Curtain

For all the wondrous places television has taken us over the years, one of the few places it doesn't let us visit is within its own halls.Why? Who knows? Maybe the fear in letting us peek is that if viewers see just how and why things get done behind the camera, they'll come away looking at the business the same way Dorothy came to see the Wizard of Oz once the curtain flew open: a lot of smoke and flash, but no substance.The latest installment of HBO's now monthly "Real Sports" magazine, premiering Monday at 10: 30 p.m., with re-airs next Thursday at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., pulls open the curtain on one of the best television brawls going, the fight between Fox and ESPN for cable sports television supremacy.

Latease Hewlett, a 19-year-old sophomore at the College of Notre Dame, could model a shower curtain and make it look good. In fact, she has worn a shower curtain -- turned into a snazzy, belted jacket by her uncle, Danny Hewlett -- at a fashion show back in her City College high school days. The curtain, graced with quarter and sixteenth notes and topped off with vintage 45s, would cause even the biggest fashion skeptic to sing in the shower.When she's not styling on the runway, Hewlett, of North Baltimore, is sweet on designer labels such as Dolce & Gabbana, Isaac Mizrahi, Emanuel Ungaro, DKNY and the store, Bebe.

Olivier Debre,79, one of France's best-known abstract painters of the post-war era, whose large-format works include the stage curtain at the Comedie Francaise, died in Paris on Tuesday. His form of art, which he described as "opposite to the geometric abstraction of the Cubism of Cezanne and Picasso," involved daring splashes of color applied with thick brush strokes intended to create a poetic and sensual mood.Ernie Wilkins,79, St. Louis-born composer and saxophonist who played with Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton, died Saturday in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Last summer's pool pass.Three dirty socks.One wrinkled shirt.Two old vocab tests.One linty superball.OK, the pool pass and one sock are yours, but the rest of this junk under your bed? It's your roommate's - you know, the sloppy kid who sleeps in that other bed across the room? Yeah, the one who happens to be your A) brother or B) sister.For sibling roommates, sharing messes, space, music and walls just goes with the territory (even if it feels as if that territory is only 3 square feet!)

Quote: "I didn't know whether to go out there or not. So, you know, I asked some of the guys, 'Can I go out there?' and they said, 'Yeah, go ahead.' I kind of got goose bumps all over." -- Diamondbacks rookie Travis Lee, who drove in five runs and earned his first curtain call.It's a fact: The Marlins are 9-29 in games in which they score first.Who's hot: The Phillies' Doug Glanville is hitting .403 (25-for-62) with three home runs during a 13-game hitting streak.Who's not: The Cubs' 5-9 hitters went a combined 1-for-22 with 11 strikeouts.

Five attacks against women at the University of Maryland, College Park this semester, including two in the past two weeks, have female students wondering whether the campus is safe.In each of the most recent incidents, a man has entered the women's showers on the sixth floor of Centreville Hall, a co-ed dorm, and groped showering residents. The incidents occurred a month after a rape, an assault and an attempted kidnapping on (( campus."This is your home," said freshman Stacy Lee, who lives on the floor where the most recent incidents occurred.

If some members of No. 15 Long Reach did indeed look past unranked Hammond yesterday, as some may argue, they missed a pretty impressive performance by Golden Bears fullback Randy Curtain.Curtain slashed, bulled and lunged his way to 131 yards and a touchdown on 23 carries as visiting Hammond shocked the Lightning, 21-7, on "Senior Day.""We've had some hard losses this year but we still think we're a pretty good football team," said Bears coach Joe Russo, whose team must now get set to face Wilde Lake (7-0)

We stood before the death chamber, in a stuffy little room where we had come from another stuffy little room in the middle of the night.With the sureness of a voting-booth screen, a beige curtain snapped back. The reporter next to me lifted his pen from his pad and crossed himself.In front of us was Flint Gregory Hunt, only it was not the Flint Gregory Hunt I had interviewed two weeks before. That man, scheduled to die for the murder of Baltimore police Officer Vincent Adolfo, was animated, outspoken, shifting in his chair as emotions of all kinds crossed his face.

NEW YORK -- Even before the curtain rises, it's obvious that Broadway audiences won't be seeing the same "Triumph of Love" enjoyed by Baltimore at Center Stage last year.For one thing, the curtain itself is an addition. It's hilariously huge, spilling onto the stage floor and threatening to spill into the laps of front-row patrons. Like the complex 18th-century Marivaux comedy upon which this musical is based, the curtain gives you a lot of material to contemplate.Moving uptown in more ways than just the transfer from Baltimore to the Big Apple, this glitzier "Triumph" is a comfortable fit in the Royale Theatre, whose plush red upholstery and gilded decor make the French comedy seem at home.

