November 2009 Issue by Urbanite LLC

New Fiction • Chef 101 • A Knight’s Tale november 2009 issue no. 65

GROWING PAINS THE YOUTH ISSUE

Health Supplement:

The Coverage Conundrum

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november 2009 issue no. 65

the youth issue 42

contents

keynote: the father figure

joe jones, founder of the center for urban families, on keeping dad in the picture interview by marc steiner

way out 46 the geoffrey canada’s program for helping children overcome systemic poverty has

been dubbed “the harlem miracle.” the federal government is about to invest billions of dollars in duplicating his approach nationwide. can baltimore get on board? by greg hanscom

gift 54 the sixteen-year-old ilyich rivas doesn’t have his driver’s license, but he does have a

peabody fellowship and an opportunity to conduct the baltimore symphony orchestra. what’s he got that we don’t? by rob hiaasen

neverland express 60 the you’ve hit 40 without a wife or kids, and you sometimes still wake up on your friends’

couches. does that make you a hero or a loser? a meditation on the man-child moment. by tim kreider

departments note 7 editor’s age wisdom you’re saying 9 what missing the point

you’re writing 11 what all grown up: a father’s hands, a first shave, and looking too young corkboard 15 this month: a big schaefer, tiny trains, and the luck of the irish goods: hunting with the birds. plus: art and coffee, one-of-a-kind clothes, and 17 the comics galore baltimore observed 21 knight job: getting medieval with a professional jouster by mimi kirk

this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: resource: a roundup of local cooking classes audio slideshow: area 13-year-olds talk about their lives

the BRAC army is coming. or not. 25 maneuvers: by greg hanscom

up: kids and clay meet in sowebo 27 fired by brent englar

scope: cover me! why the uninsured aren’t the only ones waiting for health care reform by deborah rudacille

blue light / blue heat 64 fiction: b y a r i e l s. w i n t e r

on the air: urbanite on the marc steiner show, weaa 88.9 fm

69 eat/drink cutting class: i’m a hopeless cook. can a real chef help? by molly o’donnell

reviewed: blue hill tavern and el guapito

nov 10: health insurance and health care reform

nov 11: the full interview with joe jones

77 the feed: this month in eating

nov 25: teenage conducting prodigy ilyich rivas

75 wine & spirits: the beaujolais backlash art/culture 79 as told to: taylor branch listens, and listens, and listens … by wil s. hylton

on the cover:

illustration by emily c-d

plus: an underrated reservoir, a local jazz summit, and live from death row eye to eye 90 urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on steve ziger w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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Issue 65 : November 2009 Publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro Genera l Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne K . Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Literar y Editor Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com Proofreader Robin T. Reid

FACES of a NEW NATION

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urbanite november 09

Contributing Writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Clinton Macsher r y, Tracey Middlekauff, R ichard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Mar tha Thomas, Sharon Tregask is, Michael Yockel, Mar y K . Zajac Editoria l Interns Amanda DiGiondomenico, Brent Englar Design/Production Manager Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic Production Coordinator Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer K ristian Bjørnard Kristian@urbanitebaltimore.com Videographer/Website Coordinator Chris Rebber t website@urbanitebaltimore.com Production Interns Tyler Fitzpatrick, Kelly Wise Senior Account Executives Gwendolyn Bethea Gwen@urbanitebaltimore.com Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan Econ Econsusan@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R . Lev y Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives R achel Bloom Rachel@urbanitebaltimore.com Cour tney Lu xon Courtney@urbanitebaltimore.com Adver tising Sa les/Events Coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com Adver tising Intern Shantez Evans Book keeping/Marketing Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Har ris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050 ; Fax: 410-243-2115 w w w.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2009, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved. Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.

editor’s note

photo by Rebecca Johnsen

photo by Brian Whipple

photo by Hannah Hiaasen

contributors Rob Hiaasen spent fi fteen years writing for the Baltimore Sun. In 2003, he was named a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. For this month’s feature on child prodigies (“The Gift,” p. 54), he spent time with 16-year-old Ilyich Rivas, who has a one-year conducting fellowship at the Peabody Conservatory and an opportunity to conduct the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Hiaasen has long been interested in creative people (of all ages) and their artistic process and environment. He is currently working on a novel and hopes one day to become an adult prodigy. Mimi Kirk has held editorial positions at Smithsonian magazine and AARP The Magazine, and her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy and Museum. She will graduate with an M.A. in creative nonfiction from Johns Hopkins University in 2010. This month, Kirk ventured inside Medieval Times in Arundel Mills Mall (“Knight Job,” p. 21) to profi le staff knight Sam Talley—and sample the eccentric dinnertheater chain’s fare. “It reminded me a little too much of my meaty, starchy childhood in Iowa,” she reports. “I could have gone for some broccoli spears.” Kirk lives with her husband, three cats, and a dog in Washington, D.C. Photography intern Kelly Wise will graduate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in May 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in photography. Wise, who grew up in Laurel, now lives in Bolton Hill and has also interned for the arts enrichment organization Kidzart. She shot the photo that appears with “Fired Up” (p. 27), about middle school students who created ceramic murals to spruce up Hollins Market. The kids stood proudly at the murals’ unveiling, she says. “It was nice to see how much the community supported them.”

Every fall since 2001, kindergarten teachers in Maryland public schools

try to determine how prepared their young charges are for class using a windily named device known as the Maryland Model for School Readiness Kindergarten Assessment. The year-toyear statistics have been striking: In 2003–2004, a woeful 27 percent of Baltimore City schoolchildren were deemed “fully ready” to learn; last year, that number jumped to 65 percent, just a few ticks below the state average of 73 percent. What happened? A lot of things. One was a five-year action plan for school readiness put together by the Baltimore Leadership in Action Program, or B-LAP, a team representing city agencies, nonprofits, and community groups that came together in 2003. Jennifer Gross, a senior consultant with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, calls B-LAP “extreme collaboration”—it’s built on the principle of “results-based leadership,” which emphasizes accountability. B-LAP devised a series of steps— most modest and easy to implement, such as more free programs at city museums—that could better prepare city kids for early-childhood learning. So far, the plan has worked dramatically. Baltimore does not exactly leap to mind as a family-friendly city: Too many kids get killed here (forty-seven in 2003, 2006, and 2007), and too few graduate from high school on time (45.8 percent in 2008). But if you poke around the numbers, you also see glimmers of hope. Fewer kids are flowing into the Department of Juvenile Services (11,776 in 2004, 9,142 last year). Test scores are soaring (only 30.6 passed algebra in the state’s High School Assessment in 2004; 66.4 did last year). And several health indicators are promising: In 2003, 6.4 percent of Baltimore kids had elevated lead levels in their blood; by 2007 that number had fallen to 3.5 percent. It could just be a statistical blip, or course. But maybe—just maybe—a bunch of small things are adding up. For this month’s issue, which explores youth and growing up in Baltimore, we partnered with one of the forces behind some of those small things, the aforementioned Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that focuses on building better futures for disadvantaged children and families. The resources provided by the foundation allowed us to explore the theme of this issue in greater depth than we could have otherwise, and it also gave us insight into how the foundation has forged ties in its host city. In 1994, Casey moved its headquarters here from Greenwich, Connecticut (home to many a hedge-fund manager but somewhat short on disadvantaged children), looking for a more mission-appropriate base from which to wrestle with urban poverty. Casey initiatives, such as B-LAP, tend to be obsessed with accountability—using statistics to drive debate, analysis, and public policy. Perhaps its most famous program is KIDS COUNT, which for twenty years has compiled national data to track the wellbeing of American children. Those numbers then feed new studies, get chewed upon by journalists (see above), and generally keep the fate of the kids in the spotlight. Behind the numbers are stories like the ones we feature this month. In the “Keynote” interview, Marc Steiner talks to family advocate Joe Jones, whose broken childhood taught him about parental responsibility in urban America (“The Father Figure,” p. 42). In “The Way Out” (p. 46), Senior Editor Greg Hanscom details the city’s efforts to duplicate the Harlem Children’s Zone model, which has transformed the lives of kids in central Harlem. Rob Hiaasen looks at another challenge of childhood by profi ling teenage conductor Ilyich Rivas, whose musical abilities have landed him in a very grown-up world (“The Gift,” p. 54). Essayist Tim Kreider ponders adolescence from yet another perspective: the comic paradox of life in a culture that refuses to grow up (“The Neverland Express,” p. 60). And, in a special online-only feature, reporter and photographer Brennen Jensen captures the voices of local adolescents in his audio slideshow, “13.” Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com to watch. Speaking of arrested adolescence: We’ve joined Twitter. Look us up under “UrbaniteMD.” —David Dudley

What’s it worth to you? Coming Next Month: Spending, saving, and giving it all away www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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what you’re saying

photo by Chris Rebbert

and that our progressive and humane care for individuals suffering from mental illness continues to this day. The ongoing decrease in inpatient psychiatric beds coupled with an increase in the need for mental health and substance abuse services has placed a severe strain on our nation’s general hospital system—emergency departments in particular. In this climate, hospitals like the Brattleboro Retreat are not the problem; rather, they are a necessary part of the solution. —Robert E. Simpson Jr. is president and chief executive officer of Brattleboro Retreat. A Bad Example The article “Let’s Get Small” (October) details the very real problem of changing demographics in blighted urban centers. However, your choice in using Wagner’s Point to buttress your argument that cities are shrinking is somewhat flawed. Once a vibrant, close-knit community of low- to middle-class immigrant families, Wagner’s Point began to feel the effects of the local chemical factories, and throughout the years countless residents of this community died from cancer, including the community’s strongest advocate, Jeanette Skrzecz. Members of my own family who resided on Leo Street have also suffered from or succumbed to cancer over the years. In fact, the first advocate for Wagner’s Point was my grandfather, Frank Gorski, who endlessly petitioned Baltimore City mayors throughout the 1960s and 1970s for emergency evacuation plans and more roads into and out of Wagner’s Point. I agree that demographics of urban centers are changing and must be addressed. However, using a neighborhood that so many fought in vain for decades to protect and ultimately fought to leave out of fear for their own health and safety does not do justice to the memories of those who have died trying to protect this community and its families. Wagner’s Point was not an example of urban shrinkage; it was a victim whose vindication in the end was bittersweet.

—Joe Rosalski, Nottingham In Good Company Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! I just read Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s article on “Farewell, starchitecture” (“Building for the Better,” October). She has summarized my thirty-year practice of “community/civic-centered” architecture and teaching career at the School of Architecture

at the University of Maryland in a way that I never could. My client-centric mantra has always been about relationships and being of value over design aesthetics. As architects, what value can we bring to others, to enhance their quality of life and mission? There is so much more to creativity than the aesthetic. The entire composition is important, not just “the pretty.” For the first time in my successful thirty-year career, I do not feel alone. —Al Rubeling is the founder and president of the Maryland architecture and interior design firm Rubeling + Associates Inc.

Don’t You Forget About Me Missing from October’s “Update” section were the architects of the two projects you highlighted. Marks, Thomas Architects designed the historic renovation of Miller’s Court and will be the architect for the Union Mill project in Woodberry. RTKL Associates designed the renovation of the Center Club. Although magazines always have space limitations, it takes only a few extra words to complete the story. Your readers deserve to know. Projects need vision and investment, but it takes a good architect to design successful buildings and spaces! —Karen Lewand is executive director of the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Why We’re Different In her October article concerning abandoned institutions for the mentally ill (“Ghost Hospitals”), Sarah Richards made reference to the Brattleboro Retreat in Vermont and to the retreat’s Quakerinspired founding based on values of “moral treatment” and willingness to provide “capable patients” with opportunities for meaningful work. What Ms. Richards, in her well-articulated and sensitive article, did not point out is that there is a clear philosophical, historical, moral, and clinical difference between progressive institutions like the Brattleboro Retreat and the deplorable practices of the state-run mental hospitals featured in her piece. As a nation, we should all be ashamed of the conditions found in the vast majority of state-run mental hospitals, where the human warehousing of society’s most vulnerable individuals was accepted, if not expected. The members of the Ivy League Hospitals, which includes the Brattleboro Retreat and Baltimore’s own Sheppard Pratt, want to assure people that our tradition of moral treatment did not condone those practices

We noticed in a recent article about the Piedmont Wine Trail (“Thirsty Traveler,” September) that Legends Vineyard of Churchville was overlooked. We thought that your readers would be interested to know that we produce eight wine varieties. We have received several awards for our first vintages, including gold from the Maryland Governor’s Cup Competition for our Pinot Gris, Meritage, and Cabernet Sauvignon. We also produce Vidal Blanc, Chardonnay, Daylight White, Sunset Blush, and Midnight Red. More information is available at www. legendsvineyardmd.com. —Ashby Everhart is a co-proprietor of Legends Vineyard. We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

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what you’re writing

The day I changed my father’s

diaper for the first time I grew up. I asked him, “Do you want me to change you, or the nurse to change you?” “You,” he said. He was broad-chested and tall, with enormous hands. A man of few words except when drinking, he had a fierce temper. When I was no longer afraid of him, I was afraid of no one. As a child, I would not let anyone wash my hair except my father. I remember sitting in the bath screeching, refusing my mother, yelling for him. His hands could leave a large imprint but could detangle hair without pain, and if he laid them gently on a stomach ache, it went away. As a nurse, I had changed so many patients that rolling, sheet-tucking, and applying barrier creams were no challenge. My father’s breath was short; moving was an effort. His white legs turned, ankles crossed right over left as I rolled him onto his side. I knew those legs, had seen them on beaches, walking next to me. I knew the soles of his feet were ticklish. My hands were dexterous and in charge, my father frail. His full head of white hair was unwashed, smelling of despair and exhaustion. I bathed all parts, turning him slowly back and forth. I washed his hair as best I could using facecloths, a plastic bath cap, shampoo, and a tub of lukewarm water. Slowly he began to smell of hospital soap rather than not enough care. He kept thanking me between breaths. Yet I was grateful that I could place my hands into the

suffering and enter unafraid, gently skirting between necessity and respect of space. At his bedside the world converged. My father, myself, and the child in my belly. Later that evening, clean and propped up on his pillows, he went in and out of delirium. He appeared to hold a drink, scotch perhaps, in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. I could almost see the ember and smell the wisps of smoke. “Marvelous,” my father said. “Just marvelous.” Three weeks later, he died. —Alison Livingston is an AIDS-certified RN working in clinical care and research in Ocular Immunology at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Born in South Africa, she resides in Baltimore with her husband and their rambunctious 4-year-old son.

When I was 13, I announced

to my mother that it was time for me to shave my legs. After all, the other girls in my eighth-grade class at Catholic school were doing it, at least up to their knees. I remember standing defiantly in my white shirt with the Peter Pan collar and the navy plaid skirt in the kitchen as she stood at the stove stirring whatever it was we were having for dinner that night. My arms were crossed and my one hip jutted out as I made my plea for a Bic razor and some shaving cream. To my surprise, she agreed. I followed her upstairs to the bathroom and

half-listened to her instructions on how to properly shave. I already knew what to do; I had watched some of my friends glide their mothers' disposable razors up their soapy calves on the sly. My mother handed me a razor and some shaving cream, and I hurried her out the bathroom door. I turned on the hot water in the sink and placed a towel on the toilet seat lid. Finally, I was going to rid my calves of the silky blonde hair. I was on my way to being a woman. As I slathered shaving cream on my leg and rinsed the Bic razor under the running faucet, I could hear my mother busying herself out in the hall. I knew she was sticking close to the bathroom in the event I let out a blood-curdling scream after slicing through an artery. I heard her open and close the hallway linen closet a few times, rearrange the towels and sheets. With haughty precision, I guided the cheap razor over my calf, which I’d covered with more shaving cream than necessary. The razor created paths of smooth skin. I watched the blonde hairs and dollops of shaving cream swirl down the drain each time I rinsed off the razor. I was thrilled by the prospect of finally having smooth legs. I would no longer wear knee socks with my school uniform, I thought. Instead, I would wear the socks that folded at the ankle so everyone could see that I shaved my legs. And next? Next I would ask to wear lipstick to school. Maybe some mascara? Finished, I cleaned up my mess and exited the bathroom to find my mother standing with a look of hesitation on her face. “Well, how did it go?” she asked me. “Fine,” I said proudly. “I think I’ll do the other leg tomorrow.” —Reisterstown resident Amy Brown is a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital in women’s health.

The cashier at Jerry’s

at Belvedere is used to the late Sunday night groups of college students and alcoholics who visit this old neighborhood bar’s side liquor store. I’m standing in line trying my best to look my age. Out of my group of friends, I’m the tallest. I’m the oldest. I’m the one with all the heavy liquor bottles in my hands. Hell, I’m the only one with money. But the cashier is looking at me like I’m a lost 14year-old in need of a responsible adult. As I leave the liquor store, I’m the one a man with a gray, frazzled beard and crooked yellow tooth is trying to talk up. “Hey there, you sweet little thing. You go to school ’round here? What high school you go to?”

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I pray for premature gray like 11-year-old girls pray for boobs, because I’m a senior in college who doesn’t even look like a senior in high school. My friends who are putting on adult pounds or already losing hair in their 20s tell me to shove it. I come by it honestly, genetically. My mother explains it like this: “After I received my master’s degree, a woman asked me what high school I’d graduated from.” Good to know I might look 18 by the time I’m 25. For now, I’m Alice, alone in a wonderland of creepy Lewis Carroll perverts and 45-year-old women in Victoria Secret thongs and velour sweatpants that say “HOTTIE” on the ass. In the looking glass of my mind, I’m a responsible, independent woman, and I’m fantasizing about a mushroom that will make me look the part. ■ — Sarah Coulter is an English major at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She writes many things, but mostly for school assignments.

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president.

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. Topic

Deadline

Fresh Start Nov 9, 2009 Creation Myth Dec 7, 2009 Best-Laid Plans Jan 11, 2010

Publication Jan 2010 Feb 2010 Mar 2010

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children’s book celebration LIFT EVERY VOICE AND READ Saturday, November 14, 2009 10 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. Enjoy stories, crafts, and fun provided by the Maryland Zoo, the Walters Art Museum, and others. Noon - 1 p.m. Special guest Floyd Cooper, recipient of the 2009 Meyerhoff Children’s Coretta Scott King Award for his illustrations in Garden The Blacker the Berry. 3 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad comes Meyerhoff Children’s to life with a visit from Henry “Box” Brown himself. Garden 400 Cathedral St • Baltimore, MD 21201 For a complete schedule of all events: www.prattlibrary.org

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Fall Chrysanthemum Show

Through Nov 15

The fall chrysanthemum show will deck out the Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory in Druid Hill Park with thirty varieties of the indigenously Chinese flower. Alas, the mums aren’t for sale, but visitors can also admire the other colorful plants in the hothouse’s one and a half acres of flowerbeds—and save up for the holiday show of poinsettias (Dec 12–Jan 3). Those plants can be purchased.

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Dedication of Schaefer Sculpture & Garden

Nov 2, 1 p.m.

Do it now! Mayor/governor/comptroller/living legend William Donald Schaefer gets his larger-than-life (7 feet, 2 inches) due with the unveiling of local sculptor Rodney Carroll’s bronze likeness, installed—on Schaefer's eighty-eighth birthday—in a garden between the Harborplace Light Street Pavilion and the Baltimore Visitor Center.

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TEDx MidAtlantic Conference

Nov 5

An acronym for “Technology, Entertainment, and Design,” TED brings together “the world’s leading thinkers and doers” to share what they’re most passionate about in 18-minute talks and performances. The theme of the conference is the power of stories. Featured speakers include American Visionary Art Museum founder Rebecca Hoffberger (pictured) and actress Sonja Sohn (aka The Wire’s Kima Greggs). Urbanite is a sponsor of this event.

Maryland Institute College of Art, Falvey Hall 1301 Mount Royal Ave. To apply for a spot in the conference, download an application from http://tedxmidatlantic.com.

Maryland Irish Festival

Nov 13–15

Sláinte! The annual Irish Festival brings to the Maryland State Fairgrounds high-energy dancing, live music, and vendors selling Celtic jewelry and kilts. There’s also an extensive menu of authentic eats that includes fish and chips, corned beef and cabbage, soda bread, and enough beer, whiskey, and blarney to last the whole weekend.

