For those who don’t already bask in the shadow of her awesomeness, Michele is an editor, writer, humorist, public speaker and standup comic — and co-publisher of Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!

Michele is the author of the long-running “Wojo’s World,” which appears within these virtual pages.

On “WomanTalk Live” Michele did what she does best — talk — about one her favorite subjects; Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!

Check it out. Listen to the “WomanTalk Live” podcast here.

But just this once we’ll make an exception. The almost hypnotic mix of old-time religion and startling vocal artistry in this commercial nearly had us praying for release on a payment plan.

Creator unknown.

The star of Diner and Tin Men was built on Long Island. It has always been a real diner and was operating in New Jersey before Levinson bought it at auction for Diner.

Charlie Mewshaw, the general manager of Crema Coffee Company at the Hollywood Diner, says that the diner opened a new chapter of its lengthy history in August, 2009. That’s when Terry Jett, owner of the Crema Coffee Company took over the Hollywood Diner. The city still owns the building which was donated to Baltimore by Barry Levinson when he completed the filming of Diner.

I wanted to sit in the same booth in which Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) and Shrevie (Bill Stern), Modell (Paul Reiser) and Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) sat.

The Diner guys (left to right): Tim Daly, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern. Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Paul Reiser

“You gonna’ finish that?” Modell repeatedly asked Eddie about to his roast beef sandwich.

The Hollywood Diner does serve a roast beef sandwich. Called the “Saratoga,” it sounded tempting: dry-aged Black Angus roast beef, cheddar, horseradish mayo and mesclun on a baguette for $6.75.

Since the Hollywood Diner’s chef, Kevin Roberts, described how he rubs seasoning inside and out of a turkey before he smokes it for up to three hours, I had the “Smokestack.” House smoked turkey breast, chipotle mayo, smoked Gouda, thick sliced bacon and romaine on a baguette for $6.95.

Served with homemade potato chips, the sandwich was one of the best I have eaten on my jaunts around town sampling food for Welcome to Baltimore, Hon! The slices of turkey were ample, the homemade sauce, tangy and the baguette was fresh with a crunchy crust.

My companion and I ordered the large serving of fries — plain — to split between us for $3.95. They didn’t need a thing! They were crisp on the outside, tender inside and well seasoned. The serving was so large; we couldn’t finish them.

Mewshaw told me that it takes twenty-four to forty-eight hours to make a batch of French fries or potato chips.

“Everything is made fresh, here. We cut the French fries and potato chips by hand, soak them in water to get rid of the starch and blanch them by cooking them at a low temperature before we store them in the refrigerator,” he said. “Just before we serve them, we fry them in peanut oil.”

He added that the process is time-consuming, “so when we run out of them, we are out!”

Charlie Mewshaw

I asked him if they sold French fries with gravy the way the Diner boys ate them in the same booth in which I was sitting.

“We make our own gravy, too!” he replied.

The Hollywood Diner made several appearances in a number of movies after Diner. It has also appeared in Sleepless in Seattle, Homicide: Life on the Streets, Enemy of the State, The Wire, and Liberty Heights.

Baltimorean Michael Tucker, who was in both Diner and Tin Men, believed the Hollywood Diner was modeled after the Hilltop Diner in Pikesville. Barry Levinson, who was also from Pikesville, is believed to have finished many a plate of French fries and gravy at the Hilltop.

Tin Men and Diner showcased the diner’s “code” of where the patrons sat. Working men sat on the left side of the diner — if you are facing it from the outside — and the kids sat on the right.

At the Christmas night gathering in Diner, after Fenwick rolls his car on a road surrounded by woods, (I’ve always wondered where that scene was filmed. It looks like the windy San Martin Drive that borders Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, before one sleek building after another appeared on the Wyman Park side.) they all head to the right side of the Fells Point Diner, which it was called in both movies.

Chef Kevin Roberts

Tin Men, filmed in 1987, depicted the con men who sold aluminum siding to homeowners in Baltimore in 1963. They frequented the diner in the daylight hours, eating late breakfasts and lingering over coffee before they set off on sales calls (or to the race track).

The Diner boys were “night owls,” sparing with each other into the early morning and arguing over whose music was the best for making out: Sinatra’s or Mathis?

“Presley,” Boogie (Mickey Rourke) answered.

