Park Country School

Nerves of steel, that's what Judy Waters demands of students she chooses for Roland Park Country School's holiday tableaux."We don't talk about being nervous because we're not allowed to have that," said Waters, who has taught art at the private girls' school for 41 years. She also directs the tableaux, a 70-year-old tradition, in which students pose in elaborate costumes to re-create paintings and sculptures that tell the Christmas story."They learn fast, they'd better," said Waters, a 1950 graduate of the school, who tells performers to stay loose before they pose.

Actress, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith has a deep affection for what she calls "misfit theater."She means it as a compliment. It's a term she applies to plays she first saw as a girl growing up in Baltimore. At Arena Players, she would see black actors cast in traditionally white roles. And although she went to Western High School, she often attended all-girl plays at Roland Park Country School, where her best friend was a student."Those two things were my experience of what theater was. I always thought theater was when the wrong person played the wrong role -- misfit theater," Smith said.

Sally Elizabeth Nyborg, a junior at Roland Park Country School and a member of the varsity field hockey team, died Sunday from complications resulting from lupus at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was 18 and lived in Timonium.Miss Nyborg was diagnosed with the disease in March and struggled valiantly to live in her final months."The last six weeks [were] an example of how she lived her life. She was a fighter and fought until the last minute. I don't think that she thought that she would die," said her brother, Mark Miles of Charlottesville, Va.Throughout her illness, Roland Park students sat outside the intensive care unit where Miss Nyborg was hospitalized in a show of support.

At Eddie's Supermarket in Roland Park yesterday, customers and employees went about their chores, unaware that there had just been a major shift in the neighborhood cosmos.Bobbing above the bananas and the Freeze 'n Dip chocolate-flavored coating kits in the produce section was a diminutive purple planet: Pluto. Tiny astronomers from neighboring Roland Park Country School had hung it there, suddenly altering Eddie's status from the center of the Roland Park universe to the fringe of the solar system.

Four years after transferring his daughter from a city public school to a private one, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke this fall has re-enrolled Katherine Schmoke in Baltimore's school system.Katherine, 16, is a junior majoring in theater at the Baltimore School for the Arts, a public high school that boasts some of the highest average Scholastic Assessment Test scores in the city.The school only occasionally takes transfers after sophomore year, and requires auditions and interviews before admission.

The sign says: "The Baltimore Country Club believes sledding on these hills to be dangerous. We neither permit nor condone sledding."Yeah, yeah, thinks Earl Hartman as he surveys the perfect winter vista that stretches below to Falls Road. He flops belly first onto a snow tube and lets fly from the top of what is known as Suicide Hill."Yea, Earl!" his buddies cheer as the 14-year-old Boys Latin student bounces rudely down the rutted slope.Since the blizzard struck, 20 chums from Boys Latin, Gilman, Loyola High School and Roland Park Country School have gathered daily to flirt and to goad one another into death-defying flights across the former golf course.

Acheson J. DuncanHelen F. DuncanDied a week apartAcheson J. Duncan, professor-emeritus of statistics at the Johns Hopkins University, died Jan. 7, and his wife of 35 years, Helen Foster Duncan, a retired secretary at the Roland Park Country School, died a week later.Dr. Duncan, 90, and Mrs. Duncan, 91, lived at Roland Park Place. Both died of heart failure at Union Memorial Hospital.Dr. Duncan retired from Hopkins in 1971 after teaching there for 25 years. He also had taught at Princeton University, his alma mater.

Frank Artis BoothChurchman, steel workerFrank Artis Booth, an active churchman and retired steel worker, died July 29 of heart failure at his home in West Arlington. He was 85.Born and educated in Isle of Wight County, Va., one of 13 children of parents who were farmers near Smithfield, Mr. Booth moved to Baltimore during the early years of the Depression to find employment. He worked for several years at odd jobs, sending money home to help his family. He returned to Virginia to run the family farm after his father's death.

Had it been a gloomy day, Kristin Raneri might not have looked so glum. But yesterday was splendidly sunny, and Kristin wanted to be back at the ocean."

Craig Lurz is on the telephone, trying to explain the anxiety -- some might call it torture -- of waiting to hear whether his children have been accepted into their private schools of choice, when his call-waiting kicks in.He returns to the telephone line after about 30 seconds. "That," Mr. Lurz says with a light laugh, "was another parent, wanting to know if our mail had come in yet."It hasn't. The wait continues.Mr. Lurz and his friend aren't the only ones who have been setting their clocks by the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks.