Editorial

1,000,001 Ways to Stumble

When you’re juggling 101 Ways, a million and one things can go wrong. Make that two million and two this year, as we added 101 Ways Not Just for Kids to our annual compendium distributed to you Memorial Day weekend, to cover the 101 days between then and Labor Day.

While planning your pleasures, you may have stumbled on a pebble in the big, annual Bayful of fun we call our Indispensable Guide to Summer on the Bay.

Who’d have imagined a list of a couple dozen ice cream stores could have missed a favorite, Rita’s Italian Ice, whose custard and Italian ice combos taste as good as anything on a hot summer night? Or family-friendly Friendly’s, where you can sit down to ice cream — as well as the things you’re supposed to eat before dessert?

Or that we’d have failed to advise you to boat up for paddling the Bay at Beacon Surplus All-N-One Outdoor store?

Our radar screens went blank on those obvious choices — until the flack started coming in from duly disappointed readers and advertisers.

Whoops! We’re sorry.

Elaine Eff, director of the Painted Screen Society of Baltimore, finds fault with the guidance we gave in Way 5, for painting a Baltimore Screen. Now we know.

So don’t paint your screen yet until you read her letter next week.

A vast brain trust comes together each year to imagine, research, write, edit, design and proofread 101 Ways to Have Fun. We follow check-sheets and make long, cross-referenced lists. We think we’re pretty smart — until the pebble we missed looms before us as big as a boulder.

There are two morals to this story. One we take from the tradition that both Oriental rugs and Native American blankets include one fault as recognition that only God makes flawless masterpieces. We’re routinely humbled at our human imperfection.

The second is that it takes all your experience, good ideas and expert knowledge to help us inch closer to perfection.

Send your ideas, improvements and corrections for next year’s 101 Ways to Have Fun to Bay Weekly editor Sandra Martin at [email protected].