Boogie did cross to the left side when he learned that Bagel (Michael Tucker) had paid off his gambling debt. Bagel then offered Boogie – the raunchy, yet smooth lady’s man — a job.

In one of the film’s signature scenes, Boogie explains to his beautiful date, Carol Heathrow (Colette Blonigan) how something found in the bottom of the popcorn box they shared got there! Smooth? You bet. Believable? Well, the audience was privy to the wager made at the diner prior to the date. Carol bought it and forgave Boogie who laughed all the way back to the diner to collect on his bet.

In Tin Men, Barbara Hershey, who plays Ernest Tilley’s (Danny DeVito) wife, Nora, discusses the end of her marriage with Ernest in the diner. Neither Ernest nor his wife realizes that her new boyfriend is Ernest’s nemesis, Billy “BB” Babowsky (Richard Dreyfuss). The animosity between BB and Ernest runs throughout the film which begins in a Cadillac showroom and ends with a comment about the future: the Volkswagen Beetle.

In both movies, Diner and Tin Men, coffee was served in white mugs. My companion and I sipped Guatemalan coffee in green ones.

My companion was pleased with the Hollywood Diner’s coffee.

“Well blended, not bitter,” he said. He liked it black.

Henry Gaines

Henry Gaines, a Baltimore City employee, came into the Hollywood Diner simply for their coffee ($1.59).

“Two people on the street told me how good it is!” he said.

Mewshaw told me that the Crema Coffee Company operates the Hollywood Diner in conjunction with the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, which educates the city’s youths and trains them for careers, including restaurant management and how to prepare food.

Because Mewshaw added that the Hollywood Diner grounds its own beef and sausage, my companion ordered the bacon cheeseburger, eight ounces of burger cooked to order and topped with sharp cheddar and thick sliced crispy bacon for $7.25.

“The hamburger is very fresh.” he said. “No filler. The bacon is nice and crisp and the roll is excellent.”

I didn’t have to ask him Modell’s question, “Are you gonna’ finish that?”

Photos by Caryn Coyle

View Hollywood Diner in a larger map

Corbett, a former Associated Press reporter in Baltimore, will read from Poker Bride, in the Poe Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 24th.

Of his research for the book, Corbett said: “There isn’t a fly-blown town from Grangeville, Idaho to Nevada that doesn’t have a Chinese restaurant. The more I poked around, the more Chinese I found.”

Rosalia Scalia at Enrico’s

Corbett’s previous books are the novel Vacationland, publishing by Viking in1986 and Orphan’s Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, brought out in 2003 by Broadway Books.

Scalia — who wowed a crowd at Enrico’s sports bar in Highlandtown the night before Thanksgiving 2009 with a story about picking a an Italian dandelion called cicoria — won a 2010 MSAC award for her story “Uncharted Steps.”

In part, the story reads:

“Onion ran toward the shelf like an old lady. “Guy! You shot Daddy’s homemade shelf! You said that gun wasn’t real. You and your friends ruined Daddy’s shelf and broke the lamp. You gotta leave. Or just your friends have got to go, but all of yous can’t stay here.

“What am I going to tell Ma about the shelf? You know it’s going to be the first thing she notices!”

Scalia, a 1976 graduate of the Institute of Notre Dame on Aisquith Street, will most likely spend her award on books.

Rafael Alvarez can be reached via pamuk@alvarezfiction.com

We have the best steamed crabs and crab cakes on the planet…

We support our sports teams like no one else (and before you challenge me on this, remember that we still had lots of fans in the stands in 1989 when the Orioles lost their first 21 games of the season)…

And, at the first sign of snow, we freak out like nobody’s business.

You would think that we would be better at this. After all, we’ve had more snow on record this year than any other year in the recorded history of snowfall in Baltimore. Yet, with even the mere mention of more snow in the forecast causes Baltimoreans to panic.

For some reason, when the weather people call for snow, we find the strange need to immediately run to the grocery store—even if our pantries are overflowing. My friend, Bert, works at a local market, and he says that people who usually come in for only a few items have been coming in and buying $300 and $400 worth of food.

The worst part is that they did this before the first snowstorm. Then, some came in again and bought the same massive amounts of food before the second storm.

What I want to know is what in the world are they doing with all this food? Unless their family is as big as The Waltons or The Duggars, there is no way that they got through that much food in less than a week.

And what do we buy? Bread, milk, eggs, toilet paper, and batteries.

