Sundries

It was an air-tight, couldn't-go-wrong case. Private eye William Jazwinski had all the dirty laundry on his client's philandering husband right there on video—all set for the judge to see.

“She had evidence that would have allowed her to get anything she wanted in the divorce,” says Jazwinski, president of Essex-based PDQ Private Investigators and Processors.

Alas, even air-tight cases can be blown to smithereens.

Call ’em what you want—yard sales, rummage sales, estate sales, or garage sales—but the name of the game is still the same: One guy’s flotsam and jetsam is another gal’s ruby necklace.

From early spring ’till fall, yard sales are in full bloom all over the Baltimore area, luring a segment of the population for whom bargain-hunting and haggling is an addiction of sorts.

And, oh, the stories these garage-sale groupies can tell, of the exhilarating victory or agonizing defeat at the hands of private junk peddlers.

For 27-year-old Federal Hill editor Kristen Keener, yard-sale nirvana came a dozen or so years when, as a Fab Four-obsessed teenager, she came upon a robin’s-egg-blue Beatles lunch box. Although lacking a thermos, 25 cents later it was her proudest possession.

“Shortly thereafter I found the same item in a collector’s catalogue,” says Keener, “with a heart-stopping price tag of $225!”

It was a theme party the likes of which only a Dan Van Allen could have cooked up.

For the festivities, Van Allen, a fine furniture restorer and decorative painter, bought a couple of roosters. To provide atmosphere. “I love animals and kept them for several years, until they started digging up the bulbs in my neighbor’s garden,” he says.

Then he arranged to have plenty of fresh coconuts—which, hacked in half with a machete held rum drinks—as well as an old drum that was revved up as a bonfire. While some of the guests danced around the fire, others had the pleasure of watching a Bela Lugosi film.

Still, still, there was something missing. Voila, intrinsic to any self-respecting voodoo party is, naturally, a Haitian Voodoo Altar.

Van Allen got to work.

In 1990, 17-year-old Mohan Thapa arrived at his uncle’s house in Woodbridge, VA, hoping to begin a new life. When his uncle discovered that his nephew had neither a job nor any money, he quickly sent Thapa packing on a train to Baltimore. It was a city in which the teenager knew not one soul.

Getting into Penn Station at 11:30 p.m. in November, Thapa climbed on the No. 3 bus hoping to locate someone who would help him. After getting off the bus, he walked for an hour and a half and finally spent the rest of the night sleeping in the stairwell of an apartment building. The next day, with $.75 to his name, he bought a cup of coffee and later in the day, located a pizza shop. “The owner gave me a job distributing flyers for the store, and the cook let me share his apartment,” says Thapa, who today owns Charles Street’s Kumari Restaurant and Bar.

Flipping through her e-mails one morning last year, Hilary Greene was struck by one from a high school friend with the subject line reading: “Lung lobe needed.”

It was a third or fourth generation e-mail from another Massachusetts woman, Ellyn Cohen [who Greene did not know]. Suffering from a fatal lung condition, Cohen, the mother of two young children, had hoped for a transplant from a deceased donor, but to no avail. Her condition was rapidly worsening and finally, in desperation, she wrote to friends and relatives seeking a living donor.

Little did she know that Greene would step up to the plate and end up donating one of her lobes. It was dangerous and extremely painful transplant surgery, but it was to save Cohen's life.

Quick Now: Why are the tines of dinner knives curved?

Well, dear reader, during the reign of Louis XII, pointed dinner knives not only tore the meat in manageable sizes, they also were used to pick the remaining shreds of food that were stuck between a diner's teeth when the meal was finished.

Fortunately, Cardinal Richelieu—Louis’ chief minister—was so appalled by this behavior that he exerted his considerable influence to have the knives’ tips rounded.

OK, Try this one: Why do we shake hands?

When Hollywood celebrities like Sharon Stone, Halle Berry or Paris Hilton make appearances at glitzy events, there’s usually one accessory they never leave home—a Moo Roo handbag designed by Mary Norton. Norton has refused to let lupus stop her from adding sparkles to the wardrobes of a long list of celebrities, as well as everyday fashionable women across the globe.

“I was diagnosed with lupus just after the birth of my second daughter in February 1998,” says Norton from her home in Charleston, S.C. “But in retrospect, I think I actually had the disease before my older daughter was born. At that time I’d get terrible rashes after I’d been in the sun, but I just assumed that this was an allergie reaction to sunscreen.”