Fairy Tale

IT MAY NOT be quite the stuff of happily-ever-after. But the latest twist in the saga of the supersized nursery-rhyme characters that have been languishing in the long-closed but hardly forgotten Enchanted Forest amusement park is pretty darn close to a fairy tale come true. A dozen strong backs and a few trucks last week managed to move the unwieldy wood-and-fiberglass figures of Mother Goose, Papa Bear and six of Cinderella's 10-foot-long mice to a Howard County petting farm from what's left of the Route 40 fairy-tale park.

'Country Boy' and baseballThank God he was a country boy. Or what would we play during the 7th inning stretch? John Denver gave the fans of Baltimore a lively, foot-stomping song to clap to during Orioles home games. The Babe Ruth Museum is giving the fans a history lesson on the classic song at its newest exhibit, "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," which opens tomorrow.The exhibit chronicles the 1973 hit song from its genesis and through its 23-year history as the Orioles' 7th-inning stretch song.

On their wedding day, Stephen Christ waited for Stephanie Tagliaferro at the very same altar where she first saw him 17 years ago.In August 1982, Stephen was a 12-year-old altar boy at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Baltimore. Stephanie, also 12, attended services there. One Sunday after church, Stephanie asked her mother about "that cute altar boy."Though their parents were acquainted, the two youngsters hadn't met each other at the large church. They didn't strike up an immediate friendship once they were introduced but they did join the same church youth group.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening sketched out a far-reaching expansion of the state's mass transit network yesterday while his Republican opponent, Ellen R. Sauerbrey, called the plan a budget buster that should take a back seat to road building.Moreover, Sauerbrey pressed her call for ending mass transit's dedicated revenue, a move legislators say would leave it vulnerable to Annapolis budget cutting.The day's events highlighted, at least on mass transit, the candidates' divergent views, something Glendening has tried to during the campaign on a host of issues.

Want to know the best thing about fairy tales? Even without the magic, they're magical.At least they are when handled with the deft touch and lightness of spirit director Andy Tennant displays in "Ever After," a re-telling of the Cinderella tale that features Drew Barrymore at her most beguiling, Anjelica Huston at her most bedeviling and Leonardo da Vinci -- Leonardo da Vinci? -- at his most bewitching.Told in flashback (with legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau handling the introduction)

Anne Arundel Community College's Moonlight Troupers will present the classic fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel," with a few twists, this weekend and next.The company, which produces a children's play every other spring to coincide with an AACC course in children's theater, is using William Glennon's adaptation of the Brothers Grimm story of a witch and the two children who outsmart her.This version has no wicked stepmother. The children's real mother is put under a spell by the witch. A bird and a gnome -- puppets of nearly human size -- are unwilling henchmen of the witch, leading the children to the gingerbread house.

NEW YORK -- There was a peculiar logic to the Kirov Opera's choice of Mikhail Glinka's "Ruslan and Ludmilla" as the fourth and final production of its three-week Russian opera festival, which concluded Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera.Glinka's "Ruslan" (1842) was not only the predecessor of the Kirov's other productions -- Tchaikovsky's "Mazeppa" (1884), Borodin's "Prince Igor" (1890), and Prokofiev's "Betrothal in a Monastery" (1946) -- but is also the source from which all Russian operatic music springs.

"Cymbeline" is a Shakespearean fairy tale, complete with a wicked stepmother, lost children, a journey in the woods and, ultimately, a happy ending.At Washington's Kennedy Center, director Adrian Noble's imaginative Royal Shakespeare Company production reinforces the play's fairy-tale qualities from the opening speeches, which he has re-assigned to a storyteller character, who shares the crucial introductory exposition with a host of hooded listeners, sitting around a fire.Each time the storyteller mentions a major character -- King Cymbeline, his daughter Imogen, her banished husband, Posthumus Leonatus -- that character stands and faces the audience, discarding a hooded robe and revealing the character's full costume underneath.

WASHINGTON -- There was a long time ago a young prince who wanted to show the world his intelligence and refined taste. Instead of ordering construction of a grand palace, he commissioned the making of a book.The prince was Sultan Ibrahim Mirza, who in the mid-1500s governed part of what now is Iran. His book is as wondrous as a fairy tale -- and a reminder that Iran's history consists of more than its current disputes with the United States.The volume made for him has the text of a Persian literary classic called "Haft Awrang" ("Seven Thrones")

MANILA, Philippines -- If Imelda Marcos is to be believed, her husband, the dictator, bricked up his family home with lead-covered gold bars.If the Philippine Central Bank is to be believed, the amount of gold the Marcos family allegedly hoarded would have required a convoy of trucks to move. Its size would have exceeded all the gold reserves ever kept in the bank's vaults.If a private investigator is to be believed, $7 billion worth of the Marcos gold held by Marcos-family front companies is navigating through Swiss accounts or has been laundered already.

