Eccentric

They sit in the back room of a farmhouse in the woods, the veterans alongside the rookies. Soon enough they'll be walking the beat, gearing up for the long, hot summer. But first, a briefing on current conditions: "We've got a guy coming south out of Massachusetts," says the briefer. "He's going into shelters and talking about Armageddon and the end of the world. It scares some people. Before long he's going to run into a northbounder who is camouflagued and traumatized by the gulf war."

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.

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.

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.

Talk about quirky. To even find the Pasta Company, it would help to know where the better-known No Way Jose Cafe is (across the alley), and if you don't know that, you'll wander around the alleys of Federal Hill -- as we did -- before you find 1041 S. Marshall St. The quirkiness doesn't stop at the door, either. The Pasta Company looks like a throwback: 1960s-ish coffeehouse, with posters, one light bulb and one very friendly waiter, Steve. His good will, and the basic but decent food, make dining at the Pasta Company a pleasant, down-to-earth experience.

Bob and Tracy Kean had no plans of moving from their home on Westview Road in Original Northwood four years ago. However, when the Baltimore couple saw a house that they really, really wanted they just couldn't resist the temptation to buy it. So, they bought the house, packed their bags, and moved -- seven houses up the street. The house the Keans bought is a 3,000-square-foot Tudor built in 1931 by the Roland Park Co. The Keans, who paid $150,000 for the house in April 1995, knew they would have regrets if they didn't take a stab at owning it. "We weren't itching to move since we had more than adequate space," said Mr. Kean, 50. "But we thought that if we didn't jump at the opportunity, we would always look at the home and know we could have done it better."

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, and Martha Stewart, the Queen of Cold, together in the kitchen.Franklin takes the word right out of my mouth when she tells Stewart that being there with her is "unbelievable."But it wouldn't be a Martha Stewart holiday special, now would it, without one or more unbelievable moments. "Martha Stewart's Home for the Holidays -- The Family Tree," which airs tonight on CBS, has enough bizarre moments to still please dyed-in-the-wool Stewart haters. But, in fairness, there's also quite a bit to like about the program, as holiday specials go.I offer that qualified praise with full knowledge that some will claim that I, along with most of the media, have caved in to the almighty power of Martha Stewart Living OmnimediaInc.

I hear the distant thunder hum, Maryland!The Old Line's bugle, fife, and drum, Maryland!She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumbHuzza! she spurns the Northern scum!She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come!Maryland! My Maryland!-- James Ryder Randall, 1861ON A MAP, Maryland might be a page badly torn from a book, nothing like those boxy states from the plains with their stolid square corners. True, there is the straight-edged northern border, the work of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, trudging through the woods in the 1760s to settle boundary trouble between Penns and Calverts.

Talk about the past and the future melding together -- Fells Point is a place where the modern world and its history are would-be partners looking to two-step to an unfamiliar song.Probably in no other Baltimore neighborhood are the forces of historic preservation and unadulterated commerce stronger than in Fells Point. The result is a rather odd yin-and-yang phenomenon.There are plans for a coffee museum that would reclaim a sad structural wreckage on the corner of Thames and Bond streets that dates back to Revolutionary times.

"Big Chill" director Lawrence Kasdan has come up with yet another self-consciously witty ensemble comedy featuring a memorable gaggle of misfits in "Mumford." But unlike "Grand Canyon," his superlative 1991 comedy-drama of Los Angeles manners, "Mumford" goes the Frank Capra route, undermining the movie's more eccentric charms.The movie's title derives both from the town in which it is set and from a psychologist who works there. Played by Loren Dean with a never-changing passive smile, Mumford has recently arrived and set up shop on the town's pretty main street.