Eccentric

The place is Austin, Texas. The time, morning, afternoon, night and morning again.A young fellow in a car runs over his mother and speeds off home, to wait for the police. At the scene of the accident, amid talk of calling an ambulance, a man tries to pick up a young woman who is jogging.A guy sitting in a restaurant asks his friends, "Who's ever written the great work about the immense effort required not to create?"A few blocks away a stoned soothsayer is revealing, though probably not for the first time, "We've been on Mars since 1962."

Most farce fans associate playwright Ray Cooney solely with Great Britain, but "My Giddy Aunt," a comedy he co-wrote with John Chapman, is set in India. Nor is that the only uncharacteristic thing about it. The show, which opens tomorrow at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, is also part thriller. Mike Moran, a veteran of two other Cooney comedies, directs this daffy tale of eccentric Lady Eppingham, her unscrupulous nephews and her illegitimate half-sister, who is determined to run Lady E's tea estate.

Veteran actress Halo Wines, who has been appearing at Olney Theatre Center for four decades, returns in the title role of Jean Giraudoux's "The Madwoman of Chaillot," opening tomorrow. Wines portrays Countess Aurelia, an eccentric Parisian who mobilizes her fellow eccentrics to combat the forces of greed threatening to destroy her neighborhood. Written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the play embodies Giraudoux's views on freedom and free spirits. Directed by James Petosa, the cast includes Alan Wade, David Marks and Anne Stone.

Dan Deacon makes music for children and inner children alike. Equal parts earnest and eccentric, Deacon's songs range from explosive celebrations to ambient noise. Here are five essential Deacon songs, from the bizarre to the brilliant. 1. "Wham City" from the album "Spiderman of the Rings" A nearly 12-minute ode to the collective of experimental artists and musicians, of which Deacon is a key member, "Wham City" is Deacon's opus. Fittingly, a gang of Wham City folks sing together on the song -- a triumphant, experimental epic.

'Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today's Youth,' published by Lee & Low. It's a collection of letters between young people and Rosa Parks. The letters are short and to the point; they are an excellent way to get into Rosa Parks' head.Also because I'm a writer I have many literature anthologies at home. I'm now reading a new one compiled by Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, 'Norton Anthology of African American Literature.' It's really the most thorough I've seen. I'm reading short stories and poems by writers I didn't know about.

This is the final weekend to catch Center Stage's playfully adventurous production of "Travels With My Aunt." Adapted by Giles Havergal from Graham Greene's 1969 novel, the play features four actors in business suits playing two dozen roles - male, female and canine - as they enact the story of a meek, retired British bank clerk who becomes entangled in the international affairs of his eccentric Aunt Augusta.Tonight's curtain is early, 7 p.m., to allow theatergoers to take advantage of the theater's Expresso Cafe, held on the mezzanine after the performance and featuring live acoustic music by local duo Gunther Watson.

Mounted on the back wall of the set for Fell's Point Corner Theatre's production of "Eleemosynary" are two white, fabric-covered trapezoidal shapes. They turn out to be wings, created by an eccentric character named Dorothea, who is convinced that man can fly."The secret of flight lies in the assurance that we are worthy of flying," Dorothea says. Heavily weighted with metaphor, it's a typical line in Lee Blessing's feminist play about three generations of women in an intellectually gifted but emotionally challenged family.

Anyone who wants to know why a play becomes a classic will get a good idea by seeing 2nd Star Productions' version of the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman 1936 comedy "You Can't Take It With You." Running at Bowie Playhouse in Whitemarsh Park, the madcap play takes the audience back to a simpler time, drawing them into a family circle of carefree eccentrics who do what they want. Homeowner and head of the family is grandfather Martin Vanderhof, who quit his job 35 years ago when he decided to pursue more interesting activities like attending random commencement exercises at nearby colleges.

I've never met a school lunch I liked. Anything consumed at a school, at midday, is hardly my idea of a lunch. I was reminded of this earlier this week, on a cheery visit to my old friend Eleanor Beers, the mother of Bill, a Loyola High School classmate of mine. She is an accomplished cook and entertainer. Bill and I ate lunch together for four years. His lunch bag, prepared by Eleanor, was a four-course treat: sandwich, homemade cake, home-packed bag of potato chips and a piece of fruit.

If you're a magician, I suppose, people ask you how you get out of a straitjacket while hanging handcuffed upside down over rows of flaming spears. When you're a travel writer, people ask you how you pack.This surprised me at first, since I always considered packing to be the least interesting part of my job. Let me amend that. It is the second least interesting part of my job. The least interesting is unpacking. I have been known to let my bag sit, half-emptied, for weeks in a corner of the bedroom, which is not that bad an idea because when a new trip comes up I sometimes have the pleasure of finding I'm already half-packed.