearance at an Anthony Brown-Ken Ulman “Get Out the Vote” rally, Tamara Jones is mostly succeeding in keeping her 12-year-old daughter and friends content in line outside Baltimore’s War Memorial Building. “Sandwiches, chips, juice, plus Halloween candy,” Jones says. “And they all brought their iPads or devices to play.”

The girls, however—Jones’s daughter Riaine, Kayla Arrington, Nevaeh Donaldson, and Tara Lowery—don’t know that the First Lady is actually going to be here today, which Jones has kept a surprise, offering Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as the star attraction. “My daughter loves the mayor,” she says, noting that the sixth-grader at East Baltimore’s Henderson-Hopkins school has volunteered alongside Rawlings-Blake at neighborhood events. The mayor, in fact, is the first elected official to appear in the packed auditorium, followed by a roster of state Democratic politicos, including Lt. Gov. Brown, who eventually introduces the First Lady, sending the girls into a frenzy.

After a brief rallying speech, as Obama comes forward to greet the audience, the girls literally climb on the backs of nearby adults, thrusting their arms in the air for handshakes with the First Lady.

“I’m never going to wash this hand,” exclaims one of the girls.

“I got squished,” adds the smallest girl, Lowery, 9, nonetheless smiling and holding up a smartphone video of Obama.

“Do you think she should run for office?” someone asks Jones, who scored a hug from the presidential spouse.

“Why not? She’s smart, articulate, engaged in what’s going on—even fashionable,” Jones says. Bursting into laughter, she catches herself. “You were asking about the First Lady, not my daughter,” she smiles. “Yes, she should run, too.”

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Brass in Pocket

November 6, 2014
Towson

“Two weeks ago, program director Scott Mullins asked me into his office and closed the door,” recalls general manager Steve Yasko, as anxious former 1980s teenagers and twentysomethings wait outside WTMD’s studio for the station’s weekly “Live Lunch” performance. “He leans back and folds his arms, like he always does when he has something—good or bad—to tell me. He says, ‘We’re 48 hours away from confirming Chrissie Hynde.’ Hardest thing in the world for me not to tell anyone for two days.”

Beloved for her tough but tender songs and persona, the legendary The Pretenders front woman, true to form, comes out in black boots, torn jeans, and a black T-shirt. Promoting her album Stockholm, the 63-year-old sits down between two accompanying musicians, literally rolling up her sleeves for 45 minutes of classics like “Kid” and “Talk of the Town,” and new material—her keening, seductive alto and attitude as distinct as ever. One moment she is waving off an encroaching photographer, and the next she’s generously calling out Baltimore’s All Mighty Senators, three of whom are in the audience and opened for The Pretenders on their 2003 tour.

Later, guitarist Warren Boes recalls that the Senators initially had “no idea” how Hynde chose them to fill the prestigious slot. “We were intimidated, but had to ask when we finally met her, ‘Why us?'” he recalls. “She said she saw our CD and handed it to [Pretenders’s guitarist] Adam Seymour for a listen. She said she told him, ‘These guys must be good. They’re not making it on their looks.'”

Rain or Shine

October 13, 2014
North Payson Street

Marvin “Doc” Cheatham stands with other volunteers in Matthew A. Henson Elementary School’s lobby, next to a mural of Thurgood Marshall, Eubie Blake, Frederick Douglass, and other great Baltimoreans, including Henson, the first African-American Arctic explorer. This morning marks the 4th-annual Michael Carter Men Reading in Baltimore City Public Schools Initiative, a series founded by Cheatham and named after a longtime city schools advocate. It’s more about the male role models than it is about reading. “This is the hook,” Cheatham says. “The hope is the men will become more engaged with local schools.”

Later, encouraging the children in Ms. Copeland’s pre-K class to circle around him, Cheatham takes off his jacket and begins reading Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Then he stops himself. “Are you okay? Are you shy today?” he asks a boy in the back. “C’mon up here and sit next to me.” Most of the children are enthralled, but Cheatham interrupts himself again, addressing another quiet boy. “C’mon, you come up here, too, and sit on my other side.” Finishing the tale, Cheatham, a retired government worker who grew up and still lives nearby in West Baltimore, echoes the words of principal David Guzman, reminding the kids they need come to school every day, even when it’s raining or snowing. “My name is ‘Mr. Cheatham,’ which sounds a little funny, right?” he continues to rapt attention. “If your parents can’t bring you to school—you tell them to call Mr. Cheatham, and I’ll come get you.”

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Hollywood Dreams

October 14, 2014
Jarrettsville

Anxious production assistants hustle in and around the wardrobe and prop trucks parked behind the Jarrettsville Volunteer Fire Company, serving today as the back lot of the award-winning House of Cards. Inside, 75 extras chow on a catered breakfast before getting shuttled to the set—a nearby barn—where the real-life retirees, housewives, and cable guys will portray rural Midwestern voters. Dressed in jeans, boots, and flannel shirts for a town-hall-style meeting, everyone is soon perspiring—water bottles are handed out—under the bright lights as stars Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey take turns delivering lines from the stage. “I know it’s warm, so we are going to open this big door behind me,” says Spacey, still channeling conniving South Carolina congressman-turned-President Frank Underwood during a break. “We’ll let in that cool air outside,” he tells the crowd of extras, soaking up the performance, in Underwood’s thick, faux empathetic drawl, “to offset all the [political] hot air coming from this podium.”