Washington Ballet opened its 20th anniversary program last week. To celebrate, the company put together a program of three dances that venerated its heritage (Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" and the late Choo-San Goh's "Birds of Paradise") and looked to the future with the world premiere by the company's new artistic associate, Simon Dow, "Illuminata."Dow teamed up with the company's new resident composer, Jerzy Sapieyevski to create an abstract work that was brimming with symbolism. 'Illuminata" forges the mysticism of St. Catherine with the secular transformation of Pygmalion into a surreal soup of images and strong theatrical elements.

The first thing the audience sees on entering Howard Community College's Studio Theatre for Rep Stage's production of Intelligence is a curtain. Curtains are unusual in contemporary theater, but this one has a purpose. It reminds the audience of the secrecy that conceals the work of intelligence operations. The curtain opens to reveal a book-lined office in a fine old house. Amid the room's dark paneling, bay window and gracefully arched doorway, a computer and a telephone scrambler with blinking red and yellow lights are a jarring presence.

An acclaimed HBO series that tells the story of Baltimore with brutal murders and f-bombs aplenty has spared viewers this much: Billy Murphy's legal fees. The Baltimore attorney played himself on The Wire last week. When it came time for Murphy to talk money with his fictional client, the famously realistic show actually pulled a punch. "If you want Billy Murphy to represent you, you gotta pay to put him there," Murphy says on the show. Murphy told me that was "a fairly realistic fee discussion" but for two things.

When the Temple M pulled out of St. Jerome Creek last week and headed east for Point No Point, another charter boat already was sitting atop the artificial reef and working birds wheeled in the misty-gray sky above. A good sign. Although several of us positively twitched at the thought of grabbing rods from the overhead racks and joining the party, work was on our agenda. We wanted to see the recently completed reef off St. Mary's County from the bottom up. The deck of Capt. Greg Madjeski's boat, from cabin to stern, was decorated in wet suits, dry suits, oxygen bottles and high-tech camera equipment.

Actors in the Magical Experiences Arts Company reach even the most difficult audiences with soothing touches, fervent gazes and sincere concern. For the past three years, the troupe, led by Joanne Margolius, has performed monthly for residents of Copper Ridge in Sykesville, a facility dedicated to those with Alzheimer's disease or other forms of memory impairment. Margolius tailors the production to those with advanced dementia, many of whom she knows by name. Several in her audience can no longer speak or respond to their surroundings.

Model Heidi Klum (above) opens the curtain on another season of last year's surprise hit Project Runway (10 p.m.-11 p.m., Bravo).

1979: Curtain rises at Toby's Toby Orenstein opened Toby's Dinner Theatre with a limited warm-up production of Godspell on Dec. 4. The grand opening was planned for New Year's Eve when Jean Ann Kain headlined Hello, Dolly. The dinner theater was the first in the area to use the arena style. Before opening Toby's, Orenstein directed plays at Slayton House and at area high schools.

Francine Strickwerda's mother died of breast cancer when her daughter was only 7, disappearing forever into the fog of silence that surrounded the disease 30 years ago. Strickwerda says she was ashamed to tell people how her mother had died. Her own breasts appeared early, in the fourth grade, and she endured the mockery of classmates. But it was more than the teasing that made her so miserable. "The [breasts] of doom had taken my mother. Now they were after me," she says in her highly praised documentary, Busting Out. The movie, the first by Strickwerda, is both a short course on the history and mystery of the breast and a coming-to-terms exercise for the Seattle filmmaker, still haunted and grieving all these years later.

It's no longer enough on reality shows to outwit, outlast and outplay, to quote the bywords of Survivor. Now, you need tears. An increasing number of the most popular network reality shows feature winners who deeply deserve a break or a big prize. Humiliation has made way for helping. These shows alleviate such human misery as job loss or a death in the family by piling on lavish home makeovers with over-the-top accessories that guarantee a good cry at the end. There are more "feel-good" reality shows on the way, with CBS developing Reunion, which tracks down missing family members, and Crossroads, which gives participants a glimpse at what their lives might have been like had they made a different choice in the past.

There's a traditional curtain at the front of the Shakespeare Theatre stage for its production of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. Regional theaters - and this one in particular - rarely use these curtains anymore. But if the curtain has an antique feel, the themes in this 1892 play still strike a modern note. Maybe that's why this play has undergone a recent resurgence. Center Stage opened its season with a revival; the Shakespeare Theatre ends its season with another revival; and next month the play will launch the season at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

Over the weekend, audiences at Baltimore's two regional theaters got a firsthand lesson in the famed stage tradition of "the show must go on" -- at least most of the time. During the first preview performance of the rock musical Two Gentlemen of Verona at Center Stage on Friday, the actress playing Julia, one of the female leads, injured her vocal cords. She finished the performance, but Saturday's show was canceled because Center Stage does not budget for understudies. Audiences at Two Gentlemen on Sunday found an insert in their programs informing them that Julia would be played by a member of the chorus, Toni Trucks.