I Remember

I hardly ever hear her name mentioned as one of the better talents to break out in the '80s. But Meli'sa Morgan was indeed an impressive force. Maybe you remember the New York native's smoldering remake of Prince's "Do Me Baby," which stayed at No. 1 on the R&B charts for three weeks in early 1986. If you tuned into black radio anytime that year, you could not escape that song. The singer-songwriter didn't cross over to the pop side much, but her emotional, full-throttle hits ("Fool's Paradise," "If You Can Do It, I Can Do It Too," "Love Changes" with Kashif)

Tom Kimball, who graduated from Havre de Grace High School as a member of the Class of 1975, has published a book "That's How I Remember It," that's on sale. Here are the Acknowledgments he wrote, followed by the Foreword written by his grown son, Benjamin. More information about the book is available at tomkimball.com. It takes a flotilla of dedicated and slightly "touched" people to make something like this little book a reality. Some call them Collaborators and others, Creative Partners.

"The Annapolis I Remember," a theatrical presentation that brings oral histories and photographs of 20th-century Annapolis to the stage, has been performed previously, but Sunday's show before a packed house at Key Auditorium was my first go at it.What an enchanting piece of theater it is. Derived from Mame Warren's remarkable pictorial history of our town, "Then Again . . . Annapolis, 1900-1965," which also has just made my acquaintance, the piece employs a talented sextetof actors plus pianist Loraine Shaw to bring home the message that the defining energy of Annapolis is the sum of the people who've made their lives here.

Christine Sarbanes was recalled at her standing-room-only memorial service Friday as a "strong woman of incisive intellect" who "had the capacity to find the good in everyone." Her children said she routinely addressed them with, "Hello, lovely." Vice President Joe Biden, one of numerous elected national and state leaders who gathered at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, spoke of his days in the Senate with former Sen. Paul Sarbanes. Christine Sarbanes, 73, died March 22. The vice president, who spoke for 10 minutes, recalled the Sarbanes' overseas trips together.

As a young boy growing up in Baltimore County, Walter Engle remembers climbing the ruined tower of a medieval-style castle on the banks of Loch Raven Reservoir.His mother may have believed her 6-year-old had a slightly overactive imagination. But in 1928, when he made the hike with a Boy Scout troop, pieces of a reproduction castle called Glen Ellen were still standing in the woods beside the reservoir.jTC "I tell you, when you go to see a castle and you're 6 years old, your eyes are wide open.

When I remember now the love we shared,The tenderness with which we used to reachone another when the moment flaredInto a passion that consumed us each;When I remember all the sweet concernThat sheltered us from angry wind and storm,The loyalty that steadfastly did burnTo keep our hearts and spirits ever-warm;When I remember all of this, it seemsLike some hallucination I have framedThat has the essence of dim, distant dreamsWhere all that was is nothing as...

Quote: "I only lost four times last year, why would I remember them? I won 23 games last year. I remember those." -- Red Sox's Pedro Martinez, who is 3-0 in 2000 It's a fact: Roberto Alomar and his brother, Sandy Alomar, each had a throwing error, giving the Indians their first multi-error game of the season. Who's hot: The Devil Rays' Greg Vaughn, who has never finished April above .300, is hitting .333. Who's not: The Royals have allowed a major-league-high 25 homers. On deck: The Indians' Chuck Finley makes his first home start for his new team today.

PITTSBURGH -- Ben Roethlisberger didn't think much of it when Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Tommy Maddox injured his elbow after being sacked early in the third quarter against the Ravens during their first meeting of the 2004 season. "I remember just thinking I was going in for a play," Roethlisberger, then a rookie, said last week. "I was hoping that's all it was going to be because everyone knows about Baltimore's defense. I remember being a little scared being in there." Ravens@Steelers Tomorrow, 8:30 p.m., ESPN, Ch. 13, 1090 AM, 97.9 FM Line: Steelers by 9

As visitors descend on Baltimore during the summer tourism season, staff writer Larry Bingham offers an occasional look at how the city has been portrayed by writers over the years. Today, an excerpt from Baltimore native and newspaperman H. L. Mencken, lamenting the changing city in the 1920s. "I was glad I was born long enough ago to remember, now, the days when the town had genuine color, and life here was worth living. I remember Guy's Hotel. I remember the Concordia Opera House. I remember the old Courthouse.

Van Brooks Jr. remembers just about everything about the toughest day of his life. For some, purging the memory of something as traumatic as being paralyzed making a tackle might be first on a to-do list, but every detail of that warm fall day is burnished on Brooks' mind. "I remember everything," Brooks said the other day. "I remember making the tackle. I remember laying there and not being able to feel anything. I remember talking to the trainer, who was asking me different questions.