Many compare notes about recent extra work on HBO’s Veep, also shot in Baltimore, and past gigs. One man recounts a no-line part as a waiter on the 1970s soap Dallas, serving Larry Hagman (“I remember his cowboy hat to this day”); his TV wife, Linda Grey; and the woman who played Hagman’s mother, Barbara, Bel Geddes. “Funny thing was, years later, I get a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time. Guess the first thing he says? ‘Were you ever on Dallas?’ He’d seen a rerun somewhere.

“Of course, I asked him how I looked. He says in all seriousness, ‘You totally nailed it, Dude.’ And we cracked up.”

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Heaven’s Gate

October 25, 2014
Greenmount Avenue

On a picnic-perfect fall morning, almost four-dozen people, many with cameras, gather inside the stone and iron entrance to Green Mount Cemetery, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. Former city teacher Wayne Schaumburg has been leading tours here—the final resting place for a “Who’s Who” of Victorian Baltimore, including Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt, and Henry Walters—since 1985, first as a volunteer with the now-defunct City Life Museums. Every tour still sells out.

Built on 68 rolling acres in East Baltimore’s Oliver neighborhood, then considered “the countryside,” Green Mount is home to stunning bronze works by major sculptors William H. Rinehart and Hans Schuler, as well as 65,000 people in repose. “But you won’t find a lot of snappy epithets,” Schaumburg says beneath the yellow and red leaves of the cemetery’s massive trees. “The ones you do see, usually refer to eternal ‘sleep’ or ‘rest.’ Life was hard then and for Victorians death was often viewed as a release.”

Privately owned, Green Mount catered to Baltimore’s upper-middle and upper classes—which doesn’t mean that there haven’t been controversial and colorful characters buried on the grounds. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, once sister-in-law to Napoleon, is interred at Green Mount. Also among the buried: John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin; Johnny Eck, Baltimore’s famous “half-man” sideshow performer; and Elijah Bond, patentee of the Ouija board.

Former Mayor William Donald Schaefer also purchased a plot, Schaumburg heard, but later decided, apparently, not to be buried among the noted politicians, philanthropists, and industrialists. Instead, Schaumberg notes, “Willie Don” lies forever alongside his longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops, at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens Mausoleum.

“He’s one that got away.”

Cinema Al Fresco

High and Stiles Streets
September 5, 2014

As the sunlight fades behind Ciao Bella, a gathering crowd, many carrying picnic baskets and wine, or pizza from nearby Isabella’s, settles into the canvas chairs in the empty parking lot next door. A decade-and-a-half ago, Little Italy’s restaurant owners were at their wits’ end over the huge, bare billboard outside Ciao Bella’s—a planned mural had turned into a zoning dispute—until Da Mimmo’s Mary Ann Cricchio had an epiphany after catching a movie, al fresco, in the old country. By a small miracle, she says, the third-floor bedroom window of Ray Lancelotta’s row home (then owned by his uncle, John Pente) turned out to be the perfect height and distance to throw a 35mm film onto the billboard, giving birth, of course, to the annual, tourist-friendly, Little Italy Open Air Film Fest.

Per tradition, the final evening’s film is Cinema Paradiso—the story of a Sicilian filmmaker and his beloved boyhood theater’s projectionist. After Cricchio introduces the film—not last year’s shortened version, which drew protests, but the original, three-hour cut—Rick Huether, upstairs in Lancelotta’s bedroom, discreetly loads a Blu-ray disc into a digital projector. The state-of-the-art equipment replaced the cast-iron, 35mm projector several years ago, Huether, who works for Astro Events, admits out of earshot of moviegoers. “We could put the projector anywhere now, but people like to point out the white bulb in the window to friends who’ve never been to the festival,” he says, gesturing to just such a couple.

Meanwhile, Lancelotta, who’s been watching Cricchio’s introduction from a sidewalk bench, ducks inside his living room. “I’ve seen all the movies,” he says with a guilty smile. “I’m watching the Orioles tonight. They’re having a great year.”

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For Love of Country

North Point Road
September 6, 2014

The musket and cannon fire is so loud on the banks of the North Point Peninsula that some of those watching the action, including former steelworker David Crews, wear earplugs. Behind each shot, a putrid cloud of white smoke also blows forth—not out to the nearby Chesapeake Bay, naturally, but over the hillside crowd. “Oh man,” says Crews, shaking his head, interrupted by the stench as he tries to photograph Dundalk’s Defenders’ Day reenactment of the Battle of North Point. “That sulfur smell takes me right back to the “L” furnace at Sparrows Point.”

