kimblr.com

The Howard County Office on Aging is recruiting volunteers to help organize and serve meals at Ellicott City Senior Center one day a week, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Volunteers with experience in marketing are needed to assist staff members in program promotion and marketing.
Docents and tour guides are needed at historic sites in Ellicott City. Volunteers can learn about Howard County’s history while preparing to guide visitors through the Fire House Museum, Thomas Isaac Log Cabin, Ellicott City Colored School, Restored and Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park.
Information or registration: 410-465-8500.
Neighbor Ride, a volunteer-based nonprofit organization dedicated to decreasing isolation and improving the quality of life for older county residents, is seeking volunteers to provide reasonably priced, reliable supplemental transportation for health care appointments; volunteering; social, religious and cultural activities; and other personal needs for people ages 60 and older.
Daytime, evening and weekend opportunities are available. Orientations for prospective volunteers will be held at noon today and 7 p.m. June 25 at the organization’s offices, 8950 Route 108, Suite 115, Columbia.
Registration is requested.
The Volunteer Center Serving Howard County, in cooperation with CERN (the Community Emergency Response Network) is recruiting members of the community and referring them to local nonprofit and government agencies that need volunteers for disaster preparedness and recovery.
A disaster volunteer orientation will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. June 24 at the volunteer center, 10221 Wincopin Circle, Columbia.
Registration is required.
Information or to register: 410-715-3179.
Better BedRest Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides resources, support and referrals for pregnant women on bed rest, is seeking telephone volunteers.
Volunteers must have had an experience of bed rest because of a high-risk pregnancy or have some connection to the experience.
Information or to request an application: 410-740-7662, or e-mail, Diane@betterbedrest.org.

baltimoresun.com

In 2005, “House, MD” aired an episode titled “Three Stories” in which the audience finally found out what exactly happened to the angry doctor’s injured leg. It was a brilliant episode that stood out among an already exemplary first season, and it earned writer David Shore an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for A Drama Series. “House” has had many beautiful, tragic, hilarious, and critically acclaimed episodes since then, but season four has so far been a rather disappointing, flat season. However, if Part II of the season finale is anywhere near the remarkable caliber of Part I, titled “House’s Head,” there may be yet another Emmy nod in the horizon for David Shore.
It begins in a strip club with House getting a lap dance, and while this is not very surprising for his character, he seems very startled to be there. Quickly diagnosing his own dizzy symptoms, he stumbles out of the strip club to find a devastating bus crash outside. House was on that bus, and he has the head trauma to prove it, but he is truly concerned for another passenger on the bus that he saw display a deathly symptom just before the crash. The only problem is: he has no idea who it is!
In the ER, all of the doctors are scrambling to take care of the crash victims sent to their hospital, while some of the others were sent to another. House insists that no one is allowed to leave until he figures out who was dying, but his mind will simply not cooperate. He goes through hypnosis and flashes through hallucinations/visions of the bar before the crash and then the bus itself. Through the episode, House forces his damaged brain to return to the bus, and he decides it is the bus driver. To save the man’s life, House is willing to get himself nearly killed, and Cuddy is forced to put security in his home to keep him there. As if this would ever stop House.

starpulse.com

NEW ORLEANS — Kierstyn Cyrus cracked open the front door of her ruined home, a single goal in mind, just one precious thing she wanted to rescue. It was October 2005, the first time since Hurricane Katrina that she had stepped inside the brick ranch at 2455 Deslonde Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. The morning before a levee burst four blocks away, Kierstyn, her mother and grandmother had fled 250 miles inland.
On this mockingly sunlit afternoon, as Kierstyn entered the house, she spotted a kitchen chair perched atop the roof. Inside, the refrigerator lay sideways across the living room. In Kierstyn’s bedroom, her Tweety Bird doll was wedged amid the rafters, where the flood waters had pressed it, and all her church dresses were gone from the closet, swept away.
“Mom, where’s my book?” Kierstyn called out to her mother, Melanie. “Where’s my portfolio?”
Ms. Cyrus was standing outside, doctor’s orders. She was in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer, and she had been warned not to expose herself to the filth, germs and mold in the house. But she knew which book Kierstyn meant, and she shouted back to look under the radio on the bedroom dresser.
Kierstyn was searching for a loose-leaf binder, filled with every award and honor from her academic career. Her mother, a teacher, had begun keeping the book when Kierstyn was in Rock-a-Bye nursery school and continued all the way to the eighth-grade year interrupted by the hurricane.
The pages held all of Kierstyn’s report cards, the honor-roll ribbons, the snapshots of classmates, the certificate good for a free meal at Shoney’s in recognition of high marks. Ms. Cyrus and Kierstyn had put every page in a plastic sleeve, as if smudged fingers or spilled coffee were all the book had to be guarded against.

