Identity Crisis

PHILADELPHIA -- With food and beverage sales growing, Wawa Inc. is facing a challenge. "We want to be unique," the convenience-store chain's chief executive officer, Howard B. Stoeckel, said, but that's not easy when "everyone sells everything." Some McDonald's are venturing into traditional convenience-store territory by staying open 24 hours a day, Stoeckel said. This blurring of boundaries - it's as easy to run to a drugstore as a convenience store for a gallon of milk - is prompting Wawa and other retailers to fight for space in consumers' minds and budgets.

When Deborah Merlock began an effort almost two years ago to promote the Edgewood schools her children attend, she realized there was a much larger obstacle to overcome than academic underachievement. Edgewood residents - who live in a community that's larger than any of Harford County's incorporated cities and towns, but that lacks identity - had become frustrated with broken promises of revitalization, as well as a recent spate of gang-related crime that, while largely restricted to two neighborhoods, had tainted the entire ZIP code.

The Washington Redskins' extreme makeover is in the midst of an identity crisis. Once regarded as the toast of the league for adding a revamped offense to complement a stingy defense, Washington's recent play has revived questions about the team's outlook for the season. Eagles@Redskins Tonight, 8:30, Ch. 20, ESPN, 1430 AM, 106.7 FM Line: Redskins by 3

The Professor's Daughter By Emily Raboteau. Henry Holt & Co. 278 pages. $24. The author whose biography nearly mirrors that of her protagonist plays a dangerous game. Memories have as good a chance as imaginings to bloom into a successful piece of fiction, but a novel in which circumstances and characters are readily identified can seem like a half-hearted memoir. In Emily Raboteau's The Professor's Daughter, the sections that diverge from the author's life are by far the most absorbing, and the specter of the author -- who, like Emma Boudreaux, was raised in Princeton, attended Yale and, as the product of a black father and a white mother, looks neither white nor black -- rises so frequently, one wonders why one genre won out over the other.

WASHINGTON - For the second presidential election in a row, the Democratic Party has found itself on the short end of a nail-biting finish. This time, it cannot console itself, as in 2000, that its nominee won the popular vote but got robbed by a 5-4 vote of a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. Sen. John Kerry's loss to President Bush by more than 3.5 million popular votes, despite a record Democratic turnout effort, took any ambiguity out of the result and left Kerry's party once again asking: What happened, and where are we now?

I lament it often -- the fact that much of what I hear on the radio (especially urban stations) is so homogenous and predictable. Although some of my friends may disagree, I am not a musical snob. I swear. I can appreciate Beyonce's "Crazy in Love." (The first time I heard it at a party this summer, I was up and on the floor.) My head would automatically nod to the beat of Chingy's "Right Thurr." R. Kelly's "Step in the Name of Love" made me want to learn the moves: Step, step / side to side / round and round / dip it now ...Let me see you do the love slide ... And Kelis' "Milkshake" had to be one of my biggest guilty pleasures this year: My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard / And they're, like, it's better than yours ... But I got tired, so sick and tired of hearing those songs over and over and over.

Don't believe her. Shelby Lynne calls her new CD Identity Crisis, but the Grammy-winning artist knows who she is. And she knew precisely what she was doing in the studio as she produced what is surely the best album of her career. "I always knew I could make a record like this, really simple," says Lynne, who's calling from her home in Palm Springs, Calif. "Instead of doing a bunch of fancy production, I did it myself." Which is a good thing. Lynne, who plays Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis Saturday night, is a fiercely independent artist, a singer-songwriter of great depth and vision.

DEMOCRATS, weeping over their breakfast of cornflakes and arsenic, can console themselves today: At least Robert Ehrlich's victory shows, against much previous evidence to the contrary, that there really is a two-party political system in Maryland. Republicans, doing cartwheels across the state, can rejoice in this fact: Any party can win a gubernatorial race at least once every 35 years or so. Several weeks back, when polls were showing Ehrlich edging ahead in the race for governor, and momentum was clearly building, I reached him at home one morning.

ISLE AU HAUT, Me. -- It's 10:32 and the moon is full. Out on the town-hall dance floor, grizzled lobstermen and their partners are howling the words to a famous party song. "Play that funky music, white boy!" the mass of gyrating plaid flannel and gray sweat shirts shouts as the band on stage delivers. In the middle of this Down-East-meets-Soul-Train gathering is the host, guest of honor and the tiny island's most famous resident, Linda Greenlaw. She's dancing her heart out, taking on all comers.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - In The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon plays a spy who has forgotten everything except how to save his behind. Damon's own survival instincts kicked in when he showed up for work in Paris and the script he approved had been replaced. "It was unrecognizable in a way I was really uncomfortable with," he said in a recent interview. "And I said, `This is exactly the kind of movie that I pass on.' It had the perfect number of explosions. ... It was a peanut-butter-and-jelly kind of script."