Fables

Aesop never made it to Broadway in his day, but his fables seem to have gone decidedly "show biz" in ours."The Fabulous Fable Factory," a musical performed by and for young people, is in production on Saturday afternoons at Chesapeake Music Hall. If you've ever wondered how your favorite fables -- "The Tortoise and the Hare," "The Lion and the Mouse" and four others -- would look with some snappy singing and dancing, you're in luck.The "Fable Factory" premise is a cute one. Margo, 10, stumbles into an abandoned factory.

Over the years, Jim Shriver has amassed his own personal archive of his family's illustrious history. Even so, the Union Mills resident, like many long-time Carroll residents, has always been intrigued by one particular historic marker in front of the former U.S. Post OfficeBuilding on Westminster's Main Street. That marker commemorates the creation in April 1899 of the nation's first Rural Free Delivery Route - often called the first "post office on wheels" - and Edwin Shriver, the man who created it, who happens to be Jim Shriver's distant cousin.

Have A Brandywine Christmas beginning the day after Thanksgiving at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa. The celebration includes displays of an O-gauge model-train setup, a Victorian dollhouse and holiday trees, as well as an exhibit of Jerry Pinkney's watercolor illustrations titled Jerry Pinkney: Aesop's Fables and Other Tales. His art gives life to such fables as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. Returning to the celebration is Ann Wyeth McCoy's collection of dolls dressed in children's, antique and costume clothing.

Although no longer revolutionary, Stephen Schwartz's dark 1972 episodic musical "Pippin" continues to surprise and intrigue. In a production by 2nd Star in Bowie, the spirit of the show's director/choreographer Bob Fosse again seduces us, the dancers' sharp moves synchronized to Schwartz's catchy folk-pop-rock score. "Pippin" is the story of a naïve young prince's search for meaning and fulfillment in life. Pippin's racy grandmother encourages him to savor a series of fleshly encounters, and the amoral Leading Player guides him to battlefield competitions, sensual pleasures and, ultimately, patricide — as Pippin briefly becomes king by killing his father, Charlemagne.

Paul Kropp, author of "Raising a Reader," lists these 15 must-have books for your young child's book shelf. Suggest them to friends and family as birthday and holiday gifts.* "Each Peach Pear Plum," by Janet and Allan Ahlberg* "Goodnight Moon," by Margarret Wise Brown* "Franklin in the Dark," by Paulette Bourgeois* "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman* "Something from Nothing," by Phoebe Gilman* "The Snowy Day," by Ezra Jack Keats* "Whose Mouse Are You?" by Robert Kraus* "Frederick," by Leo Lionni* "Fables," by Arnold Lobel* "A Boy, a Dog and a Frog," by Mercer Mayer* "Thomas' Snowsuit," by Robert Munsch* "The Best Word Book Ever," by Richard Scarry* "Where the Wild Things Are," by Maurice Sendak* "The Cat in the Hat," by Dr. Seuss* "The Polar Express," by Chris Van AllsburgPub Date: 11/04/98

Common Phrases and Where They Come From, by Myron Korach and John Mordock (Lyons Press, 200 pages, $9.95 softbound). There are entire library shelves of lexicons of phrases and fables, and I have never met one I didn't like. But this fresh entry, while far from comprehensive, has the particular charms of being straightforward and uncluttered. I didn't know that the emperor Pompey was the first to take things -- everything he drank -- with a grain of salt, which he believed was antidote against poisons.

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has produced few -- if any -- fables in its 25 years, so Kimberley Lynne's The Return of the 5th Sister is an original, odd and welcome addition. It's also disturbing at times, as fairy tales and fables often are. Half of a double-billed program that is jointly titled, Just Outside the Garden, 5th Sister is a fable about feminism, self-reliance and not believing the stories we are told. It is being presented at Mobtown Players. Set in an unspecified period in the past -- the characters wear prairie dresses -- the one-act play concerns four adult sisters.

A beat-boxing donkey, a grape-obsessed fox, and a narcissistic peacock provide a modern twist to ancient tales in Glenelg Country School's premiere production of Aesop's Foibles. Collaborators Carole Graham Lehan and Tom French created the original script and score for Aesop's Foibles, inspired by the well-known collection of stories, Aesop's Fables. This farcical musical follows the story of Thalia (Maeve Ricaurte), a fledgling muse sent to help Aesop fill a tome with his imaginative stories.

Fabulist: A writer of fables. It's the one word Richard Dewey wants written on his tombstone.Eleven years ago, the 62-year-old Columbia resident discovered he liked to write stories and, since then has been telling them as well.Dewey bills himself as "Bocaccio" (Spanish for "big mouth"). Overthe years, Bocaccio has performed at the annual Maryland RenaissanceFestival, Warfield's restaurant in Historic Savage Mill and the British Association of Storytellers in England.He also is engaged foran indefinite run at the Poor Man's Dinner Theater in Slayton House in the Village of Wilde Lake, where he has performed for the past sixmonths.

