Zelda

The Maryland Emergency Management Agency, in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service, is conducting a regionwide hurricane-preparedness exercise tomorrow through March 20.The exercise will help determine if plans now in effect would be sufficient if a hurricane hit Maryland.During the first week, the National Weather Service will begin tracking the movement of Hurricane Zelda, an imaginary tropical storm off the West African coast.As the hurricane approaches, state and local emergency managers will respond to the storm.

It's almost noon. Lake Roland Dam has already started to deteriorate. About 2,000 men, women and children in the area below the dam are being evacuated.Others have been evacuated already. The state has issued a flash flood warning; three to four inches of rain are falling every hour.The Maryland National Guard has been alerted and is standing by to quell looting that is expected in the evacuated areas of Montgomery and Prince George's counties and Baltimore City. The damage from Hurricane Zelda already has surpassed $33 million.

Zelda. The name is magic. Say it, and everybody in the room instantly knows whom you mean. But we think of only part of her: Zelda the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. We think of their joy-ride through the Roaring '20s and their crackup in the '30s, when Zelda, mentally ill, bounced from hospital to hospital.Only gradually is the other Zelda coming to public attention: Zelda the novelist and short story writer, Zelda the artist. "Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings" was published in 1991, but until now her visual art has remained almost totally unknown.

Zelda Goldberg Simon, a founder of the Baltimore Ethical Society and a professional potter, died Dec. 24 of congestive heart failure at the Lorien Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Columbia. She was 77. The daughter of a salesman in the garment industry and a homemaker, Zelda Goldberg attended Baltimore City schools. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from Goucher College in 1951. She worked as an administrator for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore for several years.

F.SCOTT FITZGERALD, born 100 years ago today, died in 1940, only 44 years old, worn out by alcoholism, private misfortune and the specter of professional failure. My direct connection with one of the century's finest novelists was a brief and accidental event of my 12th birthday -- 63 years ago -- and as a result his ghost has relentlessly pursued me.Fitzgerald's success flamed up and flamed out while he was still young. Now, many decades after his death, he has become a literary icon, studied by a gaggle of experts enchanted by his command of words but fascinated also by his tempestuous life.

If you want a taste of the Gilded Age, just plunk down $450,000, the asking price for a Baltimore townhouse once owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author who gave us "The Great Gatsby" and other classics lived in Towson and Baltimore while wife Zelda was being treated for her mental health problems. Now the four-bedroom townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue in Bolton Hill is up for sale. Here's what the University of Baltimore's Literary Heritage says about his time here: "In 1932, Fitzgerald brought [Zelda]

Sometimes Madness is Wisdom -- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage, by Kendall Taylor. Ballantine. 416 pages. $28. It's a tale at once fascinating, compulsively readable and unbearably sad. The story of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald -- the golden young couple who embodied all that was beautiful and damned about the Jazz Age -- has been told repeatedly over the years. But in Sometimes Madness is Wisdom, Kendall Taylor takes a lifelong interest in the doomed Zelda and molds it into a book that is wise, compassionate and distinctly different.

The Arts item in Live about the Zelda Fitzgerald exhibit at Evergreen House should have said that it opens to the public Monday and that its hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays.The Sun regrets the errors.Say "Zelda" and everyone instantly thinks of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald flying high in the Roaring Twenties and crashing in the Thirties. Perhaps inevitably, Zelda is best known as Scott's wife, but she was a novelist, short-story writer and artist in her own right.

It was good to see Mary Meyer's sketch of the Sheppard-Pratt Gatehouse in the paper the other day (April 15). I like the Gatehouse, I look to see it whenever I go out Charles Street. I look to see if Zelda Fitzgerald is there.She was standing there some 60 years ago. A young man struck up a conversation, made her acquaintance. They got on well. He told her he was an actor.That was music for Zelda. She'd recently written a play called ''Scandalabra.'' The Vagabond Junior Players were to put it on at the converted carriage-house theater on Read Street off Charles.

On July 26, 2003, LUCILLE P.; devoted mother of Zelda Haines and Edward Powell. She is also survived by one sister Beulah Jones; one brother Milliard Powell; six grandchildren; several great-grandchildren and a host of other relatives and friends. Memorial Services will be held at New Psalmist Baptist Church, 4501M-l Old Frederick Road, Saturday, 10 A.M. Interment King Memorial Park. Professional services entrusted to Gary P. March Funeral Home.