Nora

Plays set in kitchens have become a cliche in this country, but Canadian playwright George F. Walker explodes that cliche in "Escape From Happiness," his harrowing comedy about love, families and survival, which is receiving its first major United States production--and a stunningly powerful one--at Center Stage.Like the setting, Walker's text is not without antecedents. There are suggestions of Ibsen in the central character, a housewife named Nora; of Chekhov in her three daughters; and more than a suggestion of Shepard in the rampant domestic violence and heightened profanity.

Nobody could say "darling" like Myrna Loy, who died Tuesday at 88 after a long illness.In the six "Thin Man" films that made her a star, Myrna Loy infused that word with such possibility that she seemed almost to invent a whole new language, rich in meaning and poetry, although it consisted of a single word."

Title: "All for Love"Author: Pat BoothPublisher: CrownLength, price: 239 pages, $22 Pat Booth's latest foray in the trash-novel genre starts predictably enough. Perky medical school student Tarleton Jones (Tari to her friends) juggles her studies and an affair with movie star flavor-of-the-month Rickey Cage. Rickey was bumped from first class (yeah, right) and seated next to her on a flight to Miami.One night, a madman attacks a physician in the emergency room, horribly maims him and seems ready to turn on others when Tari is suddenly imbued with a magic, spiritual voice.

DO HENRIK Ibsen's ''A Doll House'' the wrong way and Nora becomes a rather unsympathetic character. Do it the right way, and your sympathy is with her when she walks out that door.She may be walking out on her three children and her husband, but if the drama is done with care, she is almost justified in doing so.The Center Stage production that opened last evening is being done quite carefully. The script, an adaptation of the original, written in 1879, is still funny at times. There is no real way of doing this play without getting some laughs, but all things considered, the Center Stage company is doing quite well with it.Jackson Phippin is responsible for the interesting direction.

In Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll House," the marriage of Nora and Torvald Helmer crumbles almost as soon as they return home from a costume ball and remove their masks. It is a highly appropriate metaphor for a life built on illusions, and it is the theme that informs and illuminates the sensitive production that opened at Center Stage last night.This theme is also evident in Tony Straiges' stunning set -- an expansive, virtually empty room, which, despite beautiful 19th century-style molding, is actually an abstract space.

LIFE FORCE.Fay Weldon. Viking. 222 pages. $21. Fay Weldon keeps turning out novels that are witty and enjoyable, with an undercurrent of seriousness. In "Life Force," she turns from the omniscient, jokey tone of some of her earlier novels to take the viewpoint of a narrator writing about herself and three friends, all of whom had affairs in their youth with one Leslie Beck. His reappearance at the beginning of the book after many years upsets their quiet lives in London.Early on, Nora describes the Life Force that is the connecting thread for the novel's events and characters: "Leslie Beck's Life Force is the energy not so much of sexual desire as of sexual discontent: the urge to find someone better out in the world, and thereby something better in the self; . . . sparking off happiness and unhappiness; creating in our excited heads wild notions of ++ victory and defeat, but, when it comes to it, mindless and about little else than accident and survival."

Good-bye, 1992. Like all troublesome children, you'll be remembered with some affection.Hello, 1993. There's a mischievous twinkle in your baby-blues. Should we wonder what's in store for us this year, or is it best not to know?*Ken Barsa is a successful employee of the county Board of Education. But it's his after-hours avocation that brings him the most accolades.This is the 14th year Mr. Barsa has coached the championship Severna Park YMCA Swim Team (SPY). First-place banners cover the walls surrounding the pool, and Mr. Barsa is credited by swimmers and their parents with the team's continuing success.

ABC is giving "Sibs," the big send-off tonight (9:30, Channel 13) by putting it behind "Roseanne's" season premiere. Next week, "Sibs" goes into its regular time slot after "Doogie Howser, M.D." Actually, ABC should drop the new show on Saturday night, where almost no one would see it.The new sitcom has to be the biggest disappointment of the fall season. The producers defeated a gifted cast by giving them such bona fide bores to play. Nora (four-time Oscar nominee Marsha Mason) is a whimpering bookkeeper in an accounting firm who moans that her two younger sisters are competing over who is more messed up. It's a close contest.

'White Palace'Starring Susan Sarandon and James Spader.Directed by Luis Mandoki.Released by Universal.Rated R.... **"White Palace" is almost the flip side of "Avalon.""Avalon" celebrated the richness of Jewish family culture, the nurturing, the sweetness, the support -- and mourned its passing. "White Palace" looks at all that and says, goodbye. It finds happiness ever after in flight from the values of childhood and the snares of family.Conceived as a riff on the theme of erotic awakening, it concerns 27-year-old Max Baron, a St. Louis advertising man still in mourning over the death of his wife of two years ago (and still celibate)

On October 15, 2008, JULIUS A. MESSINA; beloved husband of the late Nora Messina (nee Cary); devoted father of Nora Talbott and her late husband Thomas, Nancy Shaffer and her husband Kent; dear brother of Marie Messina; loving grandfather of Meredith Millett and Mehan McGrath; great-grandfather of Julianna Millett and Bridgett Millett. A graveside service will be held at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Tuesday at 10 A.M. In lieu of flowers memorial donations in his name may be made to Stella Maris Hospice, 2300 Dulaney Valley Road, Timonium, MD 21093.

