Creative Alliance

The luckiest day in Federico Fellini's life may have been the day the circus sent him packing. Fellini, the subject of a month-long film series beginning tonight at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown, was only 7 at the time, and the middle-class life his parents had made for themselves in the small Italian village of Rimini wasn't doing it for him. Like many kids, he dreamed of something more exciting, more splendid, more colorful. So he ran away from his boarding school and linked up with a traveling circus for a life of clowns and jugglers and animals and people who in their day would have been called freaks.

Avoid the crowded malls on Sunday and opt for an artsy gift instead. The Creative Alliance's holiday-shopping alternative, Merry Mart, is an art lover's haven filled with clothing, jewelry and hand-painted brie-box clocks. All the gifts are original works of art crafted by 35 area artists. "The idea is to buy something unique and unusual, something you can't buy somewhere else, something special," says artist Kini Collins, the event's organizer. Collins and Creative Alliance directors Megan Hamilton and Kristen Anchor joined forces to give craft artists a venue at the Patterson in Highlandtown.

A decade ago, Margaret Footner had an idea: To transform her tiny Fells Point cafe into a space suffused with creative energy where local artists, business people and residents could mingle and strengthen the bonds of community. Though that's a tall order for a local restaurant known mainly for simple food and good company - for years the clientele of Margaret's Cafe included the cast of NBC's Homicide: Life on the Streets - Footner was undaunted. Over the years, the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, the organization founded by Footner and two colleagues, has become one of Baltimore's most innovative and inclusive arts venues.

The Creative Alliance has released the lineup for Art to Dine For, its annual series of fall dinner parties benefiting the Highlandtown-based arts organization The schedule includes some 30 dinners, brunches, cocktail parties and get-togethers, taking guests inside artists' studios, private homes, galleries, public parks and even a cemetery. The first event, on Sept. 10, is Backstage Scoop, "an evening of white wine and high energy" with Center Stage artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, to be held at the Roland Park home of Creative Alliance trustees.

Timothy Dicke works all day doing maintenance and other jobs around Baltimore and then goes out all night with his camera, shooting up to 2,000 photos each week of Maryland scenes lit by a phosphorescent glow. Thirty of the very best are the subject of a one-man show, the artist's first, running through Nov. 7 at Creative Alliance. There are companion shots of the Domino Sugars plant - the cheery front, in which the familiar, red and yellow sign and the lights from the office building are reflected in the nearly motionless waters of the Inner Harbor, and a moody photo of the rear, in which a lilac wall contrasts with the rest of the shadowed edifice.

Less than a year into the existence of the Creative Alliance, when the cash-strapped organizers were practically checking the upholstery cushions for loose change every night, they received -- unsolicited -- a check for $150 from Amalie Rothschild, the Baltimore sculptor and arts philanthropist. "We didn't know her," said Megan Hamilton, program director of the nonprofit Baltimore arts center. "We hadn't met her. We hadn't solicited her. She just spotted what we were trying to do and lent her support.

At the turn of the millennium, India remains for most Westerners a distant and enigmatic land: the world's second most populous nation and its largest democracy, a huge, underdeveloped country armed with indigenously developed nuclear weapons, an economic powerhouse cursed by such crushing poverty that tens of millions of its citizens are reduced to living on the streets. Photography came to India in the nineteenth century during the days of the British Raj, and ever since then Westerners with cameras have been trying to penetrate its mysteries.

After spending the night baking cookies, the morning putting a giant snowflake on her front door and a tabletop tree in her window, Mink Stole is very much in the mood to talk about her Christmas show at the Creative Alliance this weekend. And there's one thing she wants to make clear right away: This show is all about Mink Stole, cabaret singer and storyteller. It will have little, if anything, to do with another incarnation of Mink Stole, the one who has appeared in every John Waters film but one, playing everything from Edie the Egg Lady's wicked stepsister to a ruthless contender for the title of filthiest person alive.

Noncultists may ask, "The big the-whatski?" But The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers' 1998 cult film that defined a post-countercultural sort of slackerdom, is now bigger than ever, a hep hub for fan celebrations nationwide. And Lebowski fever is coming to Baltimore this weekend, with Dude- Fest! The Big Lebowski Tribute Party. It promises to make up in ingenuity what it lacks in scale. Lebowski fans, pay attention! Initiates, bear with me! Charm City's DudeFest will boast Wii bowling, so you can bowl and see the movie at the same venue.