Garb

Mike Kowalewski came to the Halloween parade determined to win."My costumes never get any prizes," he lamented, trudging through the cold drizzle yesterday morning.He carefully navigated his life-size outhouse costume, his vision restricted to a half moon cut into the cardboard door, and moved to the front of the crowd of costumed kids, awaiting his chance to wow the judge.The folks at the Festival Shopping Center in Bel Air certainly were impressed.Almost no one could resist opening the cardboard door and peering inside where Mike, 12, stood with a pair of boxer shorts around his ankles.

In the late 1990s, Brett Rohrer decided he wanted to be onstage and headed off to an audition at a community theater. He got as far as a nearby parking space. "I just sat in my Jeep," he said. "I drove to auditions several times and never went in. But eventually, I did go in, and I got hired for a role in 'Oklahoma.' Now, the theater is my sanctuary. This keeps me even. If I didn't do this, I might go postal at my job. " Rohrer, a 30-something whose day job is with a printing company, did laugh as he said that, before heading back into rehearsal for "The Great American Trailer Park Musical," which opens Friday at Spotlighters Theatre . That company has roots stretching back to 1962.

While living in different regions of Algeria as a child, Karima Roudesli was introduced to the geographic variations of the country's traditional dress. The daughter of an oil company manager, Roudesli could afford to acquire brilliantly hued, embroidered dresses and suits for her dowry, a custom that she and other Muslim women adhere to with happy anticipation.Roudesli, 43, a linguist fluent in French, English, Spanish and Arabic, as well as its Algerian dialect, treasures the history behind Algeria's native customs, but she is also a self-proclaimed feminist who has never been one to shy away from snug jeans and a T-shirt.

Dale McCabe says Americans have been asleep politically for the last 100 years, and he wants them to wake up.To get them to open their eyes, he donned a 19th-century suit and a red, white and blue "Perot '92" sandwich board, put on a stovepipe hat and, with his dog, Butch, in tow, pounded the sidewalks in Bel Air yesterday morning, pressing the flesh and distributing Ross Perot campaign material from his cream-colored carpetbag.Dressing up is nothing new for Mr. McCabe: He's often seen in Confederate attire outside his Main Street store, "The General's Tailor," which stocks Civil War memorabilia.

All it takes is a brief trip away from Baltimore to make a returning traveler realize how curiously attired this town is.The trip can be as short as an afternoon spent in Rockville or Philadelphia. The mileage doesn't make any difference.We dress in a way that is perceptively different. And that's not a bad idea at all.A few months ago a well intentioned relative of mine insisted that I visit Tyson's Corner, that clothing/mercantile crossroads of the Washington metro area. The confusing parking garages reminded me of Towson Town Center, but the similarity ended there.

Still Pond doesn't look like a hotbed of radicalism. Victorian storefronts seem to peer myopically into the narrow main street. The general store, both shop and social hub, shares its building with the town post office, which has a single window and a bank of antique post boxes.Surrounded by farmland, nine miles from Chestertown off Route 292, Still Pond looks more like a place where time has stood still for centuries. But in 1908 -- 12 years before Congress ratified the 19th Amendment, which granted women suffrage -- three women went to the polls in this sleepy Kent County hamlet and voted in a municipal election.

Mary-Marguerite Kohn, the popular co-rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church who was an outspoken advocate for social justice, died Saturday at Maryland Shock Trauma Center of gunshot wounds she suffered Thursday in a double shooting at her Ellicott City church. The Relay resident was 62. "She had gotten her degree in pastoral counseling, and she was the one I wanted to use in the diocese to counsel and help congregations get through their grief," the Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, said Monday.

A man dressed in Ku Klux Klan attire scared three black children playing basketball Sunday night in Savage, and Howard County police are investigating whether he might be responsible for a rash of "KKK" graffiti."

A Laurel man who held up restaurants, gas stations and shops in distinctive garb reminiscent of the 16th president was sentenced by a Howard County circuit judge yesterday to 30 years in prison for robberies in four suburban counties. Kevin Andre Gibson, 36, dubbed "Dishonest Abe" by police, was given separate but concurrent sentences by all four jurisdictions - Howard, Anne Arundel, Prince George's and Montgomery counties - for an armed robbery spree that authorities said targeted at least 10 businesses last year.

In the abandoned basement of an old embalming laboratory in downtown Baltimore, the body of a 76-year old man lies on awooden table.He is covered by a mound of salt taken from the ancient Egyptian riverbed, Wadi el Natron. He is surrounded by pottery of different shapes and sizes, each piece containing one of the man's organs. Staring down at him from a shelf on the rear wall is a row of tiny Egyptian figurines, all of them a luminous green.Something is happening to this man that has not happened in the past 3,000 years.