Personal History

Playwright Lynn Nottage hasn't finished writing Intimate Apparel, but audiences will get a peek at it tonight and tomorrow anyway. Intimate Apparel is the first of three commissioned plays receiving staged readings at Center Stage this season as part of a new series called "First Look." Co-commissioned by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., Nottage's play focuses on a black seamstress whose clients range from society matrons to ladies of the evening in 1905 New York. "The play is her journey, and it's about her relationships with these people whose boudoirs she enters - places that she, as a woman in that age, wouldn't have access to, and it's also about sexual taboo," the playwright explained Tuesday, the first of four days of rehearsal before tonight's reading.

Deep thought from Michael Phelps: Is random drug testing really random? The Olympian seems to have his doubts. "Feel like my #randomness for drug testing is like the randomness at the security lines at airports...6 times in three weeks?? Really?" he Tweeted this afternoon. "And not saying its bad that they test... But a little excessive IMO... Just wonder if the other athletes out there are getting the "randomness" that I get... " Perhaps he's alluding to personal history.

Howard County, which began July 4, 1851, as a western outpost of neighboring Anne Arundel County, is celebrating its 150th anniversary. To mark the occasion and give readers a sense of what life was like before Howard County became a booming suburb, the Howard County edition of The Sun will publish a column on county history and the people who were part of it. The column will appear every Tuesday through the school year on Page 3B. This week's column...

The Howard County Library invites residents to be interviewed as part of the "This is Your Life" project from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday in the Administrative Offices Conference Room of the east Columbia library, 6600 Cradlerock Way, Columbia. "This is Your Life" is a countywide initiative to encourage people ages 50 and older to record their personal histories, including memories of holiday seasons and past elections. Columbia Archives will preserve the memories in its permanent collection.

Katharine Graham's Washington (Knopf, 624 pages, $30) Billed as "a huge, rich gathering of articles, memoirs, humor, and history chosen by Mrs. Graham, that brings to life her beloved city," this is an almost bottomless cornucopia of writings about the capital, which the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post collected and brought together after the vast and deserved success of her autobiography, Personal History. When she died, in July 2001, it was near completion. She had chosen texts -- with help from her aides and editor -- and had written introductions to the main sections of the book -- an overview, society, events, visitors, the capital at war, etc. She also left notes to go with many of the more than 100 individual pieces.

Deep thought from Michael Phelps: Is random drug testing really random? The Olympian seems to have his doubts. "Feel like my #randomness for drug testing is like the randomness at the security lines at airports...6 times in three weeks?? Really?" he Tweeted this afternoon. "And not saying its bad that they test... But a little excessive IMO... Just wonder if the other athletes out there are getting the "randomness" that I get... " Perhaps he's alluding to personal history.

KATHARINE Graham, not Bob Woodward and not Carl Bern- stein, was the patron saint of a generation of women journalists. For those of us who entered this male-dominated field in the early 1970s, the publisher of The Washington Post, not the scruffy police reporters and not their cuff-shooting boss, Ben Bradlee, was the role model, the one worthy of emulation. It was Mrs. Graham, who died yesterday at the age of 84, who gave the order to defy the courts and print the Pentagon Papers, the secret chronicle of the Vietnam War. And it was her unwavering support for her editors and reporters that allowed them to pursue a "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate hotel to the highest reaches of government.

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan is launching the gubernatorial campaign's first television commercial today on four Baltimore stations, the same day he is officially announcing his city-based running mate. Oddly enough, the first images in Duncan's 30-second TV spot are cardboard cutouts of Mayor Martin O'Malley and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. Duncan then appears on screen, eclipses his Democratic and Republican rivals and introduces himself to viewers with a quick rundown of his personal history: one of 13 children who grew up in a small house in Rockville.

"Personal History," by Katharine Graham, Knopf. 625 pages. $29.95.In December 1937, Katharine Graham, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Chicago, wrote her older sister Bis that she wanted to go into the newspaper business to become a labor reporter and maybe someday "working up to political reporting." Clearly, she had some reservations about her ability to be - as she wrote - a "GOOD reporter ... a gift given by God to very few."Graham never realized that dream, but in the course of 30 years at the helm of the Washington Post, she fostered a newsroom environment where hundreds of ambitious, idealistic and determined reporters realized theirs.

