Madeleine

On April 29, 2003 ROBERT JOSEPH CLAUSEN, beloved husband of Maria Clausen (nee Balsavia); devoted father of Robert D. Clausen and his wife Maureen and Susan Clausen Paquin and her husband John; dear brother of Anita Bova; dear grandfather of Joseph and Madeleine Clausen and Christopher Paquin. Friends may call at the family owned Ruck Towson Funeral Home Inc., 1050 York Rd (beltway exit 26A) on Thursday 6 to 9 p.m. where a vigil service will be held at 7 p.m. A Funeral Mass will be celebrated in The Church of the Nativity on Friday at 10:30 a.m. Interment Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens.

As Madeleine Jansen prepares to play the title role in her high school's production of Fiddler on the Roof, the Mount Airy teen-ager is taking her cues from a musician who is more than a little bit familiar with the classic. Her tutor, Lya Stern, played violin a quarter century ago in a production starring the actor whose name is synonymous with the play, Zero Mostel. "She tells me stories about the production of the original Fiddler, like when Zero Mostel ... would change the act each night and how the actors and orchestra would have to follow along and keep on their toes," said Madeleine, who will make her debut in the fiddler role when South Carroll High School's production opens a four-performance run tonight.

As Madeleine Jansen prepares to play the title role in her high school's production of Fiddler on the Roof, the Mount Airy teen-ager is taking her cues from a musician who is more than a little bit familiar with the classic. Her tutor, Lya Stern, played violin a quarter century ago in a production starring the actor whose name is synonymous with the play, Zero Mostel. "She tells me stories about the production of the original Fiddler, like when Zero Mostel ... would change the act each night and how the actors and orchestra would have to follow along and keep on their toes," said Madeleine, who will make her debut in the fiddler role when South Carroll High School's production opens a four-performance run tonight.

There he is, tall and lithe, bashfully looking at the camera as he swings a large ax and chops firewood. Next, we're treated to glimpses of him teaching English in Chile and, then, pulling on rubber gloves to scrub a toilet. These scenes may sound about as exciting as watching your grandmother take a nap. Except, it's no ordinary man we're watching -- it's that hot, hot, hot Prince William. Young, Sexy & Royal, one hour of dishy froth on cable's Women's Entertainment channel tonight, appears to have been thrown together with the belief that it doesn't matter what princes and princesses do. If they have blue blood coursing through their veins, people will watch.

Sister Mary Madeleine Doyle, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame and a professor emerita of foreign language at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, died of cancer Thursday at Villa Assumpta, the Baltimore motherhouse of her congregation. She was 97. The former Gertrude A. Doyle attended public schools in Towson before enrolling at the college, where she would later become chairwoman of the foreign language department. She left Notre Dame after her freshman year and, in 1925, she entered the same teaching order of nuns who founded the college.

It could have been the snow or the dreary subject matter that left several seats empty at Colonial Players' theater Sunday. Some subscribers could have been put off by the play's focus on ethnic oppression in mid-17th-century Ireland, when Oliver Cromwell's oppressive English colonization policies prevailed. But that would have been unfortunate, because it is precisely this dark history that makes English playwright Helen Edmundson's 1993 play "The Clearing" such an absorbing, emotionally charged drama.

It could have been the snow or the dreary subject matter that left several seats empty at Colonial Players' theater in Annapolis on Sunday. Some subscribers could have been put off by the play's focus on ethnic oppression in mid-17th-century Ireland, when Oliver Cromwell's oppressive English colonization policies prevailed. But that would have been unfortunate, because it is precisely this dark history that makes English playwright Helen Edmundson's 1993 play "The Clearing" such an emotionally charged drama.

Colonial Players continues its 52nd season by doing what the company does best, introducing to the area a relatively new, substantive work. Beginning tomorrow, the all-volunteer company will present "The Clearing" by contemporary British playwright Helen Edmundson. The play was acclaimed by critics when it first appeared in London in 1993 and in its U.S. debut in Chicago in 1996, with comparisons to American playwright Arthur Miller in the way great moral issues are addressed within a personal drama.

Madeleine Greene trained as a home economics teacher in a fit of teen-age rebellion. That's why, 45 years later, she spends her days answering questions about everything imaginable - from Medicare coverage to cooking 180-pound pigs. She could have been an elementary school teacher - that was her mother's suggestion - but Greene doesn't regret her youthful defiance. Her scope as a "family and consumer sciences" educator in the Maryland Cooperative Extension's Howard County office is wide: from fraud and environmental protection to sewing and food safety.

From a distance, Madeleine Keesing's line-drop paintings look like finely woven textiles. Step a little closer and the weave seems to ripple and flow across the surface of the canvas like water in an eddying stream. But look even closer and the undulating lines resolve into hundreds of rows of precisely ordered drops of paint that suggest the elemental stability of atoms in a crystal grid. "People always ask how I do these paintings," Keesing says. "Either they think they must be made by a machine, or they think I squeeze the pigment from the tube directly onto the canvas.