Family Secrets

Nancy Murray's new play, "Asking Questions," is a Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry that will have you awaiting some crucial answers at Fells Point Corner Theatre. Murray's tightly scripted one-act is about family secrets. A relatively young-looking mother, Meg (Shanna Babbidge), must have been a teen-ager when she had her now-15-year-old daughter, Mandi (Julia Pickens). The tense relationship between mother and daughter in this single-parent household is now heightened by Meg's refusal to have a full discussion about the status of her husband.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be at the Enoch Pratt library's main branch on Thursday to discuss her new memoir, "Prague Winter," which delves into a family background that had been shielded from her for decades. As The Baltimore Sun's Mary Carole McCauley reports, in 1997, at age 59, just days after being confirmed as U.S. secretary of state, Albright learned about a family secret. "I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish," said Albright, a native of Czechoslovakia.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be at the Enoch Pratt library's main branch on Thursday to discuss her new memoir, "Prague Winter," which delves into a family background that had been shielded from her for decades. As The Baltimore Sun's Mary Carole McCauley reports, in 1997, at age 59, just days after being confirmed as U.S. secretary of state, Albright learned about a family secret. "I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish," said Albright, a native of Czechoslovakia.

Nancy Murray's new play, "Asking Questions," is a Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry that will have you awaiting some crucial answers at Fells Point Corner Theatre. Murray's tightly scripted one-act is about family secrets. A relatively young-looking mother, Meg (Shanna Babbidge), must have been a teen-ager when she had her now-15-year-old daughter, Mandi (Julia Pickens). The tense relationship between mother and daughter in this single-parent household is now heightened by Meg's refusal to have a full discussion about the status of her husband.

Growing up in a Green Spring Valley home ruled by order, discretion and cocktail hour, Molly Bruce Jacobs was not aware that someone was missing from her family. But when Jacobs was 13, her parents told her about Anne, her younger sister's twin. Anne was born with hydrocephalus -- excess fluid within the brain -- but had defied doctors' predictions of an early death. At that point, she had lived in a nursing home for infants and then at Rosewood State Hospital in Owings Mills. In Secret Girl (St. Martin's Press, $22.95)

It's no secret that Sherry Glaser is mourning her father, Norm.He died of liver and stomach cancer at the age of 61, this week, last year."I miss him like you can't believe," the 37-year-old actress and writer says. "I'm not depressed. I'm just very sad."In her one-woman show, "Family Secrets," Glaser plays her father, along with four other members of a dysfunctional Jewish-American family. The show comes to the Gordon Center in Owings Mills for performances tonight and tomorrow afternoon.

This tense, unsettling, sensual movie, like Philippe Grimbert's source novel, is called A Secret (or, of course, Un secret); Grimbert's American publishers gave his book the name Memory. In Claude Miller's exquisite adaptation, both titles prove equally apt. It skillfully portrays a boy who senses all the unspoken tension in his family, and with the help of a family friend, traces it back to the Holocaust. A Secret evokes the pain of youthful sensitivity as well its special potency - the way it can make intuition almost turn psychic.

One of the three books targeted in parent complaints last month willbe removed from county middle school library shelves.Joan M. Palmer, associate superintendent for curriculum and supervision, said ina statement Tuesday that she will order the teen romance "Family Secrets," by Norma Klein, removed from middle school libraries. The bookwill remain available in high school libraries.The other books, which each drew one parental complaint, "Witches' Children: A Story of Salem," by Patricia Clapp, and teen romance "Sweet Sixteen and Never . . .," by Jeanne Betancourt, will remain in middle school libraries.

I have a 12-year-old son from my first marriage, and his birth mother is my sister. We never told him that his birth mother is his aunt (whom he really doesn't care for much). Circumstances have arisen now that we need to tell him. I do not want to see him hurt, and I worry how this will affect him. Can anyone help?-- C.B. of Dallas, TexasTell this child the truth without delay or run the risk of someone else in the family revealing the secret."There's no way family secrets stay family secrets.

At some point during a conversation with pop psych healer John Bradshaw, you're destined to hear about his sexless marriage and his battle with booze, his dad's same battle with the bottle and the antics of a sex-abusing grandfather.Mr. Bradshaw sorts through this stack of dirty laundry, then hangs up the worst of it for everyone to see.The point is, with Mr. Bradshaw there are no family secrets. There can't be. Not when you're mining your family's malfunctions and striking solid gold.For those who haven't caught this self-styled family counselor on "Oprah" (talking battered child)

Annie's Ghosts Hyperion Books, 416 pages, $24.99. A nnie's Ghosts is an exhaustively researched, often moving testament to the ties that bind families together - including connections we aren't even aware existed. The author, Steve Luxenberg, is an associate editor at The Washington Post who has supervised two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. A former Sun editor, he brought more than three decades of investigative reporting experience to his quest for information about the crippled and institutionalized aunt he never met. Annie Cohen was born with a leg that was bent and couldn't be straightened out, and when she was a teenager, the limb was amputated.

This tense, unsettling, sensual movie, like Philippe Grimbert's source novel, is called A Secret (or, of course, Un secret); Grimbert's American publishers gave his book the name Memory. In Claude Miller's exquisite adaptation, both titles prove equally apt. It skillfully portrays a boy who senses all the unspoken tension in his family, and with the help of a family friend, traces it back to the Holocaust. A Secret evokes the pain of youthful sensitivity as well its special potency - the way it can make intuition almost turn psychic.

At Lucky's China Inn at Oakland Mills Village Center, owner Elsa Chang serves up recipes created by her husband and her husband's brother. One such dish is "Two Brothers' Shrimp," featuring lightly fried shrimp served with broccoli in a creamy sauce. "Don't ask for the recipe - they won't tell you," warns the menu. "My husband and his brother, they are from China," said Chang, who is from Hong Kong. "His brother is a very good chef in China and he [taught] us the recipe." Chang has owned Lucky's since 1998, when the village center was renovated.

WASHINGTON - Sanford J. Ungar reached a college presidency by a route that strayed far from the conventional road, the one that begins with a doctorate and leads through department chair, dean and provost. He has been a dean - of the School of Communication at American University - but he has no doctorate. His entire career has been connected with journalism, not academia. Still, when he becomes president of Goucher College in a month, Ungar says he will be returning to familiar ground, going home to a community like the one that nurtured him. He sees in Goucher something of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., of the 1950s and 1960s, the family and clan and community that raised him and sent him off to Harvard, to London and Paris, to South Africa and Kenya, to the Washington Post and National Public Radio.

Families seldom admit wrongdoing," an older relative told Edward Ball when he began the inquiry that would become his new book, "Slaves in the Family."

WASHINGTON -- They are the ones who are in a position to know: Did first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton really throw a lamp at her husband as legend has it? Is President Clinton a midnight snacker? What's the first family really like behind closed doors?With access to the president second only to immediate family, the permanent staff of ushers, butlers, cooks, stewards and other White House domestic employees knows the secrets that lurk in the West Wing and executive mansion in any administration.

WASHINGTON - Sanford J. Ungar reached a college presidency by a route that strayed far from the conventional road, the one that begins with a doctorate and leads through department chair, dean and provost. He has been a dean - of the School of Communication at American University - but he has no doctorate. His entire career has been connected with journalism, not academia. Still, when he becomes president of Goucher College in a month, Ungar says he will be returning to familiar ground, going home to a community like the one that nurtured him. He sees in Goucher something of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., of the 1950s and 1960s, the family and clan and community that raised him and sent him off to Harvard, to London and Paris, to South Africa and Kenya, to the Washington Post and National Public Radio.