Katharine Graham has written a best seller and nobody's more surprised than Katharine Graham. "It wasn't even on the chart of my secret hopes," she confesses. "It truly stuns me."But that's the way it's been, at least since 1963 when her husband and publisher of the Washington Post, Phil Graham, killed himself, and she pulled herself together and to everyone's amazement -- mostly her own -- took charge.She always underestimates herself. It is the motif of her memoir, "Personal History."She was 46 when she took over the Post.

Discussing the behavior of someone as self-destructive as pro golfer John Daly is dicey business. Too snarky and it comes off as cruel. Too preachy and it comes off as too righteous. I'm not sure we'll sound just the right tone here, but Daly's recent weekend is a pretty instructive primer on the guy. Daly started off at a PGA Tour stop in Palm Harbor, Fla., that's in the greater Tampa-St.Pete-Clearwater area. (The tournament is called the PODS Championship, and, boy, I can really get on a riff about these stupid corporate names for golf tournaments - I mean, PODS are portable storage bins where you stuff junk that you should probably throw out, right?

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- It seemed most appropriate that Queen Elizabeth II should arrive here, a place of cobblestone streets and brick storefronts frozen in time, where people in period-piece costumes talk as if they're still in the 17th-century British settlement. "Hail the Queen," someone shouted from a crowd gathered to see Her Majesty's entrance into the Governor's Palace, where she dined with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux / 196 pages / $22 In one chapter of his new memoir, Jonathan Franzen recalls his youthful immersion in the German language, which culminated in a grudging conquest of The Magic Mountain. It was, appropriately, an uphill battle. Thomas Mann's masterwork, with its jackhammer ironies and its Teutonic nerd of a protagonist, almost drove the Swarthmore senior out of his mind. Yet he recognized "at the heart of the book ... a question of genuine personal interest both to Mann and to me: How does it happen that a young person so quickly strays so far from the values and expectations of his middle-class upbringing?"

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan is launching the gubernatorial campaign's first television commercial today on four Baltimore stations, the same day he is officially announcing his city-based running mate. Oddly enough, the first images in Duncan's 30-second TV spot are cardboard cutouts of Mayor Martin O'Malley and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. Duncan then appears on screen, eclipses his Democratic and Republican rivals and introduces himself to viewers with a quick rundown of his personal history: one of 13 children who grew up in a small house in Rockville.

Kweisi Mfume's bid for the U.S. Senate has not been mortally wounded by reports of sexual harassment and favoritism under his watch at the NAACP, political experts said yesterday. The accusations might undermine Mfume's ability to raise money and reach out to voters beyond his historic base of support in the Baltimore area, experts said. But the campaign could suffer fatal damage, they said, if additional revelations emerge. "If there is nothing new- and this is the end of it -then depending on how effective his campaign team is, he can possibly survive it," said Julius Henson, a longtime Baltimore campaign strategist schooled in the art of bare-knuckle urban politics.

Although he shares his surname with the king, Chris Presley isn't related to Elvis. And while wearing his usual jeans and T-shirt, the Baltimore County resident and full-time Elvis impersonator doesn't look much like him, either. But when Presley takes the stage tomorrow at the 10th annual Night of 100 Elvises, he hopes to connect with the late lip curler on a level that's deeper than bloodline or dress. For a few moments, Presley believes, the "power of Elvis" will be with him as he swaggers, gyrates and croons for the hundreds who will gather to watch him and others perform at the Lithuanian Hall on Hollins Street.

Katharine Graham's Washington (Knopf, 624 pages, $30) Billed as "a huge, rich gathering of articles, memoirs, humor, and history chosen by Mrs. Graham, that brings to life her beloved city," this is an almost bottomless cornucopia of writings about the capital, which the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post collected and brought together after the vast and deserved success of her autobiography, Personal History. When she died, in July 2001, it was near completion. She had chosen texts -- with help from her aides and editor -- and had written introductions to the main sections of the book -- an overview, society, events, visitors, the capital at war, etc. She also left notes to go with many of the more than 100 individual pieces.

BOSTON - The Oscars are all tucked into their new homes and the red carpet - OK, the cranberry carpet - is rolled up for another year. But before this event recedes into the History of the Academy Awards, could we take one last look at the history of history? In the run-up to the glitzy event, many in Hollywood described 2002 as the year of the smear. A campaign, or so they said, was launched to discredit A Beautiful Mind on the grounds that the John Nash on the screen was not the John Nash in real life.