Judy Garland

"Me and My Shadows: Living with the Legacy of Judy Garland," by Lorna Luft. Pocket Books. 417 pages. $25. The Life magazine photograph from 1969 remains etched in memory. Singer and screen idol Judy Garland and her younger husband pose unsmiling, each casually smoking a cigarette, moments after getting married. What lingers is Garland's ravaged face, with its huge and haunted eyes. Six months later she was dead.Although Garland's "other daughter," Lorna Luft, never mentions the 1969 photo in her unsentimental and insightful new book, she writes that when nightclub manager Mickey Deans became her mother's fifth husband, Garland was in the final stages of prescription drug addiction and "was dying in front of his eyes."

Judy Garland would have turned 75 today, and TCM reminds us why her life is worth celebrating."Sea World and Busch Gardens Adventures: Alien Vacation!" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- Rodney Dangerfield and Dave Coulier are aliens (tell us something we don't know) who visit Earth to watch how we interact with the animals! What an amazing coincidence that they land in a theme park! Lucky for us, there are plenty of celebrities on hand -- R&B group All-4-One, country singer Bryan White, ice skater Michelle Kwan -- to help keep the hour moving along!

How many past and present TV stars can you cram into one two-hour movie? CBS manages to squeeze seven into "Dead Man's Island" tonight, setting a standard other networks could have a hard time topping. But then, would they want to?* "Roseanne" (6 p.m.-6:30 p.m., WTTG, Channel 5) -- Sitcom moms Barbara Billingsley, Isabel Sanford, June Lockhart and Alley Mills introduce clips from past episodes. The best stuff comes at the end, however, when Roseanne and the moms get to trade quips.* "In the Lake of the Woods" (8 p.m.-10 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45)

ABC decided to stop the killing yesterday, announcing it will move Steven Bochco's "Murder One" away from a disastrous Thursday night matchup against NBC's "ER," the top-rated series on network television.Following this week's "Chapter Eight" episode, the critically acclaimed legal drama will be pulled from the schedule, to be relaunched Jan. 8 in the 10 p.m. Monday night time period now occupied by "ABC Monday Night Football."As for why he scheduled the series against "ER" in the first place, ABC Entertainment President Ted Harbert yesterday issued a statement saying, "It seemed like a good idea at the time.

This evening could force you to choose from between Frasier Crane, John Wayne, James Garner and Judy Garland. No one ever said life was easy.* "The Jenny Jones Show" (9 a.m.-10 a.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- I'm not sure why anyone would want to watch Jenny Jones, but today's segment, featuring people with totally useless talent willing to do anything to get on TV, sounds marginally entertaining. At least no former boyfriends will be surprising former girlfriends with news they've had a sex-change operation.

In yesterday's Today section, a story about the stage $H production "The Wizard of Oz" incorrectly stated the location of the show. It runs through Sunday at the Lyric Opera House.* The Sun regrets the error.Some reassuring things to know about "The Wizard of Oz," the stage production opening tonight at the Morris A. Mechanic Theater:Dorothy's house lifts off and whirls away in a tornado. Nasty Miss Gulch transforms into the Wicked Witch while pedaling her bicycle. The Lullaby League and Lollipop Guild of Munchkins sing and dance.

In the obituary of Phyllis Beamer Gordon in Wednesday's editions, a daughter, Diane L. Davis of Abingdon, was omitted from survivors.The Sun regrets the errors.Phyllis B. GordonTeacher, volunteerPhyllis Beamer Gordon, a retired teacher and volunteer, died Monday at Franklin Square Hospital Center of complications after surgery. The Edgewood resident was 71.She retired in 1984 after teaching kindergarten and primary grades at Joppatowne and Edgewood elementary schools for 18 years.She had first taught high school science in the 1940s in Carroll and Prince George's counties.

Title: "The Ultimate Test of TV Trivia"Author: Jaime O'NeillPublisher: HarperLength, price: 343 pages, $9.95 (paperback) The author of this irresistible collection of miscellany counsels readers not to worry if they have a good memory for the medium. He had the same misgivings.While compiling and categorizing these 1,700 questions -- they range from sitcom casts to hucksters for commercials -- Mr. O'Neill confesses in his introduction: "I became increasingly uncomfortable about how much I knew about so many silly, inconsequential and even stupid things."

These days the auction houses' collectibles catalogs are as star-studded as the latest copy of Entertainment Weekly.Almost every screen luminary of the present and, more particularly, the past, is likely to be represented on their pages by an article of clothing worn in a film, an old Oscar some heir is disposing of, a poster advertising one of their movies or some artifacts they have collected.If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the following partial list and the recent or forthcoming auction activity associated with their names:* Errol Flynn.

