Eccentric

I'm young, tall and skinny and know the long transparent dresses the designers did for summer are just for me. I want to buy one to wear to my cousin's engagement party, but both my boyfriend and my father are flatly against it. They say it is too bare, that I will be uncomfortable and so will they. What do I wear with a dress so it won't reveal too much?You can do one of two things: Wear something under the dress or something over it.New York designer Anna Sui, who did some of the most romantic sheer dresses this season, suggests wearing a pale slip, full or knee length, under it."

Before the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, there was the murder of Medgar Evers.Evers' civil rights activism as field secretary for the NAACP in Jackson, Miss., had attracted the disdain of Southern segregationists. He was killed by a single bullet in the back on a June night in 1963 in his own driveway. Ironically, Evers' death galvanized the civil rights movement and helped to fulfill some of his greatest aspirations. It also recast the assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, from an eccentric segregationist into a violent racist.

Velvet Elvis lives a lowdown life, stuck in cheesy motel rooms, smoky barrooms, swap-meet sales. Velvet Jesus gets hawked by the highway, sold from the backs of pickups with Velvet Sinatra and Velvet John Wayne.For sheer kitsch value, black velvet paintings have always had fans. But respect for the highbrow variety -- yes, there is such a thing -- has been hard to come by until recently.But in places such as chic, white-walled Huntington Beach Arts Center in Southern California, an art form generally scorned and reviled in museum circles is now being celebrated.

Take one look at Fritz Fell's townhouse yard, and you get the feeling you aren't in Baltimore anymore. Fell's garden contains 23 varieties of palm trees, eucalyptus and an ornamental banana tree. Spanish moss clings to Bradford pears and aloe grows along the pathway. Fell grew up in Highlandtown, but he says he has always preferred warmer climates. "I always liked palm trees and going to Florida and California," says Fell, the owner of a pest control company. In August 2006, a friend in Virginia Beach showed him cold-hardy palms, and Fell decided to try one in his yard.

Planting season takes on a different character every year. This year's rain produced prodigious peony crops. It gave us backyard gardeners not much time to plant right after the frost date in early May. Either rain fell, or the ground was too saturated to plant. The skies cleared for the weekend of May 20. Local nurseries swarmed with customers at early hours, and almost every household in the neighborhood had someone out weeding or planting. By Monday, May 23, I had to restrain myself from going out into the garden immediately after breakfast.

'Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker,' by ThomasKunkel. 497 pages. New York: Random House. $25 The best reason to read a literary biography about the editor of a humor magazine is to be entertained, at least every now and then. But there is little fun in 'Genius in Disguise,' the life of Harold Ross (1892-1951), founder and first editor of the New Yorker and a great eccentric.Ross was an unlikely person to create a sophisticated magazine. The son of a Colorado silver prospector, he dropped out of school in the 10th grade to become an itinerant reporter.

"Give Back the Light"Where: Spotlighters Theatre, 817 St. Paul St.When: Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. through July 31Tickets: $8-$9Call: (410) 752-1225** 1/2 In the first five minutes of "Give Back the Light: One Day in the Life of Sarah Bernhardt," playwright Patricia Plante establishes that the great French actress was indeed eccentric.Not only do we learn that she traveled with 40 trunks and 250 pair of shoes, but Katherine Lyons, who portrays La Bernhardt, wraps a live snake around her neck.

There are at least two Nicolas Cage personae. One is the wildly eccentric, Oscar-winning character of Leaving Las Vegas, as well as similar loose cannons in Adaptation, Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart. The other is the action hero of The Rock, Con Air and Gone in 60 Seconds. National Treasure, which opened Friday, combines both of them. Cage plays an eccentric, scholarly treasure hunter who seeks riches possibly buried by our Founding Fathers, who wanted to prevent the booty from falling into British hands.

Don't judge this book by its title: Jayne Anne Phillips' "MotherKind" (Knopf, 304 pages, $24), which sounds like some new kind of baby formula, is in fact a novel with more depth than its name suggests. Phillips has written well about mothers and daughters before, most notably in her 1984 novel "Machine Dreams." But "MotherKind," in which a young woman nurses her mother through the final stages of cancer while caring for her own newborn baby and two stepsons, is particularly sobering. Phillips plunges headlong into a fraught situation as Kate, 31 and hugely pregnant, settles her failing mother into the suburban Boston home she just bought with her not-quite-husband Matt, a not-quite-divorced internist with two young sons of his own. Soon the baby, a boy, is born, and Kate's life becomes a dizzying sleepless round of chemotherapy appointments and morphine shots combined with breast-feeding and diaper changes.