Drag

It's cold, but we've seen worse. One of the worst Maryland ice storms in recent memory ended 10 years ago today. A half-to three-quarters of an inch accumulated; 40-mph helped drag down trees and wires. Emergencies were declared. A half-million customers lost power, some for a week. Eight hundred pedestrians were hurt in icy falls. Thirty Montgomery County school buses skidded off the roads

Rudolph W. Giuliani is running for president, it would seem, and watching his interviews reminds you that it is quite a leap from City Hall to the White House, and that the lecture circuit is not the best preparation for higher office. Out there, Mr. Giuliani is saying the same applause lines night after night, but in a TV studio, even with the friendly folks at Fox, the lines sound over-practiced. He purses his lips, furrows his brow, juts his chin, gives his teeth-baring grin, but there isn't much evidence of thoughtfulness, which is what people are keen to hear these days, not just that a man can hit his marks.

Call it Southern hospitality. Call it just plain nuts.A century ago, residents found that the way to escape the thousands of out-of-towners who flock to their city looking for fun, was to leave. So every year since, they disappear for weeks at a time -- after first handing over their house keys and belongings to strangers who sleep in their bed, rifle through their fridge and shower in their tubs.Few hotels and scant parking during mega-events like the annual boat shows and this week's Whitbread Round the World Race have turned brief home rentals into a profitable sideline for many Annapolitans who fill up the time away with vacations, cruises or visits to relatives.

"The Two Janes" is the 14Karat Cabaret's answer to the cinematic question: "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Deconstructed, or as producer, director and adapter Laure Drogoul puts it, "deranged and decomposed," the show stars two male performers in drag -- Madenney-SSSHHHMadenney as Baby Jane Hudson and Joe Meduza as her sister Blanche."The Two Janes" opens tomorrow at the Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Show times are 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 5 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 14. Tickets are $10. Call (410)

Robert McCraw, 31, has been racing motorcycles for just a few years but the Sykesville resident already ranks near the top 10 in the country on the American Motorcyclist Association Pro-Star circuit.Like several other Carroll County riders, McCraw switched from cars to motorcycle racing for the speed."I went to the drag races a lot with my father," said McCraw. "My father raced cars in the '70s and '80s. I wanted to go fast and instead of pouring my money in cars, I got a motorcycle instead where it is cheaper to go faster."

Dave Tolley has won drag races at other area tracks, but until Labor Day weekend, the Mount Airy driver had never been able to win on his home track, 75-80 Dragway."

"Stonewall," which opens today at the Charles, turns out not to be a documentary about the key event in gay history, a riot that broke out in the late summer of 1969 when New York vice cops pulled one of their customary nocturnal raids on a Greenwich Village drag bar, the Stonewall Inn.Rather, it's a fictionalization of that event, following the tangled lives of several of the men who took part in the uprising, using the violence of the moment as a contrast to the emotional lives of the individuals.

Wayne Selby, 27, of Sykesville always wanted to race cars. He was a regular spectator at local oval tracks when he was young, hoping someday that he would have a car of his own.About five years ago Selby's neighbor, Tom Higgs, a regular drag racer, took him to 75-80 Dragway. After that, it didn't take much to convince Selby that he should try drag racing."I knew I couldn't afford to run a dirt track car, so I went to a drag race with Tom. I decided to give it a try," he said. "Once I got racing in it, I knew I kind of liked it and the more I did it the more I liked it. It kind of grew on me."

The checkered flag has been waved, marking the end of the first drag racing season at Arundel High School.Students established several marks this semester in the Metric 500 Dragster Competition, a part of the new Introduction to Technology class.These potential engineers and technicians were challenged to design and build the fastest dragster while adhering to a set of engineering specifications.Students used computers to design and test their vehicles for efficiency and speed, and several designs reached well over 180 mph.The budding racers modified their dragsters to achieve the lowest possible drag coefficient after testing them in a wind tunnel.

When "Hair" debuted a quarter century ago, it was a musical that held nothing sacred. So it makes sense that the revival -- which opened a national tour at the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre last night -- doesn't hold itself sacred either.What's surprising is the approach taken by director James Rado, who co-authored and starred in the original. With music by Galt MacDermot and a libretto by Rado and Gerome Ragni, that groundbreaking production was a phenomenon that brought rock music to Broadway and espoused pacifism and free love in a nearly plotless format punctuated by shock value.

