Housewife

UTICA, N.Y. -- Anita Maxwell laughs when she recalls an encounter with an elder of the Italian-American community here who seemed puzzled by her political career. "He said, 'You look like a plump Italian housewife,' " she says, "and so I am."But no one would call Anita Maxwell your average housewife. At 61, she has 11 children and 21 grandchildren and she is running for a seat in the New York Senate as a decidedly progressive Democrat and strong supporter of abortion rights."They just didn't believe it because I'm Italian and I have 11 kids," she says.

When we check back in with the Housewives, Kim's daughter Kimberly is getting ready to head to prom. Kim's storyline has been put on the backburner, so far, but this was pretty cute.  Kimberly's boyfriend picks her up and it's all adorable and perfectly awkward with Kim talking about chicken salad and trying to get them to have a cup of lemonade or some other such nonsense. We also get to spend a little more time with Kyle's teenage daughter, Alexa, who is in the process of learning how to drive.

THE young woman behind the counter at the auto-repair shop was insistent. "I need two telephone numbers," she said.I pointed to the number printed on the check. "That's a day and an evening number," I explained. "I don't have a second number."She nodded knowingly, picked up a red pen and printed the word "HOUSEWIFE" on the face of the check.Housewife! I spent the rest of the day moping about the fact that the dreaded H-word had been applied to me.When I was a teen-ager, I could never quite decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew what I didn't want to be -- a housewife.

On her second try for the title, a Harford County wife and working mother was crowned Mrs. Maryland and will represent the state in the national pageant this summer. Heather Ziehl of Bel Air, who founded the community service and networking group True Housewives, was crowned Mrs. Maryland 2013 this weekend, beating out four other contenders at Baltimore's Crowne Plaza. Ziehl, a 34-year-old who runs marketing and events for Arc of the Northern Chesapeake, who competed as Mrs. Northern Chesapeake, had been first runner-up last year, the first time she ever entered a pageant.

A memorial service for Mildred V. Hunt, a longtime Baltimore resident, will be at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Schimunek Funeral Home, 9705 Belair Road.Mrs. Hunt, who was 74, died of heart failure yesterday at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center following a long illness.Born and raised in Baltimore, the former Mildred Hoos graduated from Eastern High School in 1934. Shortly after graduation, she married Gerard K. Hunt. They settled in Towson and raised three children.Mrs. Hunt, a devoted mother and housewife, was also an avid bowler.

Services for Effie V. Comer, a Baltimore housewife, will be at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Crouch Funeral Home, 127 S. Main St. in North East.Mrs. Comer, who was 87, died Saturday at the Francis Scott Key Medical Center after a long illness. She was a native of Troutdale, Va., and lived for many years in Cecil County before moving to Baltimore in 1956.Surviving are her husband of 72 years, John F. Comer; two sons, Howard G. Comer of Baltimore and Brian Comer of Montana; three daughters, Hallie Brown of Media, Pa., Violet Ball of Port Deposit and Joann Kiser of Baltimore; 37 grandchildren; and many great-grandchildren.

Eleanor N. Lewis, a community volunteer and housewife, died Saturday of congestive heart failure at Roland Park Place, where she had resided for 12 years. She was 89 and had lived in Roland Park for many years. Born Eleanor Nelson in Pottsville, Pa., she was raised in Roland Park and was a 1932 graduate of Roland Park Country School. She earned a degree in English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1938, she married H.H. Walker Lewis, an attorney and author. He died in 1999. She was a volunteer at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the city Department of Social Services.

She's not ready to play in Miss Marple's league, but I'll take her over Jessica Fletcher any day.I'm talking about the amateur sleuth Hetty Wainthropp (Patricia Routledge), who makes her debut tonight in "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates" (9 p.m.-10: 30 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) on PBS' venerable "Mystery" series.Wainthropp is a sixtysomething English housewife who decides she's had it with retirement and winds up with her very own detective agency. Not much of an agency actually -- a bicycle, a phone, a teen-age assistant (Dominick Monaghan)

THE KENTUCKY HOUSEWIFE.Lettice Bryan; introducedby Bill Neal.University of South Carolina.456 pages. $19.95."Never make your husband blush to own that you are his wifebut by your industry, frugality, and neatness, make him proud, and happy to know that he is in possession of a companion who is a complete model of loveliness and true elegance."These are the words of Mrs. Lettice Bryan, who in 1839 compiled a cookbook so helpful in its tone and so distinctively written that the reader of today just knows, somehow, that the author herself exemplified loveliness and true elegance.

AMMAN, Jordan -- The world knew her as the cool, beautiful skyjacker, who offered the safety pin from her live grenade to the pilot in the cockpit as a souvenir, and told the passengers to relax with some champagne.Leila Khaled, the "girl revolutionary" whose attempts to hijack airplanes in 1969 and 1970 echo in the security checks that airline passengers undergo today, now is a mother and a housewife.She remains unapologetic and unrepentant about her activities as a Palestinian terrorist.

