Black And White

For many folks headed to Preakness, the focus of the afternoon isn't the race. It's the fashion — and we don't just mean hats. If you're in the grandstands, the Jockey Club area or Corporate Village, you'll want to dress the part. Betsy Dugan, owner of Bettina Collections in Cross Keys and former co-owner of Octavia in Pikesville, has been dressing women for Preakness for years. "This is the time ... to dress up," she said. If there's one rule of thumb, it's that ladies and gentlemen at Preakness should look like ...well, ladies and gentlemen.

Wedding date: Feb. 9, 2013 Her story: Dana Perzynski, 28, grew up in Columbia. She is an associate planner with Ayers Saint Gross, an architectural and planning firm in Baltimore. Her mother, Karen Kurzawa, is a commercial interior representative; her father, Paul Perzynski, died in 1996. His story: Graham Johnson, 30, grew up in Davidsonville. He is a vice president and commercial relationship manager at SunTrust Banks. His father, Todd Johnson, is managing director of investor relations for National Real Estate Advisors; his mother, Gail Johnson, died in 2008.

Our 60-year-old house, which we've been slowly renovating, contains a guest bathroom that's in need of new wall tiles. The original floor, still in place, consists of the small black-and-white tiles that were the norm back in the '40s. And you can guess what color all the fixtures are. We'd like to retain the style that the homebuilders chose for this small but functional bathroom, even though it's kind of dull. Can you suggest ways of introducing a bit of visual fizz without altering the basic design?

Editor's note: Freelance writer Diedre A. Ware grew up in Havre de Grace and graduated from Havre de Grace High School. Her recollections of what it was like growing up black in an era when children's dolls were white was published recently in Dolls magazine based in Iola, Wis., http://www.dollsmagazine.com . It is republished here with permission, along with photographs that ran with the Dolls magazine version. As a child, my dolls were by best friends. When I confided in them, I knew they would never tell.

True story: In the early '70s, this newspaper's most incompetent copyreader was in career trouble. It seemed his employers expected him to spell words correctly, even the hard ones, like sheriff and caricature. He also wanted to write, but in the phrase of Peter De Vries, hated the paperwork. His prospects in either endeavor were limited.Add the fact that it was Christmas Eve, the mega-depressive spoonful-of-arsenic night of the year. Add the fact that he had been so busy thinking about his own problems that it suddenly dawned on him he had not bothered to buy his poor, hard-working wife a Christmas present.

For the first few decades, movies only came in black and white. Then color took over and elbowed its predecessor into the shadows.But a little black and white can still do a lot for a film - as New Line's "Pleasantville" proves. "Pleasantville," which opened in theaters Friday, uses glorious B&W to depict the title town, a throwback to those wholesome little villages that dominated TV screens of the 1950s (think "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver"). The effect is both nostalgic and visually striking.

I'm having a ridiculous argument with my husband, who insists that my new job means more to me than our marriage. This is the story: When I married five years ago, I wore only minis. I have great legs, and I admit that I used them to the best advantage.Then I got a promotion, and because I wanted to look professional, I started wearing pantsuits. Now my husband is complaining. He says he fell in love with my legs, but now all he sees are pants. He wants me to get out my old dresses and wear them.

The invention of photography radically changed people's relationship to images because it revolutionized their ideas about what pictures could look like and mean. Two shows currently at area galleries demonstrate that the camera can describe the world in characteristically minute detail, even when the images it produces are not photographs at all in the conventional sense. Laurie Snyder's exquisite black-and-white images of trees at Goucher College's Rosenberg Gallery, and Philip Bogdan's large color prints of woods at the Maryland Federation of Art's City Gallery, revisit the idea of landscape by calling into question the nature of photographic representation.

The old black-white dialogues explaining American racial tension in Los Angeles are sadly inadequate. The truer racial landscape is self evident at the Los Angeles morgue in the wake of the riots: Latino and Asian bodies lying next to dead black and whites.We remain wedded, however, to the romantic notion that the American identity is being forged out of the tumultuous black-white embrace. American movies such as "48 Hours" offer us images of black-white bonding stories. But watching Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte brawling it out in San Francisco, I am more intrigued by what's not told.