If fly-by-night dragsters had the power to invent a venue for their illegal races, they'd be hard-pressed to conjure a better racetrack than I-70 near the Baltimore City-Baltimore County line. Wide, straight, designed for expressway speeds yet little traveled late at night, it's a vestige of a never-completed crosstown highway. The deaths of two young people early Sunday morning, allegedly spectators at what Maryland State Police investigators believe was a drag racing event, suggest this isolated strip - a 1 1/2 -mile dead-end spur between a park-and-ride lot and the Beltway - is more than a curiosity.

It's cold, but we've seen worse. One of the worst Maryland ice storms in recent memory ended 10 years ago today. A half-to three-quarters of an inch accumulated; 40-mph helped drag down trees and wires. Emergencies were declared. A half-million customers lost power, some for a week. Eight hundred pedestrians were hurt in icy falls. Thirty Montgomery County school buses skidded off the roads

Authorities in Prince George's County say they are optimistic that they can curtail the kind of dead-of-night drag races that set the stage for the deaths last weekend of eight spectators on a dark rural road. "We're going to look at this both as a law enforcement and an engineering standpoint," Sharon Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Prince George's County Police Department, said yesterday. "There are some opportunities for using technology here." Taylor said police are considering placing cameras on remote highways favored by the growing number of drag racers and their followers, who use use stealth and mobility to hold often impromptu competitions and to disappear rapidly when alerted to the proximity of police.

Yesterday morning, the driver in the lane to the right of me decided to turn left - and did. All I saw was a flash of turquoise as it cut first in front of me and then in front of the car in the lane to the left. But, hey, that's OK - what's a little heart-jolting fright among your fellow drivers, when you have this very important need to make that left turn, right this minute. On Sunday afternoon, I was driving up I-95 and, this time, the flash was a beige one. Impatient with the seemingly brisk, 70-plus mph flow of traffic, Beige on Wheels weaved across the lanes, nosing into the smallest of openings that would propel him toward his destination, oh, maybe three minutes faster.

A 16-year-old girl told Howard County police she was grabbed by a man who attempted to drag her into the woods yesterday afternoon on Martin Road, a few blocks from Atholton High School in Columbia. Police asked for the public's help in identifying the assailant and issued a composite sketch based on the girl's description of the man: about 30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches tall, with an average build, blue eyes and short hair and wearing a navy blue T-shirt and vest. She told police the man was following her about 2:20 p.m. as she was walking from Atholton High, then grabbed her in an attempt to drag her into the woods.

Rudolph W. Giuliani is running for president, it would seem, and watching his interviews reminds you that it is quite a leap from City Hall to the White House, and that the lecture circuit is not the best preparation for higher office. Out there, Mr. Giuliani is saying the same applause lines night after night, but in a TV studio, even with the friendly folks at Fox, the lines sound over-practiced. He purses his lips, furrows his brow, juts his chin, gives his teeth-baring grin, but there isn't much evidence of thoughtfulness, which is what people are keen to hear these days, not just that a man can hit his marks.

Surfing the Web for new music, video and MP3 downloads can be a serious time investment. These picks can help take the drag out of click-and-drag music choices. Some downloads may contain explicit lyrics. All are free, except as noted. "Mighty `O'" by OutKast, available at outkast.com: The track is available as a buyable download from iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody, but you can hear it stream on OutKast's Web site. It provides a good example of how Andre 3000 and Big Boi's talents are undiminished since the supernova of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.

There's a new piece of exercise equipment in our house that's getting a great deal of use, and when I say "a great deal of use," I am, of course, lying. It's my wife's new treadmill, the one she had me drag out of her car, up the driveway, into the house and down a flight of steps to the family room. Oh, you should see this baby. It has a calorie counter, heart monitor and pulse sensor. It has a "Power Incline" button and a "Speed Control" dial you can set for any of four "Speed Training Zones" you wish to experience.

Headlining tonight's Baltimore Pride Block Party is RuPaul Charles, perhaps the world's most famous drag queen. The 44-year-old Charles, who is best-known for the 1992 dance hit, "Supermodel/You Better Work," has lain low for the past few years - or rather, as low as a 6-foot-4-inch diva can lie. But now he's back in the spotlight, touring to promote a new album, RuPaul RedHot, as well as a line of anatomically correct RuPaul dolls. The performer will take the stage last at the party on Eager Street in Mount Vernon, which runs from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. First, though, he took a few minutes to discuss good music, aging gracefully and blogging.

Have you noticed on The Swan that after all that plastic surgery, most of the women look like drag queens? -- Clinton Kelly, stylist and host on TLC's What Not to Wear