Yuppie

Take one single woman, her gay brother, a successful architect and his best friend (also gay), a waitress and a schizophrenic homeless woman in Manhattan, and what you get is "Eastern Standard," a play by Richard Greenberg that sometimes questions, sometimes laughs at the "yuppie" lifestyle.Western Maryland College will present this adult play that also examines gay and homeless issues at 8 p.m. tomorrow through Sunday on the understage of Alumni Hall." 'Eastern Standard' tells the story of six people who meet by accident.

Sen. Barack Obama is finally coming into focus. For a while now, the Obamaphiles have insisted that their candidate represents a profound break with the past. No more culture wars. No more "relitigating the 1960s," in Mr. Obama's own words. But what about relitigating the 1980s? There's always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that's been hard to pinpoint. But I think I've got it: They're self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which was to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

BRAINERD, Minn. -- When the "Sacramento Kid" decided to hop a freight train to the hobo convention here in early May, he donned his overalls and red T-shirt and lit out for the airport.The airport? Well, there was just no way the 29-year-old computer chip engineer had the time to travel the full distance by boxcar from his California home.A quick flight to Minneapolis, a warm car ride to the rail yards and there was the Kid --ing alongside a monstrous black train, reaching for a steel ladder above his head.

A Uniontown dog kennel still has a few more hoops to jump through before getting approval to expand its business to handle up to 200 canines. Earlier this month, the Carroll County Planning and Zoning Commission raised questions about Camp Yuppie Puppy's request to construct a kennel in the 3400 block of Uniontown Road, where the dog boarding and grooming business has operated since 1994. County officials told kennel co-owner William Quinn that he would need to provide more details about the project and account for discrepancies between plans he supplied to the commission recently and those presented in 2004 to the county Board of Zoning Appeals.

"I will never look this good again."Once you are on this side of 40 and the decline begins, you can say that to yourself every morning with some certainty. You will never again look as good as you do right now.But this is particularly and painfully true as I look at the photographs made of me at Elegant Images in Columbia Mall. Hair poofed to the max. Makeup as thick as peanut butter. Bare shoulders skimmed by satin and silk. I will never look this good again.I went -- in the name of investigative journalism -- in a work shirt, khaki shorts and my yuppie mommy white Keds.

I have barely slept in months. I rarely change clothes. My legs are scarred. My arms are bruised. I have destroyed five manicures. Worst of all, I have made a discovery: The 1950s generation, people I scorned as visionless, were actually right on target. Ordering a brand-new suburban cookie-cutter house from the Sears catalog sounds like a great idea. It's a mystery to me why we massage-loving, goat cheese-eating, cell-phoned yuppies of the 1990s feel the drive to buy and renovate houses.

Bill is right about yuppie greedheads. It takes one to know one.Grit your teeth and say it: Arkansas is No. 1.The Maryland budget has no new taxes. Don for president!Be patriotic. Buy stocks.

ON JUNE 4, I had wanted to treat a friend to an Orioles game at Camden Yards. It was an anniversary: 27 years earlier, I had attended my first game at Memorial Stadium. It did not happen though. We were turned away: sold out.Then a scalper came by, wanting $40 for a ticket. I said no. He replied, "Enjoy the game in a bar buddy!" I said "Enjoy your time in a cage!"We bought tickets for Labor Day weekend -- the only future date that tickets were available. Then we went to my old neighborhood, Highlandtown.

A running battle seems to be going on between modern women and men who patronize places called "gentlemen's clubs," which are anything but.These are nightclubs that feature females who dance, jiggle and shake while wearing little or nothing.Unlike sleazy old-time strip joints, which were run by the crime syndicate, the "gentlemen's clubs" don't have hookers taking guys in back rooms or B-girls hustling customers for outrageously priced drinks.In the "gentlemen's clubs," the men -- a majority of the yuppie persuasion -- just look, gawk, ogle and, presumably, fantasize.

Here's the most troublesome question gnawing away at the foundation of Robert R. Bowie Jr.'s "The Naked House Painting Society": If a husband were planning a romantic weekend to rekindle his relationship with his wife, why would he invite his wife's former lover to go along?The cynical answer is because it sets up the plot of this play,currently being presented at the Spotlighters as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival.Admittedly, there are some interesting complications in Mr. Bowie's account of two yuppie couples -- the former lover is accompanied by his gullible wife -- who return to the Martha Vineyard house where the principals changed partners 10 years ago.The most intriguing complication concerns infertility, a theme that not only increases the play's emotional stakes, but also produces a clever and unexpectedly dark plot twist.

