Sheila Dixon made her debut the other night as a Stoop Storyteller. Make that Poop Storyteller.
The mayor took the stage at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on Monday night to share a holiday memory as part of the popular storytelling series.
When she was a little girl growing up in West Baltimore, Dixon said, she and her older brother and sister always climbed into bed together on Christmas Eve to await Santa. Then along came another little Dixon.
The baby of the family was about 9 months old when his first Christmas rolled around. He was still in a crib, so it was decided that the future mayor, then about 5, would sleep in there with him.
"In the middle of the night, I started to feel something, something warm and mushy," Dixon said. "I woke up, I put on the light. This is Christmas Eve. We're in new pajamas looking forward to Santa Claus. Well, I woke up, and I had poop all over me. My brother had pooped all over the crib and all over me."
Not the usual Meyerhoff fare, but there were laughs all around, The Baltimore Sun's Annie Linskey reports.
Anybody out there who thinks poop stories aren't exactly mayoral might recall how Thomas D'Alesandro III famously described the job. After leaving office, "Young Tommy" said being mayor was like being served plate after plate of poop. (Except he used another word for it.)
Oh gee, Mom and Dad
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein surely expected his life to be scrutinized as he emerged as a leading candidate to head the Food and Drug Administration. But all the way down to conception?
The Wall Street Journal's health blog has an article on Baltimore's health commissioner that links to a piece his parents, both doctors, wrote a couple of years ago for Academic Psychiatry. Title: "The Two-Physician Family: A Balancing Act of Work and Love."
And Steven and Margaret Sharfstein, who met and married in medical school, write about l-o-v-e at one point as an action verb. As in the act of conceiving the potential FDA chief.
"A key choice was the timing of our first child," they write. "During our internship and despite being on call every other night and every other weekend and sometimes being out of sync with each other, 'we' managed to get pregnant."
Sharfstein declined to comment. He wouldn't say if it was the Obama transition team or his parents who were keeping him mum.
A moment of fame, a little swag
