Triangle

Referring to betrayal, a character in Harold Pinter's play of that name comments, "Not much more to say on that subject." Maybe not, but the Nobel Prize-winning playwright certainly found a different way to say it. Betrayal, Pinter's 1978 chronicle of a romantic triangle -- a husband, his wife and his oldest friend -- unfolds in reverse, moving from the postmortem of the affair to its instigation. If you go Betrayal runs through June 24 at Everyman Theatre, 1727 N. Charles St. Tickets: $18-$30.

Buying a home can be a nerve-racking experience.It can take weeks, even months to find the right home. But for Dave Espy, all it took was a simple drive through Crofton on an October autumn day 35 years ago."I was from Kentucky before I accepted a government job in Washington," said Espy, who has since retired. "I knew I needed to find a house nearby, and Crofton had everything I was looking for. So we bought a house and haven't moved since."The same is true for Barbara Swann, who has lived in the same 2,200-square-foot Colonial since moving to the western Anne Arundel County community three decades ago."

ZONING DECISIONS are often complicated in Howard County. But a case involving plans to build a strip mall on Montgomery Road in Ellicott City has the subtle flavor of that old chicken-and-egg joke.You know, which came first? This time, the subject is development.People whose own homes were viewed with apprehension by old-time residents a few years ago now fear a proposed shopping center on land where the older houses sit.What goes around really does come around.Heavy development of this area near U.S. 29 and Routes 103 and 100 began in the 1970s.

Raoul Middleman's paintings can galvanize an art show, with their scudding clouds, flashes of light and active brush strokes that communicate the intensity of feeling behind them.In the C. Grimaldis Gallery's impressive exhibit "The Painterly Landscape," one meets Middleman's "Corner of the Barn" just inside the door. It's impossible not to respond to trees so energetically painted that they appear to rush up from the ground toward the squiggle of light that peeks out beneath the stormy clouds.

Police are looking for a man who held up an Ellicott City liquor store at gunpoint Thursday night and stole an undetermined amount of cash, police said.About 9: 40 p.m., the man entered Triangle Liquors in the 8800 block of Baltimore National Pike and pointed a handgun at a clerk, police said. After taking cash, the man fled, police said.Police described the robber as white, age 20, with a thin face, a crew cut and weighing 140 to 150 pounds. He was wearing a black and purple shirt and a dark baseball cap.Pub Date: 4/26/98

ONE OF THE great mysteries of life -- ranking right up there with the Bermuda Triangle -- is exactly how Jesse Jackson became the country's premier black leader. It couldn't have been by election. I certainly don't remember ever voting for this fool.But premier black leader he is. Polls show it. But more than the polls attest to Jackson's primacy as a leader. We owe the fact that black Americans now call themselves African-Americans to Jackson's charisma.It was he who proposed the change years ago. Blacks didn't accept it as a suggestion to be discussed.

When third-graders Theresa, Davon, Makis and Amethyst go to the new Meade Heights Elementary on Fort Meade this morning, they'll watch videos, use bathrooms and store their bags in lockers -- all right in their classrooms.And when their teacher Sandy Haney has spare time, she'll write lesson plans and correct papers -- not in her classroom, but at an L-shaped desk in a two-person office next door that she'll share with another teacher."When you've never had anything, you don't realize you missed it," said Haney, who has taught at Meade Heights Elementary for eight years.

Vagabond D.C. United returns to RFK Stadium at 7: 30 tonight (HTS) for only the second time in July, facing Major League Soccer Eastern Conference rival Columbus.United has lost two straight on the road -- one of league's worst refereeing messes in Los Angeles when it finished with nine players, and to Kansas City last Saturday.Coach Bruce Arena predicted a midsummer slump once United's Latin American "Magic Triangle" attack returned from Copa America and World Cup qualifying. Coming back after six games that the trio missed would require an adjustment period, Arena said.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks rose in the slowest trading day of the year yesterday, after the International Monetary Fund and Group of Seven nations pledged to speed $10 billion in aid to South Korea, igniting a rally in Korean shares."

"Gut Symmetries," by Jeanette Winterson. Knopf. 240 pages. $22.The poetry of physics has become the stuff of novels. Martin Amis dabbles in it. Alan Lightman revels in it. And in "Gut Symmetries," Jeanette Winterson embraces it with love.Two of the characters in her new novel's love triangle are physicists, the third a poet, and she uses science, astrology and the Tarot to frame a fable enveloped in mysticism. When all the stardust is stripped away, however, the story is slender, even silly, built as it is on coincidence (or fate, which one character calls "a useful excuse")

Kathy Delauney's kitchen has granite counters, to-the-ceiling cabinets, stainless-steel appliances and recessed lighting. But none of those features is what makes it a great kitchen. The best part? It can handle a crowd. "It's built for entertaining," says Delauney, who bought the half-gutted two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath rowhouse in Federal Hill last year and renovated it. "It's not crowded. You don't feel like you have to shoo anyone out." The space was moved from the back to the middle of the first floor and opens to the living room.

