Color

After decades of sporting green and white markings, the patrol cars driven by officers from the Bel Air Police Department are now sleek black. "We felt it was time to move forward a little bit," Deputy Chief Rick Peschek said when asked about the new look, adding the change will be like day and night. Black is a power color. A few years back, a fear in the conspiracy theory community was that a shadow government with a legion of black helicopters would soon be taking over. Then there are those black Secret Service vehicles with black tinted windows that show up in the strangest places when a high ranking official is visiting.

Add some personality to your meals with these oven-to-table cocottes from the Martha Stewart Collection, a fun way to personalize dishes from baked puddings to casseroles. Each lidded ceramic dish holds eight ounces. Sold in pairs, choose either the green cow/blue duck combo or the red chick/yellow rabbit. The cocottes are oven-safe to 450 degrees and dishwasher-safe. Each box also has a sample recipe. Set of two, $34.99 at Macy's stores and macys.com. — John-John Williams IV , The Baltimore Sun .

Mums are bee and butterfly magnets Just when I thought the bees and butterflies had disappeared from our garden until spring, I found more visiting our "chrysanthemums" (mums) than I could count. And, during one Indian-summer afternoon, I saw more bees and butterflies on our mums than I'd seen in our garden all summer. Guaranteed to enliven a fall landscape, mums are as popular with people as they are with bees and butterflies. Yet mums were popular with people more than 3,000 years ago, too, when they were first cultivated by the ancient Chinese.

For those of you anticipating the return of the "Maryland Pride" football uniforms, the wait appears to be over. Maryland is planning to wear the uniforms - yes, THOSE uniforms - for Saturday's game against Georgia Tech, according to multiple folks in the know. The school hasn't yet made an announcement. These uniforms will actually be a variation (different color scheme, I'm told) than the multi-colored Under Armour creations that debuted in last season's opener against Miami.

There was a time when the real reasons weren't known for why the autumn leaves of leaf-losing trees and shrubs look so colorful prior to falling. But it was an important question just the same, since autumn's leaf-color changes clearly signaled the end of the growing season. In lieu of a scientific explanation, then, other explanations were concocted - and some were as colorful as autumn-colored leaves themselves. For instance, according to pre-Colombian Algonquins - Native Americans that once resided in our area - a fierce fight was fought long ago and high in the sky by spirit warriors against a great-bear spirit.

What are the season's hottest colors, and how do you properly incorporate them into your home? My season's hottest colors are a deep turquoise peacock and gray. I love turquoise peacock. Right now, I'm working on a master bedroom of a young couple who are world travelers who have been everywhere, including Morocco. In their bedroom, they have a lot of oversized wood furniture. I'm doing a finish on the wall that is an Americanized plaster version of tadelakt — a Moroccan plaster technique.

It's easy being green, once you learn the knack. To create the distinctive pigment for Elphaba, the title witch in "Wicked," makeup designer Joseph Dulude had one goal. "The most important thing was that we didn't want it to look fake," Dulude said. "We wanted it to look like skin, and we wanted Elphaba to be pretty. People hate her not because she's ugly, but because her skin color is different. " Dulude tried several products before he settled on Landscape Green Chromacake, after discovering that it could not be applied full-strength, which required airbrushing.

Sinful Colors, a Revlon-owned nail-polish line, is warning state regulators of 117 layoffs in Beltsville as it closes the Prince George's County facility next year. The layoffs, set to begin Jan. 1, appear to be the Maryland manufacturing cuts that Revlon said in September would be coming as part of a global reorganization eliminating 250 jobs. The company would not say then how many layoffs would hit Maryland, or where its local manufacturing operations were located. State officials and a number of local economic development representatives said they didn't know the facility's location — even the Prince George's County Economic Development Corp.

Labor Day has come and gone, but there's no need to pack away all that white. Not only can you still wear it, you can use the color to give your decor a lift. Fashion designers from Derek Lam to J. Mendel stocked their fall 2012 collections with crisp winter whites. And interior designers agree: All year round, white is hot. Patrick Sutton, a Baltimore interior designer and owner of Patrick Sutton Home in Harbor East, has long extolled the virtues of decorating with white. "It's been one of my favorite colors for my whole career," he says.

Expecting the usual entertaining evening delivered by talented players at Toby's Dinner Theatre of Columbia, I found instead a life-affirming, near-religious experience at "The Color Purple" - a musical epic tracing a black woman's journey from abject subjugation in youth to achieving in maturity love, power and nobility. Adapted from Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg's film, the musical follows Celie, from a poor girl in 1911 Georgia, at age 14 in her second pregnancy resulting from rape by her father, through her struggles until maturity.