nytimes.com

This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday April 29 2008 on p15 of the International section. It was last updated at 00:11 on April 29 2008.
“We’re being confronted with an unfathomable crime,” Austria’s interior minister, Günther Platter, said yesterday as the details began to unfold.
“This case is one of incomprehensible brutality and horror, the most shattering and serious case of its kind that has ever come to light in Austria,” Platter continued, attempting with difficulty to sum up the sense of shock in the country at the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, who spent 24 years in a cellar prison where she bore seven of her father Josef’s children.
Questions were being asked yesterday, by everyone from commentators and parents to psychologists and politicians, as to how what the Austrian press has dubbed the “house of horrors” case had come to happen in the small town of Amstetten, 70 miles from Vienna. Not least because the discovery occurred less than two years after another young Austrian woman, 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch, managed to escape the clutches of her kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil, who had imprisoned and sexually abused her in a cellar beneath his garage near Vienna for eight years.
That case was also referred to as “unprecedented” and “unfathomable”. Yesterday Kampusch signalled via her spokesman that she was ready and waiting to give Elisabeth Fritzl and her children any moral and financial support they may need.
“There are pressing questions raised by this monstrous crime which need to be put to a rich, self-satisfied society in which during a quarter of a century what was happening in the immediate vicinity went apparently unnoticed,” Petra Stuiber wrote in a commentary in the Austrian liberal daily Der Standard.
It was “logical”, Stuiber said, that all the foreign media had drawn parallels between Fritzl and Kampusch and asked “why in Austria?”

guardian.co.uk

At the end of the second act of Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” the character of Barbara decides she’s over her addict of a mother. Barbara tells her fellow siblings to call the doctor, fetch black coffee and a towel and clean out all Mama’s pills. This does not go down well with Violet, the matriarch of Letts’ house of familial horrors.
“You can’t do this,” she shouts. “This is my house! This is my house!”
Aside from a sudden switch into uppercase, what Barbara says next doesn’t look like much on the Pulitzer Prize-winning page: “I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!”
But if you happened to see — in either Chicago or New York — what the Steppenwolf Theatre Company actress Amy Morton does with that line, you won’t be surprised that “August: Osage County” has turned into a hit Broadway show or that Letts became the first Chicago resident to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama Monday.
The generational confrontation in Tracy Lett’s "August: Osage County" in New York. From left, Amy Morton, Rondi Reed and Deanna Dunagan. (New York Times photo)
ON STAGE: The Broadway production of "August: Osage County" plays at the Imperial Theatre in New York through April 20, then at the Music Box next door from April 29. Contact Telecharge for tickets.
TIMELINE: Tracy Letts’ path to Pulitzer Prize glory.
Dennis Letts (1934-2008): Actor’s dream came true in his son’s play.
Steppenwolf’s confounding sage: A profile of Tracy Letts by Tribune critic Sid Smith from July 2007.
CHRIS JONES’ REVIEW: "August: Osage County" is only more intense as it opens on Broadway.
So would “August: Osage County” have won the Pulitzer without its phenomenal cast?
Morton emits the kind of primal scream that almost has you running for the exit in terror — both for the character and yourself. At one early performance in New York, the silence as the second act came ringing down was interrupted by a seemingly unconscious utterance from a patron blown back in his high-priced seat. “Oh my God,” he said, “Oh my God.”

leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com

ASBURY SACRED ARTS SERIES will present “Stations of the Cross: The Weight of Dust,” an offering of 14 clay tiles and poetry by Kathryn Cramer Brown, Asbury artist in residence, through April 4 at Asbury United Methodist Church, 205 S. Main St., Harrisonburg. Exhibit will be open 8:30-10 a.m. and 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. on Sundays, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on Monday-Friday and other times by appointment. 434-2836 or www.asburyumc.cc.
SPRING MUSEUM AND GALLERY WALK will be held from 4-8 p.m. on April 4 and will feature more than 28 venues. Venues in and around Court S quare and along Market and Main streets, Harrisonburg, will open their doors for special arts activities and serve refreshments; some offer special discounts. Free. Held rain or shine with outdoor activities weather permitting. Some of the activities planned are “Altered Books” exhibit at the Massanutten Regional Library, the HHS National Art Honor Society exhibits in the Cally’s hallway, Scott Murray will perform at the Smith House Gallery, “Wearable Art” exhibit at OASIS Gallery, Trash to Treasure art activities at the Harrisonburg Children’s Museum and much more. 801-8779.
SOUP AND ARTS FEST, sponsored by the Parent Teacher Fellowship at Eastern Mennonite High School, will be held from 5-7:30 p.m. on March 29 at the school. An all-you-can-eat gourmet soup buffet, with soups provided by 14 local restaurants, will be served in the EMHS dining hall and will accompany student art displays, a gift shop, artisan demonstrations and vocal music by the EMHS Chamber Choir. Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for ages 6-12, and children younger than 6 for free. Tickets will be available at the door. Proceeds will benefit the Eastern Mennonite School Fine Arts Department.
150 FRANKLIN STREET GALLERY will reopen for 2008 with the First Friday Art Walk from 4-8 p.m. on April 4. New shows include sculpture by SukJin Choi, detailed colored-pencil drawings by Walter Bradshaw and new Panama-style needlework designs by Bib Ferrenbach. Refreshments available. The gallery is open 5-8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on Saturday. 434-3824 or visit www.150franklinstreetgallery.com.

rocktownweekly.com