Chase Gardner played a big role in Harford Tech making it to yesterday's Class 1A state baseball final. The junior third baseman led the team with a .539 average heading into the state semifinals, where he went 2-for-4. Gardner says he feels fortunate just to be playing at all. He had to make a long recovery from an accident last summer, when he fell off a 3-foot ladder while working in a local retail store, breaking the right occipital bone in his head. He was flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center and, despite not having surgery, he couldn't do any physical activity for six months.

Glenelg girls soccer goalie Kerry Krammer doesn't remember much about last month's state soccer championship. Late in the first half, as Krammer went hard into a slide tackle against a breakaway opponent, her head slammed into the opponent's knee. She never lost consciousness, but she suffered a concussion. "I can barely remember the game," Krammer said. "I remember the bus ride to the game. I remember warming up. I remember making one save, but I don't remember anything else." The next thing she recalls is the car ride home from Anne Arundel Medical Center that night.

The sudden rise of Mike Huckabee in the Republican jousts is a cool plot turn, one that makes you lean forward and turn up the sound. An amiable, well-spoken Southern conservative with a Gomer Pyle face challenging the teeth-baring Rudolph W. Giuliani and the sleek Mitt Romney. You watch him field questions for a few minutes and the man's appeal is pretty clear. He comes off as a real person, not a caricature: He sounds like a guy talking to you, not a stiff with a set of applause lines.

Helen J. Rizzo, a writer whose subject matter ranged from conservation and religious issues to growing up in Union Square, died of congestive heart failure Sunday at Ridgeway Manor Nursing Home. The longtime Westgate neighborhood resident was 85. Helen Joan Lukosevicius, a daughter of immigrant parents from Lithuania, was born and raised in the couple's Lombard Street rowhouse that stood between Stricker and Calhoun streets. "They were tailors and took an active part in the Lithuanian immigrant community that was centered around St. Alphonsus," said a daughter, Phila Hoopes of Westgate.

PITTSBURGH -- Ben Roethlisberger didn't think much of it when Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Tommy Maddox injured his elbow after being sacked early in the third quarter against the Ravens during their first meeting of the 2004 season. "I remember just thinking I was going in for a play," Roethlisberger, then a rookie, said last week. "I was hoping that's all it was going to be because everyone knows about Baltimore's defense. I remember being a little scared being in there." Ravens@Steelers Tomorrow, 8:30 p.m., ESPN, Ch. 13, 1090 AM, 97.9 FM Line: Steelers by 9

The kind of Christmases that Kathryn "Kitty" Whistler Burch vividly remembers are those of a vanished rural America depicted in Currier & Ives prints. And while the years might have robbed her of most of her hearing and she is now nearly blind, Burch, who celebrated her 108th birthday Dec. 13, still has precious memories of those long-ago snowy winters that seemed to hold the world in their grip. On a late, slightly blustery December afternoon, Burch is sitting in a comfortable chair in a dark-paneled room at College Manor, a Lutherville nursing home where she has lived the past two years, waiting for several visitors.

This time of the year for some reason I get filled with nostalgia like a Jules Verne balloon.I'm like Marcel Proust who smelled a cookie and couldn't stop remembering.Wood fires are my cookie. I remember walking through an old square in my hometown in Romania, late fall 1958, kicking leaves with my feet and feeling as nostalgic as I do now for something I remembered then.I remember sitting on the step of the Santa Maria Maggiore cathedral in Rome in 1965 eating an apple while everything turned to nostalgic gold around me.I sat in a steamy cafe by the Spanish Steps later with a bitter hot espresso looking wistfully on the fashions of the year 1965, miniskirts and polka dots, and feeling so terribly young and alone.

Act to safeguard integrity of vote To almost no one's surprise, Tuesday's election was a fiasco. It is just fortunate that it was a primary rather than the general election ("Election woes elicit calls for firings," Sept. 14). For years, warnings from many organizations about the integrity of the ballot have been ignored. The legislature dithered, failing to pass legislation requiring adequate security, quality assurance and a clear, auditable trail for the electronic voting machines.

It was 20 years ago this week that my generation, the Xers of slacking, hip-hop and dot-com foolery, stopped being children. Many of us, including myself, were in middle school, while others still played in sandboxes on that freezing clear morning in January 1986. But just as my parents had seen the promise of their generation "born in this century, tempered by war" cut down by gunfire in Dallas, my own had seen the hopes of President John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" extinguished in a horrific plume of flame off the coast of Florida.