Fall In Love

Michelle is certain that Eric, her husband of 10 years, is going to leave her. "He says he loves me," says the 35-year-old civil engineer, "but I know he doesn't mean it. And it's all because I'm too fat."Michelle never dreamed anyone would ever fall in love with her. "My mother would hit me or scream at me whenever I didn't do something right." Miserable at home, Michelle buried herself in books. She met Eric in a college physics lab and fell instantly in love.But in all the time they've been married, she says, he has never stopped criticizing her weight.

"Love's Labour's Lost" is one of Shakespeare's lightest comedies, and the Bowman Ensemble's outdoor production at McDonogh School is as airy as the setting. But director Matthew Ramsay and costume designer J. Marshall Walker introduce an image near the end that I found rather chilling.When the Princess of France and her three female attendants learn that King Ferdinand of Navarre and his followers plan to court them in disguise, the women decide to hide their faces as well. The text calls for the ladies to be "masked."

Every day for nearly a year, the silence at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation Cemetery in Reisterstown has been broken by the lingering notes of a trumpet. Amid the rise and swell of the cemetery's green, rolling slopes, the source of those notes can be found, lips pressed against a gleaming Vincent Bach trumpet, sounding a repertoire of melodies in memory of a woman named Goldye. It's Bernie Goodman. And since last June, when his wife of 50 years died, he has made a daily ritual of playing beside her grave, where a bronze marker reads: "Beloved Wife, Mother - Grandmother."

TEN YEARS ago Philip Anglim appeared at the Mechanic Theatre in a lauded production of "The Elephant Man." For his interpretation on Broadway of the tragically misshapen John Merrick, Anglim garnered the prestigious Tony Award.Now the actor is back at the Mechanic, starring with A. Mappa through Dec. 30 in David Henry Hwang's bizarre but brilliant work, "M. Butterfly," the winner of the 1988 Tony as Best Play.Hwang's play attempts to dispel the stereotypes associated with Eastern and Western cultural and sexual mores.

PHILADELPHIA - The backlash over Janet Jackson's halftime performance at the Super Bowl has now stretched through spring training and into the Stanley Cup playoffs. Congress is working on a bill that would give the Federal Communications Commission the power to levy fines up to $500,000 for each "patently offensive" broadcast incident. Clear Channel, which owns nearly 1,200 radio stations in 99 markets, recently dropped Howard Stern and others after receiving FCC fines for indecency. Aside from the three months of discussion about a three-second breast exposure, the irony is that Congress and the FCC are taking aim at indecency in an era when pop culture has turned positive in its message.

If you're a big fan, you already knew what was coming in the season finale. But it didn't make it any easier -- or less heartbreaking -- to watch. The majority of the Season 3 "Downton" finale, or the "Christmas special" as its called in the U.K., took place in Scotland, where the whole family (minus Branson) visits the Highlands home of the Dowager's niece, Susan, and her husband, Shrimpy. Most of the trip included bagpipes, hunting, more bagpipes and Scottish reel dancing. But more on that later (and more on O'Brien meeting her Scottish lady's maid doppelganger)

Willie Don has passed. There is no denying, the world is a less colorful place. He invited me to his house in the governor's mansion because I wrote him that I missed Maryland and equated him with Maryland. I lived in Baltimore for 10 years (1978-1988), and then Rockville, but moved to Iowa for a husband and his job. We moved back to Maryland. I always think of him nostalgically as "Mayor Schaefer. " He made me fall in love with Baltimore and its Inner Harbor, revitalized, and Maryland, when I moved to there to attend the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

Tonight started with a shower scene and a CHEST! 4,582 -- yep, that's about where I lost count of the times ABC blessed us with close-ups of our Bachelor Sean Lowe's bare, shirtless, glowing, absolutely amazing chest. I'm sorry, where was I? Had I played a drinking game tonight while watching, this recap would've been a bit more ... colorful.  Doing a shot for each time Sean bared his beautiful pecks for the camera (and another shot for each time the camera showed Sean's hand on one of the ladies' knees)

In the movie Love Actually, a widowed father played by Liam Neeson asks his morose grade-school son what's bothering him. Is it his mother's death? Problems at school? Bullies? "You really want to know?" answers the boy. "Well, truth is - actually - I'm in love." His father is surprised but expresses relief that it's not "something worse." The son fixes him with a look of disbelief: "Worse than the total agony of being in love?" Prepubescent boys aren't supposed to be tormented by romance, and neither are their adolescent brothers.

The real-life affair Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe nurtured during the shooting of "Proof of Life" has made headlines. But on-screen romances that turn into real-world couplings are as old as the movie medium itself. Here's a partial list: Loretta Young and Clark Gable, "Call of the Wild" (1935). Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy carried on during and after several films together during the 1940s. Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, "To Have and Have Not" (1944). Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, "All the Fine Young Cannibals" (1960)