Fables

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.

All brides are, for a day, the heroines of a storybook romance. Many hands lovingly and carefully busy themselves to make the fantasy come true. The gathering of flowers, the baking of sweets and pasties, and the fancy stitching on wedding finery is rewarded in those precious moments when the bride passes to cast her spell on her guests.Her gown sets her apart as princess, duchess or queen among her circle of well-wishers, and it should enchant with all the mysteries that veiling, broideries and ornament can effect.

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.

The Camel DancesThe camel had her heart set on becoming a ballet dancer."To make every movement a thing of grace and beauty," said the Camel. "That is my one and only desire."Again and again she practiced her pirouettes, her releves, and her arabesques. She repeated the five basic positions a hundred times each day. She worked for long months under the hot desert sun. Her feet were blistered, and her body ached with fatigue, but not once did she think of stopping.At last the Camel said, "Now I am a dancer."

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.

The circus meets the ballet in some of the 20th century's greatest music is the way the Washington Opera's current production of Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen" can best be described. There is superb choreography, there are enchanting costumes, there is a high-trapeze act, there are flying machines and there are sets that feature gyring clocks and machine parts. But the most wonderful thing about this production, which was created for London's Covent Garden in 1990 and which has now opened at the Kennedy Center, is that it does not overwhelm Janacek's tender animal fable about human yearning and resignation.

ONCE THERE lived a teacher who enjoyed working with children. Frequently the teacher said that she preferred the company of children to adults. Every day, she would teach her students and at night head home feeling tired but happy. At about the beginning of April, just as the earth was starting to smell like daffodils and butterflies, a scary thing happened. After a wonderful day in the classroom, the teacher went home feeling ill. She did not feel too bad at first - just a little different, as if she had a small tickle in the back of her throat.

When I was a kid, the library in my family's 200-year-old farmhouse in the Appalacian foothills of northwest New Jersey seemed an infinite frontier. By grownup standards, it was modest, a few hundred books. But to me, it was mysterious, daunting, inviting, unconquerable. The contents were beyond the limits of my imagination. I don't remember learning to read, but I have few if any memories that predate devouring more or less every book I could reach. My most regular expeditions were in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

William Trevor has built a reputation in the past 30 years as a superb novelist and short-story writer in the traditional narrative mode. He is a craftsman who shuns the sensational. Instead, he elevates the ordinary lives of real people to precious significance.His novels "Nights at the Alexandra" and "The Silence in the Garden" take a small canvas and detail it to precision. In his latest novel, Mr. Trevor creates a fable that uses elements of suspense and intrigue. The result is a complete success.

When he was asked why he preferred publishing newspapers to making movies, William Randolph Hearst explained in his ruthless way, "You can crush a man with journalism, and you can't with motion pictures." It's still true that there is nothing quite as devastating to an ordinary person's reputation as a series of scandalous headlines, especially in tabloids where a blend of fact and speculation can be brutally employed. For a taste of the damage that cold print can do to private lives, read Zoe Heller's new novel What Was She Thinking?