Maryland State Fairgrounds 2200 York Rd. $10 adults, $8 seniors, $5 children 12–17, free for children younger than 12 www.irishfestival.com

Festival of Trees

Nov 27–29

Billed as the largest holiday event on the East Coast, the 20-year-old Festival of Trees features more than five hundred wreaths, trees, and gingerbread houses painstakingly decorated by local designers, plus the SantaLand theme park (complete with a three-hole mini golf course and a carousel), “reindeer” pony rides, and plenty of holiday shopping. The first twenty visitors each day get in free. Proceeds benefit the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Maryland State Fairgrounds 2200 York Rd. $10 adults, $5 children 5–12, free for children 4 and younger 443-923-7300 www.festivaloftrees.kennedy krieger.org

Holiday Festival of Trains

Nov 27–Jan 9

The B&O Railroad Museum’s Festival of Trains is a railroader’s dream, with its elaborate train gardens—miniature neighborhoods populated by tiny buildings and people and model choo-choos that chug through the landscape. Santa Claus himself will ceremoniously arrive via locomotive on Nov 27 at 10:30 a.m. and will drop by on weekends through Dec 20.

B&O Railroad Museum 901 W. Pratt St. $14 adults, $12 seniors, $8 children ages 2–12 410-752-2490 www.borail.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: © Roman Ivaschenko | Dreamstime.com; photo by Narda Carroll; photo by Roger Haile; photo by Jerry D; courtesy of the Kennedy Krieger Institute; courtesy of the B&O Railroad Museum

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From his post at the counter of tiny High Grounds Coffee Roasters (3201 Eastern Ave.; 410-215-9202; www.highgroundscoffee.com) across the street from the Creative Alliance, artisan coffee roaster Brett Bixler could see the lengths to which his customers were going to promote their art. So Bixler launched the Baltimore Artist Blend, a “medium to dark-roast blend designed to bring creativity, passion, and inspiration to your daily life.” The beans come in a 12ounce bag emblazoned with an image of work by a local artist. So far twenty artists have been profi led, including Annapolis plein air painter David Diaz and MICA grad Thomas Wilson LaGrange. Bixler is always looking for more; to suggest an artist (or yourself), e-mail high.grounds@yahoo.com.

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Something in the Air Baltimoreans who grumble about paying high rates to faceless corporate wireless goliaths should take a cue from their city’s plentiful supply of slogans. Software developer and entrepreneur Paul Dowling founded Believe Wireless in 2002 to bring wireless Internet service to the Baltimore area that was both affordable (residential packages start at $29.95 per month; business packages start at $59 per month) and convenient (locally based technicians provide 24-hour support). Seven years later, the company has extended its range as far north as Sparks and Reisterstown, west to Ellicott City, and gradually south toward D.C. “We provide everything,” says sales rep Karen Neiderer. “We own our own networks, so when you call in you’re calling into Believe in Baltimore, and we’re coming out right away.” To learn more about Believe’s services, call 410-902-0070 or go to www.believewireless.com. —Brent Englar

Maryland native Shabdiece Esfahani spent her college years learning the craft of fashion design at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying in such fashion-forward cities as Brussels and New York. After graduation, she moved back to her home state and opened up Di[e]ce Boutique (1211 S. Charles St; 410-244-6554; www. dieceboutique.com) to carry apparel and original art by local designers and artists, as well as vintage clothing and home accessories. Each item of clothing in the Federal Hill shop is one-of-a-kind, either made or altered by hand. To the beat of the local bands pumping through the sound system, shoppers can have their unique finds tailored in-house, schedule a personal shopping appointment, or browse ecofriendly wares like recycled-wood-and-steel furniture or plantable business cards embedded with wildflower seeds. “I want to help make people aware of the talent that’s here and help the local economy at the same time,” Esfahani says. Don’t miss the shop’s winter knitting and crochet workshops.

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Frills Aplenty One of a handful of small shops in the tucked-away Ruxton Station, Linens & Lingerie (7625 Bellona Ave.; 410-825-1736) sells just what its name says, with a sweetly old-fashioned twist. Bed linens range from easy-care polyester (translation: no ironing) to sleek 1,000-thread-count cotton and can be personalized with monograms or scrolly floral embroidery that matches wallpaper, fabric, or carpet swatches. The lingerie is strictly sleepwear, from white silk negligees to soft cotton robes. Owner Blair Franke took over the 26-year-old business in 2005 from her mother, who was inspired by an elegant, long-vanished linens store on Howard Street. “We have a loyal customer base,” says Franke, noting that some have shopped there faithfully since the store opened. But she says that the younger crowd likes the shop’s bridal registry and personalized bridesmaid gifts, such as the pictured travel accessories ($106 for the set). —Marianne K. Amoss

photo by Kelly Wise

A Life in Pictures Just in time for Comic-Con—the annual graphic storytelling extravaganza at the Convention Center—comes the opening of two new comic stores, the first in downtown Baltimore in more than a decade. “We’re living in a golden age of geekdom,” says Heiko Spieker, who co-owns Graphic Novelty (1712 Thames St.; 410-522-0215; www.graphic-novelty.com) with local restaurateur Benjamin Greene of Miss Irene’s in Fells Point. They sell movie and TV merchandise as well as comics and graphic novels. Over in Federal Hill, Alliance Comics (904 Light St.; 410-685-0021; www.alliancecomics online.com) relocated to Baltimore from Bowie and opened in September. “Most people who are even remotely interested in comics can find something they want to read in here,” promises co-owner Amy McNeal, referring to the store’s “huge selection” of new-issue comics and graphic novels (and bacon- and wasabi-flavored gum, according to its Twitter feed). —Brent Englar

photo by Kip Fulks

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Ty l

Just in time for Comic-Con—the annual graphic storytelling extravaganza at the Convention Center—comes the opening of two new comic stores, the first in downtown Baltimore in more than a decade. “We’re living in a golden age of geekdom,” says Heiko Spieker, who co-owns Graphic Novelty (1712 Thames St.; 410-522-0215; www.graphic-novelty.com) with local restaurateur Benjamin Greene of Miss Irene’s in Fells Point. They sell movie and TV merchandise as well as comics and graphic novels. Over in Federal Hill, Alliance Comics (904 Light St.; 410-685-0021; www.alliancecomics online.com) relocated to Baltimore from Bowie and opened in September. “Most people who are even remotely interested in comics can find something they want to read in here,” promises co-owner Amy McNeal, referring to the store’s “huge selection” of new-issue comics and graphic novels (and bacon- and wasabi-flavored gum, according to its Twitter feed).

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PS-2009 Urbanite 2nd Grade 10-19.qxd

10/19/09

11:22 PM

Page 1

The Geographic Mapping Project

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27 Transformer Hollins Market gets a facelift

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Knight Job Inside the storybook world of Medieval Times

ome guys read comic books. I am a superhero,” says Sam Talley, assistant head knight at Medieval Times in Hanover, Maryland. The proclamation might sound ludicrous, but with his curly black hair and athletic build, Sam actually kind of looks the part—imagine a young Christopher Reeve in Superman. We’re sitting inside a large waiting area just outside the 1,000-seat arena where the Medieval Times dinner-theater show takes place several nights a week. This particular Medieval Times facility, officially dubbed the “Baltimore Castle” (there are eight other castles across the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Atlanta), guards the Arundel Mills mall in Hanover. There’s a DQ/Orange Julius across from the entrance, and Burlington Coat Factory is down the hall. The experience itself is standardized throughout the chain: Guests pay $55 to eat roast chicken and ribs with their hands while watching a jousting tournament and other feats of armored combat performed by a cast of knights on horseback. Sam met his wife, Lori, here. “She was first one of the wenches, and then she became a princess,” he says. Wenches— typically attired in low-cut, ruffly blouses— and more modestly dressed male serfs serve food to the guests, while the other employees perform as the show’s cast of characters. The main players are the king, the prince, the princess, and the six knights, each garbed in a different color combination and several of whom bear a resemblance to Fabio, the golden-tressed male model. The knights

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baltimore observed Back to School: There was something new in the course catalogs at Maryland’s community colleges this fall: green jobs training. (See Urbanite, April ’09.) Lucious Anderson, vice president for business and continuing education at Baltimore City Community College, says the school’s fi rst five thirty-five-hour, non-credit classes in “weatherization tactics” and “home energy analysis” fi lled quickly. The graduates— workers from the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development— will help tighten up 2,100 homes of lowincome city residents in the next three years, cutting energy use by up to one-third. The work is funded with federal stimulus dollars. The school is now reaching out to private contractors interested in energy efficiency work and, starting this month, will also offer courses in solar energy installation. “This is a beginning,” Anderson says of the school’s green job training efforts. “We see it as a long-term trend. We’re helping shape green-collar industry in Baltimore.” Top Bard: Fifty years after the creation of the position, Maryland has a new poet laureate, the state’s ninth. (See Urbanite, January ’09.) On October 1, Gov. Martin O’Malley bestowed the honor upon Stanley Plumly (pictured), director of the creative writing program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a six-time Pushcart Prize winner. Plumly’s nine poetry collections include Old Heart, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. His new position, which he inherits from St. Mary’s College professor Michael Glaser, will take him to readings at schools, universities, and other locations throughout the state. Plumly plans on being a “hands-on, inperson” laureate, he says, “so that people are not simply reading the poems on a page but are engaged at a different level— hearing, speaking, and talking about poetry, which is supposed to be, and I think is, the pinnacle of language.”

State poet: UM prof Stanley Plumly takes the laureate post.

John T. Consoli/University of Maryland

broadswords until only the Red Knight and the Green Knight are left standing. The prince then reenters the scene, and he and the Red Knight make mincemeat of the Green Knight, whose treachery has been revealed. Sparks fly as their swords clash. Watching Sam, it’s not surprising how seriously he takes his role as the Red Knight—indeed, how he melds into the character. Some of the other knights look a bit sloppy as they heft their weapons, but Sam is a crisp standout. Finally, after a lengthy battle, Sam dramatically thrusts his weapon into his foe’s body, again and again. The Green Knight convulses at every blow before expiring in the sand. The entire crowd—minus the section wearing green paper crowns—cheers lustily for Sam. At the story’s end, prince and princess happily reunite. In real life, it’s Sam who has found his true love at Medieval Times. “I’d tear down the throne of an empire for her,” he declares soberly. Reality and plot sometimes seem to blur in the lives of Sam and Lori. Lori’s grandmother used to tell her to wait for her prince on a white horse. “Sam’s first horse, Frosty, was white,” she enthuses. “I mean, how many girls marry their Prince Charming?” After the show, Sam and his fellow knights go out in the waiting area, a dimly lit space with massive chandeliers and a nearby “Museum of Torture.” There they hobnob and pose for photos with audience members clutching stuffed unicorns and plastic gift swords. “You might get goosed, too,” Sam says. It’s a good life, the life of a knight, but it can’t last forever. Sam’s best friend, head knight Steve Ager, is at 33 the only knight older than him at the Baltimore Castle. “Steve and I looked up one day and asked ourselves, ‘Where did all these kids come from?’” he says. “Some of them can’t come to the bar with us.” When I ask Sam what he’ll do when he hangs up his lance, he says he’d like to work with horses, or write, or perhaps take a desk job with the company. But he thinks he can remain a knight for another ten years. “I’ll do this until I can’t do it anymore,” he says. At 30, Lori has been performing at Medieval Times for as long as Sam. “I love being a princess, I really do,” she says. “I dread the day that I’ll have to hang it up.” Some Medieval Times princesses land gigs as Disney World princesses, but Lori says she’s too old for that now. She guesses she’ll have to step down in a few years. But she’s hoping for a new story line—one with a queen in it. “I could always go back to being a wench, too.” ■

U P d at e

learn how to play each color so one can easily substitute for another. Tonight, Sam tells me, he will play the Red Knight. Sam has been working as a knight at the Hanover branch for almost six years. He was “discovered,” the way a movie star might be, while getting his watch fi xed at the mall. At the time, he was an amateur skateboarder and sometime construction worker. Two executives from Medieval Times called him over and asked if he might be interested in becoming a knight. “I thought to myself, Who are these long-haired assholes asking me all these questions?” he says. Medieval Times dispatched Sam to knight training camp at the company’s ranch in Denton County, Texas, where he was put through physical tests and learned how to ride the Andalusian horses that the company breeds for its shows. Out of the ten would-be knights at boot camp that year, he’s the only one still performing in the Baltimore Castle. He’s 29. “The usual shelf life of a knight is two to four years,” he says, “but some can do it for longer.” Sam’s parents—a D.C. lobbyist and a lawyer—initially despaired over his career choice; they called it a “play job,” he says. But they’ve come around. “People drop out, and I haven’t,” he says proudly. “The cream rises to the top.” He pauses for a second to ask one of the wenches to make a call for him. “Thanks, baby,” he calls out as she turns away. Like many a fairy tale kingdom, Medieval Times is a land of anachronistic gender roles. “This is a conservative, traditional place,” Sam says approvingly. The only female character, Princess Leonore, is a passive figure relegated to the castle. Early in the show in a flashback scene, she mewlingly asks the prince if she can accompany him on his journey, but he refuses, asserting that he has no room for all her “trinkets” in the caravan. The plot of the show, set in 11th-century Spain, centers around festivities hosted by King Philippe to celebrate newfound peace with a neighboring area. The prince, en route to said region with a treaty, is captured by an enemy, and the king and the princess fret back at the castle. Meanwhile, games and a jousting competition—all on horseback— take place among the knights. Members of the audience are split into six color-coded sections, handed paper crowns of the same shade, and told to cheer for their knight. Adults and kids alike take the charge seriously, whooping loudly when their knight wins a competition or performs his choreographed fight moves well, swinging authentic-looking medieval weapons such as a battle-axe or a bola, a heavy spiked ball attached to a stick via a chain. As the two-hour show nears its end, the knights kill each other off with bolas and

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Two sides of Charm City: Will BRAC’s military transplants trade the Jersey Shore for urban living?

HOUSinG

Maneuvers It’s a cloudless late-summer day in Fort Monmouth, a mile from the Jersey Shore, and inside the First Atlantic Federal Credit Union, Lionel Richie’s voice lilts through the sound system on radio station WWZY, “The Breeze.” Elizabeth Theisen, a sincere 48-yearold with strawberry blonde hair, pink nails, and heavy-framed eyeglasses, settles into her chair beneath a banner that reads, “Maryland Transition One-Stop Career Center.” Theisen works for the Susquehanna Workforce Network, a state-funded nonprofit that runs workforce development centers in Harford and Cecil counties. She is here because Fort Monmouth is being shuttered by decree of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission, a federal body charged with trimming the nation’s military apparatus. In all, more than 5,000 of the fort’s military and civilian jobs—mainly in high-tech communications—will be sent elsewhere. Many of these jobs are headed to Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground, joining the estimated 45,000 to 60,000 jobs BRAC will deliver to Maryland, directly or indirectly, in the coming years. It is Theisen’s job to aid in the transition by helping employees’ spouses and partners find work in Maryland. That’s her official job description, anyway. In practice, she is an ambassador to New Jersey for the Old Line State. Her office looks like a tourism kiosk. Racks along the walls hold rows of brochures, magazines, and tax information forms. “People come in and they ask me all kinds of questions,” says Theisen, who lives in Anne Arundel

County. “‘Where are the Asian markets? Tell me about septic systems, schools, assisted living.’ I never know from one moment to the next what I’m going to be discussing.” Competition for the high-skill, highwage BRAC immigrants—and their roughly half a billion dollars in annual income and property taxes—has been fierce within the state. Theisen is officially agnostic when it comes to where in Maryland they should move. “I steer people to where they would be happiest,” she says. Those interested in urban living are steered to the nonprofit marketing group Live Baltimore and a slew of financial incentives designed to increase the city’s modest slice of relocating families. (Studies put that share at less than 10 percent.) But those in the business of selling Baltimore have their work cut out for them. Lee Ann Womack is belting, “I hope you daaaance!” on The Breeze when Reginald Norwood comes by with a question about whether his New Jersey E-ZPass will work on the toll roads in Delaware and Maryland. (It will.) A fit-looking civilian fielding and training manager, Norwood plans to commute from his home in southern New Jersey rather than relocate to Aberdeen, where his job is moving. Norwood, it turns out, grew up on Edmondson Avenue in West Baltimore. He’s in no hurry to move back. “I have a 4-year-old daughter,” he says. “We go back, and I tell my daughter, ‘This is where I was born.’ But it is not a place to raise kids. The stuff around the Inner Harbor is beautiful, but you go a few blocks and you’re back in the ’hood.” Norwood goes on his way, and after a quiet spell, a jowly, mustachioed electronics engineer named Ira Weiner walks in. Weiner was an “early mover”—one of the first people

to volunteer to go south with his job. He took a bus tour with Live Baltimore, but wasn’t convinced. “I’m afraid of Baltimore. I take one step across the line, and all of a sudden the hoodlums are coming out of the woodwork,” he says. “Besides, the school system stinks. All those people with fancy houses in North Baltimore have the money to send their kids to private school. I don’t. And Sheila Dixon—have they locked her up yet?” Theisen looks horrified. On The Breeze, the Chi-Lites croon, “Oh, girl, I’d be in trouble if you left me now.” Other BRAC transplants are more open to Baltimore’s charms. Tech writer and editor John White planned to come by Theisen’s office today, but he’s laid up at home, recovering from recent knee surgery. On the phone, he says he and his wife, who works at fort headquarters, were leaning toward Harford County or Cecil County until they visited Baltimore with their daughter, who is considering moving to Fells Point. Now, they’re thinking seriously about the city. “We’re looking at Bolton Hill, or maybe buying a shell in Reservoir Hill and rehabbing,” he says. “But we love Wyman Park. We love the Avenue [in Hampden].” White is even willing to forgive the Maryland Transit Administration for backing out of its plan to expand MARC train service between Baltimore and Aberdeen. It’s only a thirty- to forty-minute drive up I-83, he reasons, “and it’s really a true reverse commute.” Because he and his wife took the Live Baltimore bus tour, they qualify for $6,000 in down-payment and closing-cost assistance. The state has also waived its oneyear residency requirement, so their youngest, a senior in high school, can jump into a state university and pay in-state tuition. Budget analyst Liz Mayer is planning to move to Baltimore, too. Speaking on the phone from her office, Mayer says she and her husband, an Army electronics engineer, are building a house in Pikesville. She says they considered living downtown but wanted a house large enough to host grandchildren visiting from New Jersey. She admits that, given the choice, she would stay where she is. “I was born and raised here,” she says. “I’ve used the same pharmacist, the same dentist all my life. It’s kind of scary.” Still, Mayer says she is looking forward to having easy access to the cultural opportunities in Baltimore—opportunities that Elizabeth Theisen keeps her abreast of with regular e-mails. “There will be an adjustment period,” Mayer says. “I’m giving myself at least six months to figure everything out.” ■ —Greg Hanscom

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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UMBC Biotech Forum November 18, 2009 | 6-8:30 p.m. Healing, Feeding and Fueling the World through Biotechnology

The UMBC Biotech Forum is an annual free event open to the public where individuals can hear from industry experts on new opportunities within the biotechnology field.

www.umbc.edu/biotech Sponsored by UMBC’s Graduate Programs in Biotechnology

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MASTER OF

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Neighborhood icon: Baltimore students in the Middle School Ceramic Art Program have created murals to spruce up Sowebo’s Hollins Market.

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On a crisp October afternoon, about a hundred people gathered on the south side of the Hollins Market in southwest Baltimore to hear Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings speak and celebrate the dedication of a series of 12-foot-tall murals. In colorful

ceramic tiles, the seven murals depict neighborhood icons: the B&O Railroad Museum, H.L. Mencken, an arabber and his cart. The artwork was created by Baltimore city and county schoolchildren in the Middle School Ceramic Art Program, which supplies area middle schools with free clay, glazes, and kilns. In return, the schools incorporate ceramics instruction into their general art curriculum, and art teachers sponsor afterschool clubs that meet several times a week. At Rosemont Elementary/Middle School in West Baltimore, teacher Shadi Nourbakhsh leads a jewelry-making club. For a fundraiser last spring, members made and sold earrings for Mother’s Day. One student earned $90—of which she got to keep half. The Middle School Ceramic Art Program began in 1993, when the now-defunct Museum of Ceramic Art received a grant from the Abell Foundation to host students from twelve Baltimore schools at the museum for a month-long workshop. According to Shirley Brown, the program’s executive director, the experience was so successful that the following year it was reconfigured an on-site enhancement to art classes in city schools, and the Ceramic Art Program was born. Today the program serves fifty-nine middle schools—forty-six in Baltimore City and thirteen in Baltimore County—and artwork by participating students has been installed around the city in such locations as the Eubie

baltimore observed Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. Brown can’t quantify the program’s effects on student achievement, but she says the feedback she receives is overwhelmingly positive. Working with clay, she explains, “requires tremendous attention to detail. The skills spill over into other subjects.” Other rewards are more tangible. Projects such as the Hollins Market murals provide “an invaluable opportunity to give students something of permanence that they’ll be remembered for,” says teacher Eric Volkmann, whose students at Catonsville Middle School created the Mencken mural. “When you make something, it becomes part of your heritage. You can pass it on from one generation to the next,” says Rosemont sixth-grader Jeremy Jimenez, whose class created a mural of the market itself. Naijma McGarrell, an eighth-grader at Rosemont, agrees. “With clay,” she said, “you make it real. You can have it forever.” ■ —Brent Englar Each month, Urbanite profiles people and programs that are transforming the city, one block at a time. To nominate a transformer, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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“Lanny makes a difference in the lives of others on a daily basis.” The delivery of your first baby should be an exciting time. For one expectant family at GBMC, it was bittersweet. Months before their due date, the husband was sent to Iraq. To honor their bravery, Lanny threw a baby shower. During delivery, Lanny arranged for a direct phone line into the operating room so that they could hear the first cries of their healthy baby boy – together.

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Cover Me! The scar is barely visible now. For a few

weeks after the dermatologist burned off the white bump on my forehead last summer, I had a red dot there, like a slightly off-center bindi. But considering the diagnosis—basal cell carcinoma, a common and treatable but still malignant form of skin cancer—and the total cost of paying for my own lab tests and in-office surgery ($477), I figure I got off easy. Like about 47 million other people who live in the United States—16 percent of adults, nationally, according to a June 2009 Gallup poll—I don’t have health insurance. My excuse: I’m neither poor enough to qualify for medical assistance nor rich enough to easily afford a private plan. There are many people out there who fall into this gap, and, thanks to a struggling economy and stubbornly high unemployment rate, more are on the way. Many, like me, are self-employed; others work for companies that do not offer health insurance benefits, have been unable to pick up company-paid premiums after job loss, or just use youth and relative good health as an excuse to opt

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How can health care providers, patients, and business owners make the best of a sick system?

out of coverage—the so-called “young invincibles.” We are “self-pay” all the way, which means that we typically only go to the doctor when family members start harassing us or we can’t get out of bed in the morning. As any doctor will tell you, such a strategy is a prescription for a potentially ruinous medical disaster. It took me more than six months, for example, to check out what was going on with that mysterious thing on my forehead. I was very lucky that it was not a malignant melanoma, which could have been busily seeding cancer cells through my body. Melanoma, which is responsible for threequarters of all skin cancer deaths, is best treated with a swift surgical intervention. As a science writer, I’ve often marveled at the brilliance of researchers striving to unlock the mysteries of disease and the skill of physicians translating research results into clinical practice. But as a citizen without health insurance, I’m baffled by the perverse logic of spending billions of tax dollars each year on cutting-edge research while failing to ensure that every American receives basic

health care. That frustration, I’ve learned, is often shared by the people working within the system who struggle to deliver care within a framework that seems to discourage, rather than facilitate, the delivery of services to the sick. Amid the current polarized debate over how to improve American health coverage, it’s worth noting that uninsured people like me are not the only ones anxiously awaiting reform; so too are doctors, nurses, hospital presidents, business owners, and just about everyone else who has to negotiate the labyrinthian complexities of insurance reimbursement. They just don’t always agree on what that reform should look like.

ccording to a December 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, more than half of small business owners support health care reform, and a surprising 53 percent prefer some kind of “public option”—the government-run health insurance plan famously favored by progressives. Since that’s not the political ideology

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one generally associates with the business community, I meet up with Marie Gleason to discover why. Gleason, 58, is president of William J. Gleason & Sons, a construction equipment repair business founded by her father in 1951. She also works as director of administration for Days Cove Reclamation Co., a demolition debris landfill on the same site, and is responsible for purchasing and administering the health insurance plans for both companies. “Was I out sick the day I got stuck with this job?’ she jokes over a glass of lemonade at Barnes & Noble in Towson. Although health insurance has always been a big expense for the company, premiums have skyrocketed in recent years as the company’s workforce has aged, she says. Three of Gleason’s twenty employees at Days Cove are now older than 60—one reason the company’s premium jumped 18 percent this year alone. “We want to keep good people who are experienced, but they are going to get older, and insurers base everything on the age bracket,” she points out. “Our insurance agent said, ‘Can’t you hire a few 18-year-olds?’” The company worked around the problem, she says, by choosing a high-deductible plan—$2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families—and then paying employees’ deductibles. “That brings the premiums down,” she says. “Even if every one of our employees met their deductible, we would still pay less than we would for a lower-deductible policy.” Gleason is also encouraging employees eligible for Medicare—the governmentfunded insurance program for citizens 65 and older—to come off the company policy “and we’ll pay the supplement,” she says. “That brought the premium increase down to 11 percent.”

coverage after leaving their jobs]. Most can’t afford it.” That’s exactly the problem with employer-subsidized health care, says Bradley Herring, 38, an assistant professor of health economics and policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There is a pretty broad consensus among health economists that the system has led us as a nation to have coverage that covers too much and pays providers too much,” he says. “If people have to pay, they make much smarter choices.” It’s certainly true that when you are paying for all your own medical care, you only buy what you really need; I use drug-store reading glasses rather than paying for a visit to the optometrist and prescription lenses. But according to those in the health care trenches, excess coverage leading to too much choice is hardly the problem. In fact, they say, patients and doctors have too little say when it comes to deciding which treatments are needed and which facilities offer the best care. “A lot of people who have insurance don’t really understand what their insurance provides until they use it,” says nurse case manager Kathleen Saunders, who works in the critical care unit at a Baltimorearea hospital. “The networks determine where you will go and how much is covered. People are shocked to discover it doesn’t cover everything.” Saunders, 51, has been a nurse for twenty-six years, but it wasn’t until she began working as a case manager in 1999 that she had to start thinking about the ways that quality of care—and quality of life—are affected by what kind of insurance coverage patients have, or don’t have. A person who is treated for stroke, for example, will

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“We want to keep good people who are experienced, but ... insurers base everything on the age bracket,” says business owner Marie Gleason, who is responsible for purchasing health plans for two companies. “Our insurance agent said, ‘Can’t you hire a few 18-year-olds?’” Most employees, Gleason adds, have no idea how much their health insurance actually costs. “It’s only $10 out of each paycheck for individuals and $50 to $60 for families. They think that’s their premium.” Because their company-paid health insurance is so affordable, “people run to the doctor for every little thing,” she says, “and doctors will order every last test. They have no idea how much it all costs until they leave and have to get COBRA [the federal program that permits former employees to continue insurance

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need some form of rehabilitation therapy. “Insurance plays a big role in where they go,” Saunders says. “You have to go to the place covered by your insurance. That may not be the best place for stroke, or the place your doctor wants you to go.” Meanwhile, hospitals are under pressure to release the patient. “As soon as someone is ready to leave the hospital, we’ve got to get them out to a place that’s covered,” she says. “Sometimes that’s easy and sometimes it’s very hard.” If the battle with the insurance company gets too ugly, she says, physicians themselves will wade into the conflict. “On paper you can fight or challenge the insurance company, but it is literally a full-time job, for doctors and families.” According to a 2003 study of 1999 data published in the New England Journal of Medicine, bureaucracy and administrative costs consume at least 31 percent of health care spending in the United States (versus 16 percent in Canada). Case managers like her, Saunders says, “are only necessary because the health insurance system is so damn complicated. You need people to oversee the whole spectrum of care and be sure that resources are being used appropriately.”

The appropriate use of limited resources

is, of course, at the heart of the health care reform debate—and different groups have different ideas about what constitutes fair use of resources. “The way that we in the U.S. have subsidized private health insurance is to exempt health insurance from taxes,” says Hopkins’ Herring. “For people with mid-tohigh incomes, this is a generous subsidy. But for lower income people, the benefits are minimal. My choice would be to reverse that and make sure that lower income people get a much higher subsidy.”

or state-based pool of insurance providers that would improve access to coverage for individuals and employers by offering a wider choice of health plans. The catch is that in order to function properly, the exchange would need to attract plenty of healthy young people to even out the risk pool for companies—and healthy young people are the least likely to purchase health insurance if they are not compelled to do so. A friend who works at a hair salon that recently began offering its employees an optional plan told me that most of the younger stylists dropped out after a few months. “They’d rather spend the money on other things,” she says. Premiums for the older employees spiked as a result. The solution? The older employees pitched in to pay the premiums for the younger employees just to keep them in the program and keep their own premiums down. A well-functioning exchange would have to eliminate insurers’ ability to limit coverage or set premiums based on health status, Herring says—a reform that is unlikely to be instituted unless health insurance becomes mandatory for everyone. “The concern then becomes if you require coverage, that low-income people receive subsidies to cover some fraction of the plan.” This is similar to the Massachusetts Health Care Reform law enacted in 2006 that provides fully subsidized health care for residents of the state earning up to 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) and partially subsidized health care for those earning less than 300 percent of the FPL. Meanwhile, supporters of a public option point to an unofficial Congressional Budget Office estimate that a public plan based on Medicare rates—which are usually lower than

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“There is a pretty broad consensus among health economists that the system has led us as a nation to have coverage that covers too much and pays providers too much,” says Bradley Herring, an assistant professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If people have to pay, they make much smarter choices.” Herring, who worked as a health economist in the George W. Bush White House, is not a fan of the public option—a low-cost government health insurance plan that advocates say would force private insurers to offer more competitive rates. “Most progressive advocates suggest that a public plan is needed to increase competition, but my take is that it is possible to both increase competition and increase choice through a well-designed insurance exchange,” he says—a nationwide

continued on page 39

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Scope continued from page 35 private insurance rates—would save the federal government $110 billion over ten years by pushing down premium prices, thus lowering the cost of subsidies to low-income people. Maryland is now doing a pretty good job of making sure that low-income families and individuals are covered. Prior to 2008, the state had one of the most restrictive eligibility levels for medical assistance in the country, covering only families with incomes of less than $6,600 per year for a family of three. (See Urbanite, January ’08.) The state’s expansion of Medicaid under the Governor’s Working Families and Small Business Health Coverage Act, effective July 1, 2008, raised the bar to 116 percent of the FPL, or approximately $21,200 for a family of three. The act also extended medical assistance to parents and other family members caring for kids covered under the Maryland Children’s Health Program. More than 47,000 adults and 50,000 children are now covered because of the legislation. And, since June 2006, the Maryland Primary Adult Care Program has offered health services for adults with an income of less than $1,046 per month. But those without employer plans who earn more than eligibility limits for medical assistance must navigate the Wild West of the private insurance market, where premiums for full coverage for midlife people like me usually range from $300 to $400 per month and premiums for families are well over $500 per month. During my extended bout of non-coverage, I spent weeks poring over booklets from Maryland insurers before finally tossing them in the recycling. The high cost explains why roughly 700,000 Marylanders—15 percent of the state’s residents—remain uninsured. Saunders sees the costs of this policy failure in the critical care unit every day. An

common among the uninsured, she points out, and winds up costing both the individual and the system more in the long run. “The really heartbreaking thing is when people come in with a cancer diagnosis that could have been picked up by screening but wasn’t, so they come in with advanced disease,” she says. “Then the health care system winds up spending lots of money to try and fix something when it’s too late.” Every hospital in Maryland treats some number of uninsured or self-paying patients. At Howard County General Hospital, President and CEO Vic Broccolino says his number is far lower than at many other institutions. Broccolino, 67, has been in hospital administration since 1969, working as CFO/ comptroller at Franklin Square and then Bon Secours Hospitals (where he became CEO) before moving to Howard County General in 1990. He oversaw that institution’s merger with Johns Hopkins Medicine in 1998. “Only 9 to 10 percent of our patients are self-pay or no insurance,” he says. Even so, approximately 4 to 5 percent of the hospital’s budget, or $8 to $11 million per year, goes toward bad debt (unpaid bills) or charity care, which is subsidized by the state. The hospital does not turn over charity care cases to collection agencies. Still, “people wind up with huge bills they can’t afford to pay,” Saunders says— both the uninsured and the insured with high deductibles and copays. Despite its progressive policies, Maryland has the second highest rate in the nation of liens places on houses for medical debt. As the Baltimore Sun reported in a three-part series on hospital debt collection in December 2008, Maryland hospitals placed more than 8,000

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Patient choices are severely limited by the current system, says Donna Smith, who was forced into medical bankruptcy. She now lectures around the country on health care reform. “Even when you have insurance, you still fight. It’s a defective product.” uninsured person who shows up at the hospital with heart attack symptoms receives exactly the same quality care as an insured person, she says. “If you come into the ER with an acute, life-threatening problem, they will take care of it.” But you won’t get the necessary aftercare or pharmacy if you don’t qualify for medical assistance, she says. “The hospital spends all this money to save someone’s life, and then they are lost to follow-up.” My own “maybe it will go away if I ignore it” approach to a puzzling symptom is

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liens on houses between January 2003 and June 2008 and won more than $100 million in judgments against former patients, some of them people whose medical expenses had previously been written off by the state.

Donna Smith, 54, is well aware of the dire consequences of unpaid hospital bills. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer around the same time her husband, Larry, was diagnosed with coronary artery disease. They had insurance, but copays and deductibles mounted to the point where they were forced to sell their home and move into their adult daughter’s basement. Hospital, doctor, and pharmacy bills “wiped us out in a matter of months,” Smith says. For their troubles, the Smiths received roles as subjects in Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, about the weaknesses of the American health care system. “Being in a Michael Moore film is not something you aspire to,” Smith says dryly when we meet in the cafeteria at Howard County General Hospital, where her husband is currently being treated. He has aged into Medicare “and now he can go anywhere he wants” for medical

care, she says. Four years after the couple was forced into medical bankruptcy, Smith is working for the California Nurses Association as an organizer. She lectures around the country on the need for health care reform— and insurance companies continue to provide her with great material for her talks. In an unfortunate postscript to her Sicko story, Smith was hospitalized over Labor Day weekend with chest pains. After determining that she was not having a heart attack, physicians at Howard County General Hospital released her on the condition that she return after the holiday weekend for a series of tests. However, her current insurer refused to authorize either the prescription ordered by physicians to alleviate the pain or their orders for an upper-GI scope and cardiac stress test until a third-party administrator had reviewed the case. “I said, ‘You mean I have four Johns Hopkins doctors telling me I need this medication and these tests, and an insurance company bean-counter is going to overrule that?’” The answer, unfortunately, was yes. “My HR department said they found a provision in the policy that says if medication is considered an emergency, they have to cover them. I will probably get

the tests eventually,” she says, “but who knows where I will have them.” Patient choices are severely limited by the current system, Smith points out. “Even when you have insurance, you still fight. It’s a defective product.” That sounds about right to me. As I was sitting on the table in my dermatologist’s office, trying to absorb the unpleasant news he had just delivered, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll never be able to get health insurance now.” The doctor looked up from the chart he was scribbling on. “No, you can still get insurance,” he said. “They’ll just exclude skin cancer.” ■

SCOPE

—Frequent contributor Deborah Rudacille wrote about Bethlehem Steel retirees who lost their health insurance after the company’s bankruptcy in Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town, which will be published by Pantheon Books in March 2010. More on health insurance and health care reform on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on November 10.

Rx for the Uncovered If you do not have health insurance,

go to http://dhmh.maryland.gov/gethealth care/. This site has links to state and county health care programs for children, seniors, and young adults and primary care for adults with limited incomes. If there is a program for which you might qualify, you’ll find it on this site, which also lists federally qualified health centers and Maryland qualified health centers, which offer sliding scale medical care for uninsured people.

If you are trying to find a doctor or

hospital that will allow you to self-pay, go to http://mhcc.maryland.gov/consumerinfo/. The state’s annual Health Plan Performance Report and Hospital Performance Evaluation Guide are also linked to the site.

If you cannot pay your hospital bills, be

aware that as of June 1, 2009, Maryland hospitals are required to provide free medically necessary care to all Maryland residents with incomes less than 1.5 times the Federal Poverty Level (approximately $33,075 for a

family of four). The new law replaces the previous voluntary guidelines for charity care. Most hospitals have financial counselors who work with patients to put together payment plans and to help them apply for charity care if they meet the new guidelines.

Other resources: The Family Health Administration offers free screening for breast and cervical cancer for low-income Maryland women between 40 and 64 years of age. If you live in Baltimore City, call 410-350-2001; Baltimore County, 410-887-3432. The Breast and Cervical Cancer Diagnosis

and Treatment Program provides care to uninsured or underinsured women who meet income qualifications. For more information about the program, call 410-767-6787 or 1-800-477-9774. —D.R.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

keynote

The Father Figure Family advocate Joe Jones on the importance of keeping Dad in the picture Interview by marc steiner

oe Jones knows what it’s like to have a father—and to lose him. Jones spent the first nine years of his life living with his mother and father, who tag-teamed on childrearing while training to become a nurse and a teacher, respectively. “We lived in the projects in East Baltimore, [but] I didn’t even realize that we were kind of poor,” Jones says. “I was in this cone, you know, being protected and raised and nurtured by them.” That changed when his parents divorced, and Jones and his mother moved to West Baltimore. He started running with a pack of older kids who were dealing and using drugs. “Not having my father in the household anymore, only having limited contact with him,” he says, “my image of what life was transitioned from that cocoon environment with both my parents to this street culture environment.” By 13, he was using and selling heroin. His addiction to heroin and cocaine would last for seventeen years, during which he would spin in and out of prison. Since getting clean in 1986, Jones has rededicated his life to another calling: patching wayward fathers back into the families they helped create. He was the driving force behind the Baltimore City Health Department’s Men’s Services program as well as a local affiliate of the national STRIVE employment services program. In 1999, he founded the nonprofit Centers for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, since renamed the Center for Urban Families. The organization provides services ranging from childcare to job training, all aimed at helping fathers provide for, and remain a part of, their families. Jones was a member of President Bill Clinton’s Work Group on Welfare Reform and currently serves on President Barack Obama’s Taskforce on Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families, as well as on several local and national boards of directors. “When we think about the way in which we have designed interventions for families in our country, it really is code for ‘women and children,’” Jones says. “One of the biggest challenges I think we face as a community—as a nation—is the number of children who grow up in families where the fathers are not present. I think that is at the crux of all of the challenges we have with children not having the level of support [they need]."

urbanite november 09

photograph by marshall clarke

Let’s talk about the importance of families in the lives of children. Some people look at the inner city and see children running amok, without supervision, without any kind of parental guidance. How real is that?

It’s very real. Families are really challenged in terms of being able to provide the longitudinal, intimate, consistent relationship with the children that adults bring into the world. I look at it in practical terms. If you’ve got a city block and there are twenty houses, and you’ve got a two-parent family in each one of those houses, when one or two families disintegrate and you end up having single-parent households in two of those twenty houses, the ability for that neighborhood to absorb that is relatively high because the single-parent households are still two out of twenty. But when you have neighborhoods where the overwhelming majority are single-parent households, the likelihood [is much lower] that a community can absorb that and it won’t negatively impact children’s outcomes. We try to incarcerate our way out of this, you know. We build more prisons, we put more laws on the books. We try everything to deal with these issues [of troubled kids]. But children’s outcomes in our country are limited by our [in]ability to engage the men that helped bring them into the world.

Q A

How do you propose that we do that?

There’s a study called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. This is a study that’s being conducted by Princeton and Columbia universities in twenty-something cities, including Baltimore, where they survey low-income women who have given birth in hospitals. And they try to assess the status of the relationship between the pregnant mom and her partner. Around the time of the birth of the child, the women [usually] indicate they’re in a

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romantic relationship with the expectant father. They have aspirations to marry. They have aspirations to be good caregivers to their children. But one or two years down the road, those expectations and aspirations aren’t realized, and those relationships begin to disintegrate. There should be some intervention at that point.

Q A

So what goes wrong, and how would you intervene?

So, you got a fictitious couple, Keisha and Raheem, right? Keisha’s pregnant and she’s poor. Raheem is poor. So Keisha goes to the welfare office; she says, “I’m pregnant, and I need some support to make it through.” The welfare office says, “Keisha, given your situation, you meet the eligibility requirements. However, we need to know about Raheem." And the welfare office only needs to know about Raheem because in order for Keisha to be eligible for the benefits, Raheem has to be held accountable for paying back the system, through child support, for the benefits that Keisha and ultimately the child will receive. So the benefits that she receives [are] basically a loan to Raheem. That’s how child support begins to accrue. Let’s think about this. We know that around the birth of the child, this relationship is still likely to be romantic. Wouldn’t it make more sense that, when Keisha comes in, the caseworker says, “I want you to think about bringing Raheem in because we also want to think about a set of services not just [for] you, Keisha, but for you and Raheem.” If he’s going be financially held accountable for child support, what do we now need to do, to get him into the labor market so that he has the ability to pay? We need to engage these low-income men and encourage them be involved in the lives of their children. We gotta create more opportunities for them to play the mainstream game and [make sure that] public policy doesn’t cut off their necks.

A lot of policy makers—especially conservative policy makers—might also say, well, he owed the money. He didn’t live up to his responsibilities, so it’s our duty to get that money from him.

I’m not saying that Raheem doesn’t have an obligation to pay. But we have to be flexible enough in our policies so that he can come above ground, so he can get into the labor market and be put in a position where he can pay. The state of Maryland actually has an initiative called the Child Support Incentive Payment Program. As long as Raheem gets a job, a legal job with a pay stub, and he’s paying consistently over a twelve-month period on his original support order, then the amount of debt that he has accrued can be wiped off the books. Some people question, “Why would we as taxpayers want to do that?” Well, I want Raheem to have a relationship with that child. I want Raheem to be a caregiver who’s in a position to help shape the values and the beliefs of that child. I want to be working with Raheem to help him understand how to manage his own behavior so he doesn’t end up producing other children that he’s not in a position to take care of. This multiplying effect is what’s killing us.

It’s one thing to give child support. It’s another thing to say that the father is actually in the kid’s life.

There are really only two dedicated public funding [streams] that have anything to do with men in our country. Prison is one: the criminal justice system. And the second is the child support system. We’ve gotta do something that has not been done in any signiﬁcant way, and that is invest in families that include fathers.

There are really only two dedicated public funding [streams] that have anything to do with men in our country. One is prison: the criminal justice system. And the second is the child support system. We’ve gotta do something that has not been done in any significant way, and that is invest in families that include fathers. Barack Obama has talked ad nauseam in his speeches, in his writings, about the responsibility of men to take their rightful role in the family and help to raise children. This year, Sen. Evan Bayh from Indiana and [Illinois] Rep. Danny Davis from Chicago introduced what’s called the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009. This legislation, if passed, will provide an additional public resource that communities, state governments, nonprofit organizations, and criminal justice institutions can [use] to begin to address the needs of low-income men who happen to be fathers. About 65 to 70 percent of men who are incarcerated are fathers, right? Think about the impact when we’ve taken the men from the community. What does that do for a child who’s growing up without their father around?

So in order to bring family structure back to an inner city world, a world of poverty, you’re saying you have to change the entire way we address our social service system.

We’ve gotta have intentional public policy. We’ve gotta have intentional intervention that focuses on the family as a whole, not just women and children. We’ve gotta do it. ■

On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview with Joe Jones at www.steinershow.org or tune in to The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on November 11.

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The Way Out in the early 1990s, Geoffrey Canada was the president of a non-

profit that operated a handful of programs for young people in New York City. The organization, called the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, ran after-school programs, a truancy prevention program, anti-violence training. It was good work, and Canada was being rewarded for it with grants from foundations and government agencies and heart-warming tales of inner city kids getting the love and attention they deserved. He was plenty busy. But something ate at Canada. He didn’t seem to be making a dent in the problem that underlaid all the others: Intergenerational poverty hung over parts of the city like smog. Almost two-thirds of the kids in central Harlem lived below the poverty line, and three-quarters of them scored below grade level on state reading and math tests. “We thought we were making some progress,” Canada recalls. “But when we looked at the data, it was clear that the problem was worse than ever.” Canada, who had launched himself from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx to an elite New England college and then the Harvard School of Education, wanted to know what it would take to give these kids the same opportunities he’d had—and not just the handful his nonprofit served, but every kid in the neighborhood. “It was really the issue of scale,” he says. “The small number of families we were working with was insufficient to move the needle. You can’t do gang prevention, you can’t do teen pregnancy prevention, you can’t do early childhood education, in isolation. Because the challenges beset every stage of child’s life, we decided we had to look at the community writ large.” In 1997, Canada launched an experiment he called the Harlem Children’s Zone, covering twenty-four blocks that were home to roughly three thousand children. Within that area, he set out to change everything about the experience of growing up, creating a nurturing, healthy, academically rigorous environment for kids from birth all the way to college. In 2000, he created “Baby College,” a nine-week program to teach expectant parents and those with kids younger than 3 about early childhood development and good parenting skills. The next year, the organization created the Harlem Gems preschool program and a program aimed at helping families manage childhood asthma. In 2004, it launched a charter school called Promise Academy and a childhood obesity prevention program. To improve living conditions, the organization helped tenants rehab apartment buildings.

by greg hanscom illustration by harry campbell

urbanite november 09

the federal government has promised to pour billions into urban â&#x20AC;&#x153;childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s zones,â&#x20AC;? lifting kids out of the mire of intergenerational poverty.

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Asked where she imagines 2-year-old Ty’ajah in 15 years, Lashaunda Manuel, 17, says, “Still in high school. On her way to college. And not having babies— not most of the stuff I did.”

Taken alone, none of these programs was unusual. What distinguished the Harlem Children’s Zone was that Canada fit them together into an interlocking whole, so that a family entering the program stayed in. And he went to great lengths to draw them in, sending recruiters door to door and offering free meals and other incentives to attend the programs—all in an effort to change the overall culture of Harlem to one where kids stood in the center, not at the fringe. And from the start, Canada worked with unblinking focus to measure the results of his transformation. “You’ve got to be willing to collect and be honest about data,” he says. “And people have to be willing to change based on the data, in real time. Regardless of the plan, when new issues come out, you have to have the ability to adapt.” Canada has said that his mission is to get the kids in his programs to reach “escape velocity”—the speed an object needs to reach to overcome gravity and go into orbit. The Harlem Children’s Zone, he says, launches kids beyond the gravitational pull of the neighborhood’s crime, poverty, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy. And, if test scores are any indication, it works. A preliminary study of the Harlem Children’s Zone by Harvard economists Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, released this spring, shows that by the time its students reach elementary school, the program has closed the persistent “achievement gap” between black and white students in both math and English. By middle school, the achievement gap has actually been reversed: On math tests, Children’s Zone students outperform the average white student in New York City. The Harlem Children’s Zone now covers ninety-seven blocks, serving eight thousand children with its pipeline of programs. Geoffrey Canada starred in New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough’s 2008 book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. Supporters on both sides of the political spectrum sing his praises. And longtime fan Barack Obama has made the Harlem Children’s Zone a centerpiece in his administration’s efforts to combat urban poverty. Under the banner of “Promise Neighborhoods,” the president has pledged to create twenty more “children’s zones” nationwide. The Department of Education is due to unveil applications in the spring for what Obama has estimated will total “a few billion dollars a year.” So next fall, in twenty lucky neighborhoods, the heavens will open and money will rain down, bringing with it a miracle cure for one of the nation’s most insidious ills. Baltimore, where several proposals are in the works, seems like a prime candidate. But the road to a local children’s zone is littered with obstacles—many of our own making.

photo by Valerie Paulsgrove

the harlem children’s zone experience begins

with a scene something like this one, which plays out in a tidy classroom at the Park Heights Family Support Center in West Baltimore: As a siren wails outside, child development specialist Michelle Hanna welcomes seven women—mothers and mothersto-be—to the second of twelve weekly parenting classes. She asks if anyone can tell her what the day’s theme, “nurturing,” means. After a long silence, a young mom named Lashaunda Manuel, dressed in a sharp white-collared shirt and black vest, pipes up: “It means caring, supportive, loving.” Hanna writes these words on the blackboard, adding “stimulating” and “emotionally attentive.” Ignoring the hip-hop ring tone that erupts from someone’s bag, she passes out markers and asks the women to divide a piece of paper into four boxes. In the first box, she has them write “nurturer” and then jot down some examples of what that means, or, if they prefer, draw a picture. In the second box, they write “bully” and repeat the process. The third box is for “victim” and the fourth for “nurtured.” “I think we all have a little of each of these traits now and then,” Hanna says. After a few minutes, Hanna asks Seletta, who has a 1-year-old son, to share what she has written. Seletta’s boxes are filled with simple stick figures. She starts with her “nurtured” box. “My father used to walk me to school,” she says, smiling a little. “I felt safe walking with my father.” In the “nurturer” box, she’s drawn a picture of herself reading a book to her son and “watching him go to sleep.” Then there’s the “bully” box, which shows two stick figures, one with a gun, and dotted lines shooting toward the other. A third stick figure lies on the ground. “That’s me robbing somebody, and a police light,” she says, “and my son is watching, and then I’m dead.” “Why would you draw that?” Hanna asks. “I was in a gang,” Seletta says simply. “That’s where you were,” Hanna says. “That’s not where you are now?” w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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By the time students reach elementary school, the Harlem “Yeah,” Seletta says. “Yeah.” “Thank you for sharing that,” Hanna says. Later, the students take turns reading from a handout about children’s physical and intellectual development. One entry begins, “The child whose needs are met, whose discomforts and fears are quickly removed, who is held, loved, played with, and talked to develops a belief that the world is a safe place, and that people are dependable and helpful. The child who receives inconsistent care and who is rejected develops a basic mistrust of others.” As the lessons wrap up, Hanna opens the floor to questions. “How do you get patience?” asks one mother. “How do you potty train a boy?” asks another. Hanna counsels the women to remember that their kids are individuals, on their own time schedules, not to be rushed. She encourages them to talk with their children, even in the womb, to have family meals together each day, and to stay together with the fathers of their kids. “If you’ve got a piece of family that’s working,” she says, “you do whatever it takes to keep that family together.”

the class, and others like it around Baltimore,

look a lot like the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “Baby College.” But the similarities end there. After completing Baby College, parents in the Harlem Children’s Zone would immediately be ushered into another series of parenting and childhood development seminars. Their child would be enrolled in a pre-kindergarten program that runs from 8 in the morning until 6 at night, five days a week, and includes lessons in English, Spanish, and French. Once reaching the Children’s Zone’s charter schools, that child would be committed to extended school days, Saturday study sessions, and a longer-than-usual school year that runs from September to early August. Outside the schools, the family would have access to counseling and legal consultation, as well as health services. The program has become so popular that there is a long waiting list to get in. In Baltimore, in contrast, the Park Heights Family Support Center and other programs like it struggle just to hang on to a few committed individuals, says Linda Harvey, the Family Support Center’s director. “Last week, there were five people” in the parenting class, she says. “This week there may be ten. Next week, three.” The mothers—fathers rarely attend—come for different reasons. Some, like Lashaunda Manuel, who became pregnant in eighth grade and dropped out of school, come for the GED prep classes and the free meals and childcare. Some are sent by a judge following child abuse cases. Others are in the midst of custody battles and think a parenting class will help their cases. But the forces pulling parents away, ranging from drug addiction to the demands of raising children or their own younger siblings, are often overpowering. “We have open enrollment. We never turn anyone down,” Harvey says. “But most of them, they’re gung ho this week, and then in three weeks we never see them again.” For those parents who stick with it, the staff at the Family Support Center provides direction to

Children’s Zone has closed the persistent “achievement gap” between black and white students in both math and English. By middle school, the achievement gap has actually been reversed: On math tests, Children’s Zone students outperform the average white student in New York City.

preschools and Head Start programs. Harvey has some dramatic success stories. But low-income families often move frequently, the programs are scattered, and Harvey says she doesn’t have the resources to track families after they leave. “The Harlem Children’s Zone absorbs the child into the system. More importantly, it forces the parent to be accountable,” she says. “Our program can’t do that—take the child all the way from birth to college. We just don’t have the money.” Plenty of childhood and family resources exist in Baltimore, but navigating the maze of services can be confounding for parents. “If you pick up a tennis ball in West Baltimore, South Baltimore, East Baltimore, and throw it, you’re either going to hit a social worker or a nonprofit or an agency designed to ‘help the poor,’” says Ed Burns, former city police officer and public school teacher and, famously, David Simon’s collaborator on the book The Corner and the HBO series The Wire. “They’re like weeds. But nothing ever really changes, because they are [isolated] programs.” Burns, who now lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia, compares a kid growing up in the streets, attending one of these many programs, to a seedling: “Take it and nurture it for six months, and then put it in the closet for a year. Take it out and nurture it some more, then back to the closet,” he says. “You’re not going to get much of a plant.” He saw the results firsthand in the classroom. “When I was teaching [in Baltimore City], most of my kids, who were between 14 and 18, had the eyes of old people,” he says. “Nobody had lit a fire when the fire was there to be lit.” Burns first learned about the Harlem Children’s Zone in the mid-1990s when he was working on a proposal to create a kind of urban kibbutz—a safe space for children to develop, insulated from the drugs and violence of the streets. (See Urbanite, March ’07.) He worked with both the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University to create some sort of a children’s zone here. “Unfortunately, that line that runs down the middle of Baltimore—Charles Street—kept the two programs apart,” he says. “We never got to a working model.” But now, the prospect of federal Promise Neighborhood funding has breathed new life into efforts to create a more coherent system for Baltimore’s kids. Canada has visited Baltimore at the w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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“We can’t do East Baltimore and West Baltimore,” says the University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth. “There’s 25,000 just in our little Promise Heights area.”

photo by Valerie Paulsgrove

invitation of local leaders, and university and nonprofit delegations have trekked to Harlem to check out his project. The city will be well represented this month at a conference hosted by the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City on November 9 and 10. But thus far, Baltimore is offering anything but a united front. There are at least four Promise Neighborhood proposals in the works: The mayor’s office has been working on one in Park Heights; the nonprofit Living Classrooms is involved with another; and the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins are each pushing proposals as well. University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth says the school is designing a “parent university” program akin to Baby College and is meeting with community groups to talk about creating a tapestry of interlacing children’s services within “Promise Heights”—a five-neighborhood zone comprising Druid Heights, Upton, Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park, and Poppleton. He envisions a system that would prepare local kids for the university’s science and technology programs, including one that trains the type of technicians who work in the university’s swelling biotechnology apparatus. “Ideally, before too long, we would have kids who could grow up in West Baltimore, get a good education in the schools of West Baltimore and at the University of Maryland, and then get good jobs in West Baltimore,” he says. Much of the groundwork has already been laid, according to Rev. Alvin Hathaway of Union Baptist Church in Upton. The DRUM Healthy Families center, created in 2003, provides support for pregnant mothers and offers parenting and early childhood development classes. Union Baptist has been providing Head Start preschool classes for forty-one years; it’s one of the oldest programs of its kind in the country. The Harvey Johnson Center in the church annex provides after-school programs, a computer lab, and recreational activities. “The [University of Maryland] has always been involved here, but there has never been a focus around

transforming a community,” Hathaway says. “Now we’re starting to talk this way.” Across town, the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) have been involved in talks about creating a community-level support network for children in East Baltimore. Institute Director Robert Blum says the network begins with urban health workers, local residents trained at Hopkins who reach out to expectant mothers, providing in-home visits and connecting them to prenatal care. Blum is leading a group that is talking about the second piece: providing care for kids up to 4 years old. Grade schoolers can now attend the East Baltimore Community School, a public “contract school” that works under an “expeditionary learning” model, providing math, social studies, and English lessons that revolve around a common theme. (This semester’s theme is “What happens when communities change?”) To buoy up the academics, EBDI has launched “Elev8 Baltimore,” part of a national initiative that provides before- and after-school and summer programs, youth mentoring programs, health services, and education for parents. “Right now, we have a lot of individual initiatives,” Blum says. “What really needs to happen, to ensure that kids don’t fall between the cracks, is to tie it all together.”

the key problem is that a tightly woven safety net is

tremendously expensive. The Harlem Children’s Zone was born in Wall Street’s heyday. Contributors included the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. Before the meltdown, Wall Street was contributing upwards of $15 million a year to the organization’s $68 million annual budget. Canada was able to win that support by appealing to donors’ business sensibilities: It’s cheaper to provide kids with a healthy upbringing, he argued, than to lock them up later. But with Wall Street philanthropy on the wane, Canada has had to lay off staff and rein in expansion plans. Another important question about cloning the Children’s Zone concerns its founder: How much of the Harlem success is due to the charisma and leadership of one man? Making something like this work will require someone who can rally a community, raise money, and knock down the walls that separate government agencies and nonprofits. “I would love to see [a children’s zone] in Baltimore,” Linda Harvey says. “I just don’t know that we have a Geoffrey Canada here.” continued on page 86

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

The Gift Before he hit puberty, Ilyich Rivas could conduct Beethoven. Was he born this way, or did he just work at it harder than the rest of us?

by rob hiaasen | photography by joe rubino

urbanite november 09

A life in music: At 16, Ilyich Rivas has been learning how to conduct for ten years. This year, he’ll get the opportunity to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on occasion.

e always wanted to work with his hands.

In 2003 at the University of Cincinnati, a young man—a boy, really—waited backstage to be introduced. His hair was short, not the curled mane that would later give drama and sex appeal to his face. The boy was a bit chubby, and his tuxedo looked too big. He would grow into it soon enough. “He can conduct all the Beethoven symphonies by memory,” music professor Rodney Winther told the crowd. “He’s really quite the prodigy.” After the affectionate, immodest introduction, 9-year-old Ilyich Rivas conducted the university’s Wind Symphony in “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Video of the performance, however, only revealed Ilyich’s back. A camera had failed, so Ilyich’s expressions and doublebarreled eyes couldn’t be seen as he handled Sousa’s national march. Seven years later, his hands are moving again, as Ilyich sits in the back row during a conductors’ seminar at the Peabody Institute. Gustav Meier, the program’s director, points to Ilyich. It’s his turn to face the orchestra and conduct a share of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. “I’m Ilyich Rivas. How’s everyone?” he says, politely, confidently. “I’m happy to be here.” Then, an audible inhalation (a snort?) and a transfer of power from his balled fist tucked into his gut then outward across the orchestra. Big sound. His hands, dipping and floating. Then, a jerk of the head, knocking his big hair for a loop. His dark brow knitting, the briefest of smiles (look quickly), and a nod to the woodwinds for a particular line. Meier stops the young conductor. Stops him again. He wants more power—“unbelievable power!” Ilyich reaches down again into his pit and summons that powerful thing. It is not a great moment in music. It is a good rehearsal. Yet, it’s what Meier saw on that audition DVD. “I’ve never quite seen a person so mature at that age. There’s not an ounce of distraction,” Meier says. “He feels the emotions of the music and is able to pass it along to the audience and the orchestra.” Two years ago, Marin Alsop, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, also saw Ilyich’s audition tape, which includes performances given when he was 11, 12, and 14. What she witnessed was charisma, sincerity, and outstanding musicianship. “He’s unbelievable,” says Alsop, who also knows a thing or two about setting tempo and perspective. “Ilyich is still young and growing into his talent.” She is understandably proud and protective of Ilyich. Based on his audition conducting the BSO this year (“It was like driving a Ferrari,” says Ilyich, who does not yet have a driver’s license), he was awarded a BSO-Peabody Conducting Fellowship. Designed to develop young conductors, the full-ride grant allows Ilyich to spend two years at Peabody, working with Alsop and Meier and, in time, conducting the BSO on occasion.

For the teenager who left high school in Denver to pursue a professional career in conducting, the fellowship in Baltimore will be Ilyich’s higher education. At the risk of undermining his social life. Ilyich Rivas is 16. “I haven’t told my classmates,” he says. Specifically, “I haven’t told the girls.” He is, as Alsop says, flying under the radar, which is a change given his stellar career. Ilyich doesn’t need more pressure. (Alsop, by the way, entered Yale University at 16. “Not everyone knew it, but I knew it.”) Like many 16-year-olds, Ilyich has a touch of acne, an appetite for Chipotle burritos, and a dedicated interest in dating. Unlike most teenagers, he has an agent, a prestigious fellowship, and one whopper of a homework assignment. At his family’s home in Pikesville one afternoon in the fall, Ilyich had his father’s sheet music open so he could memorize Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Both men, both conductors, stood before the music. “It’s magnificent,” says Alejandro Rivas. “It is touched by the universe,” says his son. Oh, to be young with great hair and to touch what has been touched by the universe. Or to be young and wear pink-and-yellow sneakers while knocking off Russian tennis players at the U.S. Open this year, as then-17-year-old Melanie Oudin accomplished before bowing out in the quarterfinals. To be, well, not 17 and witness such determination and skill is great sport and a vicarious thrill. We root for youth. We watch in disbelief. We know their stories. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps started swimming at 7; by 10, he held a national record for his age group, and at 15 he was the youngest member of the U.S. swim team in the 2000 Olympics (and the youngest American swimmer to qualify in sixty-eight years). Another sports phenom, Tiger Woods, once shot an embarrassing 48 over nine holes on a California golf course; in his defense, he was 3. This is not normal. These people don’t have regular brains, as Thomas Mann wrote in his short story “The Infant Prodigy.” These people have been touched by some kind of universe. Or they just work really, really hard.

he etymology alone is daunting. “Prodigy” is from the Latin prodigium, which means omen or monster. What kid wants to consider himself some kind of monster when he’s just trying to get through middle school? Nevertheless, a child prodigy is generally defined as someone having extraordinary ability before the age of 15. These high-performing children create on the level of skilled adults, typically in such fields as math and music. Mozart was a classic prodigy, having composed symphonies by the age of 9. Artist Pablo Picasso and chess champion Bobby Fischer were considered child prodigies. Michael Jackson joined the Jackson 5 at age 5. Stevie Wonder signed with Motown when he w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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was 11. Baltimore-born jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut enrolled at Peabody at 9. Singer-songwriter Tori Amos won a scholarship there when she was 5—although she would later leave Peabody because of her distaste for sight reading coupled with a fondness for playing John Lennon songs by ear. Violinist Itzhak Perlman performed a Mendelssohn concerto on The Ed Sullivan Show when he was 13. He did not, however, consider himself a child prodigy. “It sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a finished product,” Perlman told the New York Times in 1996. Because of the difficulty of defining giftedness, educators, researchers, and even the gifted themselves hesitate to use such labels as “prodigy” or “genius.” “I’m not sure I know exactly what ‘prodigy’ means,” says Dr. Linda Brody, an educational advisor and director of Johns Hopkins University’s Study of Exceptional Talent (SET). “The exact level of achievement needed to garner that label is undefined.” More than 250 children, having scored at least 700 on either the math or reading section of the SAT before age 13, are identified for the program each year; about 4,000 kids have gone through the program since it started in 1980. Although problematic, many terms are used to describe students with advanced abilities. “Highly able? Gifted? Talented? But what does that mean? The top 2 percent or 5 percent? Exceptional in one area or many? There’s really no term that works,” Brody says. Also, labeling a child a prodigy or genius can further alienate young people who might already be prone to isolation given their exceptional skills. The SET program is designed to develop talents in gifted children, help them ward off boredom and achieve their lofty potential via intellectual stimulation and advanced opportunities. Maybe they just need to be with peers who share their interests and abilities, so they don’t feel like outcasts, Brody says. “We need to balance

helping students develop exceptional talents with also addressing their social, emotional, and broad academic needs.” There is life outside math, chess, golf, swimming, and conducting. There is growing up. “There’s a learning and maturity process, and you can’t bypass it,” Alsop says. “I want Ilyich to have a great life, and a great life doesn’t mean getting on an airplane every week but also having an ability to step back and assess what kind of citizen of the world he can be.” Until then, Ilyich still needs his father to give him a ride to campus, where he studies seven hours a day, three days a week. At home, he practices and studies daily. Labeling him a prodigy might be a disservice, as if his skills were genetically grandfathered in. Ilyich was born into a family of conductors; environment and innate ability are certainly factors. It also might help to come from a country such as Venezuela, which instituted a massive federally funded social program devoted to childhood music education. That system has produced, among other extraordinary musicians, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music director, 28-year-old Gustavo Dudamel. But beyond creative genes and institutionalized music programs, something else is at work here, something so astonishingly elemental it can be overlooked and underestimated. At Florida State University in Tallahassee, researchers studying elite musicians discovered what appears to primarily account for differences in skill levels: practice. Not mindless drills or playful scrimmages with your football or chess buddies—but solitary, deliberate practice where there’s little threat of enjoyment. By age 20, most accomplished musicians have spent more than 10,000 hours honing their skills with their instrument—about 8,000 hours more than amateurs of the same age, according to the university’s High Ability Study. Only this kind of relentless practice can consistently produce expert performance levels. Gifted artists, fueled by a consuming interest, push themselves to practice longer and harder, and they can be duly rewarded. “They are motivated by practice because they see it is the most effective way to improve,” says K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor and co-author of the study. “If practice time decreases over time, they see their performances not improving, and that leads to people dropping out.” The findings underscore how preparation and training are central to success. Even the most talented among us may need ten years or more of intense involvement to consistently perform at high levels. It took Bobby Fischer nine years to achieve Grand Master status in chess. With exceptions, scientists and authors might publish their first work at 25, but it might take another ten years to produce their best work. Again, practice makes perfect, or close to it. It might be impossible to calculate how many hours Phelps has spent training in a pool or how many golf shots Tiger hits after a round of competitive golf. “You really don’t need a special explanation for these individuals,” says Ericsson, who speaks to children and parents at international conferences focusing on giftedness. “Whether they are gifted or not we can argue, but they all agree if the gifted child stops trying to improve, they are going to get stuck and arrest their development. They risk turning into some misunderstood genius.” In his research, Ericsson came to another conclusion, which also might not be surprising. Parents play a crucial role in the development of gifted children, who need interaction and a stimulating environ-

The etymology alone is daunting. “Prodigy” is from the Latin prodigium, which means omen or monster. What kid wants to consider himself some kind of monster when he’s just trying to get through middle school?

Duets: Ilyich often plays music with his father, Alejandro, who was a conductor in his native Venezuela.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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ment to flourish. As Ericsson says, “The child is not a flower who can evolve alone in a desert as long as it gets water.” Sometimes the child needs a good stereo.

ince he was 6, Ilyich wanted to “move his hands around.” Although he would also become an accomplished pianist (conductors often play a musical instrument), his first love was conducting. As a child, he often watched his father conduct, and the sounds of pianos, cellos, and singing filled their home. Everywhere, music. “I couldn’t escape from it,” he says. Did he want to? “No.” “He was,” says his father, scratching for a good word in English, “overjoyed with music.” “I succumbed to it,” Ilyich offers. Now, if one must point fingers at Ilyich’s other musical influences, then John Williams shouldn’t be spared. The renowned film composer had no idea what he helped create by writing the theme to Star Wars. A young Ilyich would pester his parents to play the soundtrack so he could conduct along with it. He soon discovered the Beatles, and he might be the only person younger than 50 who owns the soundtrack to The Graduate. The Rivas family left Venezuela in 1994 and lived in Cincinnati and Denver before starting over in Baltimore. It’s a life of promise, opportunity, and sacrifice. But Alejandro Rivas, a youthful 41 (youthfulness and musicianship run rampant in this family), deflects the notion of sacrifice. You do whatever you can for your child. And if that meant Alejandro and his wife, Marjorie, quitting their orchestra and university jobs in Denver so their son could study at Peabody, that’s what they would do. Alejandro is an unemployed conductor in a tough job market for any profession, but he’s committed to being his son’s mentor, his soccer partner, and his ride. Friday is Ilyich’s day off from school and a day off for his father’s taxi service to Peabody. In the decorous living room of their townhouse, a baby grand is center stage. Here, father and son team up to sing and sight-read; Ilyich mans the piano, while his father is on lead vocals or cello. Their shared interests venture beyond music, though. Every day the two of them break for an hour of soccer, setting up cones in a nearby field for drills. For recreation, they also play flight simulator video games (the Rivas men are airplane buffs). But then it’s back to practice. “At my age, I have to be twice the perfectionist to earn the respect of musicians,” Ilyich says. With each performance or practice, he’s also trying to impress himself. Psychologists call this “the rage to master,” the almost obsessive need to improve on a skill that gifted youth typically display: “Maybe this time, I’ll do it perfectly from the beginning.” Ilyich made his auspicious American debut in August when he conducted the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (the orchestra’s director of artistic planning had also seen Ilyich’s audition DVD). Those first

“If the gifted child stops trying to improve, they are going to get stuck and arrest their development,” says psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson. “They risk turning into some misunderstood genius.”

Balancing act: As Ilyich Rivas transitions from gifted child to young adult artist, he will need to develop interests outside of music. “I want Ilyich to have a great life, and a great life doesn’t mean getting on an airplane every week,” says BSO music director Marin Alsop.

minutes on the podium, Ilyich was terrified. He imagined what the musicians might have been thinking. This kid! What could he possibly do? But he quickly settled down and went to work with his hands and eyes, always the eyes. Oh, and the tux fit fine. There is, of course, a downside to passionately pursuing one object. Ilyich is not a gifted dancer. Or dart thrower. And soccer, well, he’s a work in progress. “He tries to be impressive,” his father jokes, “but oh, you poor thing.” The young man can eat, though. “When I’m done with breakfast, I’m already thinking about lunch. When I’m done with lunch, I’m thinking of dinner.” And he thinks about girls. “Going to movies with girls is tied with music as my favorite things.” And is that not one definition of a balanced life? Books are another interest. When he’s not plowing through required reading on the entire history of music, Ilyich might duck back into Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle or Ellison’s Invisible Man. Not surprising, this taste in good books: His mother was a professor of Latin American literature when the family was in Denver (her specialty: Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano). In that previous life (like, high school), Ilyich says he was known not as the class nerd but rather as the obsessed-music guy. Friends told him he was lucky that he already knew what he wanted to be in life. Remember, he’s just 16. As Ilyich continues to grow into his talent, he has more than enough time to study philosophy and enjoy literature, improve his soccer and dancing skills, and see many more movies with girls. He can earn the highest honor in American driving—a Maryland driver’s license—and still have time left over to become a citizen of the world. No pressure. ■ —Rob Hiaasen is a former staff writer for the Baltimore Sun. This is his first story for Urbanite. On the air: More from Ilyich Rivas on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on November 25. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

American pop culture loves to celebrate adults who act like kids. In real life, however, it’s a little more complicated. by tim kreider i l l u s t r at i o n b y e m i ly c- d

Young people anymore they seem to have a hard time growin up. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just that you don’t grow up any faster than what you have to. —Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

’m hardly the first commenter to note that our culture has succumbed to a collective case of arrested adolescence. Adults dress like frat boys, who in turn dress like 10-year-olds. There is a thriving adult market not only for children’s toys ($300-plus for a replica of Mace Windu’s lightsaber, which I’m hoping it goes without saying does not actually work) but for blockbuster films based on children’s toys. Adolescence, a condition that used to be remedied around age 13 by means of ritual circumcision, now seems to linger well into midlife, and sometimes beyond. As a friend of mine once ruefully said, “We’re the first generation to reach our 30s still waking up on our friends’ couches with our pants on.” We might define adolescence as that grace period when we have the freedoms of adulthood without the responsibilities—e.g., sex and drugs without kids or rehab. And we as a nation are famously fond of our freedoms (guns, drugs, porn) and averse to reciprocal responsibilities (taxes, regulation, voting). The recent controversy over whether we ought to be allowed to text-message while driving epitomizes not only that historic conflict but also a distinctive characteristic of adolescence: self-absorption to the point of obliviousness to other people’s ontological reality. The popular film comedies of producer and director Judd Apatow have become to the ’00s roughly what John Hughes’ were to the ’80s: the movies that define adolescence for a generation. Except that the characters in Apatow’s comedies, for the most part, aren’t actual adolescents; they’re adults still acting like adolescents. A New York Times television critic, in describing a character who’s actually based on a colleague of mine, offhandedly anointed this increasingly familiar figure of “the urban loser man-child” a “21stcentury archetype.” Anyone who’s ended up as a television critic should probably throw the stone loser with care, but it is clear that this “archetype,”

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the underachiever adrift between adolescence and adulthood, appeals to a much broader audience than the teen demographic. It all seems like an indication that our culture is deeply uncertain—maybe even in crisis—about what exactly constitutes being a grown-up these days. I like Judd Apatow’s films. They’re vulgar, as is pro forma for modern comedies, but they also have an intelligence and a gentleness seldom seen in U.S. movies. His protagonists are good-hearted goofballs—randy and lunkheaded, but fundamentally decent guys. They give each other earnest relationship advice while smashing old fluorescent light tubes across each other’s legs. And for all their joshing about “You know how I know you’re gay?” they’re oddly tender and sentimental with each other and tend to weep more than any other males in American films who aren’t being tortured. They certainly resemble the men I know a lot more than do the thuggish action heroes you see clutching guns and sulking in most movie posters. But sometimes, watching Steve Carell cherishing his Oscar Goldman action figure in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or Jason Segel eating cereal out of a salad bowl in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen, I wonder whether this is how gay men used to feel watching Paul Lynde or Charles Nelson Reilly: Wait, is that supposed to be me?

Because, in a sense, I am the real-life version of the guy depicted in Act I of these movies, the “Before” guy, as yet tragically unredeemed by the right girl or a respectable day job. My friend Jenny Boylan, a transgendered writer, says that when she was a little boy she assumed she would grow up to wear blouses, not shirts, and that even in her earliest dreams she was always female. Similarly, it never occurred to me, in writing up the proposed outline of my life at age 12 in the back of World Geography class, to include a 9-to-5 job or a wife and kids anywhere in my vision of my future. Instead I pictured myself writing science-fiction novels and living in a circular house in Montana with a pet puma—which, transposed into the key of real life, is kind of how I actually ended up: a 42-year-old cartoonist and writer living in a turret in Brooklyn with a cat. (They don’t let you keep pumas in the city. Apparently they bite.) I’m not the sort of dingbat who feels personally indicted by fictitious characters. My reaction is probably more like the mild affront to verisimilitude that police officers and physicians must experience whenever they watch CSI or ER. None of these figments is supposed to be a realistic depiction of what it’s like to be a cop or doctor; they’re the civilian world’s fantasy of what it must be like. The appeal of the Eternal Adolescent to the aging adult, trammeled with a job and kids and mortgage, is pretty obvious. He’s a figure on whom to project delusions of freedom. As a friend once told me, “The day you get a job, a little piece of each of us is going to die.” But because our culture is so ambivalent about youth and responsibility, this guy gets to be the object of both jealousy and scorn. Morality tales from A Rake’s Progress to Reefer Madness have always gotten to have it both ways, letting their audience ogle the sordid lives they affect to condemn. The pretext of prim instruction is what carnies and stag-film distributors used to call “the square-up,” tacked on like a deathbed conversion. In Apatow’s case, it seems more like titillation is the packaging and moralism the hidden agenda, but you still get to spend most of his films cutting up with your derelict buddies and yet leave the theater reassured that putting all that behind you to settle down is the right and natural order of things. One friend assures me that “every man who sees the lifestyle of a guy apparently unencumbered by squalling kids and 9-to-5 crapola is looking on with pure, naked, helpless longing.” Being envied is one of the few advantages of my chosen lifestyle. But, like most people, I take my advantages for granted and find reasons to grouse. Going without the societal markers of adulthood—a day job, marriage, children— relegates you to semi-marginal status, less than fully adult. You’re always consigned to the air mattress on overnight stays while the guest room goes to the couple with children. (Admittedly, this only makes practical sense, but it still smacks of the Kid’s Table and isn’t easy on your back.) There’s a sense that people are still waiting for you to come around, assuming that if you’re still single it’s only because you haven’t met the right person, that if you’re childless it’s because you don’t know what you’re missing—the same way street corner evangelists are sure you’ll kneel right down on the sidewalk and accept Jesus into your heart if you would just take five minutes to hear the Good News. And, because societal pressures are so pervasive and insidious, if you resist this one you will suffer from the same sort of inward doubts and anxieties as other outsider groups, secretly wondering whether you might not in fact be some sort of stunted and pathetic man-child instead of the respectable cartoonist and cat owner you like to see yourself as. (It must be worse for women; men who aren’t interested in marriage and kids are just patronized as immature, but for a woman it’s seen as downright unnatural, the female equivalent of not w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

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knowing who’s in the Super Bowl.) I was saddened but also relieved when I heard the sister of the late writer David Foster Wallace tell an interviewer that, until he got married in his early 40s, Wallace spent a lot of his adult life not feeling quite like a grown-up. As in real life, what finally confers adulthood on the feckless heroes of these comedies is a committed relationship with a woman. This is partly a matter of dramaturgy and partly just demographics. There needs to be a romance in most of these stories for the same reason that even 1950s movies about giant radioactive insects had to grind to a halt every twenty minutes for a scene with some narcotized, sexless love interest: So boys can get their dates to go see them. And, after all, comedies from Shakespeare to Sturges traditionally end with a wedding. What disturbs me is that even in a culture that supposedly celebrates individuality and rebellion, maturity is still apparently assumed to be a matter of domestication, of conformity. Still, I notice that the credits usually roll as soon as the protagonists get their lives together/get married/get a job, for much the same reason that fairy tales end at “happily ever after”: Being a grown-up is kind of boring. Or let’s say dramatically inert. Films about marriage (as opposed to courtship) are not usually comedies, unless they’re bedroom farces about adultery. And movies or TV shows set on the job are practically nonexistent; outside of Mike Judge’s workplace comedies and The Office, the people we see at work onscreen generally have little-kid fantasy jobs, like being a detective, a doctor, or a spy. In other words, it’s not just teen comedies that are set in that idyll between living at home and having a family of your own; practically everything is. Look at almost any ensemble sitcom: Everyone spends all of their time hanging out with groups of close friends in coffee shops or bars, able to devote all their energy to romantic intrigues and zany schemes. Even though the characters may allegedly be young professionals and are played by actors in their 30s, they are, essentially, college kids.

have one friend who harbors a daydream of someday being able to afford an estate where all her friends could come and live. She envisions it as a compound with a large central house and smaller cabins scattered around it—a re-creation of the closeness and community of young adulthood, all your friends within walking distance. Another has moved into a co-op that feels like nothing so much as a college dorm for grown-ups—individual rooms off the hallways for privacy, with large common kitchen/living areas where people can congregate. A lot of utopian communities, from Walden Two to the starship Enterprise, seem to be modeled on this same template. There’s a reason so many people idealize this period of their lives as a short-lived paradise, and it isn’t just nostalgia; in some ways, it really was. No one had jobs they had to think about much. People had all the time in the world for hilarious conversations and dumb arguments, flirting and closing down the bars, conceiving lunatic theme parties and rock operas, and generally enjoying each other’s company. Friendship is never again as high a priority in people’s schedules. You certainly didn’t have to contrive ways to meet people by taking classes or joining Internet singles sites; you just hung out in groups of friends and occasionally you woke up with one of them. If it kept happening with the same person, eventually you had a Little Talk and you were going out. It was, in short, the most fun a lot of people were ever going to have in their lives. Of course “fun” isn’t synonymous with “happiness,” and it’s easy to forget how miserable we were the whole time. Anyway, trying to revisit that life later on is like going back to the woods where you and your friends played as kids only to find they’re condominiums now. It’s just not there anymore. For one thing, the hangovers last longer and involve a dreadful new component of crippling existential anxiety in addition to the more familiar symptoms.

Going without the societal markers of adulthood—a day job, marriage, children—relegates you to semimarginal status, less than fully adult. You’re always consigned to the air mattress on overnight stays while the guest room goes to the couple with children. There’s a sense that people are still waiting for you to come around. Wasting time no longer feels liberating. In the memoir Prime Green, Robert Stone, remembering a period he and his literary friends spent in England doing just about everything except writing, says, “We were young enough to enjoy ourselves.” Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth—the years are to us then as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing later on just makes you nervous, not with Puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you’re running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells. Besides, there’s nobody your own age left to play with anymore. Everybody got jobs, had families, bought houses. We did all these things that were supposed to make us happy and fulfilled but mostly seem to divide and isolate us. As adults, you have to flip weeks ahead in your datebook or Blackberry to fit in a dinner with good friends. There are some people you genuinely love whom, if you make a conscientious effort, you see once a year. And if you want to meet someone new, you have to go on dates, which are like job interviews where you might have sex. A married but childless friend of mine (with whom, in conformity to Apatowesque caricature, I currently spend a lot of time playing Lego Star Wars Wii) likens seeing all his married friends announce their pregnancies to being on a battlefield and seeing grenades land all around you, taking out comrades closer and closer to you, your best buddies, everyone, until only a few scattered survivors are left, blinking around to see who’s still standing. As I get older and my own friendships become sparser, I think often of the bittersweet ending of my favorite coming-of-age film, the undeservedly forgotten Fandango (1985). A young Kevin Costner, in the role of the group leader/mover/trickster, has coaxed and goaded his buddies into taking road trips, jumping out of airplanes, and going through with their weddings. Now he’s lighting out for Mexico to escape the Vietnam draft and halfheartedly cajoles them, “If you’d all just come with me, you’d see …” He’s not just talking about Mexico. But his friends have outgrown him, and they all choose to stay behind, to face the draft, marriage, real life. One of them even mockingly calls him Peter Pan. The last shot is of Costner’s character standing on a hill silhouetted against the dusk, the boy-king of Neverland alone in his splendid exile, silently raising a beer in toast. ■ —Tim Kreider’s writing appears in the New York Times, Film Quarterly, and The Comics Journal. He contributed the graphic short “The Stabbing Story” to the August 2008 Urbanite.

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urbanite november 09

fiction

Blue Light / Blue Heat By Ariel S. Winter photography by chris myers

stole a blue light police camera, the one at the corner of GreenBut she slept in the living room that night, and I moved the mount and 26th Street. I mainly wanted to see if it could be done. blue light to the top of our Billy bookcase in the living room the I went in broad daylight—I’m not going out to Greenmount in the next morning. It turned out I just couldn’t sleep with the blue dark—and used one of those old telephone pole belts that all of the light flashing. phone technicians used to carry before cherry pickers became du It wasn’t until several days later that the thought that the jour. There weren’t any wires. I just unscrewed the bolts, lowered police were now watching my every move really struck me. I had the whole contraption to the ground with a length of hemp and brought the surveillance into my home! Wasn’t that worse? I tried a square knot, and rolled it home on a furniture dolly. Nobody to review every action I had taken in the living room since I’d stopped me. The blue light on top of the box never even paused its lugged the blinking contraption in there. I stood for an hour in the incessant blinking. They must have those things on Wi-Fi. doorway picturing each move—from the door to the couch, from At home, I cleared a spot for my trophy on my dresser. I the couch to the door, from the couch to the DVDs to the televithought the big black box with the Baltimore Police shield emblasion, or to the bookcase. What had I worn? My twenty-five-year-old zoned on the side would serve as a constant bolster to my manCare Bear T-shirt that said “Stare with Love”? That tie with the hood, the urban equivalent of a mounted moose head or a taxitomato sauce stain in the shape of a W that no one at the office dermied trout. After all, when did it become OK for the state had warned me about? Nothing? Had I adjusted my crotch? Had I to document my every move? Weren’t my actions my private scratched my ass and then smelled my fingers? Had I put my feet property, mine to protect? In the words of Banksy, “What are you up on the coffee table with my shoes still on? There was no way for looking at?” me to be sure. And who was watching me now as I stood transfixed, I looked at the box. The box said, “24-7 BELIEVE.” I did. trying to remember if I had worn my birthday suit or sniffed my ass But when my wife came home, she walked or mistreated the furniture? What were they into the living room after changing out of her thinking? work clothes, put her hands on her hips, and I had to accept those days as lost. I couldn’t said, “What’s on your dresser?” be at fault if I was ill-informed. The police still “I need to know “A PODSS,” I answered. hadn’t come for their damn camera anyway. If what they’ve got “A PODSS?” they were watching, they were silent. (Just the “A Portable Overt Digital Surveillance blinking—blue light—what did it mean—blue on me,” I said, System.” light—what had I done—blue light.) Going Her brow furrowed. “I want it out of our forward, I wouldn’t be at anyone’s mercy. I connecting the room. I won’t sleep in there with that thing.” purchased a closed circuit surveillance camera gold-plated A/V “Where should I put it?” I said. system, a CCT, and set it up in the living room “Back.” so that anything they could see, I could see. I connectors to the I cocked my head. would have my own record. No more relying on monitor/digital She threw up her hands and headed for the imperfect memory. kitchen. “You’re not getting any until you get it My wife watched me install the closed recorder. “The out of there. I’m not having sex with the police circuit camera from the doorway. She refused watching.” to enter the living room now that the police best defense is a I thought she was overreacting. If the camera was there. good offense.” police were watching, why hadn’t they come “I need to know what they’ve got on me,” to arrest me? I said, connecting the gold-plated A/V connec-

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Hampden More to do in

Milagro.

A Global Boutique. Bringing you a cultural blend of clothing, jewelry, world folk art and pottery. Hand picked gifts for the Holidays arriving daily.

1005 W. 36th Street • 410-235-3800 • milagrobaltimore@yahoo.com

MUD and METAL.

Presents functional art hand made by American artists, speciallizing in decorative hardware, switchplates, ceramics, jewelry, prints and cards. Give the gift of hand made happiness or take it home with you! Open Daily!

1121 W. 36th Street • 410-467-8698 • www.mudandmetal.com

Ma Petite Shoe.

Flirty, poetic shoes and boots paired with exotic truffles, handmade caramels, and chocolate from around the world. Crafty socks and slippers and accessories with drama. Open 7 days a week.

832 W. 36th Street • 410-235-3442 • www.mapetiteshoe.com

Golden West Cafe.

Serving an eclectic menu of Southwest favorites, classic Americana and Asian inspired dishes. Baked from scratch and made with love, everyday.

1105 W. 36th Street • 410 889-8891 • www.goldenwestcafe.com

The Pearl Gallery.

The Pearl Gallery Boutique features home accessories & gifts, chinese furniture, original art works, custom framing plus Passion for Silver custom designs in jewelry, bags and scarves.

826 W. 36th Street • 410-467-2260 • http://thepearlgallery.com

Events 66

urbanite november 09

For more information on holiday events in Hampden, please visit www.hampdenmerchants.com.

fiction

tors to the monitor/digital recorder. “The best defense is a good off-duty police officer who moonlighted as a security guard. He had offense.” a gun license, but the placement service said that would cost $200 She looked up at the blinking blue light with hatred and dara week extra. I settled for Jimmy unarmed. At the end of his first ing. “My actions are my private property, mine to protect,” she said. shift, I asked him, “What did you see?” His face remained impas“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I said. sive. “Nothing of consequence,” he said, and left. The surveillance monitor came on and I watched her, the flickJimmy’s last guard job had been at the Baltimore Museum of ering blue cutting shadows in her features. She shifted her gaze to Art. He was well practiced in standing in the corner unobtrusively. my back. The angle of the closed circuit camera made it hard to During his shift, we never spoke. When I would get the urge to set read her expression, or mine for that matter. up the closed circuit monitor again, he would always step in, and “What’s happened to you?” she said. say, “Please, sir, no touching.” I pointed at the monitor. “I’m going to find out.” Before Jimmy left each day, we got into the habit of meeting at She turned and left. the water cooler, the blue light flashing above us. “You don’t have So began the reviewing. The closed circuit system recorded anything to say?” I said. directly onto a one-terabyte hard drive. I’d come home from work, “No.” sit at the monitor, and watch through as many hours as I could “You don’t have to spare my feelings. I can take it.” at two times speed. Initially I thought I only needed to watch the “You’re paranoid!” my wife cried over the intercom. hours I was actually in the room and visible to the police camera, “I wasn’t asking you!” so as to be prepared to defend my actions to any interested and/ “You’re pathetic too,” she said, and the intercom crackled. or judgmental parties who were somehow on the receiving end of Jimmy left. my PODSS broadcast. But then I began to fear that someone was It was after a week of my insisting that he must have some coming in and tampering with the police camera when I was out opinion about me that Jimmy asked, “Do you believe in God?” of the house. Perhaps it was equipped with a GPS system so the We both looked up at the PODSS. “24-7 BELIEVE,” it said. police knew right where it was all of this time. They could come I looked back at him. “If you study history and human nature and retrieve the footage during the day while I was at work, and I with a clear and rational mind, you are led invariably to the concluwould remain clueless when I watched at night, reviewing only the sion that there is no God.” segments that I appeared in. I started watch“Who’s on the other end of that camera?” ing all of the footage. It took me most of the Jimmy said. night. The flashing of the blue light on the “You are.” screen (or maybe it was the actual blue light Jimmy shook his head. “What if I told you The ﬂashing of the in the room itself) began to give me headno one?” aches, and there I would be, rubbing my eyes I said nothing. blue light on the and pressing my temples, watching myself, “Would that be worse?” screen (or maybe on the monitor, rubbing my eyes and pressing “I already told him that,” my wife said my temples. from outside the room. it was the actual My wife spoke to me over the intercom. Jimmy drank from his cone of water. “If “If this really were some kind of defiant act I’m watching you and yours,” he said, “who’s blue light itself) against the apparent creation of a police watching me?” began to give me state,” her tinny voice said, “then I might unSome nights, with my wife turned away derstand.” Two days later, I saw myself on the from me in bed, I would check the CCT reheadaches, and monitor, nodding without turning around. cordings, just for some reassurance. That was “It’s as if you want to be watched,” my wife how I learned that Jimmy and my wife had bethere I would be, had said. I nodded, but it was because I was gun to have elaborate conversations through rubbing my eyes in pain from the blue glare, not because I was the intercom. The closed circuit camera agreeing. “Most people just start a webdidn’t have a microphone, so all I could do and pressing my cam.” She paused. I said nothing, watching. was watch the pantomime, and wonder. I temples, watch“There’s no one fucking watching you on that began to get the sense that they were both goddamn camera but you!” watching me—my wife and Jimmy—all of the ing myself, on the It was when I started falling asleep at time, judging me. And saying nothing. my desk at work, only to wake up disoriented When I got home from work one day, I monitor, rubbing because there was no flashing blue light, that walked into a heated discussion. my eyes and pressI had to admit that reviewing the recordMy wife via intercom: “It’s hard enough ings on my closed circuit television was too to have self-confidence without feeling as ing my temples. cumbersome a system. So I hired Jimmy, an though you’re always being judged.” continued on page 87

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39 WEST LEXINGTON STREET, BALTIMORE, MD 21201 FOR MORE INFORMATION, OR TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT, CALL 888.761.3055. 39WESTLEX.COM

eat/dr ink

73 Reviewed

Blue Hill Tavern and El Guapito

75 Wine & Spirits

The Beaujolais Backlash

The Feed This month in eating

Cutting Class

Can a restaurant pro help me discover the chef within?

by molly o’donnell

ooking has never been a labor of love for me. I don’t relish the idea of spending long hours in the kitchen mixing and tasting, and have trouble understanding people who do. Raised by a single father whose culinary repertoire consisted of chili and baked potatoes, I’ve had to negotiate my own way around the kitchen. The meals I make for friends are usually impromptu affairs, prepared sans recipe. Or logic. I once served guacamole and chips followed by a pasta puttanesca, a combination that made my guest remark that she’d never think of fusion fare the same way.

photography by l a k aye mbah Neither of the incompatible dishes was bad, exactly, but together they exemplified the idea of cooking that I was raised with: You have to eat, so cook something. I am, however, a great appreciater: I enjoy good food in the way that people who don’t paint enjoy going to art museums. Trying to create culinary masterpieces myself strikes me as a kind of dilettantism. And I’m in good company these days: Despite all the locavore chatter about farmers’ markets and DIY frugality, most Americans remain stubbornly addicted to

takeout. The NPD Group, a market research firm, showed that we ate takeout meals an average of 125 times a year in 2008, up from 72 in 1983. Most of the frequent takeout eaters I know (myself included) cite a lack of time as the major factor for ordering rather than preparing dinner. As Michael Pollan noted in a July cover story about the death of home cooking for the New York Times Magazine, the average American only spends twenty-seven minutes a day preparing meals at home, less than half the time spent in 1963. Preparing food, he complained, has become

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

I TA L I A N

S E A F O O D

R E S TA U R A N T

Since 1937...New Location

Seafood, pasta and more! Dine in for Lunch & Dinner or

Home & Office Delivery Downtown Now located at 110 Water Street 410.986.4445 www.velleggiasitaliano.com velleggiasitaliano.com Ticket $1.50 beers during all games

Voted Baltimoreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Best Pasta 2007!

urbanite november 09

eat/drink

a spectator sport—something you watch on television, probably while eating pad thai out of a Styrofoam box. So, in an effort to awaken my inner chef—and hopefully save some of the cash I’d been handing over to the local carryout—I decided to sign up for a cooking class. Plus, even I was getting sick of eating the few things I knew how to make. This is how I found myself at the Pierpoint Restaurant in Fells Point one rainy Sunday afternoon. Chef/owner Nancy Longo, who is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her tiny rowhouse eatery on Aliceanna Street this year, has been teaching cooking classes for kids here since 2002; in 2007, by popular demand, she added classes for adults. About thirty times a year, she gathers aspiring cooks together here on days when the restaurant is dark, typically Sunday and Monday afternoons. I had visions of a stern master chef leading a soufflé-making tutorial. But, much to my relief, Longo turned out to be an unimposing and friendly figure who wore a T-shirt and jeans instead of chef’s whites and immediately offered a drink at the bar. Longo spent three years as a chef instructor at her alma mater, Baltimore International College (then called Baltimore International Culinary College), before opening Pierpoint in 1989; teaching kids and non-pros, she now takes a more easygoing approach than she did at BIC (which, she says, was “like a boot camp”). Nevertheless, she set a daunting menu for the afternoon. My four classmates—a mother/daughter team and a pair of women friends—and I would be concocting a multiethnic menu of five dishes: a Thai chicken salad, spicy pepper steak, beef empanadas, shrimp-stuffed mushrooms, and a Mediterranean bouillabaisse, plus a pomegranate salad dressing. With the kitchen in the narrow restaurant too small to accommodate us all, portable burners and cutting boards were brought out into the empty dining room. Longo issued us white aprons and set us to work chopping ingredients for the salads and bouillabaisse.

Handed a bunch of cilantro, I tried to copy the smooth, rocking chopping motion of the woman to my left, but my knife work was a sad thing to watch. Longo didn’t give lengthy instructions—she just intervened periodically over our shoulders to offer technique tips—but the Thai chicken salad gave us plenty of opportunity to practice, as the meat, garlic, and vegetables were all supposed to be pulverized into tiny pieces. Shrimp-stuffed mushrooms were more my speed—a food processor handled the chopping, and my teenage classmate boldly stepped forward to man the frying pain, which spit searing oil whenever she added a tempura-battered shiitake. Meanwhile, a saffron-laden bouillabaisse broth simmered nearby, and Longo instructed me to toss in cod, shrimp, scallops, and mussels, along with chopped garlic and onion. The mussels were pre-cooked, which was a surprise; Longo purchases her mussels this way “to avoid making anyone sick,” she told me. “It’s too scary.” (After a personal brush with serious seafood-related food poisoning in the 1990s, Longo frequently advocates on behalf of enhanced food safety regulations.) She’s also not averse to shortcuts and time-savers: When I asked her about making my own tikka masala sauce, she recommended that I doctor up a British brand of jarred sauce rather than concoct one from scratch. As our cooking marathon wore on, I came to see that my just-get-it-done school of cuisine was not totally incompatible with Longo’s own. Her cooking style—which emphasizes local and seasonal ingredients handled with a broadly Mediterranean/Asian technique—tends to be fast and simple. In other words, she’s a good guide back to the kitchen for a generation that seems to have forgotten its way. “They’re fearful. They don’t even want to pick up a knife,” Longo says of her young, post-boomer cooking students. “They come from a generation whose mothers cooked out of cans and boxes.” But this is also a generation that devours the Food Network and has been exposed to a host of more challenging ethnic cuisines: We are, in a sense, hungry to cook, even if we aren’t sure exactly how to go about doing it. That’s a change, Longo says, from ten years ago, when the young people who came to her to learn to cook “grew up on Red Lobster and Ruby Tuesday’s. They could no more hope to cook than the man on the moon.” After four hours, the class wound down. We’d gorged on bowls of bouillabaisse, sampled sweet and tangy Thai salad, and baked heaps of spicy beef empanadas. I’d learned

that you don’t have to be the Iron Chef to make something more interesting than spaghetti. That I was relatively unscathed and had managed to avoid total embarrassment was a bonus. Longo offered us all coffee and dessert, and after those long, unheard-of hours in the kitchen, I gladly accepted. Stirring my coffee and reflecting on what we had just made, I eyed the platter of leftover empanadas to my left. “Next time,” I thought to myself. “I’d make those with sun-dried tomatoes.” When I realized there’d be a next time, I had to admit that something had indeed happened over the last few hours: I had become—gasp— someone who looks forward to cooking. ■ — Freelance writer Molly O’Donnell wrote about her experience as a nude model in the March 2008 Urbanite. Nancy Longo is holding three cooking classes for adults this month, including a crash course in preparing Thanksgiving dinner on November 15. For more info, go to www.pierpointrestaurant.com. For a sample of other local cooking classes in November, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

Nancy Longo’s Shrimp-Stuffed Mushrooms 1 lb shrimp 2 green onions 1 egg 3 tbs oyster sauce 1 tsp sesame oil 1 tsp garlic, fi nely chopped ½ tsp ginger, fi nely chopped 12 large shiitake or button mushrooms — Tempura batter: 2 cups flour 2 egg yolks 2 cups ice water

reCiPe

Handed a bunch of cilantro, I tried to copy the smooth, rocking chopping motion of the woman to my left. But my knife work was a sad thing to watch.

Mix flour, yolks, and ice water together to create lumpy batter. Let sit for 15 minutes to allow ice to melt, then stir to recombine. While batter is resting, add shrimp and all ingredients except mushrooms to a food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped. Stuff ingredients into mushrooms. Dip mushrooms in tempura batter and fry in hot peanut oil until golden.

Web extra: Get Nancy Longo’s bouillabaisse recipe at www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

Mt. Washington

Rebuilding the Real economy nouRishing local foods and faRmeRs

futuRe haRvest - casa’s 11th annual conference January 15 and 16, 2010 National Conversation Training Center Shepherdstown, WV

WoRkshops on: • Sustainable Agriculture: Organic Disease Control, Soil Science • Grazing: Working Woodlands, Marketing Pasture-based Products • Adding Value: On-farm Processing, Grain Milling, Agritourism • Urban Agriculture: Home Waste, Fermentation, Food Justicey

a conference foR and by local farmers and gardeners with local food!

www.futureharvestcasa.org A Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture

HOLIDAY WINEd UP 2009 Tuesday, December 1st from 6pm-9pm Wine Tasting & Sale Up to 20% discount off wines An endless extravaganza, with over 30 wines from around the globe, paired with Hors D’Oeuvres by Chef Jason Lear. Tickets sold in the wine shop or by phone 410.244.6166 | $35 per person all included. Tickets are limited. 921 East Fort Ave., Baltimore, MD 21230 at the Foundry on Fort Phone: 410.244.6166 | www.the-wine-market.com

Satisfy Your Thirst for Knowledge

admissions@ubalt.edu 1.877.ApplyUB | www.ubalt.edu/merrick 72

urbanite november 09

Joe's Bike shop is proud to announce our new location

Joe's Bike shop fells point

fells point 723 s. Broadway Baltimore Md 21231 443-869-3435 mt. washington 5813 falls rd Baltimore Md 21209 410-323-2788 www.joesBikeshop.coM

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Blue Hill Tavern

Scene stealer: Sleek décor sets the stage at Blue Hill

Blue Hill Tavern is not related to that Blue Hill, the buzzy farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village famously favored by POTUS on his date night with Michelle. But it doesn’t matter. Baltimore’s Blue Hill, which stands across from the spruced-up Natty Boh building in Brewer’s Hill, feels wildly sophisticated for this once-working-class neighborhood. Attendants rush from the shadows to park your car, then you enter a sleek modern space full of dark wood and stainless steel. The interior is both regal and modern, with shimmery sheer draperies in ocean blue and a backlit curtain of water falling behind the bar. The best tables seem to be for parties of four or more, and the robust noise level reinforces this mandate of conviviality. The roar is a shame; this is a beautiful space and could just as easily be a spot for quiet liaisons as its Manhattan doppelganger. Chef Brett Lockard’s food is creative without excess, and the menu has a number of clever riffs on retro dishes. The grilled cheese soup with tomato, for example, is dense with gorgonzola; the tomatoes are served on the side, drizzled with balsamic. Similarly, the “steak-and-eggs” appetizer pairs paper-thin slices of rose-colored sirloin carpaccio with poached quail eggs and mimosa vinaigrette. A deconstructed Waldorf

salad calls for some fact-checking. Here it’s a hunk of iceberg with bleu cheese, served on a leaf-shaped plate decorated with apple slices and candied walnuts. Ingredients cleave for the most part to the local and seasonal, though Lockard doesn’t hesitate to mix a few mandarin oranges into the wild rice pilaf that accompanies a perfectly charred wahoo (a mackerel-like white fish). The “surf and turf” is not to be missed: a rich and creamy crab cake with a hint of mustard on a crisp slice of brioche, paired with a petite medallion of filet mignon and fingerling potatoes. Desserts conform to the nostalgia theme: A peanut butter cup finale is a serrated dark chocolate circle filled with creamy peanut butter and topped with torched meringue as gooey as marshmallow. Peach and blackberry cobbler boasts a crumble shot through with lemon verbena. If you’re drinking your dessert, among the vintagesounding offerings are a pineapple upsidedown cake (pineapple-infused vodka, vanilla, and a cherry) and a blood-orange creamsicle (orange vodka, Liquor 43, blood-orange juice, and cream). (Lunch and dinner daily, Sun brunch. 938 S. Conkling St.; 443-388-9363; www.bluehilltavern.com.)

