Servants

There's a lot of magic in the musical "Beauty and the Beast" at the Mechanic Theatre.There's magic in the form of tricks and illusions -- a fireball thrown across the stage or the chatty, disembodied head of a little boy who has been turned into a teacup. There's magic in Natasha Katz's lighting design, which contributes to the split-second effects of a withered old beggar woman transformed into a beautiful enchantress and a handsome young prince transformed into a monstrous beast.And there's magic in the eyes of the children in the audience, watching all of this with awe.But for this critic, the two most magical elements have to do with interpolations in the story.

If they won't go after Bill, the Republicans could always impeach Starr.Since it is emptying out, Bawlmer doesn't need so many civil servants. If they would serve the public better, more of it would remain and more of them could stay.At last the '99 Orioles will have a closer, which is taking last things first.4&Cheer up. It's basketball season.Pub Date: 11/16/98

"Man With a Load of Mischief" is a cumbersome title for a cumbersome musical.And that quality is especially regrettable, since this is a period chamber musical that, at least in theory, should be charming.A little-known 1966 off-Broadway show, "Man With a Load of Mischief" is a convoluted tale of romance and intrigue at a 19th-century British country inn. It was adapted by John Clifton and Ben Tarver from a 1925 play by Ashley Dukes.The problem in the production at Columbia's Rep Stage isn't the performances.

THIS WEEK, the most meaningful of any in the Clinton era since last week, saw the president and the first lady join forces with other rich people with servants -- the Bushes, the Fords, the Carters, the Powells, Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta and Brooke Shields -- to demand that the rest of us get up off our fat couch-potato duffs and do something about all the problems that the Clintons, the Bushes, the Fords and the Carters regret to say the government simply...

WHEN I FIRST heard about the residents of Bay Ridge, outside Annapolis, installing their own stop signs, painting "slow" on the roadway and then staging a sit-in to prevent Anne Arundel County road crews from undoing their handiwork, I immediately thought of the Vietnam protests.About 28 years ago, University of Maryland students and others protesting the war blocked traffic on U.S. 1, painted slogans in roadway and defaced street signs. They also tussled with police and National Guard troops in what was billed as an effort to end the United States' participation in an unjust war.Despite their noble cause, the students were considered vandals.

THE ADOPTION, by the trustees of Baltimore County's community colleges, of guidelines abolishing tenure for new faculty is sure to be applauded by those in, and chiefly out of, higher education who have been long argued that academic tenure is an unnecessary and outmoded benefit.These critics claim that granting faculty members ''lifetime contracts'' burden colleges with redundant and expensive personnel and protect the lazy, the senile and the incompetent.These criticisms are the result of a widespread misunderstanding of what tenure does and does not do and of the reasons colleges offer it.An award of tenure is not a ''lifetime contract;'' it does not prevent schools from setting a mandatory retirement age. (Federal law does, and that is part of the colleges' problem.

When Gov. William Donald Schaefer took office in Annapolis, he would call various departments to see how employees treated citizens seeking help. If the people who answered the phone were not courteous or helpful, they and their superiors would receive a blistering dressing down from the state's top elected official.Since every civil servant's worst nightmare is to be at the receiving end of Governor Schaefer's well-known temper, a large number of civil servants cleaned up their phone manners and began responding more quickly to telephoned requests.

Unfair CartoonOn March 20, you published in the Saturday Sun an editorial cartoon suggesting that federal civil servants are President Clinton's No. 1 problem. The cartoon was a cruel insult to the thousands of federal civil servants who make up a large portion of Baltimore's work force.Are civil servants perfect? Of course not. We are human and have our share of shortcomings. We make mistakes and there are some bad apples among us. It is sad to see a normally skillful and incisive cartoon commentator like Mike Lane fire such a cheap shot.

WASHINGTON -- When Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner's "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" tried out for Broadway at Washington's National Theatre 16 years ago, it went through more rewrites than a congressional bill. Then it flopped on Broadway anyway.Now director Erik Haagensen has scuttled all of the rewrites in an attempt to return to the creators' original intent. And once again, the show is in our nation's capital, this time at the Kennedy Center in a production by the Indiana University Opera Theater.

WASHINGTON -- When federal worker and sometime fisherman Bob Spore, of Pasadena, learned that it would soon be illegal for him to earn money for writing or speaking about his hobby, he was livid."

