Follies

WASHINGTON -- The latest Nobel Prize in chemistry confirms that 1995 is shaping up as a vintage year on Capitol Hill for the denigration of knowledge.Prior to the Nobel, announced last Wednesday, the legislators killed their own think tank, the Office of Technology Assessment, and also voted to terminate or financially cripple several government agencies that collect information about environment and health. Now still playing out is the latest episode, the ozone follies, starring an improbable legislative foray into the triumph of chemistry that won the big prize this year.

Folly Quarter Middle School in Ellicott City has been in existence only 10 years, but has already gathered a collection of awards and honors that includes a Healthy Howard Gold Award and being designated a "green" school for environmental awareness. On Monday, the Maryland State Department of Education will formally add blue to that color chart, recognizing Folly Quarter as a Maryland Blue Ribbon School. "Winning the Blue Ribbon Award made Folly Quarter Middle School feel accomplished," said Rena Patel, an eighth-grader.

Talent Machine Company's 11th annual holiday show, "Santa's Frosty Follies," opens tonight for a six-day run at St. John's College in Annapolis with a 66-member cast that probably could generate enough electricity to power half the Christmas lights in Annapolis.High energy, always a hallmark of the 11-year-old company's shows, abounds among dancers and singers ranging in age from 5 through 17 as they perform old favorites and several new numbers, all choreographed by company founder Bobbi Smith.

In response to Quinton D. Thompson's letter ("Obama's decision to leave Iraq led to catastrophe," April 5), I must remind your readers that the underlying catastrophe was perpetrated by then-President George W. Bush's illegal attack on Iraq. President Bush led this attack on the false pretenses that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to our nation. It was Mr. Bush's irresponsible decision to take this action that led to thousands of U.S. soldiers dead or wounded (not to mention the innumerable Iraqi civilian casualties)

Some Howard Community College faculty, staff and administrators will show off their finely honed artistic talents, and others will display their lack of embarrassment at the HCC Follies on Thursday night. Employees of the college will offer an eclectic selection of entertainment during the event, which has been staged every few years since 1983. This year, the follies will raise money for the college's Virginia Worthington Schardt, Ph.D. Educational Foundation Endowment. "Every group in our college is represented," said economics professor and follies coordinator John Bouman.

Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" is much admired but seldom revived, and the production at Toby's Dinner Theatre in Columbia gives you a good idea of just how wonderful and difficult this 1971 musical can be."Follies" is nothing if not theatrical: Old Follies stars reunite at a decaying theater as younger versions of themselves pop in and out of the action.The storytelling is unusually complex, at least by the standards of Broadway musicals, but it's an effective way to attack the themes of memory and regret.

The season's jazziest, fizziest, show-bizziest Christmas show, "Santa's Frosty Follies," is being presented by choreographer Bobbi Smith's Talent Machine Co. this week in Annapolis.As with all Bobbi Smith shows, this Yuletide revue features strong dancing and prodigious stage presence from the young and very young, plus lots and lots of shtick, color and pizazz.Elegant tuxedos, full-length gowns, ornately dressed toy soldiers, cuddly little pandas, human Christmas trees, a major snowfall, and a certain red-nosed reindeer who shall remain nameless were just a few of the things eliciting non-stop oohs and aahs from Sunday afternoon's large Key Auditorium audience.

GOV. WILLIAM Donald Schaefer, in absentia, handed Maryland lawmakers their best lines at last night's Legislative Follies, this year called "The Best Little Outhouse in Maryland" or "The Mother of All Follies," depending on whether one believed the poster or the printed program.Schaefer has not attended the General Assembly's annual joke fest since Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. skewered him in a 1987 Follies skit. But, as several hastily crafted skits proved, his sudden departure to the Middle East, where Schaefer is one of an official party escorting Kuwait's emir back to his homeland, gave legislators extra license to savage the governor for his recent streak of cranky behavior, geographic insults, vague presidential aspirations, sinking polls, proposed welfare cuts and personal letters and visits to disgruntled constituents.

We haven't seen any snow yet and very little frost so far this season, but it's time to think cool thoughts. The latest version of the Talent Machine Company's annual variety show, "Frosty Follies 2001," should help. An established Anne Arundel County holiday tradition, the show features a large cast of talented 6- to 17-year-olds performing holidays songs and dances. But for only the second time in its history, the Talent Machine will run without founder and director Bobbi Smith, who died in January.

IT MIGHT HAVE ENDED long ago, but somehow the Legislative Follies hung on to be affirmatively killed this year. A spoof of the lawmaking process -- and lawmakers, high and low -- the end-of-session romp was a welcome interlude for many of its participants and viewers. It will not be held this year, for the first time in 20 years.The Follies were strictly inside politics -- fully fathomable only to participants and their audience of several hundred gathered in the St. John's College auditorium.

