Fancy

For someone who spends so much time indulging in fantastical merriments, Paula Peterka sure has her feet on the ground. During the past 17 years, Peterka, a Crownsville wife and mother, has played ever more elaborate roles in the annual medieval pretend-a-thon known as the Maryland Renaissance Festival: wayward juggler, camp follower, a social-climbing countess named Margaret Donnington, even Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII. But when it came time to be wed in her own life, she was as real as a leg of mutton.

For someone who spends so much time indulging in fantastical merriments, Paula Peterka sure has her feet on the ground. Over the past 17 years, Peterka, a Crownsville wife and mother, has played ever more elaborate roles in the annual medieval pretend-a-thon known as the Maryland Renaissance Festival: wayward juggler, camp follower, a social-climbing countess named Margaret Donnington, even Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII. But when it came time to be wed in her own life, she was as real as a leg of mutton.

Buffalo taste, Polly-O budget. I don't know about you, but this recession has done nothing to curb my appetite for fancy cheese, just my ability to buy it. So I set out to make the stuff at home. That explains why I soon found myself pouring curdled milk into an old pillowcase, on purpose. Dialing up the cheese-making equivalent of the Butterball Turkey hot line. And, eventually, eating some very good and not-so-good cheese. "You make a lot of bad cheese before you make good cheese," Kate Dallam, owner of Broom's Bloom Dairy in Bel Air, said when I'd consulted her at the outset.

The organizers of Flowermart have an objective: fancy hats and refined behavior. "We are ensuring that the next generation of Baltimoreans knows what civility can be," said Carol Karcher Purcell, the two-day event's chairman. "We want our guests to have a wonderful day in the Mount Vernon parks." The free event is held at the base of the Washington Monument, at Mount Vernon Place and Charles Street, which will be closed to traffic Friday and Saturday. Purcell said that in addition to music and dance events - there's a 1950s dance contest Friday night - the mart is a showcase for vendors selling pots and market packs of annuals, as well as crafts.

Spring is a time when we are one nation. In a few weeks, the South will head toward its air-conditioned caves and a cold summer chill will fall on San Francisco, but in spring and fall we are one people, more unum than pluribus, stepping gracefully to the music of photosynthesis, and not even a sour economy can change that, so viva sweet spring. Here in Minnesota, spring doesn't arrive for good until Mother's Day and the opening of walleye season, when men and their mothers go fishing and sit around the campfire afterward and pass the whiskey bottle, and she talks about her years traveling with the tent show before she met their father, all the wonderful men she knew, ducktailed men with big tattoos on their chests who drove fast cars and carried rolls of fifties and weren't afraid to spend, which is a shock, to hear about Mother's wild roving years, but everyone did have them, so get over it. And the urge to rove wildly does strike people at this time of year.

From its new perch on the wall of an ornate State House meeting room, the recently unveiled portrait of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. can finally gaze down on the $37,500 rug he ordered in early 2006. The handmade custom piece from India - featuring an 8-foot-in-diameter replica of the Maryland seal - is one of several lush touches to a $10 million renovation receiving its de facto unveiling today. Less visible will be the rich red fabric that covers faded wallpaper in Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller's inner office - part of a separate $10,000 job paid for with Senate funds, according to Miller's chief of staff, Vicki Gruber.

Last week, Pisces, the upscale seafood restaurant in the Hyatt Regency downtown, closed. The grand hotel restaurant may be alive and well in other cities, but not in ours. Baltimore, in the heyday of hotel dining, had the John Eager Howard Room in the Belvedere; the Conservatory and then Citronelle in the Peabody; and, most notably, Hampton's in Harbor Court. They are all gone now, for various reasons. Harbor Court's restaurant is now Brightons, which had been the hotel's version of a coffee shop.

"Everyone abhors me," sings one of history's most notoriously cruel women early on in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, "and yet I wasn't born for such a sad fate." That may not be enough to make her a totally sympathetic character, especially since she does a whole lot of poisoning in the last scene. But Renee Fleming offers a valiant, persuasive portrayal of the conflicted Lucrezia in Washington National Opera's new production of this rarely staged work, a production that yielded dynamic musical and visual results on opening night at the Kennedy Center.

Nervously typing out this week's sports media notes while hoping that soon the leaves will be falling faster than the Dow: * Monday night's Ravens-Pittsburgh Steelers game didn't hit the heights nationally in the ratings that the Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles did this season. Ravens-Steelers got 8.8 percent of the national audience, about 8.6 million homes, compared with the 13.3/13 million for Cowboys-Eagles. (Then again, the latter game did set a record for biggest cable television audience.

If a lump of glue stuck to a hook could catch fish, I'd be a millionaire fly tier. But it can't, and I'm not. Aaron J. Adams, a tarpon and bonefish researcher, has written a book to teach nimble tiers how to create flies that mimic saltwater prey. Fly Fisherman's Guide to Saltwater Prey ($22; 224 pages; Stackpole Books) contains more than 450 color photos of flies and prey from crabs to baitfish. Adams grew up in these parts, graduated from St. Mary's College and now works at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida.