University of Baltimore Blog

(First off--sorry this is so late in posting. I'm home with what I hope is not Death Flu from Hell and slept right through the morning deadline.)

A couple years ago, I was taking an out-of-town friend of mine to the Aquarium for the first time, and one of the divers getting ready to feed the fish in the big spiral tank recognized me. He happened to be a friend of a friend; that same weekend we ran into another friend of mine whom I'd not seen for some months, and as we walked away after this second encounter my guest said to me "You know everyone in Baltimore."

It's funny because it keeps coming back to me when I run into people I know. This isn't a small town, but it feels like a very small world. This past Wednesday I went to see the performance of Eliot's The Waste Land (preceded by some fantastic jazz from Lafayette Gilchrist and The New Volcanoes) and who was starring in it but Gina Braden, who had taught me drama what now feels like a thousand years ago at Park School.

Afterward I got to talk to her--and it turned out she wasn't the only old friend there that night: my art teacher from Park, Ann, and Molly Moores, with whom I'd been in a 1995 Theatre Hopkins play, were there too, and it was amazing how little time seemed to have passed. I'm almost thirty and as I get older the importance of friends has become more and more evident to me--and since I've been here at UB I've begun to make new ones even as I run into old ones. It's a wonderful feeling.

This week's Advice from a City Resident: If you haven't already done so, take the time to go visit the Walters Art Gallery (just up the street from campus). I can remember when the Arms & Armor exhibit was in a wonderfully dungeon-like concrete structure, the only Brutalist building I've ever liked, but even in its new white-painted iteration the gallery is a fantastic resource for artists, writers, playwrights, and anybody who has an afternoon to spend marveling at Iznik tile and Faberge eggs, Lalique jewelry and Greek statues, Renaissance paintings and inlaid hunting rifles.