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John Root Hopkins’s Kevorkian piece on view at AVAM. Credit: David Colwell
AVAM Makes Us Smile
With Simpsons creator Matt Groening and Maryland artist John Root Hopkins aboard for the fun, the museum’s next show is a hoot.
Play It
Remington Youth/Community Radio, J. Roddy Walston and the Business, and Dweezil Zappa
Published: September, 2010
The Holmes Brothers, Victoria Vox, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy & The Cairo Gang
Published: August, 2010
Tommy Keene and So Percussion/Matmos
Published: July, 2010
Read It
Natalie Standiford and William Secord
Published: September, 2010
Millard Kaufman, Paul Chan, and Dr. Clara Small & Rev. David Briddell
Published: August, 2010
Jen Michalski, Dan Fesperman, and Mark Osteen & Frank Graziano
Published: July, 2010
Peyton’s Place
She has a role on the hit TV series Mad Men, but model and actor Peyton List is still a Baltimore girl at heart.

Q: What are some of your favorite hometown memories?
A: My favorite memories were probably at the Roland Park pool. That was kind of my summer hangout. I lived off of Cold Spring Lane, so we would walk down to Sam’s Bagels and The Daily Grind. I went back about a year ago with my boyfriend, and all these memories came flooding back. I thought Roland Park Country School’s theater was the biggest I’d ever seen when I was in my middle-school productions. But it looked a lot smaller this time around.

Pottery Yarn
After 30 years, the wheels keep turning at Baltimore Clayworks.

Deborah Bedwell’s first encounter with a potter’s wheel was less than auspicious. The West Virginia native was a recent transplant to Maryland in 1969 when she signed up for a ceramics class at University of Maryland, College Park. She needed to fulfill a teaching certification requirement for her new position as an art teacher at Malcolm Middle School in Waldorf, and ceramics seemed like an easy, fun choice.

The Blue Seas Saga
Some of the best rock bands of the 1970s recorded at Blue Seas Recording Studios, until it sank, under mysterious circumstances, into the harbor.

It’s not every day you see a guitar floating in the Inner Harbor.

But on Christmas Day 1977, a Martin D-28 guitar drifted past Pier 4, along with reels of audiotape, microphones, speaker monitors, a recording console, and a 1906 Steinway grand piano.

As the items scattered, an old barge lay almost fully submerged near its moorings at the pier, not far from where the Hard Rock Cafe stands today. As unlikely as it sounds, the musical equipment floated out of the barge, which had been converted into a high-end recording studio called Blue Seas.

Nobody's Fools
A husband and wife live their publishing dream from an Eastern Shore barn.

One drizzly day in the winter of 2006, while on lunch break, Robbi Behr and her husband Matthew Swanson took stock of their lives. On the surface, they had everything: on-the-move careers at a strategic marketing firm, a car, a dog, and a house in Hampden. Yet, all of this seeming success was keeping them from their greater goal: to make books together. "At the time, Robbi was a designer, and I was an account manager and writer," explains Swanson. "Both of us were weary of not having time to make art once we became adults.

To Ethan—From Lafayette, Carl, and Coltrane
Local jazz tradition passes from generation to generation, with some help from a state program.

The Samick spinet piano in Kayle Simon's front foyer in Columbia comes with the standard, wooden piano bench. When her 16-year-old son Ethan is visited by his classical piano teacher, the instructor pulls up a chair alongside the bench and cocks his head attentively, listening to see if the teenager's phrasing and timing on the Bach and Beethoven pieces are accurate.

Flicked Off
How the Maryland film industry went from bustling to bust and its chances for a revival.

"Gooood morning, BAAAL-ti-more!" burbles Tracy Turnblad, the zaftig heroine of Hairspray, as she skips down a Highlandtown block in the opening song-and-dance number of the 2007 movie-musical. The scene onscreen looks authentic, right down to the marble stoops attached to the Formstone row houses, but anyone with access to imdb.com (The Internet Movie Database) knows the truth. The scene wasn't filmed in Highlandtown. In fact, it wasn't even filmed in Baltimore—or Maryland, for that matter. It was filmed on a Toronto soundstage, just another in a recent string of major Hollywood productions that have flirted with shooting in Baltimore only to be seduced by competing cities and states offering larger tax incentives to filmmakers.

How did this happen? How did Baltimore, once voted by Moviemaker Magazine as one of the "Top 10 U.S. Cities" for filmmakers, lose its preferred status?

The Kings of Dru Hill
Baltimore's biggest R&B export stages a comeback.

The members of Dru Hill have gathered at the Belvedere Hotel's Owl Bar to discuss the logistics of a forthcoming tour to promote their reunion album, InDRUpendence Day, the quartet's first new music in eight years.

Spaghetti and Encores
A Little Italy restaurant turns an upstairs dining room into a popular cabaret.

It's a Sunday night up on the second floor at Germano's Trattoria, a Little Italy stalwart strung along the neighborhood's main drag. The pumpkin-colored walls are hung with vintage Art Nouveau posters, but all eyes are upon vocalist Sophie Louise Roland, a statuesque blonde in a diaphanous maroon dress.

The evening's entertainment, she says, is all about "sensuality." Patrons now have all the more reason to look up from their plates of braised beef shanks and red beet ravioli. "No one is going to die tonight," she adds with a grin.

From Poverty to Peabody
A Ukrainian youngster's unlikely odyssey includes homelessness, American benefactors, NPR, and piano study in Baltimore.

Dasha Bukhartseva vividly recalls the day she and her mother, Natasha, became homeless. It happened eight years ago, when Dasha was 10 years old. "They'd thrown away all our food and our stuff was in boxes," she says. "We slept on chairs in the lobby for that night, but we were hiding; we had nowhere to live."

Guitar Hero
Paul Reed Smith has joined the likes of Fender and Gibson in the pantheon of electric guitar makers.

"Guitars are almost like iPods," says Paul Reed Smith. "I've never seen anybody in a bad mood with an iPod in their ears. It's a mood adjuster. It's almost like really sophisticated, expensive OxyContin."

Smith is musing on the power of the six-string "mood adjusters" he's been creating for 35 years, the last 25 as the pioneer behind Paul Reed Smith (PRS) Guitars, now the third largest electric guitar manufacturer in the nation. (Iconic old lions Fender and Gibson are numbers one and two, respectively.)