Jam

Latino Fest Learn to dance the salsa, merengue and mariachi, tap your feet to the beat of Latin jazz, applaud dancers in colorful costumes, and sample Hispanic cuisine from the Americas and the Caribbean this weekend at the 21st annual Latino Fest in Patterson Park, Eastern and South Linwood avenues. You can also view arts-and-crafts displays, and children will be entertained by clowns. Latin bandleader, percussionist and composer Joe Cuba will perform at 7 p.m. Sunday. Festival hours are noon to 11 p.m. Saturday and noon to 9 p.m. Sunday.

Robert "Silverspoons" Dorsey pulls a pair of thick metal spoons from a back pocket and gently fingers the heavily taped handles."Watch this," he says as he places the spoons back-to-back between the knuckles of his right hand. He crouches, then begins drumming the spoons on his knees, thighs and belly. The sound he makes is similar to the rhythmic cadences of a tap dancer.It's Christmas Eve at the city's Central Automotive Garage on Dickman Street in South Baltimore, and Mr. Dorsey's co-workers are, in his own words, being entertained by a "low-brow kind of guy," one who knows how to play a pair of spoons "like they're supposed to be played."

The pain is still fresh, but Mary Ida Vandross has to find a way to face the music. A year after burying the last of her four children, the great song stylist Luther Vandross, the Philadelphia resident can hardly bear to hear recordings of her son's famed champagne tenor. "I'm getting a little adjusted to listening," she says. "Before, I just couldn't do it. It's one day at a time." She's promoting The Ultimate Luther Vandross, a posthumous best-of collection with two previously unreleased songs.

Caught with a couple of joints he didn't get the chance to light up, Eric Staton was ordered to appear before a Baltimore judge. Two weeks later, in a basement courtroom on North Avenue, prosecutors said they would drop the possession charge if Staton agreed to pick up trash for five hours. Staton, 42, hesitated before taking the deal. "Ten grams is nothing," he told a spectator during the hearing. "They should legalize that marijuana. " In recent years, Maryland has taken small steps to scale back laws against possession of marijuana.

At 2 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning, the Sip and Bite on Boston Street was packed. A salvation for the inebriated, a sanctuary for the sleepless and fellowship for the lonely, the small Canton restaurant has been serving great old school diner food since Truman was president. And newly renovated inside and out, it's still as good as ever. Walking in, the comforting sound of spatulas hitting the flattop griddle made us feel right at home. The interior has gotten a face lift over the past year and a half — fresh paint, new equipment — but still keeps its old school diner feel.

ON HIS DEATHBED, he received 100 telephone calls per hour. More operators had to be hired to handle the load. "We've never had this number of calls, even when Lucille Ball was here, Kirk Douglas or George Burns," said Paula Correia, spokeswoman for Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Never anything like this, ever."One person who visited the dying man said: "It's a real shame. I went to the hospital and saw him, but he was unconscious. He didn't even know I was in the room. It wasn't a pretty sight, man. It was sad . . . I think it's terrible that this happened.

I used to think orchids were only grown by rich matrons in grand manors, fine ladies in white gloves who had greenhouses in which to cosset the fragile, stemmed beauties, and servant gardeners to tend them. Then they started selling orchids in grocery stores and in hardware stores, and I decided orchids must not be such forbidding plants after all. "The exotic quality of the orchid is what conjures in the mind of the consumers this high intrinsic value," said Jim Jordan, executive director of the American Orchid Society in Delray Beach, Fla. "And that makes people reluctant to try them."

Tulips like these deserve more than a tiptoe. They deserve some grand and glorious musical gesture; a rhapsody in red, yellow, purple and pink.They deserve a rollicking march as they parade in row after row of magnificent color toward a crescendo of mountains at the horizon.They deserve an audience, and this they definitely have. During the two weeks of Washington state's annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, an estimated half-million visitors traipse through the valley's 700 acres of tulips in bloom.

Shirtless, hair flowing, legs pumping, Dr. Theodore Houk is a familiar sight running along North Charles Street on his twice-daily, 5.5-mile trek between his Lutherville home and his job at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. "You always see him out there," said Kathleen Wrona, who has seen Houk, an internal medicine specialist, often during her commute. On Thursday, she saw him again, witnessing as the vehicle in front of her struck Houk, critically injuring him and sending him to Maryland Shock Trauma Center via helicopter.

Jonny Lang hadn't even been conceived when Jimi Hendrix died. By the time he was learning to play guitar, he'd missed the countercultural icon by more than 20 years. Singer Susan Tedeschi was born about two months after Hendrix died in 1970. Today, they're both accomplished musicians, with several Grammy nominations to their credit (even a win, for Lang). But on Thursday at the Hippodrome Theatre , they won't be playing their songs. They'll be playing Hendrix's. Lang and Tedeschi are two of the performers on the Experience Hendrix tour, a traveling revue-style concert that gathers some of the country's better-known musicians to perform two hours of Hendrix's catalog.