The New Year Is Off and Running
If you were as lucky as I was, the days between Christmas and January 4 belonged to a different time zone. In that week, it’s possible to pretend everything’s done that needs to be done.
Not now! 2016 has come out of the gate like a horse on a fast track with a big purse at its end. It’s already run through its first week and speeding through its second. Things are moving.
The biggest is the Maryland General Assembly, which turns Annapolis from a sleepy town to a working capital for 90 days. One hundred eighty-eight citizen-lawmakers from every corner of the state gather, surrounded by a pack of influence-peddlers all devoted to shaping the law in their favor.
Decisions that shape your life are being made there — and now. Find out how to follow that action in this week’s feature, Your Primer to the Maryland General Assembly.
Everybody working at the State House will be too busy to catch the last season of Downton Abbey, started this month on PBS. But the rest of us manage the realities of our lives better with regular submersion in the plot lines of drama.
Chesapeake Country’s many theater companies are beginning new seasons of live drama. Venus in Fur — a play to make you reconsider what you think you know about relationships, sex and power — is Colonial Players’ January eye-opening offering. Get stimulated at The Player’s theater in the round off State Circle on East Street Thursday to Sunday through January 23.
The drama turns to our inner lives and family relationships at Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s Studio 111 Theater on Chinquapin Round Road. In 19th century Russian master Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, “as their lives seem to spill over into ours, we witness life happen as it happens, unscripted and untidy,” says artistic director Sally Boyett.
Stimulate your heart to beat faster in a third drama opening this week for two performances only, January 15 and 22, An Evening with Poe at Hammond Harwood House, where you’ll meet the master of suspense, drink port and hear dramatic readings from The Cask of Amontillado.
Art galleries are hanging their first new shows after the holidays. To open your eyes wider to the world, see what’s on the walls and in the works at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, St. John’s College’s Mitchell Gallery and Annmarie Garden.
Classes to stimulate your mind and tune up your body are soon starting, as well, at colleges, art centers, senior centers and wellness centers. Meadow Hill Wellness’s Empowerment — an eight-week, life-changing, mind-body course — promises to do double duty.
Bay Weekly is up to new things as well, with new page of short news, Dock of the Bay (a section faithful readers will remember) and new features in the works. My question of the year is how we can keep you reading. Who knows that better than you? Please stop in during my “Editor Is In” hours Thursdays in January to tell me.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]