If the clouds part this evening, we should have a fine view of a very bright International Space Station as it zips up the East Coast and crosses the Chesapeake Bay just south of Baltimore. Look to the southwest about 7:55 p.m., and watch for a steady, starlike object climbing past Jupiter at a brisk 17,500 mph. The space station will pass high overhead at 7:58 p.m., flying northeast through the starry Summer Triangle. Then watch it vanish into the Earth's shadow at 7:59 p.m.

CLARIFICATION An article in Sunday's Travel section gave the impression that Chiodo's Tavern in Pittsburgh was open for business. The bar closed in 2005. THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR THOMAS WOLFE SAID YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN, but if somebody offers you $500 to try, it can be worth the trip. "Five-hundred bucks?" an old Pittsburgh friend asked. "They are giving you 500 bucks to do Pittsburgh? You could buy the whole town for two grand." Not anymore, I said. My hometown, once a gritty, grimy, blue-collar steel town, is now the darling of the travel writers.

Referring to betrayal, a character in Harold Pinter's play of that name comments, "Not much more to say on that subject." Maybe not, but the Nobel Prize-winning playwright certainly found a different way to say it. Betrayal, Pinter's 1978 chronicle of a romantic triangle -- a husband, his wife and his oldest friend -- unfolds in reverse, moving from the postmortem of the affair to its instigation. If you go Betrayal runs through June 24 at Everyman Theatre, 1727 N. Charles St. Tickets: $18-$30.

BAGHDAD -- A pre-dawn ambush killed five members of a U.S. military patrol and left three others missing yesterday in an insurgent stronghold dubbed the "Triangle of Death" where two American soldiers were taken captive and slain last year. U.S. and Iraqi troops scoured date palm orchards, fields of high reeds and irrigation ditches along the Euphrates River southwest of Baghdad in search of the missing. Helicopters and airplanes scanned the terrain from the air, and the military established checkpoints throughout the agricultural region in case their captors tried to smuggle them out of the area.

LOVELAND, Colo. -- In less than a month, thousands of artists from the United States and abroad will travel to this city in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains for an annual sculpture show that has helped to cement Loveland's reputation as a creative haven. This year, though, the event will take place in the shadow of a debate over a large bronze sculpture that some residents say is too erotic, and inappropriate for a public art installation. The sculpture, titled Triangle, was created by Kirsten Kokkin, 54, a Norwegian-born and internationally acclaimed sculptor who moved here 20 years ago. Roughly 14 feet tall and 9 feet wide, Triangle depicts three nude figures - a man and a woman holding up another woman.

Triangle Katharine Weber Farrar, Straus and Giroux / 244 pages / $23 The images are as unforgettable as they are horrific: Young women screaming, their hair and long skirts on fire. All around, the confluent smells of burning flesh and machine oil, enveloped in a smoke thick as fabric, choke the life from them. It is March 25, 1911, and the most notorious fire in New York history is burning at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co.. Before nightfall, 146 workers, nearly all immigrant women under 25, will be dead.

If only La Mujer de mi Hermano (My Brother's Wife) had a dollop of humor and at least one character worth rooting for. It's certainly got three fine-looking leads, and plays for much of its length like the kind of steamy potboiler for which the term "guilty pleasure" was coined. But what the stars, director Ricardo de Montreuil and writer Jaime Bayly have come up with is a singularly joyless affair, the story of a complicated love triangle involving three ludicrously overdrawn characters - an unfulfilled wife, an inadequate husband and an oversexed brother-in-law - who don't have a clue how ridiculous they are. Neither, apparently, do the filmmakers, who treat the material with all the earnestness of a junior-high sex-ed lecturer.

Race for the Cure The lowdown -- On Saturday, Federal Hill welcomes the annual Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Race for the Cure. Races take place in cities all over the country, and last year, more than 20,000 people participated in the Maryland races. This year's participants can take part in a 5K Run, 5K Walk or 1 mile Family Fun Walk, which Ronald McDonald is scheduled to lead. The event promotes breast-cancer awareness and raises money for breast-cancer research and treatment. If you go -- Registration tents open at 6 a.m. Saturday and the aerobic warm-up takes place at 7 a.m. The 5K run begins at 8 a.m., the 5K walk at 8:30 a.m. and the 1 mile fun walk at 9 a.m. Race festivities will begin on the B Lot of M&T Bank Stadium, 1101 Russell St. There will be limited parking at the stadium and at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

LONDON - Shortly after Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, stated there was a 30 percent reduction in the number of Iraqi attacks, statistics for November highlighted the real situation: 109 dead, 81 of them Americans. General Sanchez's positive spin on the situation failed to note the sophistication of recent attacks carried out by well-trained and organized guerrillas who are carefully selecting their targets - Spanish intelligence officers, Japanese diplomats, Italian soldiers as well as American forces.