Fall In Love

Paul Taylor works full time downtown, where he goes to happy hours and other social events and plays in organized city sports leagues. When it comes time to go home, though, Taylor, a 33-year-old single statistician, hops in his car or onto the Metro and heads 20 miles northwest to his two-bedroom condominium in Owings Mills' New Town community. With house renovations in full force and new condos and apartments sprouting all around downtown Baltimore, thousands of single young professionals have flocked to neighborhoods such as Mount Vernon, Federal Hill and Canton, attracted by proximity to restaurants, pubs, night life, sports stadiums and the stylish aura of urban life.

For me, premieres are like when you fall in love. It's like the first time in that it's going to last forever. -- Director Pedro Almodovar at the premiere of his film Bad Education

The Rev. Michael Ray, 39, recalls when a family friend decided to divorce his wife after 49 years of marriage. The minister also has witnessed divorces, after fewer than 10 years of marriage, among his church members and in his neighborhood. Ray's congregation, Laurel Church of Christ, is holding a "Love, Sex and Marriage" seminar today and tomorrow to help prevent other marriages from going down the drain. "It would be easy for a church to sit back and criticize the direction our society is going," Ray said.

Julia Child preferred to think of herself as a teacher rather than a chef. And when she died last Friday, at age 91, she left behind a legion of devoted students, including chefs, cooking instructors and food writers who credited Child with helping them learn their craft. Donna Crivello, owner of Donna's coffee bars, recalls laughing at Child's antics on television when she was young. But when Crivello became serious about cooking, one of her first books was Child's The French Chef. "I was eager to learn, and with great direction, Julia not only taught me how to make some of my most favorite dishes, but taught me some very basic techniques of cooking that I still use today and now pass on to my own students," she said.

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.

Murder! Mayhem! Betrayal! Lust! Sounds a little too good to be true for a high school musical, huh? Not so with Glenelg High's production of the vivacious, energetic Pippin. Pippin is the story of a young man on a search for meaning in his life. He tries being a soldier, but he just isn't cut out for it. He tries being an artist, but as Pippin says, "You have to be dead to find out if you're any good!" Finally, he finds himself on a young widow's farm and falls in love with her, only to realize he wants more out of life.

Scientific research wouldn't necessarily suggest the basis for a love story to many people. But exploring the question of whether love is magical chemistry or just basic biochemistry was an idea that caught the fancy of the makers of the indie film Dopamine. "It's geeky, I know," co-writer and director Mark Decena says sheepishly. "That dialectic of two opposing views of what love [is] -- that conflict -- I just felt there could be a story in that." So did the Sundance Film Institute, which invited Decena and co-writer Timothy Breitenbach to work on the script at its screenwriting lab. The result was their debut feature, which opens tomorrow in Baltimore, Washington and eight other cities as part of the Sundance Film Series.

Normally I am not a liar. I'm the person who fills out the customs declaration for two postcards and a duty-free candy bar. Security guards know my life story, and cops know if they pull me over I'll confess that, yes, I was speeding. Then I met a guy online -- a great guy. And for a long time, neither of us could bring ourselves to tell the truth about it. Now, during this week of hearts and flowers, it's time to come out of the closet. I was a 24-year-old writer living in Spokane, Wash.

On a recent Monday night, 48-year-old Robert Epstein waited outside the cliff-side restaurant Las Brisas in Laguna Beach, Calif., clutching a single peach-colored rose. "I'm about to embark on a very bold, very personal experiment, one that some might call -- and in fact have already called -- crazy," Epstein, the editor in chief of Psychology Today, wrote in a June editorial-cum-personal ad. He was looking for a woman to fall in love with him in a given amount of time, say within six months.

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."