When I was in my early 20s I had a black-and-white pantsuit that I just loved. Then I married, had two children and put on weight. Now after six months of dieting I am back to my original 130 pounds. As a reward I want to get myself another striped pantsuit. But every time I try one on my husband says I look like a jailbird. Should I give up?Of course not. A striped pantsuit is young, dashing and always looks modern. That's why so many designers like stripes and keep using them in different width and color combinations.

Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Baltimore-born Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer and first black Supreme Court justice who was instrumental in ending Jim Crow segregation. His representation of schoolgirl Linda Brown resulted in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which ended separation practiced in a wide variety of public facilities and institutions. Yet Marshall sought more than just desegregation. Explaining his vision, Marshall proclaimed that "a child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi … has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States.

The storms of winter 2010 shut down roads, cancelled classes, closed up shops and nearly ended a signature Baltimore event before it started. On a cold January night, organizers of the Pratt Contemporaries' inaugural Black and White Party watched the uncertain forecast and the falling snow, worried that the conditions were going to keep guests away from their humble celebration. Yet several inches of snow - usually a kiss of death for the winter-wary in Maryland - did not prevent 200 or so people from attending.

Wedding day: Oct. 27, 2012 Her story: Marielle Alexis Newman, 27, grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. She is a color specialist for Under Armour. Her dad, Howell Newman, works for IBM and her mother, Leona Newman, works for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. His story: Benjamin Allen Schiffman, 26, grew up in East Petersburg, Pa. He is a patent examiner for the U.S. Patent Office. His dad, Jeffrey Schiffman, is the sports director at WSBA, a radio station in York, Pa. His mother, Lynne Morrison, is the executive director of Hands-on House, a children's museum in Lancaster, Pa. Their story: The couple met at University of Delaware, when Benjamin was a freshman and Marielle was a sophomore.

Appropriately, given the prominent TV references, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opens its 2012-2013 SuperPops season this weekend with a rerun — a program called "The Golden Age of Black and White. " This celebration of 1950s television and more first "aired" in 2006 and proved to be a vibrant, smoothly crafted example of the productions created by the Symphonic Pops Consortium, founded in Indianapolis by BSO principal pops conductor Jack Everly. The show's return promises an equally refreshing dip into the past.

For more that two decades, author Emily Bernard has been fascinated by Carl Van Vechten, a white man who played a seminal - and controversial - role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. She was in turns appalled by Vechten's air of entitlement, amused by some of his provocations and moved by his devotion to individual artists. (For instance, Van Vechten lobbied authorities to erect a nude, anatomically correct statue in New York's Central Park of the African-American activist James Weldon Johnson.

Lord help us, they're talking race again. "They" meaning Republicans and Democrats. Race is a critical, sensitive and sometimes painful issue with relevance to everything from environmental policy to education reform to criminal justice to media to health care. For a politician to address it requires political courage. That's why politicians do not address it. Usually. That changes during political season when a given pol calculates that breaking his customary silence might net some tactical advantage.

School officials in Baltimore County are unnerved by it; in Howard County, they're studying it. In Anne Arundel, they're under a federal agreement to fix it. The problem they and many other school systems share is a huge disparity in the levels of school disciplinary actions against black and white students. Black students are suspended at triple the rate of whites nationally.To say this is a volatile issue is to understate the case. Some observers, particularly black parents and scholars, believe the schools have difficulty communicating with black youths.

The recent school test scores were depressing ("Stuck in place," July 11). I attended school during the Great Depression and into the early 1940s when those who did find jobs were often victims of frequent layoffs. In that environment, children had to be raised in poverty, too. There was no television and a single radio, perhaps an RCA Victor "Victrola," was in the house. Libraries were few and far between. Students walked to school in all kinds of weather or rode a streetcar to distant locations.

If you didn't get a chance to attend the recent Black and White Party, a fund-raiser for the Enoch Pratt Free Library, you can get a taste of the event at this Baltimore Sun photo gallery. The event, whose theme was "Evening in Paris," was organized by the Pratt Contemporaries, a group of young professional who support the library.  Here's another Pratt event worth attending: this Saturday's Booklovers' Breakfast with Michael Eric Dyson. It will be held at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, 700 Aliceanna St., from 8:30 a.m. to noon.