Partners

Kiss and Motley Crue performed at Jiffy Lube Live on Friday night. Midnight Sun contributor Jay Trucker was there. Thirty years after they first toured together, Kiss and Motley Crue are back out on the road, opening their 2012 summer tour on an intermittently stormy night in Bristow. But if Crue is officially the opening act on this tour, their bigger stage show, equal-lengthed setlist and more frenzied audience suggests otherwise.  Motley Crue's stage show is a spectacle.

Online education is a hot trend at the moment. But within that trend, there's an increasingly hotter sub-trend: online music education. Baltimore's Connections Academy , one of the bigger players in online K-12 education in the country, today announced that it's partnering with the Juilliard School in New York City to deliver online music education to pre-college students beginning this fall. The program is called Juilliard E-Learning. [My observation: This is a heckuva smart move by Juilliard, to extend its brand online to youngsters in K-12.

Baltimore city students will have a plethora of options for education and recreation this summer, under a new partnership between city agencies and school system that will expand the scope and length of programming for city youth. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakeand City schools CEO Andres Alonso announced Wednesday that with the help of non-profit and philanthropic communities, the city's recreation efforts will converge with the system's summer learning initiatives to create a unique structure of a full-day of summer programming.

The Bryn Mawr School and Gilman School have each agreed to pay $350,000 to Baltimore City to fund traffic-calming and streetscape improvements along Northern Parkway and Roland Avenue, which intersect near the two schools in the Roland Park area. Under the agreement, announced Wednesday, the schools will maintain the improvements that fall in the public right-of-ways on Northern Parkway between Roland Avenue and Boxhill Lane, and on Roland Avenue between Northern Parkway and Cold Spring Lane.

Soccer United to partner with Bohemians; friendly slated for June 5 D.C. United announced a development partnership with the Baltimore Bohemians of the United Soccer Leagues' Premier Development League. A friendly between United's under-23 squad and the Bohemians has been scheduled for June 5 at Bel Air's Cedar Lane Park, the Bohemians' home field. As part of the agreement, the Bohemians will provide United with prospective players who might have the potential to play in Major League Soccer.

Catherine Mahan founded a landscape architecture firm in 1983 on the first floor of a Mount Vernon rowhouse. She had four employees and scraped by at first doing jobs for local architects and designing backyards for homeowners. When she retired from Mahan Rykiel Associates this year, the Baltimore-based firm had 42 employees, an office in Hong Kong and a long list of completed projects in the United States, Portugal, Japan and Mexico. Under Mahan's guidance, the firm has handled many local projects as well: It designed rooftop gardens for Harbor East's high-rise residences and for Mercy Medical Center, created a backdrop for the infinity pool deck at the new Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, redesigned Center Plaza in downtown's office district, landscaped the light rail line and created the plazas at Oriole Park at Camden Yards . The firm has worked out of the former Stieff Silver building in Hampden since 2001.

Loyola University Maryland is expected to announce Tuesday a partnership with a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm for a startup accelerator that will help students quickly form new companies — one of a handful of such programs recently launched in the Baltimore area. Wasabi Ventures will work with the university to attract and mentor students into the accelerator program. The venture firm will provide professional staff to manage the program, oversee funding for new companies, and offer internships.

The founder of a payment processing firm in Rockville has filed a $300 million lawsuit against Baltimore-based private equity firm Sterling Partners, alleging that he was fraudulently induced into selling SecureNet Payment Systems. The lawsuit, filed last week in Baltimore City Circuit Court, alleges that SecureNet's founder and chief executive, Marc Potash, was duped into selling a 52 percent interest of his company to Sterling Partners for $56 million in September 2010. The lawsuit says the deal stipulated that Potash was to remain CEO and have day-to-day control but was wrongly fired a year later and was unable to collect millions in installment payments.

Students and staff at Prince George's County Public Schools are celebrating National School Breakfast Week March 5 to 9 in partnership with Kellogg's cereal company, to increase nutrition awareness and help a local Feeding America food bank. For each school breakfast purchased by students during the week, Kellogg's will donate a bowl of cereal to a local food bank through its "Eat, Share, Prosper" program. According to school officials, Prince George's County public school serve an average of 170,000 breakfasts each week.

Patricia T. "Patty" Rouse, who with her late husband, Columbia developer James W. Rouse, co-founded Enterprise Community Partners Inc. and who devoted her life to making sure that decent and affordable housing was accessible to all Americans, died Monday afternoon from complications of Alzheimer's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at Vantage House in Columbia. The Wilde Lake resident was 85. "Patty Rouse was a visionary, who, along with her husband, saw a time when all Americans would have a home they could call their own," Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Baltimore Democrat, said in a statement released Tuesday.