So I guess we’re planning on sitting around making French toast, then getting sick from said meal (I mean, why do we really need so much toilet paper?), and then expecting to lose power because we must need the batteries for flashlights.

Or something…

I mean, it’s not like you’re going to starve to death. Most people have neighbors close enough to them. If you really completely run out of food, I’ll bet that you could walk to your neighbor’s house and borrow a frozen pizza.

But for some reason, people in Baltimore begin to believe that they will run out of everything and another Donner Party will result.

Come on, folks. You’re really not going to have to eat the weakest link in the house. Or the family pet. This is Baltimore, not the desolate tundra.

Oh, and I guess I need to publicly apologize for something regarding this year’s snowstorm. I wished for a snowstorm on my February birthday. I got it.

So, um, God, universe, or whatever is out there, you can stop now. Really. I totally appreciate it all. But please feel free to send the rest of the winter’s snow to someplace in the mid-west.

Or up to Vancouver. You know, for the Olympics. They’re complaining they don’t have enough.

I guess I need to apologize to the Olympics too. Sorry…

Had I known how much manifesting power I had, I would have asked to win the lottery on my birthday. My bad…

I think that this winter, all Baltimoreans have learned to be careful what they wish for. What do I mean? Well, so many people I know are always talking about how busy life is today and how they wish they had more “family” time—time to spend at home with their families.

Okay, people, you’ve been snowed in the house with your kids and spouses or parents or significant others or roommates for well over a week.

Just one question—how’s that working out for you now?

I’ve gotten e-mails and seen FaceBook posts non-stop over the last week. People are dying to get out of their homes. They can’t wait until the kids go back to school. One friend even posted this morning that she was so happy to be back to work.

When work seems better than a snow day, you know people have gotten cabin fever—and they’ve got it bad.

Many Baltimoreans also spent tons of time cooking and baking with all the food they bought. So now they’ve gained weight. They think it’s going to all come off because they’ve had to shovel lots and lots of snow.

But it doesn’t work that way.

They’ve also spent tons and tons of hours parked on the couch watching everything from “American Idol” to reruns of “Gilligan’s Island.” And the latter, they watch with a hopeful gleam in their eyes. Wouldn’t it be so nice to be stranded on a hot, deserted island right about now?

Then change the channel and put on “Survivor.”

As for me, I’m happy that I can still fit into my jeans after the winter munchfest of 2010.

Of course, I can’t breathe. Or walk around in them. In fact, I pretty much just need to lie down on the bed while wearing them. But, dang it, I can still get them on.

That counts for something, doesn’t it?

The Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra created a true-color image showing the extent of the snow cover, which reaches up to lower New York State. The full-size image is large, but well worth the wait.

Also, check out the Snowmageddon images sent in by our visitors.

Photo: Jeff Schmaltz MODIS Team, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Sometimes I think I could cross the country on nothing more than coffee, gas, $9 truck stop showers every other day, and Pop Tarts.

Ninety-nine cents at any gas station in America.

Remember when Pop Tarts were only for breakfast? Now they’re in every convenience store in the country, right next to the Slim Jims. Does anyone really eat the chocolate ones? Gimme strawberry and blueberry.

Get me in the right mood, I will tell the greatest Pop Tart story of all time, one involving a picky eater named Guy Matricciani – if a fly buzzed through the kitchen he’d leave the table — and his mother, the sainted Angie Pompa Matricciani, who one day had had it with her son’s unending culinary complaints.

It’s enough to make an otherwise sane woman hop a Greyhound bus and ride.

Somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly where. Across an atlas’ worth of road trips that began in 1978 with a drive to Chicago to interview Studs Terkel and see the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field, I have tried to keep as accurate a captain’s log as possible.

To lean on my days at the Sunpapers when — if you forgot the “t” in Presstman Street — a copy desk hawk who drank Prohibition homebrew with Mencken would point out that your fly was open in front of the entire newsroom.

If narrative exactness exists beyond spelling and grammar, it is elusive.

In The Paris Review — issue No. 191, winter 2009 — Mary Karr observes that “… in the (1940s) memoir was akin to history, which was absolute.

“One reason for [our recent] surge in memoir is the gradual erosion of objective notions of truth … we mistrust the old forms of authority — the church and politicians, even science. The subjective has power now.”

