Real Life

"Oh, no," groaned 17-year-old Hayden Hutzell, as the car she was driving thumped over yet another neon orange traffic cone. By the time she finished her ride of a few hundred yards in the Sunday afternoon sun, the Ellicott City teenager had slowly rolled the car over more lane-marking cones than she could remember, weaving in and out of makeshift lanes she could barely detect. She was unable to reply to her police officer-instructor's simple question of how many months ago she got her driver's license.

Grant Whitacre's acting career began with a scribbled phone number on the back of a racing program. It almost ended there, too. The 25-year-old jockey, who grew up in Howard County and graduated from Atholton, was getting dressed in the jockeys' room at Laurel Park in August. As he was putting his clothes on, he noticed a piece of paper stuck to the wall. It was a casting call for jockeys interested in auditioning for roles in a Disney movie about legendary Triple Crown winner Secretariat.

G ee, someone deserves a medal! Women of a certain heft are suddenly everywhere. "Mad Men's" Christina Hendricks, the Jessica Rabbit-proportioned redhead who also happens to be a good actress, is on the cover of New York Magazine. Michelle Obama, whom a recent Los Angeles Times editorial described as an "athletic, real-woman-with-curves," launched her initiative to fight childhood obesity. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics is the source of some interesting insights into what athletes - especially female athletes - actually weigh.

"The Blind Side" has a supremely satisfying wrap-up: photos of football player Michael Oher with his adoptive family and the footage of his selection by the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL draft. There's nothing like that tingle of authenticity coming after a resonant fact-based story. Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale - make that Big and Tall - en route to these closing attractions. Author Michael Lewis titled one chapter "Freak of Nurture" in his terrific nonfiction source book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game."

In the movies, cops slip their snitches $20 or $50 in a back alley and give them a black eye so their friends don't think they're squealing. In real life, informants are registered and have government-sounding titles - "DEA-numbered source," for example. They operate under offices with cryptic acronyms such as CIRC, for Confidential Informant Review Committee. They even have their own bureaucracy, like the Drug Enforcement Administration's Confidential Source Unit. In real life, informants get their money, sometimes in five- and six-figure amounts, in the form of checks from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Her name was Natalie, and she was dying of cancer. She was 9 years old, I think, and one of those groups that grants wishes to terminally ill children had offered to make hers come true. Her wish was simple, she wanted a big party for her 10th birthday, but of course it was also heartbreaking because there would not be an 11th. Her doctor knew it, her family knew it and Natalie - because she was close to a boy who was at her same stage of cancer and had recently died - knew it. I thought about Natalie and her sweet, sad party the other day, more than 25 years after I'd written a story about it for the newspaper I was working for back then.

Men in suits and women in high heels swirled on the ballroom dance floor at Martin's West as a big band played and candelabras shone on a sea of dinner tables. Dr. Diana Griffiths of St. Agnes Hospital had to concentrate on faces to recognize her cancer patients. "I'm so used to seeing people in a hospital setting," she said. "This is real life." Hospitals and cancer support groups across Maryland participated in National Cancer Survivors Day on Sunday, a time set aside to celebrate the 12 million Americans who have overcome the disease.

The Haunting in Connecticut is part of the dreary tradition of "real-life" haunted-house movies, such as The Amityville Horror, instead of the livelier one of make-believe, such as The Innocents or The Haunting or the more recent The Orphanage. Why are the supposedly fact-based "boo movies" so much more plodding and heavy? Instead of milking ambiguity for suspense and terror, these movies proceed with (pardon the expression) dead certainty. If something looks like a ghost and moves like a ghost and smells like a ghost - it is, invariably, a ghost.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made. This film from contemporary master Laurent Cantet (Heading South), about a French grammar instructor teaching a diverse group of 14- and 15-year-olds in a Paris school, depicts a mixture of instinct and process that allows a pedagogue to sustain genuine communication with his students while preserving his own sanity. Jon Voight's Pat Conroy in the great American film Conrack swept up his students with his outsize personality and his poetic relationship to his subject matter.

I've never been one to eat peas. As a child, my mother insisted I finish my vegetables, so I swallowed peas like pills with my iced tea. How do I explain that I now find myself befriending not just one serving, but an entire bag? Frozen peas are just the ticket for reducing swelling after an eye job. I don't really like admitting to vanity, but I'm convinced that denial does no good. It's like lying about your age. What's the point? After you lie, you're no younger. So, I might as well own up and be done with it. Now I officially become one of "those" women.