The day's breakfast special at the Woman's Industrial Exchange is creamed chipped beef on toast for $3. Its mere appearance on the menu launches Baltimore filmmakers Lillian Bowers and Matt Pittroff into a riff worthy of Proust's madeleine.
They're a funny pair to be reminiscing together over morning platters past. Bowers, mother of a young son, married to an astrophysicist, feels most comfortable in a realm bereft of strip malls and other contemporary indignities. "I'm not at peace in the world the way it is," she says, "so I look back."
Pittroff, 28, on the other hand, earns his keep making commercials. He and his TruckStop Motion Picture Company team are also responsible for the award-winning "Entrepose," a film he describes as a "very experimental, droll comedy. We locked ourselves in a condemned hotel. It was an incredible creative experience."
Odd as it may seem, Bowers and Pittroff share artistic sensibilities - and a sense of humor about each other's peccadilloes. Even though the two had given it little thought until two years ago, they also share a love of the Woman's Industrial Exchange, its chipped beef, fabled tomato aspic and timeless gentility. Their film, "Not a Lady Among Us!" documenting the institution's 120 years on North Charles Street, premieres tonight, sandwiched between champagne and dessert receptions, at the Senator Theatre.
Bowers, who works on the support staff of the Johns Hopkins University library, was drawn to the Exchange after meeting Kathleen Waters Sander, a Silver Spring historian and author of "The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900." Bowers had recently completed "Little Castles," a piquant, consummately "Baltimore, hon" appreciation of Formstone, the fake-rock faM-gade that graces so many rowhouses and other structures throughout the city.
As Bowers learned about the Exchange's role in helping needy women support themselves and their families by selling hand-crafted goods in its gift shop, a movie took shape in her mind.
The Exchange film project embodied two dovetailing notions that Bowers delights in: The notion that nothing is what it seems and her sense that 19th-century Baltimore "is right under the skin." How many people, she wondered, had passed the building over the years with no clue that within a way of life had persisted for more than 100 years? Bowers wanted others to feel the presence of that past as she did.
