Johns Hopkins Gazette: October 20, 1997

In Brief

Waverly-Greenmount shows off with autumn multicultural festival

On Saturday, Oct. 25, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the merchants of the Waverly-Greenmount Business Corridor will hold the third annual multicultural festival, held for the first time in autumn.

The event is sponsored by the Waverly Business Association and co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, Charles Village Community Benefits District, Greater Homewood Community Corporation and Union Memorial Hospital.

The Greenmount International Harvest Festival will be held in the 2800 to the 3500 blocks of Greenmount Avenue, and it will celebrate the cultural diversity of the area's businesses and neighborhoods. Local schoolchildren are involved with this year's festival--they have created window displays with local businesses depicting the different regions of the world represented on Greenmount Avenue.

Two staging entertainment areas--Waverly Towers Shopping Center and 32nd Street--will showcase performances by The Baltimore Islanders Steel Band, Mambo Combo, Part Harmony (a men's a cappella group), high school jazz quartets, gospel choirs, an Irish fiddler and others. The Kinderman, Scooby the Clown, jugglers, storytellers and a children's corner will entertain festival-goers of all ages. This year, the festival will also feature an international fashion show with local college students as models as well as an arts and crafts corner.

There will be ethnic food offered by local restaurants and the area's five international grocery markets.

For information, call Morgan Allyn, festival logistics coordinator, at 410-516-1985 or Jennifer Jaros, festival coordinator, at 410-516-1011.
--Leslie Rice


Odyssey program gets 'critical' with its fourth Media Forum

The Odyssey Media Forum continues this Wednesday with Leonard Slatkin, director of the National Symphony, who will discuss his innovative views of today's orchestral scene--the music, its audience and the challenges faced by contemporary directors. The maestro will also talk about some of his favorite pieces and offer some suggestions for the classical music lover's CD collection.

For the past several years, the Odyssey Media Forum has consistently remained one of the School of Continuing Studies' most popular non-credit lecture series offered on the Homewood campus. This year's series is called "Meet the Critics," and it brings to Homewood some of the country's foremost critics who shape our tastes and help us screen what we read, see and hear. Last week Bill Carter, television critic for The New York Times, talked about the changes taking place in television today. In the weeks ahead other guest speakers include Robert Brustein, theater critic for The New Republic, Stephen Hunter, movie critic for The Washington Post and Jonathan Yardley, book critic for The Washington Post.

Although the program is offered as a five-session non-credit course, people are encouraged to attend individual sessions. Tickets per session are $17; the entire session is $80. Tuition remission for full-time Hopkins staff is offered. And, through a grant from the Dean of Students Office, full-time Hopkins undergraduates may attend sessions free. The series meets on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. in the Schafler Auditorium of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy.

"This is a chance for a frank, behind-the-scenes look at the culture of our times, from some of the leading voices in television, music, theater, film and publishing," says "Meet the Critics" coordinator Ghita Levine. "It's an opportunity to learn what's really going on and to question the relevance of some of the arts in today's world."

For more information, call the School of Continuing Studies at 410-516-4842.
--Leslie Rice


Medical News

Estrogen therapy improves blood flow in men with coronary artery disease

Estrogen therapy, which has halved coronary artery disease symptoms in post-menopausal women, may hold similar health benefits for men in the same age group, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered.

In a study published in the Oct. 15 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology, the researchers showed that conjugated estrogens, which contain a variety of estrogen compounds, increased blood flow to the heart by nearly a third in men with coronary artery disease. The finding contradicts prior studies showing that 17-beta-estradiol, another form of estrogen, improved coronary blood flow in women only.

"This is the first study to find that middle-aged men may one day benefit from the protective effects of estrogen," said Roger S. Blumenthal, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Hopkins.

Research is now ongoing to develop "non-feminizing" estrogen compounds that would improve blood flow in men without increasing their risk of breast or other cancer, or produce such feminizing effects as breast enlargement.

The study, which was supported by Hopkins' Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease, included the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
--Karen Infeld


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