Appearing at a Paul Reed Smith Guitars benefit for the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, Journey guitarist Neal Schon surprised the audience by getting down on one knee and proposing -- on stage -- to Michaele Salahi. She accepted, and the couple cried and kissed. UPDATE : According to TMZ, Schon proposed with a million-dollar rock. He was so scared it would get stolen, TMZ reported, Schon had the dazzler, all 11.42 carats of it, driven to Baltimore in an armored vehicle.

Take away the glamour, the TV cameras and the tabloid headlines, and Michaele Salahi's latest drama could almost be an Anne Tyler plot: Disaffected housewife risks it all to walk away from a stale marriage and into an entirely new life. But, hey - without the glamour, cameras and tabloids, Michaele would hardly be Michaele. When the one-time White House party crasher and reality TV star walked away from her husband last year, he whipped the celebrity media into a frenzy by claiming she was kidnapped, only to realize soon after that she was perfectly fine - purring most contentedly in the very open arms of rock star Neal Schon of Journey.

100 Years Ago Cruel Corset A large ad in the Times showed a woman washing clothes on a scrub board with the headline: "Baltimore's best store: Hochschild, Kohn &, Co. ; Housework is easy in a 'Housewife' corset. " "The Housewife Corset (shown in right hand corner) is an exclusive Hochscild, Kohn & Co. corset. It was brought out in response to the popular demand for comfortable, durable, inexpensive corset which would enable the housewife to perform her household duties with perfect ease, and still preserve her figure.

Bethenny Frankel has turned her one-time unhealthy obsession with being thin into a multifaceted empire. Her Skinnygirl brand features supplements and reduced-calorie margaritas. She has cookbooks, exercise videos and soul-baring tomes. The natural food chef-turned-reality television star is finding success in food — the source of decades of struggle. "I was obsessed with being thin," Frankel, 40, recalled. "I didn't care about health. " Frankel, who started dieting at 8, will mix heart-wrenching tales with humor and good old-fashioned girl talk Saturday night when she appears at the Hippodrome for "Skinnygirl Night Out: A Conversation with Bethenny Frankel.

Series The Biggest Loser:: Chef Rocco DiSpirito takes contestants to a restaurant where they learn to make healthier choices when dining out, then it's time for a workout with Sugar Ray Leonard. (8 p.m., WBAL-Channel 11) American Idol: : Twelve semifinalists, including Baltimore native Ju'Not Joyner, perform in a two-hour episode. (8 p.m., WBFF-Channel 45) Dirty Jobs: : Mike tries to take the day off and persuade two of the show's producers to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. (9 p.m., Discovery)

HOLLYWOOD - The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Kate Winslet half her wish, nominating her for best actress for her indelible performance as a one-time concentration-camp guard in The Reader, but skipping over her other acclaimed performance, as a suffering suburban housewife in Revolutionary Road, a film directed by her husband, Sam Mendes. Winslet apparently had hoped to avoid having her two performances go mano a mano by expressing her wish (via the studios' campaigns)

The Everyman Theatre is bringing an updated version of the classic Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler to Baltimore next week. Written in 1890, Ibsen questioned the role of women in Victorian society through his protagonist Hedda, an affluent woman trapped in a marriage to a struggling scholar. The adaptation, written by acclaimed up-and-comer Jon Robin Baitz, stays true to Ibsen's work but cuts down on much of the original text and replaces it with a more modern vocabulary. "This is a new approach for Hedda -- it's sexy and dangerous and fun," said Deborah Hazlett, a member of the resident acting company at Everyman who plays Hedda.

The cookbook explosion of the past two decades has not been limited to the new and exotic. Scholars and cooks have been looking back as well, finding forgotten recipes in America's culinary history.No region has been more rewarding than the South, in no small part because a preoccupation with entertaining has been a regional characteristic there. And over the years, women published recipe collections.Three of the best have been reissued this year by the University of South Carolina Press in a "First Cookbooks in America series:" "The Virginia House-wife," by Mary Randolph (1824)

TURIN, Italy -- In a downtown Salt Lake City bar four years ago, all eyes were on the TV, where a 35-year-old housewife from Scotland faced a seemingly impossible task: deliver a 42-pound stone 93 feet with pinpoint precision to break a tie and capture the Olympic gold in women's curling. When Rhona Martin coolly tapped the Swiss stone aside to give Great Britain the win over Switzerland, the Port 'O Call erupted. Men in football-team sweat shirts hooted and high-fived each other as if they were watching an AFC playoff game.

Those of us who came of age with the feminist movement wanted to be a Gloria Steinem kind of feminist. Not a Betty Friedan kind of feminist. We were not the restless suburban housewives for whom the frumpy, doughy Friedan spoke. We were not the woman who suffered "a nameless, aching dissatisfaction" with her life of chores and children. Instead, we were young careerists like the sleek and husky-voiced Steinem, who had the physical qualifications to make her journalistic mark in a bunny costume.