"If you are afraid of crowds, this is not the job to have," said Charley Oberman, an ushers' supervisor at the Baltimore Arena.He ought to know. The former Baltimore Civic Center turned 30 years old last week. He and three other Arena employees have been at the ticket windows, turnstiles and aisles since opening night, Oct. 23, 1962, when the Baltimore Clippers took to the ice against the Providence Reds.The Arena, which Baltimoreans persist in calling the Civic Center, was never a stylish hall.

MICKEY CARROLL, 89 One of last surviving Munchkins from 'Wizard of Oz' Mickey Carroll, one of the last surviving Munchkins from the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, died Thursday of natural causes at a caretaker's home in Crestwood, Mo. While in elementary school, Mr. Carroll danced at the Muny Opera. When his father died when Mr. Carroll was in his teens, he helped support his family by working in vaudeville. He later traveled to Chicago and worked in clubs and on the Orpheum Theater vaudeville circuit.

Jack Bauer will be back, actor says Kiefer Sutherland, 42, will be back to play Jack Bauer for an eighth season of the hit counterterrorism drama 24, the actor said Tuesday. Sutherland told the Associated Press that 24, in its seventh season, will start shooting its eighth in May. Song and dance Anne Hathaway is set to play Judy Garland in both film and stage adaptations of Gerald Clarke's 2000 biography, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. In other film news, Zac Efron has dropped out of his role in a remake of Footloose.

Happy Feet, an animated musical centering on an emperor penguin who can't sing a lick (unlike all the other penguins, for whom singing is a birthright and who do so incessantly), will be playing on the Maryland Science Center's IMAX screen beginning today. Showtimes this weekend are 10 a.m., 4:25 p.m. and 8 p.m. today; 10 a.m., 5:35 p.m. and 8 p.m. tomorrow; 10 a.m., 12:10 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. Sunday. The science center is at 601 Light St. Additional showtimes and ticket information: 410-685-5225 or mdsci.

The overture to the Merely Players' production of Meet Me in St. Louis, featuring "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," evoked a warm glow and signaled the start of what should have been an evening of pleasurable, nostalgic theater. What followed seldom met that promise, even casting doubt on whether the 1944 movie starring Judy Garland measures up to memory. Based on Sally Benson's The Kensington Stories, both the musical and the movie follow a family facing a father's transfer from St. Louis to New York City the year before the 1904 World's Fair.

Why? That was the inevitable reaction to the news that Rufus Wainwright, the innovative pop singer / songwriter, planned to re-create Judy Garland's justly famous solo concert in Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961 -- and to do so in that very place, right down to the original orchestrations. Even after attending Wainwright's performance last week (I caught the first of two quickly sold-out nights), I'm still not entirely sure why anybody would want to do this. Well, all right, except for female impersonators, who have long found in Garland a font of inspiration and would surely want to get out on that stage.

There is something wrong with a society that can't allow itself to just enjoy the simple pleasures of a Christmas TV special without analyzing the experience to death. Have we become so media-critical and deconstructionist that there's no place for a little Rudolph joy in our post-postmodern hearts? That's what I was thinking as I sat down with Bravo's The Christmas Special Christmas Special, a one-hour look at the history of Christmas television shows. The special, hosted by Carson Kressley (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy)

No one on television does show business biography better than PBS' American Masters series. Tonight, American Masters revisits the life of Judy Garland, one of the greatest concert hall performers we have ever known, and it is two hours of pop culture bliss. It's not a perfect biography. In fact, some might argue it's not even a biography if the word is meant to include a critical study of a life or career. There is little criticism here. American Masters' Judy Garland: By Myself is an appreciation of her fabulous career from vaudeville to MGM films, and the concert stages of America and Europe.

In spirit the most animated of live-action movies, The Wizard of Oz (1939) returns to the big screen with two showings at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Sunday at 1 p.m and Monday at 6:30 p.m. - so even those who resist catching reruns on the small screen can savor once again the greatest family fare Old Hollywood brought forth. (For my money, only Disney's Pinocchio even comes close.) Of course, it's a my-first-movie benchmark for millions, but it's also a brilliant film. The makers conjured a fantasy at once out of this world and down to earth.

The double bass was Jay Leonhart's ticket out of Baltimore, and now the instrument has temporarily brought him back to his hometown. In four decades as a jazz bassist in New York, Leonhart has played for a Who's Who list of singers - Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Cook, Judy Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme. The list goes on and on. He's played in trios and quartets and big bands. But now he's gone solo with a one-man show called The Bass Lesson, which recently premiered at the second-floor studio at Bertha's in Fells Point, where it continues every Wednesday night this month.

Every year, the networks afflict us with hundreds of mediocre and dozens of truly awful made-for-TV movies. Except for HBO, that's the norm for films on network television. But there are the two or three made-for-TV movies each season that are so daring, smart, well-written and splendidly acted that they redeem the entire industry and make us believe in television as the greatest storyteller of our times. "Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows," an ABC biography of the legendary singer starring Judy Davis, is one of those rare films.