Gypsy

Back in the 1960s, when Tank Hill was campaigning as a crowd-pleasing welterweight, he noticed that he and his stablemates from Mack Lewis' Broadway gym fought most of their battles on the road."

50 Years Ago* A fine gesture on the part of the Westminster Riding Club was the presenting of a check to the Carroll County War Memorial Fund Committee in the amount of $130.36, the proceeds from the Carroll County Spring Horse Show, sponsored by the club in May. -- Democratic Advocate, June 15, 1945.75 Years Ago* The annual motorcycle gypsy tour will be held Sunday, June 20, and promises to be the largest and best ever held. The start will be made from this place at 8 a.m. and proceed to Frederick via Woodsboro, and from there to the historic Harper's Ferry.

The bride wore black for her Halloween wedding at the Baltimore City Courthouse - black vinyl, black lace and black boots. Karen Lambert, a.k.a. "Gypsy," turned up totally Goth for her wedding to Michael Feifer, who looked more like Edgar Allan Poe's funeral director in his 19th-century formalwear. They came up from Kent Island where they've just moved. Mike works for the master guitar maker Paul Reed Smith, and Gypsy works at McDonald's. They've been planning a Halloween wedding for a long time.

`Time Frames' Ever wonder why old works of art in a museum generally don't look as old as they are? It's thanks in part to the work of conservators who preserve the pieces and keep them as striking (or nearly as striking) as when they were created. Today, visitors to the Baltimore Museum of Art can learn all about the work of conservators at the program "Time Frames." BMA conservators will discuss the effects of time and the elements on works of art, and they will show how proper framing helps to preserve pieces.

Frances Dee, 94, who co-starred in films with Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman and her husband, Joel McCrea, died Saturday in Norwalk, Conn., her son said. Miss Dee achieved stardom in 1930 opposite Mr. Chevalier in one of the first talkie musicals, The Playboy of Paris. She retired after making Gypsy Colt in 1954. Her husband died in 1990.

Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend Michael Dregni Oxford University Press / 326 pages / $16.95 The definitive portrait Django Reinhardt, of the most celebrated guitar player of the first half of the 20th century. Michael Dregni, Jonathan Bor observed in 2004, "writes lyrically of a place where the crosscurrents of art, music and fashion collided to produce a cultural richness that happens only once or twice a century."

Gogol Bordello plays at Sonar See Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band from New York City known for its theatrical and costumed stage shows, perform tonight at Sonar Lounge. Gogol Bordello incorporates such instruments as an accordion and fiddle with cabaret, punk and rock music and multiple languages. Doors open at 8 p.m. at Sonar Lounge, 407 E. Saratoga St. Tickets are $20. Call 410- 327-8333 or go to sonarlounge.com.

The Hollins Market district in southwest Baltimore looks like an Aaron Sopher ink sketch from the 1940s. On a Saturday morning, produce vendors dip into wooden crates to sell their wares at Lombard Street and Carrollton Avenue. Women and their children and grandchildren emerge from the old market building with bulging shopping bags full of such items as tripe, sweet potatoes and chicken wings.The scent of fresh baked rye bread permeates the area.Generations who grew up in the Hollins Street neighborhood -- in the old parishes of St. Peter the Apostle, 14 Holy Martyrs, St. Luke's Carey Street and St. Martin's -- still return to the market for shopping even though they now live in Columbia, Ellicott City and Catonsville.

THE LAST THING Gloria Brennan expected to purchase when she was shopping in Bogota, Colombia, recently was a puppy.''I couldn't leave her with that man,'' explains Brennan, who was born in Colombia and visited her sister there in September.''On the street I saw this man who looked like a gypsy. He was holding the smallest puppy I'd ever seen in one hand and a monkey in the other. Both of them were for sale, and he kept holding up this little pup saying 'Here's how she bites and here's how she walks,' and the poor little thing, who couldn't have been more than 8 weeks old, was so frightened she was shaking all over.

House of Meetings Martin Amis Zoli Colum McCann Random House / 352 pages / $24.95 Colum McCann has a distinct flair for history and language which serve him well in his fourth novel, Zoli. The title character, a beautiful Gypsy poet (based loosely on the actual Romani poet Papsuza) who attains heroic status, symbolizes the persecution of her people (first by the fascists, then the Nazis, then by a Communist Romania that turns on its own). Zoli, urged to learn to read and write by her grandfather (Gypsy girls are forbidden literacy)