Costume designer Melissa Webb keeps some pretty strange company, all of her own making. There's a Swamp Nymph, a Ghost Bride, a Grassman and a Topiary Woman, all looking like something out of an especially Grimm fairy tale. There's a Death Dance Bird, a collection of feathers on taffeta that is the stuff of an ornithologist's nightmare. And there are four Uppity Ladies, 8-foot-tall women swathed in silk and lace who, physically and emotionally, look down on the rest of us. "They're dramatic, they create drama," Webb, 34, says of her fabric creations, a mixture of earth-toned wariness and unexpected whimsy on display at South Baltimore's Gallery Imperato through Sept.

First, take a bunch of recent college grads with an interest in fantasy, horror and heavy metal. Mix in an indeterminate amount of beer. Let rise for several months. Garnish with a couple of umlauts. Then brace yourself for an original rock opera called "Gr?ndleh?mmer," currently in the early-rehearsal phase and scheduled for a premiere in October at a Charles Village venue. The project is nothing if not ambitious - five acts, 15 songs, a seven-piece band, a cast of about two dozen and the promise of lots of violence, heroics and humor.

"The Horror of a Fairy Tale" was the title of the essay Janna Chevon Thompson submitted in January when she applied for the Baltimore Teachers Union's Extreme Classroom/Library Makeover contest. She wrote about how she'd realized her dream of teaching arts in an urban setting with her job at Southside Academy in Cherry Hill. But in addition to "discouraged students, lack of funding [and] lack of support," she was constantly frustrated by "an uninhabitable learning environment." When it's hot, there is no air conditioning.

For the next two weekends, midshipmen will display teamwork and discipline along with performance artistry when they present Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, a fully staged, costumed and choreographed production with a live pit orchestra, in the annual Naval Academy Winter Musical. The cast will venture into the challenging realm of the 1987 musical that brought Sondheim a Tony award for his score and a Tony to James Lapine for his book. Into the Woods brings adult dimensions to familiar fairy tale characters who deal with the threatening environment they've helped to create.

In its English offering this week of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Opera AACC calls upon the talents of Anne Arundel Community College faculty members, Maryland-based singers and 15 students from county elementary, middle and high schools. The shows, including today's at 3 p.m., will be presented at AACC's Pascal Center for the Performing Arts. James Harp, the artistic administrator of the Baltimore Opera, is the stage director of AACC's production, and Anna Binneweg, AACC's music director, is music director and conductor.

Allow yourself to be swept away into the land of princesses, jesters, and dancing swans in Marriotts Ridge High School's production of Once Upon a Mattress, a twist on the classic fairy tale, "The Princess and the Pea." Once Upon a Mattress is a story of bravery, adventure, and most of all, love. The story begins with a hopeful young prince waiting eagerly for his mother, the queen, to finally approve a suitable princess to be his wife. And if the prince's anxiety isn't bad enough, citizens of the kingdom are forbidden to marry until the queen has approved the perfect princess for her kingdom.

Once in a Promised Land Laila Halaby Beacon / 338 pages / $23.95 Dislocation is something few Americans know anything about, but it might well be the very thing that will define our lives for decades to come. Dislocation is a variation on disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement is alleged to be the main reason people become terrorists. Fear of terrorism in a post-Sept. 11 world has led to a presumption that all Arabs are potential terrorists, potential killers - dangerous and untrustworthy.

There is a downside to winning American Idol. The victor can be profiled in a movie as dreadful as The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale. The film premieres at 9 tonight on Lifetime, and Barrino's story would seem perfect fare for a cable channel dedicated to empowering women. The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale airs at 9 tonight on Lifetime; it repeats at 8 p.m. tomorrow and 9 p.m. Monday.

Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre's Cinderella is a hit judging by the enthusiastic response of 7-year-old Kate Murphy, one of many young people in the audience at the show's opening weekend. She said she most "liked when [Cinderella] said she didn't go to the ball" referring to the "Lovely Night" number sung by Cinderella and her stepsisters recounting their experiences after the ball. Summer Garden's 40th season opener of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella is an unpretentious production similar to what the legendary duo created in 1957 as a live television show for then 21-year-old Julie Andrews.

Martha Clark had just finished digging a hole outside the store at her Ellicott City petting farm when 10 people came trudging out of the nearby woods carrying a giant, rust-covered metal candy cane on their shoulders. The group made its way up the hill and carefully lowered the end of the cane into the hole. After several shovels full of dirt - along with a pause to scoop a wayward toad out of the way - another piece of the former Enchanted Forest amusement park had reached its new home.