We're now entering the fourth week of the "CSI: Benghazi" hostage crisis. That's how long an FBI forensic team has been trying to gain access in Libya to what the State Department still calls a crime scene -- the Obamaadministration's preferred term for the location of the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador since 1979 and the first successful al-Qaeda-backed attack on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11 strikes. (Our embassies and consulates are sovereign U.S. territory.) It is perhaps not accidental that the State Department cites the need to complete the investigation as an excuse to stay silent on the whole matter.

Former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich's recent Op-Ed attempts to paint President Obama as part of our Middle East problem ("As Middle East burns, Obama fiddles," Sept. 30). His suggestion that moderate Muslims help remove the threat from radical Islam to our culture exposes a typically shallow appreciation of the situation. The politically correct mantra that all our problems are caused by a small faction of Islamist terrorists is disingenuous at best. From moderate believers to radical fundamentalists, Muslims of all stripes abhor our promiscuity, women's equality, mixing of the sexes, homosexuality and tolerance for drugs and alcohol.

Once again, with his intemperate criticisms of the handling of the anti-American episodes in Egypt and Libya, Mitt Romney has leaped before looking into the arena of President Barack Obama's greatest political strength. In accusing the Obama administration of apologizing in the wake of an attack on the American embassy in Cairo and the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Mr. Romney has laid himself open to the charge of politicizing a foreign policy crisis. Worse, he has at least temporarily shifted the focus of the presidential campaign away from his strongest debating point, the stalled economy at home.

Nearly a month after an unarmed black teenager was shot to death by a neighborhood watch captain, police in Sanford, Fla., have yet to make an arrest. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was returning from a convenience store near the house of his father's fiancee in a gated community Feb. 26 when watch leader George Zimmerman spotted him and called police to report a "suspicious" person. Moments later, Mr. Zimmerman confronted the teen - ignoring the dispatcher's advice not to follow the youngster - and shot him in the chest, apparently as Mr. Martin pleaded for his life.

Lillie M. Oliver and her husband, Lawrence, have lived in their East Baltimore rowhouse since the 1960s. The couple, who have been married 65 years, said they were terrified recently of losing the house they worked so hard to purchase because of an outrageous $41,000 water bill, which the retirees could not afford to pay. Prompted by my office, workers with the Department of Public Works investigated the matter and reduced the Olivers' bill to...

Sometimes less is more, more or less. Sometimes, less is all you have and all you have will do just fine. Sometimes, the small things, the short things, the bits and pieces are worth keeping because they might be one day useful; my father felt that way about stove bolts. Walter Hard, a Vermont folk poet of Robert Frost's generation, once told of the frugal Yankee woman - was there any other kind? - who left a bag in her attic labeled, "Pieces of string too short to use. " So, alrighty then, that's my preamble and I'm going with it. Here, forthwith, are pieces of column too short to use ... • Suggestion for the Baltimore merchants who oppose Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's proposal to increase the city's bottle tax to five cents to pay for school renovations: Turn what you see as a problem into an opportunity.

Director Eric Schaeffer has said he was going for a haunting effect in his production of the James Goldman-Stephen Sondheim musical, Follies, at Signature Theatre, and there's no question that he has achieved it. This is an interpretation that's spooky from start to finish. Set designer Lou Stancari's environmental approach, replete with blackened walls and fallen beams, makes it look as if the Arlington, Va., theater is about to cave in around you. The production begins with the ghost light for illumination (the lighting is by Chris Lee)

A recent article ("War of 1812 is a big deal - in Canada," March 4) mentions the British burning of Washington and the American burning of York (now Toronto) but does not include that York was then the capital of Upper Canada, or that the British scorched our capital in 1814 largely in retaliation for our depredation in 1813. I submit that the reason the War of 1812 has "no compelling narrative" for Americans is that the American narrative of the war is conflicted. While people in the Chesapeake region commonly view the war as a fight against invaders, it is clear that the primary American objective in the war was the territorial conquest of Upper Canada.

The General Assembly is wavering between approving Gov. Martin O'Malley's marquee proposal to install wind-driven electricity generators off Maryland's coast and putting the idea off for further study. But what lawmakers ought to do is vote it down and be done with it. Offshore wind is too risky. It's too expensive even as advertised and will probably cost more than that. Although they won't make for flashy talking points if O'Malley runs for president, there are far better and cheaper ways to meet Maryland's energy and environmental goals.