In 1814, some 4,000 hardened British redcoats landed here, planning to march to Baltimore and join the ships attacking the city. Instead, suffering key losses and slowed down by Maryland militiamen, they retreated after making it only as far as Patterson Park, where massive numbers of militia troops from the region were dug in. This afternoon, though, the British are giving as good as they get—standing firm in firing lines, lobbing volley after volley—before finally turning back. Their sergeant’s commands, however, are shouted in a noticeably un-English accent, with “About face!” for example, sounding more like “A-boot face!”

“We’re Canadian, from Niagara Falls,” Mike McAndrews explains. A bearded bear of a man, sweating profusely in his 23-ounce melton wool redcoat, heavy gray slacks, and boots, McAndrews notes that in the U.S., it’s difficult to find War of 1812 reenactors willing to portray the British. But in Canada, it’s the other way around. “To us, the loyalists were on the right side of history,” McAndrews says. “Look at whose picture is on our money—it’s the Queen.”

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Roland Avenue

September 15, 2014
Hello in There

Dale Johnson leans his 20-year-old, pale-green Bianchi bicycle against a Hampden porch, grabs three small trays—a hot lunch, a cold-cut dinner, plus fruit, juice, and milk—from the cooler atop his rack, and rings the bell. “How are you, Bruce?”

“I’m doing good,” the middle-aged man answering the door says, managing a smile while shakily grasping the food that Johnson has brought by. “Polish sausage and sauerkraut? I love Polish sausage.” After briefly reminiscing about his college lacrosse days, Bruce mentions he’s got a psychiatry appointment later and plans to take the bus. Johnson listens and nods before waving goodbye, off to his next Meals-on-Wheels delivery, part of a small, two-wheel program with other cyclists that he began two years ago. “The best thing, really, is that it attracts younger volunteers,” Johnson says. “The average age of Meals on Wheels drivers must be 77. I’m only 62,” he laughs.

Later, he hands a blind gentleman two meals and lets him know he may have found someone to help read him his mail on a regular basis.

At two homes, only a relative of the incapacitated recipient makes it to the door. At others, Johnson may be the only person some see and interact with all day. “I’ve had a few clients who’ve died, which is sad, but you also meet interesting people,” he says afterwards, still in his bike jersey and spandex shorts.

His favorite is Ms. LaRue. “She’s 98, 5-feet tall, but she still has a spark about her,” Johnson says. “She used to go ballroom dancing with her husband and my wife has me doing that, so we compare notes occasionally. ‘Tell your wife,’ she said to me once, ‘that Ms. LaRue thinks you have great legs.’”

Home Court

August 9, 2014
Druid Hill Avenue

The squeals of high-tops and “pop, pop, pop” of basketballs pounding asphalt fill the sweaty, tense August air rising off the Cloverdale Park court. There’s barely a word spoken, let alone any trash talk, before former NBA All-Stars Gilbert Arenas and Metta World Peace (formerly Ron Artest) arrive—in T-shirts and long shorts like everyone else—to select 10 local players to take on the national “Ball Up Streetball” touring team tonight at Towson University. An American Idol-like competition for streetballers, there’s also a $100,000 contract and chance to join the professional Ball Up squad at stake.

“I’m looking for players with fundamentals, who are tough,” the Queens-born, 6-foot-7, 260-pound World Peace tells a cable sports outlet filming the tryouts. “Gilbert, he’s going to be looking for flashy guys who can finish.”

For 90 minutes, 75 players sprint through lightning-paced drills, half-court three-on-three games, and end-to-end battles punctuated with dunks, three-pointers, and ferocious blocks.

“All these people [here], the younger kids playing ball, checking everything out—we need more of this,” says JaJuan “Ice” Robinson, a former Dunbar guard who dropped several left-handed threes and later made the final roster, glancing around the park and packed bleachers.

Afterward, at midcourt, 6-foot-3 Stephen McCray, a recent graduate of St. Catharine College where he played forward, smiles following a call from his mother. “Oh, she’s happy I made the team,” laughs McCray, who threw down a number of rim-rattling slams. “But she was calling because I took her cell-phone charger when I left the house.”

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Abiding Mom

August 23, 2014
Market Place

Sitting near the human-bowling ball cage—picture climbing into a 4-foot steel sphere and being pushed down a “lane” toward pins the size of boxing heavy bags—Dr. David Jaffe, 54, soaks in the action in Venice Beach muscle pants and a Japanese baseball T-shirt, calmly sipping a White Russian. A joint in one hand (okay, faux joint), Jaffe is, of course, impersonating “the Dude,” the radically laid-back protagonist portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ comedy, The Big Lebowski. Given his attention to detail—authentic jelly sandals, for example—Jaffe wins “best male” costume at the first-ever Cult Classic Fest at Rams Head Live. Meanwhile, his wife, Brenda, creatively channels the never-on-camera Cynthia Sobchak, ex-wife of the Dude’s best friend, Walter, by donning a Hawaiian lei and pinning a photo of her beloved Pomeranian to her dress.

“We’ve watched it 75 times,” he says. “You find something new every time.”