Even in Nora Roberts' world, truth can be stranger than fiction. In the best-selling author's books, the smart, sexy heroines solve crimes, rescue loved ones and always get the guy. And in mountainous Western Maryland, Roberts' new boutique hotel has just as improbable - and rose-colored - a back story. As a longtime resident of nearby Keedysville, Roberts watched the old inn on Boonsboro's main street, which dated from the 1790s, slowly decline. In 2007, the romance novelist and her photographer husband, Bruce Wilder, who has run the Turn the Page Bookstore Cafe across the street for more than a decade, decided to fix up the old three-story inn, turning it into a romantic, B&B-style boutique hotel.

On Monday, November 17, 2008 Nora Frye Private memorial service at a later date. Arrangements made by Burrier Queen Funeral Home and Crematory P.A. www.burrier-queen.com

On October 15, 2008, JULIUS A. MESSINA; beloved husband of the late Nora Messina (nee Cary); devoted father of Nora Talbott and her late husband Thomas, Nancy Shaffer and her husband Kent; dear brother of Marie Messina; loving grandfather of Meredith Millett and Mehan McGrath; great-grandfather of Julianna Millett and Bridgett Millett. A graveside service will be held at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Tuesday at 10 A.M. In lieu of flowers memorial donations in his name may be made to Stella Maris Hospice, 2300 Dulaney Valley Road, Timonium, MD 21093.

A play about a woman who declares her independence from her marriage and her family was something audiences in 1879 weren't ready for. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House shocked and offended people wherever it was performed. The Norwegian dramatist maintained that his script wasn't about a woman; it was about anyone who had to live according to rules created by others. But the drama tied in perfectly with the stirrings about women's rights that were being felt in Europe and the United States toward the end of the 19th century.

On November 25, 2007, NORA M. Friends may call at the CHATMAN-HARRIS FUNERAL HOME, 5240 Reisterstown Road, Thursday 5 to 8 P.M. and Friday 10 to 3 P.M. After 4 P.M. on Friday Mrs. Anderson will rest at Cornerstone Church of Christ, 4239 Park Heights Avenue where the family will receive friends at 6:30 P.M. Funeral service will begin at 7 P.M. Interment Louden Park Cemetery Saturday at 10 A.M.

We'll always have Paris," Mister Rick told Ilsa in Casablanca. The line cemented Americans' continuing affair with the City of Light as the perfect setting for romance and intrigue. And this delightfully dangerous liaison has never gone out of fashion, no matter how much our public figures deride France as a soft-sister democracy. In the appealingly amorous dramedy Broken English, opening today at the Charles, a heroine with the classic movie name Nora Wilder undertakes what has become the quintessential quest for a metropolis also known as the City of Love.

Writer-director Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of Gena Rowlands and the late actor-director John Cassavetes, has made a distinctive romantic comedy-drama called Broken English. If it lasts a month at the Charles, fans of the theater's film noir series should plan to make it a double-bill with In a Lonely Place (playing Aug. 18, 20 and 23), the 1950 romantic mystery that Cassavetes' heroine, Nora (Parker Posey), sees with a date at a Manhattan revival house. In that cult classic, Bogey plays a tormented, possibly homicidal screenwriter who tells the woman who's just fallen in love with him, "A good love scene should be about something else besides love.

On March 18, 2007, NORA BAXTER; devoted mother of Sandra Baxter; cherished sister of Susie Smith and Crawford Dotson, Jr.; adored aunt of Walter Parker; beloved great aunt of Patricia Sharp, Pamela Bass, and Ronald Parker. Friends may call at the family owned MARCH FUNERAL HOME WEST, INC. 4300 Wabash Avenue on Thursday after 8:30 A.M., where the family will receive friends from 5 to 7 P.M. The family will receive friends on Friday at Southern Baptist Church 1701 N. Chester Street at 11 A.M., followed by funeral services at 11:30 A.M.

For a 25th birthday party, there sure were a lot of "proud parents" gathered on the mezzanine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. But then, this party wasn't for just anyone. This was a celebration for Paul's Place, which had started 25 years ago in Pigtown serving meals to those in need. Now, it offers a range of programs for the neighborhood's impoverished families. While there have been various Paul's Place fundraisers over the years, in honor of its 25th anniversary its supporters were throwing their first gussied-up gala.

Half-Life Shelley Jackson HarperCollins / 464 pp / $24.95 Shelley Jackson never does the same thing twice. Half-Life is her first literary novel (she previously published Skin, a novel in tattoos, and Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel). Thus it could be said that if Jackson has an oeuvre, that oeuvre is surprise. Jackson strives for the singular, so although Half-Life might be accurately described as a novel of identity - hardly surprising literary territory - through Jackson's legerdemain, identity becomes something wholly other, both literally and literarily.