Viva El Guapito! Por favor! This midtown Mexican eatery, which appeared a little more than a year ago, has been lavished with anecdotal love from Mount Vernonites (as well as a “Best Mexican” nod from City Paper), in part because owner Yanira Castro, who is from El Salvador, bravely opened on an otherwise food-free stretch of Mulberry Street. Snuggled right behind the southwest corner of the Pratt Library, El Guapito’s merry red awning is the sole evidence of commercial activity here, and many reviewers seem to conclude their trip reports by bemoaning the empty dining room. If the pleas for more patrons seem more abject than those of the typical recession-battered restaurant, it might be because El Guapito generates such a cheery we-try-harder vibe: The nicely turned-out front dining room is a simple but handsome space, with walls lined in Aztec masks; a less formal back room boasts the kind of tiny portable bar you might find in your uncle’s basement clubroom. The sense of eating in someone’s home is reinforced by the food, which, at its best, has the lusty eccentricity of the handmade. The pair of salsas that arrive with the thick

house-fried chips are both thin and bright, one a green tomatillo salsa and the other a duskier red brew, full of earthy burn from dried chiles. At $2.75 a pop, tacos are a valuemenu standout: Each is double-wrapped in plump corn tortillas, heaped with one of seven different meats and simply dressed with cilantro and lime. Try lengua—buttersoft chunks of tongue—or tacos al pastor, with spicy shreds of deep-red pork. Carnitas, or slow-roasted pork, suffers a bit by comparison: The meat is rich but intensely salty, even when buried amid the cheese, beans, and lettuce of a well-stuffed burrito. But El Guapito fields a commendable mole, napping a burly chicken enchilada in a velvety dark sauce that balances the richness of chocolate with a pleasantly deep heat. A lonely flan is the sole dessert option at the moment, but Castro says to look for a tres leches cake in the future. Which is encouraging: Here’s hoping that there is a future to be had. (Breakfast, lunch, and dinner Mon–Sat. 110 W. Mulberry St.; 410-244-7072; www.elguapito mexicanrestaurant.com.)

reviewed

eat/drink

—Martha Thomas

photo by La Kaye Mbah

El Guapito

South of the border: Tacos at El Guapito in Mount Vernon

—David Dudley

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12:25 PM

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eat/drink

Schlock of the New

Rescuing Beaujolais from its own success By Clinton Macsherry

hortly after midnight on November 19, this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau—barely two months old—will make its debut. Shipments will have raced to far-flung markets by transport that in the past has included elephants, rickshaws, hot-air balloons, and the supersonic Concorde. Wine shop banners will proclaim, “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé (“The Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived”). Special sales displays will groan under brightly labeled bottles. Corks will pop at Francophile parties around the globe. And between then and New Year’s Day, as much as a third of the Beaujolais region’s annual wine production will pass into consumers’ hands. C’est la marketing. Among wine geeks, dissing Beaujolais Nouveau has become almost de rigueur. In some ways, this is a shame. The style dates back to the 19th century, when newly barreled wine from the villages of Beaujolais would complete fermentation on riverboat to the regional (and gastronomic) capital of Lyon. Its freshness and simplicity made it an appealing bistro wine, and it spread to Paris. Rules governing the release of Beaujolais Nouveau were formalized in 1951, and a festive event marking the harvest and new vintage evolved into an industry celebration of quick cash. In the 1970s, it became a full-fledged market rage, fueled by media-savvy magnate Georges DuBoeuf, a polarizing figure whose efforts earned him the moniker “the King of Beaujolais.” By most accounts, sales peaked in the late ’90s, and they’ve slipped steadily since. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. purchases declined from 3.9 million bottles in 2001 to 2.5 million in 2007. The strong euro hasn’t done Beaujolais Nouveau any favors: By definition a raw, simple quaff made for immediate

consumption, it’s recently crept into the $15 range. It has also fallen prey to wine’s fashion cycle, wherein blitz begets backlash. The hoo-ha may have been fun for a while, but an awful lot of the stuff tastes like “melted purple Popsicles,” as Karen MacNeil noted in The Wine Bible. And yet, the cycle still spins. (Chardonnay, Merlot, and rosé have all faced similar twists of fortune.) For the last few launches, I’ve noticed reviews touting Beaujolais Nouveau from small producers and urging appreciation of the wine on its own humble terms. The estimable Gerald Asher crystallized the revisionist view in August’s Gourmet, arguing that “heavy commercialism can also make us lose sight of how wonderfully liberating the wine is: pure, simple, effortless pleasure.” Liberating $15 from my wallet won’t be effortless, given the canned-punch flavors of most Beaujolais Nouveau I’ve tasted. But I’ll loosen my fist for the overshadowed non-nouveau wines of the region, some of which are moderately age-worthy and can be had for the same price or even less. Almost all Beaujolais is red, made from the Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc grape using a technique known as carbonic maceration. In sealed containers, whole clusters of mostly unbroken grapes undergo intracellular fermentation induced by carbon dioxide, typically leading to a fragrant, light-bodied, refreshing wine. The standard process lasts about ten days (as few as four for Beaujolais Nouveau). Grapes grown on the region’s southern plains go into basic Beaujolais and Nouveau. Wine called BeaujolaisVillages, from broad northern areas, usually represents better quality. The best Beaujolais hails from the hilly terrain and superior soils of the north’s ten “cru” villages; bottles specify those village names on their labels. Cru Beaujolais, notably from the villages of Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent, can age for up to ten years in strong vintages. DuBoeuf and Louis Jadot, large négociants who buy grapes from multiple growers, dominate the Beaujolais market at all levels. Many tasters criticize their wines’ homogeneity. Look for alternatives, such as the Chateau de La Chaize 2005 ($14, 13 percent alcohol) from the cru village of Brouilly. It pours dark purple, with pretty aromas of red berries. The medium-bodied palate carries fresh flavors of raspberry and strawberry, finishing with hints of earth and mineral. It pairs beautifully with turkey—which, come to think of it, gets its own marketing blitz this month. ■

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

wine & SPiritS

11/11/08

illustration by Chris Rebbert

Document6

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Join us for a Thanksgiving Tasting of holiday favorites from our natural free range turkey to our pumpkin pie, we promise to put you in the mood. Thursday, November 5th. Check individual stores for times.

tHe Feed Compiled by Martha Thomas CONCERT OF TASTES

NOV 1

At the twenty-ninth annual fundraiser, Annapolis restaurants and artisans do their best to ensure that the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra can continue to do what it does best. More than twenty-five restaurants supply the eats—including steak from Morton’s and dessert from the Annapolis Ice Cream Co. Local merchants stock the silent auction with jewelry, airline tickets, and more. Fred Geil and the Chesapeake Greys set the big band mood. 6 p.m.–9 p.m., $75, $65 for members of Friends of the ASO.

Sheraton Annapolis Hotel 173 Jennifer Rd. 410-263-0907 www.annapolissymphony.org

MOTHER SETON AC ADEMY WINE HARVEST

NOV 7

Mother Seton Academy, a Catholic middle school for economically disadvantaged children, holds an annual Wine Harvest to raise money for its scholarship fund. Wines donated by Grand Cru will be paired with snacks from Miss Irene’s and the Waterfront Marriott, and many of the silent auction items are handmade by the students themselves. 4 p.m.–7 p.m. $45.

Loyola University Maryland McGuire Hall 4501 North Charles St. 410-563-2833 www.mothersetonwineharvest.org

SOUPS IN THE CELL AR

NOV 8, 15, 22, 29

Boordy Vineyards pairs seasonal soups with its wines throughout the month: Try cream of Maryland crab and corn chowder with Riesling or chicken fajita with Merlot. Each week a different band will be on hand for dancing in the barn (the setting for one of Julia Roberts’ wedding scenes in Runaway Bride). Also promised are tours of the winery for adults and toasted marshmallows for little ones. 1 p.m.–5 p.m. $15.

Boordy Vineyards 12820 Long Green Pike, Hydes 410-592-5015 www.boordy.com/events.html

WATERFOWL FESTIVAL

NOV 12–15

The thirty-ninth Waterfowl Festival in Easton opens with Art- Various locations, Easton ful Feast on Nov 12, a walking tour of the Eastern Shore town, 410-822-4567 with food, drink, and wildlife-themed art at six different stops. www.waterfowlfestival.org (For ticket information, call 410-822-4567.) The Waterfowl Festival—with retriever and fly-fishing contests, decoy auctions, and plenty of local food and drink—runs Nov 13–15 at various locations around Easton. Fri and Sat, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Sun, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. $10, kids 12 and younger free.

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eat/drink

Towson University professor Jim Saunders will detail the chemical makeup and history of the cacao bean, from its use as currency in Aztec and Mayan cultures to its modern-day incarnation as chocolate. The lecture, part of the university’s Hackerman Academy Saturday Morning Science Series, is family-friendly, and Dr. Saunders promises something for everyone. Women will learn that the caffeine-like theobromine found in chocolate mimics the properties of estrogen—thus explaining the fairer sex’s attraction to it. Two sessions, 10 a.m. and noon. Free.

NOV 21

Smith Hall, Room 326 Towson University 8000 York Rd. 410-704-3491 www.towson.edu/ HackermanAcademy

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 9

FILL YOUR HOLIDAYS

with music

HANDEL’S MESSIAH

ABBA TRIBUTE November 27, 28 & 29

You’ll be “Having the Time of Your Life” hearing more than 20 of your favorite ABBA hits including “Dancing Queen,” “Mamma Mia,” Take a Chance on Me,” and many more. Please note: The BSO will not perform on this concert.

December 4

Presenting Sponsor: Constellation Energy Media Sponsors: Baltimore Magazine & WLIF 101.9

CONCERT ARTISTS OF BALTIMORE

It wouldn’t be the holiday season without Handel’s Messiah and the glorious “Hallelujah Chorus.” Join Edward Polochick and the Concert Artists of Baltimore Symphonic Chorale for this wondrous oratorio.

THE POLAR EXPRESS December 5 (11 am)

Take a ride on Chris Van Alsburg’s The Polar Express. Images from the book will be projected as the story comes to life through full orchestra and The Peabody Children’s Chorus. Presenting Sponsor: Sylvan/

TOO HOT TO HANDEL: THE GOSPEL MESSIAH

Laureate Foundation, Official Education Partner of the BSO Supporting Sponsor: Music & Arts

HOLIDAY SPECTACULAR

December 11 & 12

Experience “the jazziest, most soulful reinterpretation of Handel’s Messiah you’ll ever hear” (New York Post). Marin Alsop infuses Handel’s classic oratorio with a blend of jazz, gospel, rock and R&B.

December 18, 19, 20, 22 & 23

MARIN ALSOP

Ten shows of Baltimore’s most popular holiday tradition! Ann Hampton Callaway hosts this musical extravaganza as Jack Everly conducts a show-stopping troupe of singers, dancers and musicians, and special guests, Capitol Quartet. Presenting sponsor: Whiting-Turner Contracting Company Supporting Sponsor: IWIF Media Sponsors: WLIF 101.9 & WBAL -TV

BSOmusic.org | 410.783.8000

B A LT I M O R E S Y M P H O N Y O R C H E S T R A

art/culture

81 MUSIC

David Dudley on Baltimore Jazzscapes II

83 BOOK

Brent Englar on Loch Raven

83 THEATER

Martha Thomas on The Exonerated and Around the World in 80 Days

85 THE SCENE

This month’s cultural highlights

As Told To Taylor Branch’s marathon gab sessions with Bill Clinton produce a curious meta-history of a messy presidency. Offi cial White House Photography

BY WIL S. HYLTON

few days after Thanksgiving in 1992, Taylor Branch got a strange invitation: The president-elect wanted to see him. And not only that. Bill Clinton wanted Branch to drive from his home in Mount Washington to the gated mansion of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham for a star-studded gala in Clinton’s honor. To any other historian, the summons might have been exhilarating, but Branch was suspicious. He wasn’t a fan of Clinton, hadn’t worked for his campaign, and frankly found his slogans a bit hollow. “I thought his ‘forgotten middle class’ sounded like Nixon’s ‘silent majority,’” Branch told me recently. Then, too, there was the awkward history. Twenty years earlier, Branch had shared an apartment with Clinton while they were both working for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He had left that encounter less than charmed. In an era of mass movement and public protest, when the great gains of their generation had come not from politicians but despite them, Clinton came off as hopelessly infatuated with joining the political machine. “He seemed to be on

automatic pilot—I’m going to run for office!” Branch recalled, a trace of disappointment still in his voice. “I didn’t connect that to idealism. I connected it to ambition.” Over the next twenty years, the men had not only drifted apart; each, in his way, had also come to embody one side of the schism that marked their generation. Branch, the progressive, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for the fi rst volume of his landmark history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters. Clinton, meanwhile, had rocketed to political heights on the opposite inclination—as a “New Democrat,” offering a Third Way that liberals like Branch found tepid and uninspiring. There had never been an occasion, or a reason, to reconnect. Still, Branch went to the party. And before he knew it, he was locked into a conversation with the president-to-be. Clinton had read Parting the Waters and was especially curious about the footnotes. He had combed them to study how Branch assembled his material, how he reached beyond the usual documents of history to scour the effluvia of

men’s lives—their calendars and notepads, passport applications and wills. “I want to know if there are going to be things like that for my historians in fi fty years,” Clinton told Branch. And so the secret project began. Over the next eight years, Clinton and Branch would meet almost eighty times—usually at night, sometimes through the night—to create the record that Clinton hoped to leave behind. For each session, they would set a pair of recorders between them and simply talk. And talk, and talk—about the presidency, the president himself, and everything that came between. Clinton still hasn’t discussed the content of those tapes, but last month Branch went public, releasing a new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (Simon & Schuster), that surveys the hours of conversation and reveals many of Clinton’s most intimate thoughts during the course of those tumultuous eight years. Yet the book is not entirely about Clinton. Having surrendered the original tapes to the president after each session,

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art/culture Branch writes here mostly from memory—in particular, the preserved memories that he recorded for himself on the drive home to Baltimore after every interview. This poses certain obstacles to the book, not least of which is that Clinton’s voice is largely absent, with his thoughts and comments paraphrased; Branch repeatedly laments, “Later, on the drive home, I wished I had been able to recall Clinton’s exact words.” But what the book loses of Clinton’s voice it regains from Branch, who seems liberated by the personal nature of the project and sprinkles the book with intimate observations as pointed, and as lively, as anything he has ever written. What emerges, then, is less a formal record of the Clinton Tapes per se, than a memoir of Branch’s experience recording them. Between Clinton's long policy ruminations, Branch sketches the setting and tenor of the room, giving life to the habits, manners, and appearance of the president, often to hilarious effect. We find Clinton in the throes of endless allergies, his face swollen and red as he ponders the Dayton Accords. We sit alongside Branch in the White House bedroom watching Clinton change clothes (he’s fi xated by the president’s spindly “old man legs,” riven with surgical scars). And we witness the slow repair of their friendship— lounging on sofas to watch the Academy Awards, raiding the kitchen for nachos and bean dip, and assembling a gaggle of staffers for an evening game of cards. “It was acceptable,” Branch notes, “to growl, ‘Mr. President, don’t you fuck me with this pass.’” Aside from the levity these anecdotes bring to the president’s interminable dissertations on policy, they also create a welcome and unprecedented context for it. It has long been axiomatic that the forty-second president was a once-in-a-lifetime policy sponge; here, we not only hear what Clinton was thinking, but we also see his intellect operating in a setting that resembles real life—besieged by a din of distractions and health irritations, ringing phones and confl icting advice, pausing to help Chelsea with homework and yet floating somehow on a mental plane that is nothing short of stunning. He slips effortlessly across a thousand disciplinary landscapes, from the gyroscopic specifications of the Hubble Space Telescope to the biographical minutiae of Middle Eastern monarchs, sometimes while whipping through a game of solitaire or fi lling out a crossword puzzle in the Times, or both. This is a Bill Clinton utterly distinct from the triangulating caricature we came to know during his presidency. Branch presents another Clinton—a thundering, resolute figure who refuses to ignore the humanitarian crisis in Haiti or retreat from the budget

impasse with Newt Gingrich. As Branch comes to admire this unexpected character, he also serves as a proxy for the rest of us, especially for those left-leaning boomers who, like Branch, had dismissed Clinton as the wifty waffler that they (perhaps) dreaded becoming themselves. Their rapprochement is the story of a long and deep generational gash slowly being healed, two men at a time. Late in the administration, Branch's wife, Christy Macy, would also land a role in the White House, as a speechwriter for the First Lady. The downside of this intimacy, of course, is that Branch grows perhaps too close: He’s skittish around the really ugly stuff. On Monica and Whitewater, he pushes gently when he pushes at all; rarely is Clinton asked to examine the lesser angels of his own nature. It may be a mark of Branch’s seriousness that he spends so much time on the internal tensions of the Balkans and so little on the internal tensions of the Clinton marriage, but the absence is still disappointing. For better or worse (and one tends to think worse), the most intriguing aspects of Bill Clinton have always involved the disconnect between his political genius and his personal failings. Here, those failings are largely ignored. What we find instead is a new merger of the personal and political—a still life of Clinton’s restless mind in action, set against the backdrop of a messy and unfolding life. Schlumping around the den in his sweatpants, Clinton’s peculiar capacities (he seems able to expound on the political significance of every neighborhood in every foreign capital) seem even more astonishing than they would behind a mahogany podium. And this, Branch told me, was what captured his attention at Katherine Graham’s dinner party: That a president had buried himself in Branch’s 700-page history, raking the footnotes for clues to his methodology and then cornering Branch to assemble a similar trail for his own future historians, was boggling enough; that he would do so even before taking office was borderline absurd. “Even if I hadn’t ever known him,” Branch said, “even if it had been Richard Nixon or George W. Bush, I would have been floored right from the start. Personally and intellectually floored.” Readers will feel the same. ■ —Wil S. Hylton is a correspondent for GQ magazine. This is his first piece for Urbanite. Taylor Branch will discuss The Clinton Tapes on November 5 at the central branch of the Pratt Library. For more information, go to www.prattlibrary.org.