The event offers virtual bowling and coconut rolling—bowling is the Dude’s main recreation (along with driving around and the occasional flashback)—a trivia contest, a screening of
The Making of The Big Lebowki, plus the film itself.

Kayla Meier, 19, wins best female costume, scissoring a bright red wig into avante-garde artist Maude Lebowski’s severe bob. Meier’s mother, a “dudette” in bathrobe, sunglasses, and oversized Bermuda shorts, takes second.

“I love the message,” Mary Ann Kinsella-Meier says. “The Dude is not competitive with other people, he’s forgiving, knows who he is, and lets things roll off his back. We need people to be more like that.”

Asked if her mother displays those qualities, her daughter smiles.

“Generally,” she says, paraphrasing the movie’s famous line, “Mom abides.”

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Good Spirited

August 24, 2014
Falls Road

At twilight on a recent Sunday, David London, a magician by trade, welcomes 13 guests to the creepy space above the old stone Hampden Presbyterian Church. Among the relics on hand: a Victorian sofa suspended from the rafters, medieval rapiers, pickled animal remains, apothecary glassware, Renaissance-style portraits, dusty books on metaphysics, and a mounted deer head. London is not performing illusions or a religious ritual, per se, but hosting a more light-hearted, “Creative Spirit Séance.”

The idea is to have fun, he explains, “not to talk to your grandmother, but explore where ideas, dreams, and the imagination comes from.” Initially, guests participate in subconscious writing exercises and twist wire into random sculptures. Later, London provides a history of spiritualism, noting the Ouija board—used by Sylvia Plath (among others) for inspiration—was patented in Baltimore.

Moving to the séance area, he asks that everyone place their palms on the table and requests that the “Creative Spirit” make itself known. Eventually, a faint, ghostly voice (pre-recorded, we assume) comes across the 1970s transistor radio in front of London, who offers his own physical body to the spirit for use. After the sudden crash of a falling sword, London takes questions. “Does the ‘Creative Spirit’ have a sense of humor?” a woman asks, as London, rocking back and forth, struggles to remain in character and not break a smile.

“Yes,” the Creative Spirit intones through London. “We are in on the great cosmic joke—the mystery of life.”

Street Wise

July 11, 2014
North Avenue

Lieutenant Colonel Melvin Russell, the setting sun catching the gold trim of his police hat, is addressing several hundred men at the edge of Leakin Park on a warm Friday night. “This city belongs to all of us,” Russell implores the crowd, preparing for a 9.5-mile anti-violence march from one end of often-notorious North Avenue to the other—and back. “It’s your presence, your being out here, that’s going to turn this city around. You can’t be afraid of the kids that you used to give freeze pops and bags of chips to.”

As sirens and dirt-bike riders known as “12 O’clock Boys” fly past, organizer Munir Bahar, who launched the initial 300 Men March last summer after a string of shootings, adds that change requires time and attention: “Like a slow-cooked meal.”

Then, the men, nearly all African-American, most wearing black “300 Men March” T-shirts with “Baltimore’s Anti-Violence Movement” emblazoned in block white lettering across the back, begin their journey. Onlookers shout and cars honk encouragement as the march’s female supporters hand out water bottles every few miles.

“It gets real when you come back up under I-83 and see that hill, knowing there’s two miles to go,” laughs Ian Smith, his shaved head already glistening. Smith is also keeping tabs on Divine Jones, a Fort Worthington Elementary fifth-grader. “Even when his older brother backed out, he told me he still wanted to do it,” says Anita Harris, his mother, waiting at the Baltimore Cemetery, the halfway point. “We’ve lost a lot of friends and family to violence.”

“He took my walking stick and he was off,” Smith says.

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Bird Food

July 13, 2014
Remington Avenue

“Roll lightly. You don’t want to be smashing it into the table,” Charm City Cakes designer Mary Smith cautions her Sunday morning class who are learning the fundamentals of fondant application while competing for tickets and batting practice field passes for tonight’s nationally televised Yankees-Orioles game at Camden Yards.

Meanwhile, soon-to-be-married Orioles season ticketholders Stephen Smeal and Sherry Green are building their masterpieces side by side. He’s playing off the O’s “Birdland Passport” image, which features the Oriole bird holding a bat in each clawed foot, while her more traditional white cake is themed around the Orioles’ 60th anniversary season. Last year, the couple even planned their vacation around the team’s West Coast swing, catching several games in California. “If we win tickets,” says Smeal, “it’ll be our fourth game this week.” (They did; Green’s cake took second place.)

The proceeds from the workshop/cake competition benefit the YAI (Young Adult Initiative) Network, whose fundraising captain, Connie Schwab, has convinced her boyfriend, coincidentally Yankees beat writer Bryan Hoch—now delicately drawing the Yankees’ logo in icing—to take part. Later, using an X-Acto knife, he cuts out a silhouette of the New York skyline and rings the cake in (slightly crooked) navy blue pinstripes. “It’s good,” he says, of his rookie effort.

