Stripper

You got to have a gimmick.That advice is given by three strippers to the young novice Louise in the musical "Gypsy" before she is about to take her first walk onstage.The same advice could have been given to Bonnie Daniel, principal of Wilde Lake High School.She has good-naturedly accepted a walk-on role as a stripper in the school's production of "Gypsy" at 8 p.m. today through Saturday.As "Ms. Wilde Lake, the Unknown Stripper," Ms. Daniel will sashay in, say her one line and sashay out."

Famous TV siblings Chip and Ernie Douglas of "My Three Sons" are the real-life sons of a Baltimore Block stripper who performed during the Great Depression under the name Marilyn Primrose.This and other obscure and marvelous facts of Baltimore burlesque fill pages in the personal history of 81-year-old Bernard Livingston, lawyer, author, United Press International photographer, filmmaker, and favorite uncle of Stanley "Chip" Livingston and Barry "Ernie" Livingston."You got it," said Mr. Livingston, in Baltimore this past weekend to screen one of his documentaries in a film festival at the Orpheum Cinema on Thames Street.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, a prosecutor for more than a quarter-century, found himself in the defendant's chair yesterday, charged by the state bar with committing ethics violations during his rape prosecution of three former Duke University lacrosse players. Leaning back in his chair, his chin on his hand, Nifong listened impassively as a North Carolina State Bar lawyer accused him of making prejudicial and misleading statements to the media, withholding exculpatory evidence and lying to two judges.

,TC I ARRIVED at Camden Station on a sweltering September Sunday in 1941. I had just graduated from college, where I had become imbued with an insatiable lust for knowledge. I had heard that Baltimore was the birthplace of both H. L. Mencken and "The Star-Spangled Banner," which struck me as a fantastic combination. Then there were all those monuments, art galleries, concert halls, libraries and museums waiting to be explored, and I was itching to get started.So the first thing I did after dropping off my bags at a Cathedral Street rooming house was go to a burlesque show.

People who were not within 1,000 miles of Duke University have taken sides in the case of a stripper who has accused Duke lacrosse players of rape. One TV talk-show hostess went ballistic when a guest on her program raised questions about the stripper's version of what happened. Apparently we dare not question accusations of rape when it involves the new sacred trinity of race, class and gender. Media irresponsibility is one thing. Irresponsibility by an agent of the law is something else - and much more dangerous.

Like a first novel, Steve Yeager's "On the Block" wants to get it all in.The movie, which has its world premiere tonight at the Senator in a benefit for the Maryland Food Committee and which will eventually play on HBO, is a gritty, ambitious, honest, occasionally ludicrous attempt to examine the culture of The Block, that strip of flesh and woe that inhabits East Baltimore Street.Yeager is a Towson State graduate and industrial filmmaker who heroically raised the $360,000 the movie cost, and shot it, stop and start fashion, over the past four years.

Girl in a Box The Devil's Backbone By Kim Wozencraft St. Martin's Press / 400 pages/$24.95. Kim Wozencraft might just be the noir fiction lover's dream: She writes characters so authentic that the reader swears he or she knows them in real life; her prose is spare and powerful with nary a wasted word; and as a narcotics cop turned junkie turned writer, she knows of what she's written about in her five novels. The Devil's Backbone is, as in earlier work, long on character, emotion and conflict, and if the plot - about two very different sisters whose divergent paths come back together thanks to a series of escalating brutal crimes - has been done before, Wozencraft injects the premise with necessary freshness and an uncanny ability to strike deep at the heart of human frailties.

The death two weeks ago of B film director Doris Wishman in Coral Gables, Fla., brought the name of Baltimore's premier ecdysiast, Fannie Belle Fleming, better known as Blaze Starr, back into the news. Wishman, called "the greatest female exploitation director in history" by drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, in 1962 made Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, in which Starr plays herself - what else? - during a romp at a nudist colony. It was her only movie. Until hanging up her G-string and pasties in 1984, Starr was known as the Queen of Burlesque and the nation's premier exotic dancer, honors she proudly held for decades.

A Baltimore police lieutenant facing more than 50 departmental misconduct charges took the stand in his own defense at a hearing yesterday and denied working at an underground strip club - an allegation at the heart of the case against him. Lt. John M. Mack, a 17-year veteran assigned to the Northwestern District, told a three-member police trial board that the sole reason he was at Ronnie's West Side Gallery, in the 2100 block of W. Lanvale St., in...

It's a good bet that "Gypsy" will always be playing somewhere. One of Broadway's most distinguished shows, it gave theater legend Ethel Merman her greatest role as Mama Rose with its opening in 1959, and has been brought back in revivals there and in film. The latest local production opens Saturday at the Chesapeake Music Hall dinner theater for a seven-week run. Owner, choreographer and Jill-of-all-trades Sherry Kay Anderson will be heading the cast in Merman's famous role. Based on the autobiography of burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical centers on quintessential stage mother Rose Novick, who "has a dream" that younger daughter June can break into show business.