Over six feet tall and a trim 170 pounds, Mark Belanger had the fearless, Mediterranean good looks of a matador and played shortstop for a baseball dynasty of yore known as Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles. With a .977 fielding average and eight gold gloves over 18 seasons – all but one of them for the [...]
In “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” - Carolyn Chute’s classic narrative of rural poverty – chickens abound. “... the layin’ hens and green-tailed gamecock feed on the fish guts Beal [Bean] slings into the grass ...” Wittman hens The Sunderland fowl of Wittman on Harris Creek just south of St. Michaels do not [...]
“Baltimore isn’t just more fun than D.C., it’s way out there with quirks and weirdness …” -Mourna Handful, burlesque artist Mourna Handful / photo credit: Sean Scheidt “The Block” – a half-mile of go-go joints and gin mills on East Baltimore Street that once attracted sailors, grifters, strippers and drifters from around the [...]
Taylor Branch Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of the Rev. Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights movement; recently told a bookstore audience that “the Sixties and the Civil Rights movement captured my interest against my will …” Branch, 67, was speaking to an audience at the Ivy Book Shop [...]
HAMPDEN GALLERY HOLDING READINGS THROUGH MARCH 1, OWNER TO DEVOTE HIMSELF TO OILS & CANVAS Minas Konsolas, artist, gallery owner More than two decades of original art, used blue jeans and all the wisdom you can handle from the philosopher behind the counter will come to an end early this spring when Minas Konsolas [...]
“Oh Baltimore, man it’s hard just to live …” - Randy Newman, poet Some of the biggest names in the Baltimore writing community – newspaperman Michael Olesker, steelworker’s daughter Deborah Rudacille and novelist Jen Michalski among them – will soon give readings of their work at a saloon in the Parkville neighborhood. The first [...]
Much is made of the last words the dying speak before passing to the next world. The writer William Saroyan, whose stories celebrate living life to the fullest, phoned his exit line into the Associated Press shortly before his death at age 72 in 1981. Maria Santa Zannino, Christmas, 2012 “Everybody has got to [...]
“All booksellers are connected by some cosmic fabric …” - Rock Toews, bookseller That fabric, of course, is literature. From yard sales to estate sales, good books and old manuscripts find their way to pre-ordained shelves. Few tales have illustrated the mysticism under-girding the lives of books better than Cynthia Ozick’s “The Messiah of [...]
It was the favorite book of the poet’s father, Beautiful Swimmers, a collection of tales about the Chesapeake that won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1977. Ted Betts [1931-to-2005] was a native Baltimorean [birth name Theodore Alva Butts] who painted landscapes in watercolor and oil. The coasts of Maryland and Virginia were Delmarva were [...]
“Old man, take a look at my life … I’m a lot like you were …” - Neil Young Rafael Alvarez, 1904 to 1990 My father and I went to the graveyard in East Baltimore on Father’s Day to visit his father. We took grass clippers, a clean rag and a small vial [...]