“Well, it’s your first time, honey,” offers his girlfriend, more objectively.

Afterward, someone suggests he present the cake to outgoing Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter as a retirement gift. “Hey, I haven’t gotten him anything, and I am flying to Minneapolis after this for the All-Star Game,” Hoch says. “I’ll see him there.”

“That’s an idea,” Schwab nods and smiles. “That way it won’t have to come back to New York with me.”

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Big Dreams

July 18, 2014
Annapolis

Inside a 210-square-foot, off-the-grid home being built behind The Key School’s administration office, Cameron Salvon-Harman, a rising Key School ninth-grader, pulls a nail from his pouch and drives it into a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood, aiming for the stud. “Crap, I missed,” he says, wiping his brow. Elsewhere on the modest construction site, a dozen middle-school campers in hard hats and safety goggles, are toting lumber, sawing wood, and building bookcases.

The first “Tiny House” built by Maryland students—according to The Key School and SustainaFest, a two-year-old, Annapolis-based sustainability and education nonprofit—the project is designed to teach students about sustainability principles. In the process, SustainaFest president George Chmael II adds, they’re also learning about green design and technology, including solar electricity and rainwater filtration. Each camp day begins with a talk from a local green expert and, ultimately, the home will become a traveling exhibit. Already, Chmael II says, the project has received a great deal of interest, including a call from Good Morning America.

“It’s a little smaller than my bedroom, but I think I could live in a house like that,” says Salvon-Harman. “I’d put it on a barge, make it into a houseboat, and sail it and live on the water for a while. Then I’d hitch it to a trailer and drive across the country—just go anywhere.”

Time for Love

June 3, 2014
Foster Avenue

Standing against a wall amongst the nervous, young professional crowd at The Chasseur, a Canton neighborhood bar and restaurant, Uriah Moore, 31, grabs a drink, admittedly trying to relax. One of 28 participants—the guys mostly dressed in jeans and Polos or button-down shirts; the ladies in sun or sleeveless dresses on this warm evening—Moore is steadying himself for a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society charity speed-dating event.

“I just got out of a four-year relationship that I knew wasn’t going to work after four weeks,” Moore, a teacher, says.

For Natalie diFrancesco, The Chasseur’s general manager and tonight’s host, the cause is personal. “My mother died of leukemia when she was 38,” she says. “Her birthday just passed.”

Eventually, the women take their spots at tables spread throughout the restaurant’s intimate dining room and the men begin moving from one to the next as diFrancesco rings a bell, ending each brief round. It looks a bit like musical chairs, except each person “rates” each mini-date on a scorecard. Afterwards, those with matching “high marks” are re-introduced with the opportunity of exchanging contact information.

“McDreamy hasn’t walked through my door yet,” says Katie Shoemaker, a school psychologist, referencing actor Patrick Dempsey’s character on Grey’s Anatomy. “Oh, but I know this guy,” she whispers as her next date approaches. “I met him Saturday night,” she laughs. “Now this should be interesting.”

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Going to Pot

June 7, 2014
Linthicum Heights

Inside a Westin BWI hotel conference room, would-be entrepreneurs, older than you might think, take copious notes as Brent Tageson discusses the finer points of his profession. Dressed in slacks and a golf shirt, Tageson could pass for a corporate CEO, but he is, in fact, a Northern California marijuana grower. Eight years ago, he was busted in a raid, but today he’s working for the Cannabis Career Institute, introducing others to a rapidly changing industry. “If you take all the moisture out,” he cautions, explaining proper “curing” techniques while gesturing to photos of large marijuana plants on the screen behind him, “all you have left is plant material. And what you want is the cannabis oil.”

The $300, all-day workshop comes on the heels of Maryland’s recent decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana and revision of the state’s medical marijuana initiative. After Tageson discusses cultivation, his partner, Aaron Silverman, addresses the retail side of the business as it’s currently playing out in California and Colorado. Some here are clearly already growers—“Sure, I’m interested in potentially opening a dispensary, but I do like to garden as a hobby,” laughs one gray-haired man—while others are attending for personal, medical, or purely entrepreneurial reasons.

“I was recently diagnosed with bladder cancer,” says another middle-aged man. “I’m an insurance agent.”

Kal Shah, a Hindu businessman, smiles when asked why he’s interested in pot. “Well, I’ve never smoked marijuana,” he admits. “But I’d consider opening a dispensary,” the good-natured Shah chuckles. “Why not? I don’t drink and I own several liquor stores, and I don’t eat meat and I own two Subway franchises.”

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Wind and a Prayer

June 8, 2014
South Exeter Street

Filing out of morning Mass at St. Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church, led by Bishop Denis Madden, some 400 Little Italy parishioners gather outside for the traditional Feast of St. Anthony procession, keeping a 110-year-old promise to the medieval Franciscan friar.