Views of pond and port; Art: Suzan Rouse's works in many 0) media capture the nuances of nature.At different hours and in different seasons, artist Suzan Rouse returned to the placid fish pond with the water lilies and slender nymph sculpture on the Johns Hopkins University campus in North Baltimore. Each time she went, in rain, snow, blazing sun and twilight, the light, the air, the mood was different.Rouse's sketches led to a series of monoprints gloriously saturated with the pond's nuances, in which she abstracted "the spirituality of nature."

James Bernard "Jimmy" Watkins Jr., a veteran Baltimore & Ohio Railroad dining car chef who during his 36-year career prepared thousands of meals for passengers, including Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, died March 30 of prostate cancer at his Pikesville home. He was 89. Mr. Watkins was born in Baltimore and raised in Glen Burnie, and was a 1939 graduate of Glen Burnie High School. He began his cooking career in the late 1930s, working as a lunch counter cook at Read's drugstore at Howard and Lexington streets, and soon began looking for a better job because "they didn't pay no money," he said in a 34-page typed transcript of a taped interview made for the Hays T. Watkins Research Library at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore in 2002.

Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family made famous in "The Sound of Music," who took exception to the way her father was portrayed, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 97 and lived in Brooklandville. "She had been rabidly negative about the musical and film," said her physician, Dr. Janet Horn, who with her husband financed the publication of 3,000 copies of Miss von Trapp's memoir, which she wrote to set the record straight about her family's exploits.

There once was a village vexed by the pillage of motorists who sped through its streets. "Do something inventive, cunning and preventive to rid us of this terrible plague! Anything will do, maybe a gizmo two, so long as no new taxes are raised!" With no chance of more spending to keep people from upending the limits on motorists' speed, The police chief devised what the mayor soon prized as a quite good solution indeed. Instead of cops on the beat, speed cameras would watch the street, and keep drivers who passed under scrutiny, The better to catch on that straight little patch those who flouted the law with impunity.

Imagine "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Deadwood" hand-stitched together and given a novel slant as a mini-epic of Chinese immigrant life. That suggests the polyglot vitality of Baltimore writer Christopher Corbett's new nonfiction book, "The Poker Bride." An unofficial follow-up to his rollicking frontier saga, "Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of The Pony Express" (2003), "The Poker Bride," a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth, pivots on the fact-based Old West legend of Polly Bemis.

Twenty-nine Novembers ago, I wrote a story for The Sun about New York tinkerer Peter Cooper and the circumstances surrounding his building of the Tom Thumb, the nation's first steam locomotive, which rolled over the rails of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the nation's first common carrier railroad, founded in Baltimore in 1827. The genesis for my story was a B&O Museum exhibition, "Cooper's Locomotive," that opened that autumn and had been researched and curated by John P. Hankey. Hankey, then 27 and the museum historian, had spent a considerable amount of time researching the Tom Thumb story in Baltimore, New York City and Washington.

Imagine the vintage sitcom Sanford and Son somehow fusing with Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and you get some idea of what to expect in The Soul Collector, the bright and inventive play by David Emerson Toney receiving a robust world premiere production from Everyman Theatre. The Soul Collector, at heart, is a fable, and like any good fable, it gets its moral across while spinning an entertaining yarn. Toney's tale manages to pull several surprises along the way, some purely theatrical in the best sense of the word, others involving little sidesteps of plot.

When God created women, most of us will agree, he did a pretty good job. But when God created Dietrich, he really topped himself. And whoever said he was not merciful? He let her stay among us for 90 years, until yesterday when he could wait no longer and insisted that she join him.He created her sometime just after the turn of the century, although in her ever-mysterious way she shielded us from knowledge of the exact date. It was somewhat rudely alleged by an East German clerk who located a birth certificate that she was born in 1901 in Berlin, the daughter of an East Prussian officer who died when she was a child, and that she was raised by an aristocrat named von Losch, a cavalry lieutenant who died in the First World War.It is further asserted by various authorities that after a wrist injury precluded the possibility of a career as a concert violinist, she began her acting career in the hysterical welter of the Weimar Republic in the '20s, where, eventually, she built an unremarkable career as a somewhat plump German fraulein, in a cinema that was at that time full of plump German frauleins.

When God created women, most of us will agree, he did a pretty good job. But when God created Dietrich, he really topped himself. And whoever said he was not merciful? He let her stay among us for 90 years, until yesterday when he could wait no longer and insisted that she join him.He created her sometime just after the turn of the century, although in her ever-mysterious way she shielded us from knowledge of the exact date. It was somewhat rudely alleged by an East German clerk who located a birth certificate that she was born in 1901 in Berlin, the daughter of an East Prussian officer who died when she was a child, and that she was raised by an aristocrat named von Losch, a cavalry lieutenant who died in the First World War.It is further asserted by various authorities that after a wrist injury precluded the possibility of a career as a concert violinist, she began her acting career in the hysterical welter of the Weimar Republic in the '20s, where, eventually, she built an unremarkable career as a somewhat plump German fraulein, in a cinema that was at that time full of plump German frauleins.