Mary Karr: “We mistrust the old forms of authority …”

The week I bought it, I drove from Baltimore to Rhode Island, headed west to Toronto to see the Blue Jays play at the SkyDome, and then to Detroit to spend a few days with a man who once called me friend, the writer Tom Nugent.

Before our communication breakdown, he wrote: “… the brown wren scrabbles in the dust [and] I hope your [grandfather’s] refrigerator is plink-plink-plinking as it madly thaws! You Spanish brigand, you luff-lubbing …”

And has yet to complete the sentence.

The next summer, my son and I drove that Bug 10,000 miles along the perimeter of the lower 48. Baltimore once again to Chicago (this time not to see Mick and Keith but my Aunt Dolores); over to St. Paul, Minnesota to see the house where Fitzgerald once lived; across the Badlands to the Crazy Horse monument; down to Antelope Island, Utah and then San Francisco and Los Angeles before pushing on to Vegas; the two days it always takes to cross Texas; a hop, skip, and a hello to Florida and then up every beach on the east coast to home.

The trip produced a series of articles for the Calvert Street Circular – collected in the Storyteller anthology — as well as an essay for the defunct arts journal called LINK.

Were my motoring notes more accurate a decade ago in the Volkswagen than the ones scribbled in 2008 in the Toyota Tacoma? The Caballo Blanco’s dashboard is narrow, curved, and cramped, without a plastic steering column vase, the perfect mobile pencil holder.

The highway signs rush by, and you grab the closest blank surface while looking for a pen that works — anything to capture the thought before it flies away.

Fair game: the inside covers of books bought at the last off-the-Interstate thrift store or yard sale – Call It Sleep by Henry Roth picked up for a buck in Van Horn, Texas back in 2004 ; receipts for coffee and cheeseburgers; and the stray greasy napkin.

There is also the duel between journals. What is closer at hand — one of the half-used Reporter’s Notebooks manufactured by Stationers, Inc., of Richmond, Virginia., and left on Macon Street by Joe Mathews before he quit the Sunpapers?

Or the more formal log collected in that year’s marbled composition book?

All while straddling Interstate 10 from the 10th to the 15th of January, 2008 like Slim Pickens riding THE BOMB.

[We will meet again, Dame Vera; and when we do I will make the facts and figures of our slumber in the truck jibe with your recollections. One artist’s memoir, another one’s myth.]

Available in a variety of sizes and colors, our Snowmageddon tees feature Ernie Keeton’s sad snowperson giving the traditional Baltimorean snow salute. Or waving, depending on how you look at it.

This shirt will be a treasured keepsake to refresh your fond memories of cabin fever, grocery store shelves stripped bare, and your car buried beneath a picturesque mound of snow.

Wear your shirt proudly to let people know you have what it takes to survive the worst that nature has ever tossed at Baltimore. Get yours here.

We still want your Snowmageddon images. Send yours to snow@welcometobaltimorehon.com.

Snowmageddon Photo Gallery

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The poetic stuntman David “Footlong” Franks was found dead in his Fells Point apartment the second week of January, not long before his 62nd birthday. He was honored in an especially poignant obituary by Arthur Hirsch in the Baltimore Sun on January 17th, 2010.

David Franks holding a photo of David Franks. Thanksgiving weekend, 2005

In late November of 2005, as Franks recovered from lung cancer brought on by heavy smoking, I visited his apartment in an old barbershop at the corner of Bank and Regester streets in Fells Point with Thanksgiving leftovers from my mother.

On November 29, I received this note from David.

I sent your mother a thank-you — it was the best Thanksgiving food I’ve had since my mother cooked for family & guests & she was a great cook.

Thank you for being so thoughtful & bringing it over — I had enough for another delicious meal yesterday which is a GREAT treat for me.

What do you do about eating? You’re one of my only friends that also lives alone.  That’s not really important — what is important is if we can get together again soon & do some more reading (ourselves & others), talking … let me know what your time is like…

When you were here, I read poems and you read from your journals. They were personal [entries] & I happen to love personal essays & journals & letters — always have. Sometimes it’s a matter of finding out how other writers felt, but really the lowly “journal” is also where I find so much THAT I can relate to about being alive, even though it is not my life.

Sometimes it shows me other ways of seeing things that are part of my life (in their presence or absence) that I haven’t seen until then …

Love, David

Seen a good one lately? Send it along to observed@alvarezfiction.com.