As flames moved east during the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, destroying more than 1,500 buildings in its wake, Italian immigrants were told to evacuate. “Sparks were coming into the neighborhood,” says Jerry Elliott, president of the St. Anthony’s Society of St. Leo’s. A number of worried faithful, however, went to the church and removed St. Anthony’s statue—the same one that remains in the church today—carrying it to the waterfront and praying that their homes and church be spared. “When the winds changed overnight, they decided to hold a festival every year in honor of St. Anthony,” explains Elliott, adding that although he’s Irish, he is “married to an Italian girl” with local roots.

After the procession, the statue is placed beneath a tent for prayers to the saint and donations to the poor. “I haven’t missed it since I arrived from Sicily in 1967,” says Anthony Staiti, 74, after pinning $5 on the statue and receiving a small St. Anthony medallion. “When I was sick as a child, my Sicilian mother prayed to St. Anthony every day and lit candles until I was better. As a boy, she used to dress me up in a brown robe with the white rope belt like him, and I’d march in the procession there.

“She told me when I grew up, it was up to me if I wanted to keep praying to St. Anthony,” Staiti smiles. “I do it for her. But it’s worked, right? I’m still here.”

Born Artists

May 10, 2014
Art Museum Drive

In a crowded gallery not far from the Matisses and Miros of The Baltimore Museum of Art’s contemporary collection, Lucy Dworak-Fisher stands next to her Japanese-style, black-ink piece, “Fall Tree.” It’s a simple, but elegant lined work with a few hand-cut, burnt orange leaves clinging to branches—more scattered around the trunk—set against an austere white-gray backdrop. Dworak-Fisher, in a cotton dress and sneakers, fingernails on one hand painted blue, is reticent, however, about discussing her piece. “She likes to draw, but she’s shy,” her mom smiles. “She agreed to four photographs.”

A Federal Hill Preparatory kindergartener, Lucy’s piece is part of the 8th Annual Baltimore City Public Schools Art Exhibition, presenting 400 works from 90 public schools. Highlights include a found-object portrait of singer Lana Del Rey, a detailed pencil study of an empty school hallway, an 11th grader’s unsentimental street photography, and a middle school girl’s conceptual sculpture depicting the complex world of social media.

Later, The Mount Washington School art teacher Rachel Brander, who explains the annual exhibition is as important to faculty as students—“All you go through in a year, how could you miss a day like this?”—comes across Lucy’s “Fall Tree.”

“What’s that Picasso quote?” Brander asks rhetorically. “‘All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist.’ All kids are artists until third grade. Then they start noticing that their work doesn’t look like someone else’s and they become self-conscious,” Brander continues. “School beats it [their natural creativity] out of them, too. That’s an art teacher’s job—to put it back in.”

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One Nation

May 17, 2014
Pratt Street

In the Reginald F. Lewis Museum theater, 10 local people are sharing personal stories, many bittersweet, inspired by the American flag in a program called O Say Can You Feel, related to the current For Whom It Stands exhibition. Joyce Dennison, a veteran, retired Baltimore City teacher, and former Maryland HIV/AIDS hotline director, recalls protesting segregation at the Northwood Shopping Center as a Morgan State student and the Pine Street jail where she was locked up when she considers the flag. She also recalls former U.S. Congressman Barbara Jordan’s words: “What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”

Walter Jones recites Langston Hughes’s poem, “I, Too, Sing America” and Roderick Howard II recounts the life of Charles Ball, a Calvert County slave who escaped, enlisted, and fought in the War of 1812—only to be captured and sold back into slavery.

Ella Pope reads a letter from her younger brother Calvin, written August 24, 1968, 100 days before his tour in Vietnam was scheduled to end, and just before he was killed. “I could read between the lines that he was anxious to come home,” she says, fighting back tears as the handwritten note is projected overhead.

Finally, native-Mississippian John Wesley Milton describes growing up across the street from Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till. “Everyone knew them,” Milton says. “They were the overseers in the field where we all picked cotton.” He also recalls later holding an American flag at a march when he was about Till’s age—until police officers ripped it from him. “Meanwhile, the people cursing us were waving rebel flags.

“I flashed back to second-grade when we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. And I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’”

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Metal Age

May 25, 2014
North High Street

By 10 a.m., while health-conscious, organic-food-loving crowds sip fresh-ground coffee and cheerfully sort through locally grown produce at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market & Bazaar, a darker horde, literally—dressed almost entirely in black T-shirts—is gathering outside a vacant lot across the street.

This is final day of Maryland Deathfest XII—“America’s biggest metal party of the year”—and soon 4,000 tattooed, pierced fans of doom, death, speed, black, stoner, thrash, and grindcore (no music genre has more subgenres than metal) will be headbanging below the Orleans Street overpass.

Today’s big-name acts include Sweden’s Candlemass and the U.K.’s Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, but Charm City’s own Misery Index gets the sunburned mosh pit roiling early with a deafening, scorched-earth set. “This is my sixth Deathfest, and I came to see about 10 bands, but Misery Index was one of them,” says Pedro Velazco, a sportswriter who has driven from Kokomo, IN, for the four-day festival. “I’m 43 and I still call myself a death-metal kid.”