Allison Severance grew up on a farm in Howard County. So when she and her husband, Rick Henry, began looking for a house, her childhood experience helped shape the search: It had to be special; it had to possess charm; and it couldn't be new. They found it over the mountains in Searchwell Farm, built circa 1800 in the Washington County town of Boonsboro. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the farmhouse, along with five outbuildings, was built of limestone by Germans who migrated south from Pennsylvania through the Cumberland Valley.

This is the first in a three-part series on Maryland-based finalists for the 2007 Service to America Medals, or Sammies, one of the highest honors bestowed upon civil servants. The winners will be announced next month. Wallace Fung, chief technology officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, had a big problem in spring of last year: Computer processing errors were causing headaches for hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans and seniors trying to get medicine under the new federal prescription drug program.

Baltimore's H. L. Mencken once wrote that "injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice." True for your head, maybe, but not your heart. It turns out there's nothing like the thought that you've been treated unjustly to give you chest pains. In a study that, if not a definitive work of epidemiology, at least sounds too good not to be true, more than 8,000 British civil servants with no history or symptoms of cardiovascular disease were asked how strongly they agreed with the following statement: "I often have the feeling that I am being treated unfairly."

There are various ways to tame Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, a comedy with a thorny wife-subjugation ending. Cole Porter turned it into the musical Kiss Me, Kate. The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's approach comes closer to an Elizabethan episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. Love is not only in the air among the upper classes in director Patrick Kilpatrick's production, it also infects the servants. The play concerns two sisters -- sweet Bianca (Ashly Ruth Fishell) and older, vile-tempered Katherine (Kate Michelsen-Graham)

Painter Grace Hartigan, whose latest works are on view this month at C. Grimaldis Gallery, traces her artistic roots back to the abstract-expressionist movement of the 1950s, when her contemporaries included such giants as Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Philip Guston. But Hartigan, 84, has outlived all of them, as well as the heyday of America's first internationally important art movement, and chances are that she will be remembered as much for being a pioneer of all that followed as for her initial contributions as an Ab-Exer.

A family of aristocrats emerges from huge cocoons to prepare for yet another party in their servant-filled chateau. Guests arrive in gauzy clothes that reveal bloated bodies, mundane undergarments, weak hoops holding up skirts (and their honor). Wigs, like absurd masses of petrified cotton candy, lean at precarious angles. These horrid people prance and dance, but their gavottes have halting steps. They are about to die. They will never really know why. And that's just the first minutes in Washington National Opera's explosive production of Umberto Giodano's Andrea Chenier.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S.-led administration yesterday dashed hopes for the quick formation of an interim Iraqi government and announced it was assuming responsibility for paying 1.4 million civil servants. "You can't get in any deeper than running a country," a senior U.S. official said. "But it is not our intention for this to go on indefinitely." Still, officials dropped their insistence that Iraq would be well on its way to self-governance by mid-June. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator, said a summit of Iraqi politicians planned for next month would be pushed back.

CRYSTAL CITY, Va. - When she fled northern Iraq in 1976, walking for 21 straight days to the Iranian border with her family - the smell of burned flesh from Saddam Hussein's executions of Kurds dizzying her senses - 11-year-old Pakeza Alexander promised herself that, if she ever had the chance to help people gain freedom from oppression, she would. After two years in Iran and a marriage arranged by her parents, Pakeza came to the United States - a young teen with a 7-month-old boy in her arms and twins on the way - and built a life with her husband in Nashville, Tenn.

MIAMI -- The administration of Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will be the most closely watched to date as a case of whether Latin American democracies can combat socioeconomic injustice and simultaneously pursue global competitiveness. Financial markets have accelerated downward ever since opinion polls reported that Mr. da Silva was pulling significantly ahead of the other candidates in Sunday's election. Investors, already wary that Brazil's growing debt burden could lead to a default similar to neighboring Argentina's, took no solace in Mr. da Silva's attacks on banks and currency market traders as perpetrators of "economic terrorism" and his promise to perform "major surgery" on South America's largest economy.

IN THE 1930s, Josef Stalin created a terrible famine throughout the Soviet Union by collectivizing thriving private farms. Today, something akin to this is happening in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's government is in the process of confiscating 4,874 of the country's most productive commercial farms. Since June 23, their owners (most of whom are white) have been legally prohibited from taking care of the crops or farm animals. They must vacate their homes by Aug. 10, when the government takes over the farms.