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Bay Weekly Gets the Word Out to Audiences

Dear Bay Weekly:
Thanks for including Baltimore Children’s Theatre’s Cinderella in your calendar, 8 Days a Week, over the past weeks. Opening weekend was the company’s biggest yet. Then last week we sold out both shows. Can’t wait to see what happens at the final weekend.

And thanks for your coverage of Twin Beach Players’ production of The Foreigner. The audience was small opening week, so we hope for bigger audiences to follow. The finished set looks much different from when your reviewer Carrie Steele [The Curtain Rises: Vol. XII, No. 46: Nov. 11] attended.

—Sid Curl, Chesapeake Beach

Editor’s note: Director Curl works with both companies.

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On the Bay, Let Them Eat Cake — of the Low-Carb Variety

Dear Bay Weekly:
Thanks for Bill Burton’s column “What Everyone Wants to Know About Chesapeake Bay And Isn’t Afraid to Ask” [Vol. XII, No 47: Nov. 18]. Finally, someone has the courage to contemplate the possibility that (metaphorically speaking) not only has the emperor no clothes, but the entire entourage might be stark naked. I hope to ponder the questions from within the context you presented and provide more thoughtful and substantiated replies at a later date. In the meantime, here’s my short answer: Ask not what your fish can do for you. Ask what you can do for your fish.

For the short term, Maryland needs to play the hand we’re dealt; preserve what we have left and use the existing mandates with which we’ve been entrusted. Like you say, Mr. Burton, let’s put politics and our personal interests aside and behave in the best interest of the resource. Like good parents, let’s lead by example and apply the tough love, if necessary.

We might all have to hang up our tackle for a spell — and hire another guide. Much of Maryland’s tradition and natural heritage has already been sacrificed to real estate development, technology, recreation and transportation. Although not all would agree, these advances have given the majority an improved quality of life. Can we have our cake and eat it, too? I think so, but it will be the low-carb variety. Diet foods are never as good as the real thing, but if that’s all you can have, it isn’t bad.

As painful as it may be for those who love to fish or need to fish, the first order of business is to reduce our dependence on the Bay. Equally painful is the fact that to many Marylanders, the Bay already is nothing more than a shipping channel, a sewage treatment facility or the big expanse between D.C. and O.C. It’s the economy that matters, not the fish. We are not going to float this boat on public awareness alone. There is an existing mandate to uphold. The public has neither the authority nor the police power to protect the resource, and the environmental industrial complex has neither the inspiration nor the political independence to speak up for the resource.

Our free society has already decided, and once again the resource itself is about to make a decision, a very serious and perhaps permanent decision. It will simply disappear altogether. Then, there will be no one to blame. I just hope that this time next year I am not reading a Burton on the Bay column with another twist on a more recent movie title: “Dude, Where’s My Oyster?” Stay tuned.

—Marquerite Whilden, The Terrapin Institute, Grasonville

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November 18’s Cover Pretty as a Picture

Dear Bay Weekly:
Absolutely beautiful watermen’s picture on the cover of November 18’s paper [Vol. XII, No. 47]. It simply doesn’t get any better than that.

Might I get permission to have a copy for our new Bayside History Museum in North Beach?

—Grace Mary Brady, Leonardtown

Editor’s note: The cover photo of an oyster boat unloading after harvest at a newly opened reserve was lent to Bay Weekly by Chris Judy, Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ oyster manager. We’ve forwarded Brady’s request. Read up on the new museum in Dock of the Bay, Vol. XII, No. 45: Nov. 4.