Tapestry

Los Angeles -- Carole King is the latest artist to join the exclusive 10 million club, though it took her "Tapestry" album 24 years to get her there.Ms. King was certified last week by the Recording Industry Association of America for domestic sales of 10 million copies of the seminal 1970s album, which spent 302 weeks on Billboard's pop chart, compared with record-holder Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" with 741 weeks and third-place "Led Zeppelin IV" with 259 weeks.Ms. King joins only 21 other artists and 26 albums that have hit the stratosphere of the 10 million club.

QUIET WATERS PARK, Off Hillsmere Drive, Annapolis.Exhibitions in the Restaurant Galleryand the Visitor's Center Gallery.Showing the culmination of the love of texture and color, the woven tapestries of Annapolitan Marjorie Margulies will be on display (through Sept. 3) in the park's Restaurant Gallery. The works of Ms. Margulies, a former New Yorker who taught art in that city's high schools for 22 years, are described by Aileen Thomas of the park's Fine Arts Committee as tapestries emerging on the loom "with no prior plan, with a painter's sense of color and an almost sculptural manipulation of the weft."

Havre de Grace. -- The tapestry of Maryland political life is long and colorful, the more so because of the way some of its more durable human strands keep appearing and reappearing as the decades slip by.Go back to the tumultuous spring of 1969, and the green Connecticut campus of Yale University. Yale students are on strike, protesting the war in Vietnam and assorted other perceived evils. They want the faculty to join them in closing the university down.In the chapel, when a retired professor stands to challenge the idea that such an action will address the shortcomings of society, a tearful sophomore from Baltimore responds.

City Room, by Arthur Gelb. Putnam. 672 pages. $29.95. The recent upheaval at The New York Times stemming from a reporter's elaborate fabrications shocked the journalistic community everywhere. After all, such things weren't supposed to happen to the good gray lady long regarded as the queen of American newspapers. The scandal evoked a torrent of questions about the Times' policies and whether its golden reputation was overblown. Arthur Gelb, who started out as a copyboy and worked his way up to managing editor over a 45-year span, gives a generally glowing review of the paper's achievements while taking us on a revealing and captivating walk through the City Room.

As soft as a rose petal, the sheet practically floats on your hand. Its damask rose pattern is as intricate as a tapestry. And if you had a magnifying glass and the patience, you could count 310 tiny cotton threads in every square inch of cloth. It seems like a fabric from out of this world.The sheet's price is certainly stratospheric. At $190 for a twin flat sheet, this isn't the kind of bedding you send the kids off to camp with. But the "Tea Rose" sheet, woven in Italy for the William Sonoma-owned Chambers catalog, represents the natural culmination of the return of cotton to the American bed. These days, cotton is king-, queen- and twin-size.

The African Art Museum of Maryland will celebrate Black History Month on Sunday with a program featuring tapestries from Senegal and a children's reading session about African-American history.Events will begin at 2 p.m. at the Columbia museum, which exhibits African artwork and sponsors lectures, workshops and events. About 15 wool tapestries by Senegalese master weaver Abdoulaye Kasse will be on display. Kasse will weave a tapestry and be available to talk with visitors about his craft.

Adriana Bosch remembers asking her father to take her to the Santiago airport in Cuba when she was 4 years old so that she could see Fidel Castro get off the plane from Havana after the Cuban Revolution. She stood at the foot of the stairs, and when Castro descended, he picked her up and kissed her for the cameras. Bosch left Cuba a decade later. Her father, who worked in the cattle business, had lost all his property. Several family friends had wound up in jail. Now, at 49, after years of working on documentary films about the likes of Ulysses S. Grant, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bosch has turned her attentions toward home.

The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie thinks of Baltimore as "an old woman who's resigned and not very happy, who used to be very beautiful and is aware she no longer is very beautiful and is not very happy about it." Adichie lived here on University Parkway for about a year while she worked on getting her master's degree in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. She'll be back in the area tonight, reading from her much-acclaimed debut novel Purple Hibiscus at Barnes & Noble, at the Avenue at White Marsh.

In Mount Vernon, Greek Orthodox senior citizens dye nearly 1,000 eggs a brilliant red as a reminder of the blood shed during Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. Polish families mob Ostrowski's Famous Sausage in Fells Point for the kielbasa to break their Lenten fast. Several African-American churches move out of their sanctuaries and rent the city's largest venues for Easter morning extravaganzas. And many choirs face their busiest time of the year, nursing sore vocal cords as they soldier through Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" and other seasonal pieces they'll sing during four services in four days.

Towson University's Maryland Arts Festival has found riches in "Rags." The 1986 musical was one of Broadway's bigger flops. Its speedy demise was all the more surprising considering the credentials of its creators -- librettist Joseph Stein ("Fiddler on the Roof"), composer Charles Strouse ("Annie") and lyricist Stephen Schwartz ("Godspell"). At the Maryland Arts Festival, however, this moving, highly melodic, large-scale musical is the jewel of a three-show summer season that, in its entirety, is one of the strongest this festival has ever produced.