There are loads of merch tables here, along with beer and margarita stands, and labels, like Relapse Records, offering their wares. By mid-afternoon, food vendors such as Zombie Barbeque, Headbanging Hotdogs (100 percent vegan), and Pork Lord Tacos—with upscale Bluegrass Tavern executive chef Tim Dyson manning the grill—are busy.

“Oh yeah, different crowd than we get in Federal Hill,” Dyson laughs. “This is for fun—‘Pork Lord’ is my nickname at the restaurant. I was in a high-school band and we played this shit. I love it.”

Sideshow Mom

February 22, 2014
Light Street

The handlebar-mustachioed ringmaster at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium explains that the human digestive tract actually possesses two gag reflexes. Demonstrating, he plunges a sword through a diagram of the upper esophageal sphincter and—avoiding the heart—down through the lower esophageal sphincter, to the stomach, if all goes well.

At a World Sword Swallower’s Day celebration of the 4,000-year-old Indian art, emcee Tyler Fyre then introduces the show’s star—his wife, Thrill Kill Jill, billed as the first-ever pregnant sword swallower. But first, Fyre does his part: ingesting a 27-inch rapier and bowing forward to allow a female audience member the pleasure of removing the blade. “There was some spit on it,” the woman says later, slightly grossed out.

A former neo-burlesque trouper, currently seven months pregnant, Thrill Kill Jill was roped into the sideshow biz after meeting Fyre (real names: Jill and Tyler Fleet) in Coney Island. In fact, the Harpers Ferry, WV, couple’s two children, Hank Lightning, 2, and Duke Dynamite, 1, both on hand, previously survived their own in utero brushes with mom’s sabers. It’s not the safest line of work for a family, Fyre admits, recalling a glass sword that once broke apart in his gullet and the snake that bit his wife’s face.

Now, in a lacy, deep-slit black dress, the raven-haired, vibrantly tattooed mother—very obviously carrying her boys’ future sibling—slowly lowers a 20-inch dagger into her belly until nothing but the pirate-like handle touches her red-painted lips. “There’s not much room down there,” she says, after carefully removing the cutlass. [At this point,] “I’m a sneeze away from a dime-sized amount of urine in my underpants.”

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Wizards of Lego

March 1, 2014
Hilltop Circle, Catonsville

Maneuvering efficiently, a computerized Lego rescue truck, programmed by a handful Sykesville middle school students vying for the Maryland State FIRST Lego Championship, makes deft stops and turns inside a tabletop disaster area. With the scoreboard clock above UMBC’s Retriever Athletic Center ticking down, the kids, who’ve nicknamed themselves the Test Pilots, reprogram on the fly while nervously tugging on their WWII-era fighter caps. Meanwhile, their vehicle pulls a plastic “tree” off a power line, places an evacuation sign, and moves a family out of harm’s way.

“That may be good enough for the top 10,” smiles coach John O’Neil, a dad and engineer at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. (It was.)

With monikers such as RoboSapiens and Cherry Pi, the 72 qualifying teams here are being judged not only on robotic performance, but also design, programming, research, and innovation. This year’s competition, organized around the theme, “Nature’s Fury,” is eventually won by the iLego squad from Oakland, MD, conferring a trip to a West Coast event. Meanwhile, the Tornadoes from Hollywood, MD, capture awards in robotic performance and innovative solution—conceiving a battery-operated, CO2 cooler for storing food. Dressed as characters from a certain Judy Garland movie of their great-grandparents era, they could’ve won best costume, too.

“We came up with Tornados from the theme, ‘Nature’s Fury,’” explains 11-year-old Margaret Aaron, in pigtails, blue-and-white checked blouse, and white sweater. “Then, I thought, what says ‘tornado’ better than The Wizard of Oz?”

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Animal Lovers

March 1, 2014
Pulaski Highway

Eric Vocke, who runs the Baltimore Bully Crew, a volunteer pit bull rescue, welcomes guests past the purple and black balloons, statuette of 1998 Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal, and metal detectors. Ducking inside the packed Gentlemen’s Gold Club, Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” blares from the sound system as a young, blonde, butterfly-tattooed woman twirls above the main bar. “This is ‘Tits for Pits,’” smiles Vocke, a chef by trade, referring to the 501(c)(3)’s fourth-annual fundraiser. “We’ll raise 25 percent of our annual budget here.”

Most of the $20 cover—there are more couples and women than one might expect—plus a portion of the beverage sales go to the organization’s efforts helping pit bulls, including some from dog-fighting rings. Meanwhile, former MMA fighter Gordon “Shotgun” Shell, who has offered to fight Michael Vick for charity, signs autographs and poses for pictures. There’s also a “Lapdances for 2nd Chances” raffle.

Near the Baltimore Bully Crew T-shirt and hoodie merch table, volunteer April Doherty, a Baltimore County state’s attorney’s animal abuse unit paralegal, admits last year’s event was her first venture to a strip club. “It was, um, interesting,” she says. Husband Kevin, standing nearby, adds, “It’s not really our scene, we’re usually in bed by 9:30.” Just then, an athletic young woman in nothing more than a G-string and heels lands a near-perfect backflip atop the bar, sliding down into a full split.