MUSiC

Take Two

Baltimore Jazzscapes II (2009) The final track on Baltimore Jazzscapes II, a compilation produced under the banner of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance (BJA), is more than 30 years old. It’s a sweaty seven-and a-half-minute workout of “Lover Man,” the ballad immortalized by Billie Holiday, interpreted here by local saxophone phenom Mickey Fields at the Famous Ballroom in 1977. Both Fields, who died in 1995, and the Ballroom (now part of the Charles Theatre) are gone, but the performance is exploding with life, with Fields’ brawny blues-soaked tenor dismantling chorus upon chorus. Album producer Mark Osteen, also the BJA president, says that the alliance included the cut in part to “acknowledge the Baltimore jazz tradition”—Fields was little known outside the Mid-Atlantic but hugely influential for local players. He’d be a tough act to follow; indeed, the new material on the compilation, studio recordings contributed by fifteen different artists and groups, can’t help but feel a bit tidy and polite by comparison. But it’s a polished set that offers both a handy survey of the current scene and a strong sign that the town isn’t finished turning out serious musicians. “There are too many good players in Baltimore and not enough places to play,” Osteen says. Osteen is a musician, too—his group, the Cold Spring Jazz Quartet, contributes a wintry ballad called “Fallow” that showcases his lyrical alto saxophone. But the stars of the show are female vocalists. Felicia Carter’s torchy “Hurricane” opens the proceedings on a sassy note, joining Marianne MathenyKatz's warm and accomplished version of the standard “Comes Love,” Sandy Asirvatham’s droll bossa nova “What Have You,” and Gail Marten’s slinky “Is It Love?” Two instrumental highlights come from younger players: Twenty-something pianist Joel Holmes reels off a fleet take on John Coltrane's “Moment’s Notice,” and the Todd Marcus Jazz Orchestra, a nonet, barrels through their Mingusflavored chart, “In Pursuit of the 9th Man.” Proof that, Mickey Fields aside, the local jazz story isn’t always about history. —David Dudley The Cold Spring Jazz Quartet performs at First Unitarian Church, 1 W. Hamilton St., on Friday, November 13, at 8 p.m. For other dates from participating artists, check the Baltimore Jazz Alliance calendar at www. baltimorejazz.com.

Join Next American City as we present URBANEXUS Baltimore with our co-host, Urbanite. Baltimore, home to Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland, has long been regarded as a hub for world-class medical research. But many communities in the city continue to struggle with significant health disparities and stubborn public health challenges. What is health care innovation? Can out-of-the-box thinking help translate medical research into healthier communities? To register, go to http://americancity.org/urbanexus/baltimore/ or call (410) 243-2050 Presented by: BA LT I M O R E

http://americancity.org

www.urbanitebaltimore.com

In partnership with: www.aecf.org www.ziascafe.com

photo by Sean Williams | www.seanwil.com

photo by David Simpson

Serenity now: David Simpson's photographs of Loch Raven capture the reservoir in all seasons.

art/culture

BOOk

Lake Country

Loch Raven by David Simpson (2009) When photographer and fi lmmaker David Simpson, a Dundalk native who currently lives in Monkton, bought a small kayak in the fall of 2007, his immediate goal was to get some exercise. But, paddling through the waters of Loch Raven Reservoir, Simpson found himself distracted by the scenery. He outfitted his kayak with a motor to free his hands and began snapping photos. Two years later, he had more than six thousand images, more than enough to fi ll the 100-page coffeetable book that he has self-published this fall. The book, titled Loch Raven, is an intimate hymn to the 2,400-acre artificial lake. “I tried to approach it from how a fisherman would view it,” Simpson says. He captured blue herons and Canada geese, anglers at dawn, autumn foliage reflected in the water like paint smeared on canvas. In one of the book’s most engaging motifs, he returns to landscapes and single trees as they change with the seasons. Colors leap vibrantly off the page or blur together like phantoms. The key, Simpson says, is water and atmosphere. “If you photograph in the rain or mist, there’s a density in the air. That’s that detail you take away. It’s not crystal sharp.” Why the nigh-obsessive focus on this body of water? Northern Baltimore County isn’t exactly the Grand Canyon, after all, yet Simpson’s photographs reveal aspects we might easily miss—or take for granted—as we pass through on our way to somewhere else. “As temperature changes, the more radically it changes, the more radically the images change,” he says. “You can go back to the same place and photograph it a hundred times, and it’s different every time.” Loch Raven inspires him for more personal reasons as well. “It’s been around 125 years,” he says. “It takes care of a lot of people. It takes care of me. I’ve gotten the most heartwarming e-mails, people who’ve lived there and walked there. There’s a tremendous amount of memories there.” —Brent Englar To purchase the book, posters, or prints, go to www.lochravenphotography.com.

Trip of a lifetime: Lookingglass Theatre brings Around the World in 80 Days to Center Stage.

t H e at e r

Vindications The Exonerated at Everyman Theatre, Nov 16–Dec 14 Around the World in 80 Days at Center Stage, Nov 24–Dec 20 The Exonerated, part of Everyman Theatre’s Explore! Everyman series, may leave the audience with more questions than answers. Culled from actual letters, case fi les, and trial transcripts, the play tells the stories of six prisoners wrongly accused of crimes and their eventual exoneration and release after years on death row. “When I read the play, I immediately agreed to direct it,” says James Bunzli, associate professor of theater at Loyola University Maryland. “At first the subject seems grim and horrific, but the play finds ways to bring humanity, and indeed humor, to the stories.” The original version of the play, which was given a reading, chronicled the experiences of twelve prisoners, Bunzli says, but left a big question unanswered: How could this happen? So co-authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen took on the role of investigative reporters, digging for details from transcripts, newspaper accounts, and interviews. They eventually cut the number of subjects in half so their stories could be more fully realized. In addition to the six central characters, four actors take on auxiliary roles: spouses, police officers, attorneys, and fellow death row inmates. The main characters include Sunny and Jessie, who were convicted of killing two police officers; a Midwestern farmer jailed for killing his parents; and a poet convicted of rape and murder, even though he wasn’t even in the state when the crime occurred. Each has a powerful story to tell, says Bunzli, who directed last year’s Explore! Everyman production of Viva La Vivienne. “We hear about what got them into trouble,

about their time in prison, and about the events that led to their exoneration.” But the most interesting question of all remains after the play ends. “They are people who have been incarcerated for years and emerge from prison into a different world,” Bunzli says. “How do they make their way?” Phileas Fogg is exonerated too, in a sense. After some grand assertions about the wonders of modern technology, he makes a bet with fellow members of his London gentleman’s club: He claims he can travel Around the World in 80 Days and sets out to prove it. Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, known for its imaginative and highly physical productions of such classics as Alice in Wonderland and The Arabian Nights, brings the 1873 Jules Verne tale to Center Stage. Fogg’s various conveyances include steamer, rail, and elephant—but not hot-air balloon, which did not appear in the novel but showed up in the popular 1956 movie adaptation and has since become fi xed in the collective imagination. True to the original story, the balloon will not feature in Lookingglass’ production. —Martha Thomas For tickets to The Exonerated, call 410-752-2208 or go to www.everyman theatre.org. For tickets to Around the World in 80 Days, call 410-332-0033 or go to www. centerstage.org.

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THE SCENE: NOVEMBER CLASSICAL MUSIC

French Twists

In addition to guest-starring in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s all-Gershwin program (Nov 12–15) — which features the original arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue, plus Concert in F and I Got Rhythm variations—French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet also appears in Demons, Drama, and Dance, an evening of “musical flair and fantasy” Nov 19–21; he plays Liszt’s Dance of Death. Also scheduled are Michael Daugherty’s Superman-inspired Red Cape Tango and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. (410-7838000; www.bsomusic.org) OPERA

Mack is Back

Grammy Award-winning soprano Sylvia McNair performs Songspiel, a production featuring some of German composer Kurt Weill’s most famous songs (perhaps even “Mack the Knife”!). Presented by the American Opera Theater at the Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Nov 6–14. (www.americanoperatheater.org) BLUES

Bluesman

At the Creative Alliance, masters of the Piedmont blues—a style of thumb- and fingerpicking popular in the Piedmont region of the eastern United States—pay tribute to “Bowling Green” John Cephas, a master of the genre, who died earlier this year. A soul food dinner accompanies the concert. Nov 6. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410276-1651; www.creativealliance.org) JAZZ

Female Lead

On Nov 15, the Baltimore Chamber Jazz Society hosts the Dena DeRose Trio, led by the hard-swinging vocalist and pianist

DeRose. Part of the Five at 5 series at the Baltimore Museum of Art; a pre-concert tour of the museum is offered, focusing on works that are “designed to radiate from within, shine in the sun, or dazzle in the spotlight.” (410-385-5888; www. baltimorechamberjazz.org)

melodrama and the 1940 Hitchcock film Rebecca. The play is a “full-length quick-change act”: its eight characters are played by only two actors. Nov 11–Dec 13. (1727 N. Charles St.; 410-752-2208; www.everymantheatre.org)

AMERICAN STANDARDS

Part of Arena Players’ fifty-seventh season is Riff Raff, a 1994 play written by critically acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne (star of such films as The Matrix and What’s Love Got to Do With It?). The action centers on two half-brothers and their tragic experiences with drugs. Nov 6–29. (801 McCulloh St.; 410-728-6500)

Roots Music

Pianist, vocalist, and arranger Eric Comstock joins the Baltimore Choral Arts Society for A Celebration of the American Song on Nov 1. Promised are performances of tunes by such American music giants as Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter. At Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd. (410-523-7070; www.baltimorechoralarts.org) MUSICAL THEATER

Who’s Your Daddy?

At the Hippodrome is Mamma Mia!, the musical about a wedding in Greece and the bride’s quest to figure out which of three men is her biological father—all set to the songs of Swedish pop group Abba. Nov 24–29. (12 N. Eutaw St.; www.france-merrickpac.com) THEATER

The Silent Treatment

Single Carrot Theatre’s latest show is Illuminoctem, a new, original work by the company members. The play—based on George MacDonald’s late-19th-century story The Day Boy and the Night Girl—is wordless, with the action conveyed through music and movement. Nov 25–Dec 20. (120 W. North Ave.; 443-8449253; www.singlecarrot.com)

Camp Trip

Everyman Theatre presents The Mystery of Irma Vep, a 1984 satire of Gothic

Rough Stuff

DANCE

Eastern Exposure

Master dancers and musicians of Maryland’s Cambodian Buddhist Society created Agangamasor and His Magic Power, a dance-drama based on a classic Hindu story. Nov 7 at Towson University. (410-704-2787; www.towson.edu/ asianarts) VISUAL ART

Yarn Art

At Nudashank Gallery is Knit Wit, featured knitted and sewn 2-D pieces by such local artists as Jennifer Strunge and Chiara Keeling. Through Nov 18. (405 W. Franklin St., third floor; http://nudashank.com)

In Memoriam

At C. Grimaldis Gallery is a memorial exhibition of the paintings of Grace Hartigan. (See Urbanite, Feb. ’08.) The founder and director of the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, Hartigan passed away late last year. Nov 18–Jan 9; opening on Nov 18. (523 N. Charles St.; 410-539-1080; www.cgrimaldisgallery.com)

art/culture Tech Ed

Sight.Sound [Interaction] is an annual exhibit of new-media artworks created by national and international artists. The show is curated by Maryland Institute College of Art professor Jason Sloan and held at the school’s Rosenberg Gallery in the Brown Center. Nov 2–20; opening Nov 5. (1300 Mt. Royal Ave.; www.sight soundmica.org) LECTURE

Hero Complex

On Nov 15, art historian Lee Sandstead, host of the Travel Channel show Art Attack, gives an illustrated presentation of the Walters Art Museum’s recent exhibit Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece exhibition, which runs through Jan 3. (600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www.thewalters.org) DISCUSSION

Frank Talk

At the Pratt Library, New York Times columnist Frank Rich talks with Goucher College President Sanford Ungar about his journalism career. Also promised are music from the Peabody Ragtime Ensemble, a chance to bid on a lunch with such local celebrities as Laura Lippman and and Marin Alsop, and tours of rarely seen library collections. Nov 7. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event. (400 Cathedral St.; 410-396-5283; www.prattlibrary.com) LITERARY

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane …

At the Walters, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein gives a talk centered on his 2006 book, Up, Up and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero. A reception and book signing follow. Nov 8. (600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www.thewalters.org)

This semester’s artist in residence in Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Africana Studies, multimedia artist Hank Willis Thomas creates art that explores racial stereotypes and black identity. Ten of his pieces (including I Am a Man, pictured) are exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art through Nov 29; Thomas gives an artist’s talk at the museum on Nov 12. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443573-1700; www.artbma.org)

Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

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The Way Out continued from page 53

Money and leadership are crucial, Canada acknowledges. But, asked if the Harlem Children’s Zone model is replicable, he replies, “Absolutely.” Still, he cautions, “We are really not encouraging people to replicate programs. We’re encouraging them to replicate strategies.” He urges community leaders to create well thought-out business plans and systems of data collection and accountability. Above all, Canada is an advocate of “pipelines”: “You can’t work with kids for a short period and think that is going to be powerful enough,” he says. “You have to maintain a relationship with the child and family.” One of the greatest challenges of this type of approach, Canada says, is deciding who wins the lottery and gets all the resources. “This is where you get into politics—one neighborhood gets it and all the others are outraged,” he says. “One day we will have the technology to do this in all of Baltimore, but right now the challenge is creating a zone around a community where you can ensure that families can get their needs met.” And therein lies the real heartbreak of Promise Neighborhoods. “If they [the Department of Education] describe it as a place-based intervention for a modest number of children or families—20,000, say—we can’t do East Baltimore and West Baltimore,” says the University of Maryland’s Barth. “There’s 25,000 just in our little Promise Heights area.” If the application allows for cross-border networks and collaboration, he says he would be happy to work with Hopkins, as he does on any number of other issues. But in all likelihood, each institution will ally with its side of the city to craft a separate application. The mayor’s office and Living Classrooms could send in their own proposals, too. With luck, one neighborhood will win. Those who end up outside the zone may be able to borrow elements from the Harlem model. Ron Haskins, a researcher with the Brookings Institution who was an educational advisor to George W. Bush, notes that the recent Harvard study revealed that even kids who come to Children’s Zone schools from outside the neighborhood (by law, enrollment is decided by citywide lottery) are excelling on achievement tests, suggesting that the revamped schools alone might be doing the trick. “It sounds like a magical thing: You’re going to change the whole neighborhood,” Haskins says. “But this paper gives you hope that fixing the schools, being aggressive with parents, and focusing like a laser on achievement tests can produce results.” In Baltimore, of course, the public schools are in the midst of a major overhaul under whip-cracking schools CEO Andrés Alonso, who has cleared out dead wood, shuttered underperforming schools, and put a new emphasis on early childhood education. (See Urbanite, September ’09.) Alonso, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system, likes the idea of a children’s zone but stresses the distinction between the two cities. “The constraints are completely different. The opportunities are different, too,” he says. “The conversation here in Baltimore is as much about integration of services.” Alonso welcomes federal funding that would help energize that integration. “In an ideal world, there is a seamless progression of kids through the different stages and institutions, with an approach that reaches out to families, not just children,” he says. “But I don’t think that it needs to happen through a children’s zone approach.”

urbanite november 09

Geoffrey Canada holds fast to his argument that schools are only part of the formula and that a holistic, community-wide initiative is the only way out. “The essence to me is that Americans aspire to live in decent communities,” he says. “These are just places where basic services and supports are in place. We don’t need the PhDs and evaluations from Harvard to say that a child with a toothache is not going to do as well [in school] as a child without one. Any of us who’ve been parents understand why these basic core things are important to children.”

each morning from Monday through Thursday, Lashaunda Manuel rouses herself and her 2-year-old daughter, Ty’ajah, before dawn. She leaves the Owings Mills house where she lives with her father and stepmother and walks to a bus stop, riding a bus to the Metro, then a second bus to Park Heights, where she is often the first one to arrive at the Family Support Center. Manuel, 17, has earned certificates in parenting and child development and is preparing for her GED test. Sitting at the center’s butcher-block table, still sticky with syrup from the morning’s waffles, she says she wants to become a nurse. She says she has tried to stay in touch with Ty’ajah’s father, but their plans to spend weekends together haven’t panned out. He’s been back in school, thinking about job corps. And in addition to working on her GED and raising Ty’ajah, she’s helping raise her younger sister and brother, as her mother has fallen on hard times. The odds are stacked against her, but Manuel is determined to provide a better life for her daughter than the one she has cobbled together so far. Asked where she imagines Ty’ajah in fifteen years, Manuel says, “Still in high school. On her way to college. And not having babies—not most of the stuff I did.” But first, she needs to take that next step. Manuel says she hopes to have her own place in a few months, after she gets her GED and is no longer eligible for the Family Center’s services. Later, while her mother studies, Ty’ajah and three other preschoolers take a walk in the chilly fall breeze with two matronly staffers from the Family Support Center. Ty’ajah wears clean white tennis shoes, a flowery pink shirt, and multicolored plastic barrettes in her tidy cornrows. She has her mom’s cheeky smile and a hard time keeping her thumb out of her mouth. The four kids walk hand-in-hand along the sidewalk like a pack of little astronauts exploring a new world. They listen to a mockingbird singing from the stone chimney of a neighborhood church, greet a mail carrier in a chorus of squeaky voices, and spot a black-and-white kitten curled up in the weeds in front of a dilapidated house. Around them swirls all the disarray and dysfunction of West Baltimore, but the kids seem oblivious, suspended in their bright bubbles. Then Ty’ajah spots something in the strip of grass between the street and sidewalk. She crouches to inspect a delicate white globe about the size of a marble. She picks it up—a clover blossom— holding the stem tightly in her soft brown hand. “Flower,” she says, beaming, and trundles off into the wind. ■ —Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.

Blue Light/Blue Heat continuted from page 67

Jimmy: “But you’re innocent until proven guilty. If you always act morally, then there’s no reason to fear being watched.” My wife: “But it’s just when you think you’re acting morally that you find that someone else thinks you’re destined for hell. And how do you know unless they tell you? That’s why he wants you to judge him!” Jimmy: “The state can’t act as God. Only God can act as God.” The intercom buzzed … My wife: “Fuck you, pig.” Jimmy let that roll off of his back. He’d heard it before. It was then that my wife started going to a support group for family members of unbelievers twice a week. It met at Red Emma’s, an anarchist bookshop downtown. It didn’t matter what your family member didn’t believe in; all were welcome. It turned out Jimmy was there too. He said I didn’t believe in God or the state. My wife said I didn’t believe in her or myself. So two nights ago I didn’t wait for the end of Jimmy’s shift. I jumped up off the couch and shouted in his face, “I stole that Portable Overt Digital Surveillance System! Aren’t you going to arrest me? Aren’t you going to confiscate it? Does no one care?” Jimmy said, “Please step back from the artwork, sir.” I looked at the police camera. I looked around the living room. I sat back on the couch. Last night, an old woman was mugged outside of our home. The fright gave her a heart attack, and she died on the sidewalk.

When the ambulance arrived, the coroner said that she had been dead between twelve to eighteen hours; he couldn’t say for sure. Tonight, Jimmy and my wife were at one of their meetings. I was left alone at home. I looked into the unblinking black bubble at the base of the police box. 24-7 BELIEVE. There was no indication that a camera was even there. I raised my eyes to the ceiling, in my mind’s eye really peering through the ceiling, through the roof, past the traffic lights, the smog cover, the clouds, looking for an indication that somebody was watching me, validating me. But there was nothing. I pushed the couch over to the bookcase. BELIEVE. I stood up and tipped the whole police box to the floor. The blue light shattered and went out. The phone rang. A gruff voice said, “Stay there. We’re coming for you.” “What have I done?” I asked, excited. Finally. There was no response. The voice had hung up. I looked at the broken box, no longer blinking. I felt unsafe. I locked the door. ■ —Ariel S. Winter is the winner of the Free Press’ Who Can Save Us Now? Short Story Contest, and his writing has been featured on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency as one of the winners of the Convergence Contest. He is working on a three-volume novel called In Memoriam with Apologies, an ode to the hardboiled ﬁction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

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A sense of space and form is essential to an architect, and the ability to document and communicate that sensitivity lies at the heart of the profession. Despite architecture’s growing reliance on computers and technology, drawing remains fundamental to the initial development of any concept. It is through drawing— the physical act of moving one’s hand with the spirit of the idea—that we come to “feel” the idea, the form. The subject of this quick sketch is the interior of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, designed by Andrea Palladio and begun in 1566. The drawing’s concise nature belies the depth of spatial understanding the architect brings to the page. He has made notation only of what is necessary to capture the space, almost carving the page with lines of different weight and pressure. Behind the strongly stated columns, the church’s central space recedes from us in a controlled and graceful perspective. We understand this readily because the artist’s visual language is clear and immediate, energetic and sure. Through this drawing, we can share his exuberance at being in such a magnificent structure. The sketch is by Steve Ziger, of Ziger/Snead, currently Kea Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the University of Maryland, College Park. It is from a notebook of sketches he made on a recent trip to Italy. —Alex Castro

urbanite november 09

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