Common Thread

DEAR LOVED ONES of World Trade Center victims: "I'm sorry for what happened at the trade center. Go on with life, do it for them. Believe in the government and President Bush. They'll bring the people to justice. Nobody will escape. All will live to regret what they've done. Always remember them. Your loved ones." - Matt Odom "I am so sorry that the people you loved and treasured got killed in a terrible plan by evil people. Don't feel so bad because I'm sure your friends and family that died loved you so much.

GAITHERSBURG - The first thing you notice is that they don't notice. A strain of "Swan Lake" collides mid-air with a Latin samba and Pink Floyd's "Money." But the female gymnasts who are Maryland's Olympic hopefuls seem to hear only the bars that measure out the rhythms of their particular routines. Hill's Gym is 22,000 square feet, with approximately 40-foot ceilings, but during a recent practice, it is filled with activity. At the ballet barre, a small group of students practices footwork.

In his first two programs as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Yuri Temirkanov proved that he could make this orchestra shine in a demanding showpiece like Mahler's Symphony No. 2, and coax an utterly idiomatic performance from it in works like Ravel's "Ma Mere L'Oye Suite" and Debussy's "La Mer." Last night, he pulled off a far more difficult trick: He made the unfamiliar seem inviting, and the overly familiar sound fresh and compelling. In this case, the works in question were the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, and the Beethoven Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica")

HOW much commonality of knowledge does a society require? The end of last year saw three prominent news stories that confronted the reader with this question. One described contemplated changes in the University of Chicago's undergraduate program. Another described a looming boom in niche programming for cable television. Yet a third showed that white and African-American television viewers increasingly occupy separate universes where non-sports programming is concerned. Cutting the required core curriculum from one-half to a mere one-third of a student's load is University of Chicago president Hugo Sonnenschein's response to today's "commodification and marketing of higher education."

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. -- Tucked away in West Virginia, the Contemporary American Theater Festival may be a long way from the country's major cultural centers, but the productions at this small, professional festival illuminate some of the larger issues of our times.In residence each July at Shepherd College, where it presents plays in repertory at the 450-seat Frank Center for the Creative Arts and the 99-seat Studio Theater, the festival draws out-of-state audiences from Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington.

Students can play the didgeridoo, learn the art of songwriting and build their own Native American flutes at the fourth annual Common Ground on the Hill next week.While dabbling in the arts, they might learn about other cultures.The weeklong celebration of music and the arts opens Sundayat Western Maryland College in Westminster, with courses and performances designed to build bridges between cultures."I'm looking forward to meeting with new people and reuniting with some of the musicians I've performed with in the past," said Peggy Seeger, a songwriter and instrumentalist who has taken part in nearly 100 recordings.

JERUSALEM - It was a dead language, an 8,000-word relic. And as 19th-century Jewish pilgrims began settling the hills and valleys of what would become Israel, the status of Hebrew seemed like that of the crumbling Roman aqueducts strung across the landscape - interesting to study but unfit for restoration.Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, felt that way, wanting no part of a language that you couldn't even use to buy a train ticket. Use German or English, he said, or both.That left it up to lingual zealot Eliezer Perlmann, who arrived in Jerusalem from Lithuania in 1882, changed his name to Ben Yehuda and took up the cause of Hebrew.

At first glance, this year's juried show at School 33 Art Center appears to have such diversity that you might think it was judged by half a dozen people. Four of the eight participants are abstract artists and four are representational artists. Four are painters, one contributes an installation, one combines painting and drawing, one works in photo transfer and one's a fiber artist.But there was only one juror, Margo Crutchfield, associate curator of 20th-century art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

CARROLL COUNTY'S municipal elections this month confirmed that they are strictly local affairs, with few common threads and little overlay of countywide politics. Voter turnout was heavy in New Windsor, with a heated mayoral race, and light in places such as Taneytown, where three incumbent council members ran unopposed.Last-minute write-in campaigns in Westminster and Union Bridge demonstrated voter discontent with incumbents or election skulduggery, depending on one's viewpoint.Despite some political predictions about age and generation gaps, there was no definite trend.

When Lisa Keir saw an Oldsmobile with two men pull up near her car in the Towson Town Center parking garage, she thought everyone's worst nightmare was about to happen to her."He said he wanted my purse and I gave it to him," said Keir, 49, of Glyndon. "I feel fortunate that all I have is a bad memory and a sore arm."Keir's experience -- robbed and shoved to the ground by a man wielding a metal club -- also became a statistic in the dramatic growth of robberies in Baltimore County.Police this week issued a report on crime showing a 25 percent increase in robberies in the first three months of the year, compared with the first quarter of 1995 -- 727 robberies of people and businesses between Jan. 1 and March 31, against 583 during the same period last year.