“I’d give that 4.4,” Kevin laughs over the music and appreciative applause.

“That,” his wife leans in, “was badass.”

Ring Tone

February 8, 2014
Joppa Farm Road, Joppa 

“There’s nine matches, and only three have been approved for weapons,” Dan McDevitt reminds the motley crew of tough guys, heels, cheap-shot artists, Samoans, and “Black Wall Street” thugs—some doing push-ups, others pulling on Lycra singlets and elbow pads—backstage at the sprawling Joppa Market Place. The venue normally hosts an Amish flea market, but tonight is the site of Maryland Championship Wrestling’s (MCW) 16th Anniversary Show.

Meanwhile, 64-year-old WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, best known for putting comedian Andy Kaufman in a neck brace in the 1980s, poses for photos with row after row of fans. Later, just before intermission, Lawler, still built like a keg of beer, enters the ring to battle “The Pinnacle” Shawn Patrick. 

Despite his age and a 2012 heart attack, which occurred announcing a show, Lawler trades body slam after body slam with Patrick, an Ocean City hotel manager by day, before finishing him off with his signature pile driver.

“Phat Blues” Kelly Bell, a 290-pound MCW wrestler, retiring because of vertebrae issues, notes that being a good wrestling heel isn’t easy. “I always started with a bad joke, but you walk a line,” says Bell, who fronts the popular Kelly Bell Band in another life. “Years ago, I grabbed the mic and asked a good ol’ boy crowd what Pink Floyd and Dale Earnhardt had in common. The punch line? ‘The last hit for both of them was ‘The Wall.’

“Too soon [after Earnhardt’s death]. My tag-team partner and I needed a state police escort out of the building.”

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Carnal Knowledge

February 14, 2014
North Avenue

Billed as a “nerd date,” an eclectic mix of straight and gay couples, gray-haired and young alike—as well as curious singles—pack Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse for a Valentine’s Day science lecture from Harvard professor Sarah Richardson, author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome. Not a traditional Valentine’s date perhaps, but romantic nonetheless. “I studied biology as an undergrad, and my boyfriend is a neuroscientist at NIH,” says Will Abshier, 22. “This is a shared interest for us.”

Naturally, there’s a photo of Bill Clinton in the presentation. Not, however, because of the former president’s infamous hormones; rather to highlight that researchers now believe there are greater genetic differences between men and women—Bill and Hillary, for example—than previously understood. According to biologist David Page, whose TED Talk Richardson uses in her lecture, men and women are about as similar, in terms of the percentage difference of their human genomes, as they are to chimpanzees.

Richardson stresses that gender descriptions as more complex than “binary” “X” and “Y” labels—and that scientific “facts” remain influenced by culture and politics. She jokes that the mapping of the human genome did not include the discovery of the “Jane Austen appreciation locus” or “channel-flipping trait”.
During the Q & A, one man asks about the human male Y chromosome, which diverged 300 million years ago in mammals, but is getting smaller. “It’s an interesting subject, especially when you consider it alongside the expanding role of women and the ways some men are reacting to that,” Richardson tells another male questioner. “But yes,” she adds with a wry smile. “There’s shrinkage.”

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Monumental City

February 22, 2014
North Gay Street

Inside the marbled War Memorial Building, about 200 people, including current Maryland National Guard soldiers and a dozen and a half surviving members of the Maryland 231st Transportation Truck Battalion are celebrating that historic, all-black unit’s 135th anniversary. Later, there will be a wreath laying at the Negro Heroes of the Unites States statue at City Hall.

Also on hand, a descendant of “Buffalo Soldier” 1st Sgt. Augustus Wiley, who served in the 9th Calvary Regiment after being born into slavery in Reisterstown.

Dubbed the “Monumental City Guards” when the unit received recognition as an all-black independent militia in 1879, the truck battalion was called to active duty during the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. “The 231st Battalion was the first U.S. National Guard unit to land in Pusan—Dec. 31, 1950,” retired Sgt. 1st Class Louis S. Diggs, the keynote speaker, tells the audience.

A member of the 231st, Diggs recalls waking up in Korea after integration came to his unit’s camp literally overnight—when troop losses and the arrival of new soldiers put black and white soldiers in the same barracks for the first time—albeit two years after President Truman’s order abolishing racial discrimination in the Armed Forces.

After Korea, Diggs spent years in Japan and Germany, not realizing how little things had changed at home. “I’ll never forget visiting my mother in Sandtown before leaving for Philadelphia where I was stationed next,” Diggs recalls. “She made me a big bag lunch for the drive—didn’t have to look inside—whatever she’d cooked, I knew would be good. But after a ways, I open it and with my food, I pull out an empty jug.

“I thought, ‘What’s this?’ And then it hit me—she knew, even if I’d forgotten—there wouldn’t be a bathroom on Pulaski Highway or Route 40 that I could use.”