Unforgettable

The caller on the phone posed a simple enough question: What is the historic significance of Howard Street to downtown Baltimore?The inquiry came from David Stein, an official of the Downtown Partnership, the group that promotes the city's business core.The question would have had an obvious answer only a few years ago, when a walk along Howard Street would have supplied all the responses. Before the shopping mall and the middle class' evacuation of Baltimore, the street was the place where you met your friends, bought your bedsheets and saw Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady."

LADY DAY: THE MANY FACES OF BILLIE HOLIDAY.Robert O'Meally.Arcade/Little, Brown.207 pages. $29.95. Accurately introduced as a biographical essay, "Lady Day" delivers a well-planned work of limited length and scope. But it is marred by analysis laden with adulation of the singer, enshrining her on a too-lofty level.Robert O'Meally, tapping numerous sources in composing his five-part essay, says its "central point is that . . . she was able to invent for herself a shining identity as an artist."

It was standing room only Thursday as family, friends and admirers of Robert Francell Chew said goodbye with a spirited and moving celebration of life ceremony for the actor known as Proposition Joe. More than 100 persons crowded into the chapel at the Calvin B. Scruggs Funeral Home in east Baltimore on a cold, snow-dusted morning. They ranged from other Baltimore actors who had won featured roles in HBO's "The Wire," like Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, to Raymond Parker, the high school music teacher who rook Chew under his wing at Patterson High, taught him to sing Italian opera and helped him get an audition that led to a four-year scholarship at Morgan State University.

Mutter Museum may leave you shocked and horrified or amazed and fascinated. Either way, its collections of bones, bodies, body parts, plus tumors and other terrors, are unforgettable. The nation's finest and oldest medical museum - celebrating its 150th anniversary this month - bills itself as "disturbingly informative," and that is absolutely true. Specimens lining its wood-and-glass display cases reveal the effects of epidemics and diseases on the body, as well as an amazing array of human curiosities and anomalies.

Last week, on what would have been his father's 79th birthday, Chad Unitas visited his grave at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. There, on the edge of a pond filled with ducks and ringed by weeping willows, he knelt by the marble marker and spoke with the one many call football's greatest quarterback. "I go there a couple of times a month, to ask my dad's advice about this and that," Unitas said. "He's been gone 10 years, but I can still hear his voice. " Johnny Unitas died of a heart attack Sept.

"An Unforgettable Summer," which opens today at the Charles in rotation with "Ladybird, Ladybird," is the rare film that tries the tricky narrative device of the faux naive narrator. In other words, from the bland title downward, it appears to be a sentimental look back at a wondrous childhood event, which the narrator, now the grown son of the family in question, still treasures. But as his memoir progresses we realize what he doesn't -- that the events are terrifying, depressing, depraved and resonant.

Remember the Alamo? Many people don't. But Texans do, and they're proud of the story. In Texas, it's a symbol of a fight for independence.The story of the brave men who fought to save the Alamo is a story that you should know, too. The best place to start is right in the center of San Antonio, in the busy town square, where part of the Alamo still stands.When you cross the plaza, the Alamo at first appears smaller than you expect. But our guide, the Alamo's historian, Richard Bruce Winders, had us stop and picture the historic garrison, or fort, as it would have been 163 years ago. The classic shape of what we call the Alamo is the original church.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- The throngs had gone -- the sports reporters back to their hockey games and the spectators back to their homes for a leisurely Sunday with the family.Carolyn and Sonny Hine spent yesterday morning with their boy, Skip Away. In his stall at Churchill Downs, after finishing sixth the day before in his final race, the Breeders' Cup Classic, Skip Away underwent a veterinarian's examination in preparation for his transfer to Hopewell Farm outside Lexington.The handoff from the Hines to Rick Trontz, the owner of Hopewell, will take place tomorrow.

A DECADE from now, only serious racings fans will remember the name of the horse who won the Preakness Stakes yesterday at Pimlico Race Course. But no one who saw the race will ever forget what happened at the head of the stretch. "It was an amazing performance," said Tim Ritchey, trainer of Afleet Alex, the horse who won. This running of Baltimore's Triple Crown race will long be remembered as the one that belonged on Amazing Animal Videos - the one in which a horse buckled and almost fell with just a quarter-mile to go, but somehow kept his balance and, almost impossibly, went on to win in a runaway.

BARCELONA, Spain -- In no particular order, my top 10 memories of the 1992 Olympics, wacky, wonderful or otherwise:* 1. Those crazy Irish.They sang "Here we go, here we go, here we go," to the tune of "Stars and Stripes Forever," and that was before welterweight Michael Carruth even stepped into the ring.Heaven knows how long the party lasted after Carruth defeated a Cuban for Ireland's first boxing gold medal, and first overall since 1956.Let's just say the Irish were exuberant, apparently having chosen alcohol over sleep.