Older Sister

For nearly four decades, David Powell has been trying to put a face to a name.The face is that of his younger sister, a face he hasn't seen in nearly 60 years and has long ago forgotten. But the name is one he thinks of almost daily.Last year, using his own money, he published a book of all the things he doesn't know about his sister, all the things he'd tell her if only he could. Its title: "Sadie Lee, Where Are You?"But the 100-page book could just as easily have been called, "Sadie Lee, Who Are You?"

Leery about leaving their children home alone after school, many working parents are turning to neighborhood libraries instead. And, at the Enoch Pratt branch at Pennsylvania and North avenues, staff members gladly accept the role of surrogate family.On most afternoons, the library overflows with children doing homework or reading to pass the time until they know an adult will be home. "A lot of our youngsters are here because the library is a safe place," said branch manager Betty Boulware.

A 2-year-old Northwest Baltimore girl on a walk with an older sister was killed yesterday afternoon when they were struck by a sports car that police said a 14-year-old boy was driving.Chantelle Parrotte was pronounced dead at Sinai Hospital from injuries received about 3:15 p.m. when the Nissan 300ZX jumped the curb in the 3500 block of Woodland Ave., struck the girls, plowed through two fences and came to rest under a porch, police said.Chantelle was dragged a short distance by the car, police said.

Precocious doesn't start to describe Gaby Hoffman, the 12-year-old star of "Someone Like Me," a new NBC sitcom about a girl's coming-of-age that premieres tonight.Her screen credits include "Field of Dreams," "This Is My Life," "Man Without a Face" and "Sleepless in Seattle." She can tell backstage tales about everyone from Andy Warhol to Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner."Gaby was born 40 years old," says her mother, Viva. "She's mature, organized and knows what she wants."Gaby says her mother embarrasses her. "What can I say?

l More than 150 years after Louis Daguerre snapped the world's first photograph, the power of camera and lens remains a minor miracle. Daguerre's initial effort -- a blurry view of his courtyard -- was extraordinary only for being so ordinary. Yet photography's unique ability to transform quotidian facts into objects of mystery is stunningly apparent in "Baltimore Portrait," an exhibition at City Hall through July 23.Photographers J. Brough Schamp and Tom Guidera III have been documenting Baltimore's passing parade since 1990 with a vintage 1940s press camera set up on a gleaming silver tripod in front of a plain, white backdrop.

I suppose that there are currently scores of young girls sitting at their parents' word processors and writing ferociously about their neglected childhoods as latchkey children. For now, we have "Dream House: A Memoir," in which poet/editor Charlotte Nekola recounts her youth during the '50s in St. Louis.She tells of her mother's cooking and baking and keeping house and taking care of her and the two older children. Mother's sin, although she did her housewife's duties every day, was that she didn't seem to like it very much and was often absent-minded and remote.

It would have been so easy to have taken "Lucky Day" and boiled it down into usual TV movie pabulum.Here's what the story of this ABC movie would have been then. A woman takes care of her retarded sister after both grow up mistreated by their alcoholic mother. When the retarded woman wins $2 million in a state lottery, their mother, claiming sobriety, suddenly reappears in their lives and fights to take the woman back under her roof in order to get her hands on the money.That didn't happen to "Lucky Day."