Ballroom

Note: Since I recap both Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance and they're overlapping seasons this week and next, I'll be covering both nights in one recap for these first two weeks. They open with past winners and notable contestants being interviewed about how their life changed by putting on a number and getting in the audition line. My favorite bit is Mary with a giant, tight, curly hairdo, like when we had perms in the '80s. Tuesday Night - Los Angeles Auditions We're in Los Angeles at the Orpheum Theatre.

"Is there any way out other than the main stairs?" I asked. My husband, our real-estate agent, the seller's agent and I were standing in the finished basement of a home in Owings Mills. It was a vast space: a nice bathroom, a media room, a room big enough to waltz in and another room with hidden panels in the walls for stashing who knows what. There was even a fireplace at the bottom of the stairs, creating a spa-like atmosphere. But no, the selling agent said that there was just the one staircase, noting that some people like having only one way into the basement because exterior doors attract thieves.

With just five weeks until wedding bells ring, there are seating charts to be made, flowers to be ordered and playlists to be finalized. But Bri Fletcher and Matt Terry put all that aside to spend their Friday evenings following the directions “slow, slow, quick-quick” over and over ... and over. They, like a growing number of couples, want their first dance as husband and wife to rise above the hug and sway. They want a dance floor debut that sparkles (not to mention twirls, turns and dips)

He may not be the trend-setter he once was, but David Bowie still seems full of surprises. A year ago, he and his band were sharing arenas with Nine Inch Nails; this Saturday, Bowie moves to the opposite end of the spectrum, playing a "ballroom" show at Washington's Capitol Ballroom.Unlike the last tour, which focused on his "Outside" album, this mini-tour -- just four shows altogether, with two in New York and one in Philadelphia in addition to the D.C. date -- promises an eclectic and unpredictable mix of material.

We asked Sun readers for stories about their vacations in Ocean City. This is what they told us: The frustrated teen-ager and the formidable chaperone "Spring break in Ocean City during 1971 was not what I expected. The weather was perfect, skies were blue, but I was saddled with my 75-year-old grandmother, who was sent to chaperone me. "Since my grandmother was from Greece, she did not understand what a teen-age girl in Ocean City needs: boys, beach and boardwalk. I had spent numerous hours trying on bikinis, hot pants and micro-minis in order to get noticed on the boardwalk and the beach, but Yia Yia Paulina frightened all the potential male suitors away.

Competing in Hunt Valley, SwingTime Ballroom placed at the top with its dancers at the 2011 Atlantic Dancesport Challenge. Studio owner and instructor Scott Layfield took amateur student Barbara Ziegler, of Bel Air, to victory in the American Smooth Closed Bronze 3-Dance Challenge. Professional Vladimir Skrylnikov and amateur partner Gina Kazimir, of Bel Air, also won a championship with their victory in the American Smooth Closed Bronze 3-Dance Scholarship, after taking top honors in Waltz, Tango and Foxtrot as well.

THERE IT was in Time two weeks ago, a blurb in the Trend Alert section that, depending on your point of view, signals either the apocalypse or a new, more playful mood among newlyweds. The blurb said that in cities like Baltimore and Atlanta, the traditional wedding cake is being replaced by tiers of - you may want to be sitting - Krispy Kreme doughnuts. For this, you can thank - or blame - Matt and Sherri Rybczynski. I wish you could meet Matt and Sherri, who live in White Marsh. He's 31, she's 26. He's boy-band handsome, she has guys on the street walking into light poles.

Vivian Green seems to think she's doing something that nobody else has ever done before. Most new pop vocalists go on about their influences - how they absorbed Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, Carole King's Tapestry or somebody else's record and it sparked something within. But Green, the latest singing-songwriting darling in the crowded urban-pop field, says she has always done her own thing, followed her own instincts, shaped her own sound. The comparisons to Alicia Keys, Minnie Riperton and Jill Scott really grate on her nerves, you know.

Moving from a suburban bookstore to a swanky ballroom, this year's Book Bash will feature nearly 50 authors, including historians, actors and writers of children's books. After more than 600 people attended last year at the Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley, organizers moved tonight's event downtown to the Tremont Grand. This year, a bigger space, a jazz band and flutist, caterers and presentations by authors Chip Silverman and Michael Tucker (of L.A. Law fame) may mean an even larger turnout, said Caryn Sagal, the event's publicity chair.

Of course the wonderful thing about "Strictly Ballroom," opening today at the Senator Theatre, is that it's not strictly ballroom. It's strictly everything.It's one of those wondrous fables that seems to bore in so intensely on such a small subject that you only notice upon reflection the scale of its ambition. At the time you hardly notice it, because you're having such a good time.It might be seen as the vivid, comic dramatization of a truth uttered about academic life but applicable to any intensely factional human enterprise: The fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small.