Poe

Scott Poe has taken all the knockout punches the game of professional bowling has dealt him, and he keeps coming back for more.There have been times when he missed the cut, failed to make a couple of crucial shots, had to limit his bowling to the local tournaments because of a lack of sponsors, and just ran into bad luck in a big tournament.No wonder Poe, 34, has seen it all.The Glen Burnie resident has been dabbling with the Professional Bowlers Association tour for nine years and won't let go of his bid to make it full time on the circuit someday.

A Halloween-themed tour of Baltimore was scarier than expected for a group of tourists Saturday morning.Eight visitors on an excursion sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution were in a bus parked near the Edgar Allan Poe house in West Baltimore when two armed teen-age boys -- one wearing a fluorescent green mask -- boarded the bus and robbed them."

If history is any measure, the opera based on Edgar Allan Poe's macabre story "Ligeia" that receives its world premiere today at the Peabody Conservatory probably will be a failure.This is not said out of prejudice against either Augusta Read Thomas or Leslie Dunton-Downer, "Ligeia's" composer and librettist. It comes simply from an awareness of the precarious chances of success for operas based on Poe, who died in Baltimore at age 40 in 1849.The Thomas and Dunton-Downer "Ligeia" is at least the 35th operatic attempt at one of Poe's works.

IT IS NIGHT in the Poe House. Shadows flicker eerily on the walls of the small room where a disturbed young man is telling a spellbound audience his reason for committing a horrifying crime.Dressed impeccably in the fashion of 1843 Baltimore, he relates with chilling calm how he killed and dismembered the old man and buried his parts beneath the floor boards. "It was not for his gold," he whispers. "It was his evil eye!"Suddenly he grows pale. He seems to hear a sound not apparent to any other.

Collectors of Edgar Allan Poe and H.L. Mencken are roiling the Baltimore rare-book world during these dog days of August like stockbrokers dealing blue chips in a sell-off. "During the last three weeks almost on a daily basis people have just been lining up with books to sell," says Teresa Johanson, the proprietor with her husband Don of Kelmscott Bookshop on 25th Street. "Monday the phone rang all day. [Last] Friday was so insane I could hardly fill orders." She doesn't think it's the heat.

When Dick Thompson's seventh-grade language arts students enter their West Middle School classroom this fall, they'll discover that "Jurassic Park" has taken over.Discussing the sensational movie about dinosaurs brought back life by man is Mr. Thompson's way of introducing his students to Greek mythology."Probably the biggest theme in Greek mythology is that man has certain limits and if you go beyond, you get in trouble. Like the myth of Icarus: Men should not fly," says Mr. Thompson." 'Jurassic Park' is exactly the same concept . . . as it relates to us in the 20th century.

''Two Evil Eyes'' equal one really bad movie.The people who made the film were apparently aware of this because they shelved the movie for four years; the copyright date is 1987.They should have shelved the film forever, put it on ice, though it is most unlikely that there is enough ice in this entire world to subdue the odor from this one.The only interesting thing about the movie is the opening shot, of the Poe House here in Baltimore. That's because this two-in-one film is allegedly based on that many stories by Edgar Allan Poe.Poe could be doing a swift turn in his grave.

Robert V. Minford, a former actor and director who was a mainstay for nearly two decades at the old Limestone Valley Dinner Theater in Cockeysville and was known for his one-man show on Edgar Allan Poe, died of cancer Wednesday at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Lebanon, Pa. He was 75. For more than 20 years, beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Minford wrote and performed Journey to Eldorado, an anecdotal one-man show based on the life and...

Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, "into the region of shadows." Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on Oct. 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe's death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.

For years, residents near the Edgar Allan Poe House have said the West Baltimore attraction is in a safe neighborhood and tourists have nothing to worry about when they visit.But some now have security concerns after the robbery of eight tourists by two armed teen-agers aboard a tour bus. The tourists were waiting to enter the Poe House on Saturday."This is the type of neighborhood where at any time someone could do something crazy like that little number," said Gwendolyn Fasio, 40, who lives in the Poe Homes public housing development.