It should come as wonderful news to everyone concerned about Baltimore that the city has begun to show strong signs of reversing a four-decade population decline marked by economic disinvestment, little or no job growth and a stagnant housing market. Ironically, just as the city is starting to see signs of reinvestment, punctuated by long-overdue appreciation in housing values, there are some who see dark clouds in this healthy picture. Urban policy expert David Rusk, in a recent Sun article on the Baltimore City Task Force on Inclusionary Zoning and Housing, stated, "Baltimore would not be well served by being wall-to-wall yuppie.

BEIJING - Visiting the Chinese capital for the first time since 1996 is a startling experience. Nothing you've read can prepare you for the overwhelming physical reality of China's explosive growth, its leap from the bicycle age to the age of Audis, cell phones and a middle-class passion for fashion. Wander through Beijing's glitziest malls and watch crowds of young Chinese chatting on cell phones, roaming in and out of Nine West, Mr. Klein, Givenchy, Rolex watch stores, Starbucks, Pizza Hut or the local Cineplex, and you realize Americans have paid too little attention to the world's biggest story.

Second of two partsAmong Baltimore's many transitional neighborhoods, one made it, one didn't, and one stands on the cusp. Canton blossomed after dying factories turned into expensive housing while the city restored the waterfront. Two miles north in Middle East, efforts to rejuvenate the neighborhood near the Johns Hopkins medical campus failed as residents fled the area, and much of the neighborhood faces the wrecking ball this year. Reservoir Hill could go either way. Fabulous architecture is drawing renovation-minded residents, despite the drugs and crime.

On a recent frigid evening, I ventured into yuppie heaven -- the Whole Foods Market in the Inner Harbor East. Whole Foods began life as a natural-food store in Austin, Texas, but now has become a 166-store international behemoth, albeit a socially responsible behemoth, focused on organic, high-quality foodstuffs and friendly, competent service. Maryland has seven markets, including ones in Mount Washington and Annapolis. The one downtown occupies an expansive space with high ceilings and a concrete floor.

BOSTON - In Mystic River, the celebrated new film directed by Clint Eastwood, the climactic scene occurs at the Black Emerald, a ramshackle bar on an abandoned waterfront. The dive - a place where thugs in leather jackets order whiskey by the bottle - exudes the grittiness of the working-class precincts of Boston that the film aspires to capture. Except for one thing: The bar doesn't actually exist. Unable to find a dive that suited their purposes, the filmmakers built the Black Emerald from scratch and then demolished it after filming, because a city inspector deemed it unfit to remain standing.

The twin spires of St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church have stood like sentinels in the heart of Canton for 75 years, signposts for the neighborhood, markers for sailors plying the harbor and a comfort for the faithful, pointing ever upward toward the heavens. The parish, a century old next year, is in the midst of the most profound change in its history. So too the neighborhood. From its beginnings as an urban, ethnic church serving Polish immigrants, St. Casimir now finds itself ministering to young, upscale professionals while still attending to the needs of its aging, more traditional parishioners.

As love stories go, this isn't exactly "Romeo and Juliet" or "Casablanca." Not even Rocky and, yo, Adrian. But, then, this is the 1990s so we must make do.It begins with Mike, 33, a yuppie. And not a fake yuppie, but the genuine article.He has an MBA and is a certified public accountant. He has a cool city condo, drives a '57 Thunderbird, plays golf at a suburban club and travels the country on business. And as he frankly says about himself: "I'm a good-looking, strapping, 6-4 young guy. The all-American kind of good-looking."

Havre de Grace. -- It's hard to be a yuppie. Not only do crusty old coots ridicule you as you struggle up the ladder of life in your dress-for-success clothes, but now your own ungrateful children are nipping at your heels.The old people don't like the way you've changed the country, and the young ones wish you'd drop dead so they can have your jobs, or at least your money and your toys. You're exposed and vulnerable, and you're beginning to feel the sting of discrimination. Movies mocking you and your values are now all the rage.

CHICAGO - Cabrini-Green, one of the nation's largest and most notorious public housing projects, has a new neighbor: Starbucks. The upscale coffee house caters to the yuppies flocking to the new half-million-dollar townhouses that have joined the landscape of blighted, crime-ridden high rises, where generations of black families have lived in poverty and isolation. Driving by the park adjoining the projects the other night, Cabrini resident leader Deidre Matthews couldn't believe her eyes.

SAN FRANCISCO -- We Americans have had our flappers, our boomers, our hippies, our yippies, our yuppies. Now, as the millennium dawns, it is altogether appropriate that our English language respond to a new group for statisticians to ponder and economists to dissect: those young multimillionaires running dot-com businesses. What DOES one call 36-year-old Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, a wunderkind whose company has set book-buying on its ear? Or Yahoo's Jerry Yang, who was 27 when that Internet stock went public in 1996?