If you are wondering where to take your mom for Mothers’ Day, look no further than the campus of Morgan State University.

In the Gilliam Concert Hall of the Murphy Fine Arts Center, the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTOH) will perform on Sunday, May 12, 2013 at 7:00 p.m.

At this performance, members of the DTOH will have local talent dancing with them. Six young ladies from the Baltimore School for the Arts will perform a ballet with DTOH dancers; two dancers from the Flair Studio of Dance and Modeling will also perform.

Mari Andrea Travis, who teaches dance at Flair, said that eight-year-old Diamond Tomlin and nine-year-old Morgan Cruise will perform with the DTOH on Mothers’ Day.

Diamond has been dancing with Flair for about three years, Travis said. Morgan has been dancing at the studio for about one year.

About two weeks before Mothers’ Day, Travis got a text message— an urgent one— from Dwight Cook, the production manager at the Murphy Fine Arts Center.

Travis contacted Cook to get the details about the message. Cook told her the DTOH wanted to include performers from a couple of local dance schools in their Mothers’ Day performance at Morgan.

Cook said that he was looking for girls, ages eight to 12, five feet or under, with at least an intermediate level of technique.

Their faces just appeared to me when he described what he wanted,” Travis said of Diamond and Morgan. “I thought of these girls right away. Their potential is great and their abilities are fitting.”

Travis knows how to evaluate dance talent. In addition to teaching dance at Flair, she’s the head of the Charm City Dance Theater.

Last year, Travis created some superb and creative choreography for the production of “Smokey Joe’s Café,” which ran at the Arena Playhouse.

Travis is the granddaughter of Willia Bland, who founded Flair in April of 1968, just after the assassination of

Martin Luther King Jr.

That Flair story, if it isn’t familiar to Baltimoreans by now, should be. Bland, who was a model said she wanted to start something positive in the wake of the tragedy of King’s death.

So she started a modeling school in her home. Later, the dance component was added.

Mari Andrea Travis is also the daughter of Andrea Travis, an exquisite, elegant model herself who puts on at least two fashion shows a year. Andrea Travis is the vice president of Flair, and the director of the studio’s modeling program.

Dancing is in the blood for this family. Willia Noel Montague, Bland’s granddaughter and another daughter of Andrea Travis, is the dance captain of “The Lion King” on Broadway.

Mari Andrea Travis said that the name of the ballet the Flair and Baltimore School for the Arts dancers will perform with the DTOH is called “Gloria.” Diamond and Morgan are learning the moves for the ballet, Travis said, and will attend a dress rehearsal the day of the performance.

The parents of both girls are, as you might expect, excited about the opportunity for their daughters to perform with the DTOH. Diamond and Morgan, Travis said, are also excited, but she wonders if they realize what an opportunity it is for them to perform with the DTOH.

“They’re really excited,” Travis said of Diamond and Morgan. “They just don’t know what they’re in for. They don’t realize what a big deal this is. The Dance Theater of Harlem is one of the top African American dance companies in the world. That I know (Diamond and Morgan) don’t know yet.”

But both girls, Travis said, are taking the opportunity seriously, and have committed to practicing at least one hour per night.

If you are in a quandary about how to celebrate Mothers’ Day this year, you might want to consider heading out to Morgan and supporting some of our youth.

Needed: at least 15 corrections officers like Stanley Cherry to work in the Baltimore City Detention Center. Who, many readers will no doubt ask, is Stanley Cherry?

It would be more accurate to ask who he was. Cherry is now deceased, but he was a Baltimore high school and college sports legend before his untimely death from a drug overdose. Oh, and he was also a corrections officer.

From the years 1966-1969, Cherry attended Edmondson High School. A gifted athlete, he excelled in three sports: football, wrestling and lacrosse.

At what was then Morgan State College, Cherry played football and lacrosse. He is mentioned quite often in the book “Ten Bears,” co-written by Chip Silverman and Dr. Miles Harrison.

Silverman was the coach of Morgan’s lacrosse team in the early 1970s. His squad more than held its own with several elite white teams of the era.

In one segment of “Ten Bears” Silverman described what an intimidating force in lacrosse Cherry was. It seems Cherry was knocking opposing players out cold with body checks, which were perfectly legal.

Officials ejected Cherry from the game. Silverman protested, claiming that all of Cherry’s body checks were quite legal.

Didn’t matter, the refs countered. They wanted Cherry out of the game before he killed somebody.

Throughout the “Ten Bears,” Silverman gave examples of Cherry’s menacing demeanor on and off the field. The six words no one wanted to hear, Silverman said, were these: “Stanley Cherry is looking for you.”

Cherry planned to play in the National Football League. When that plan didn’t pan out, he became a corrections officer.

A former prison inmate, now deceased, that knew Cherry since he was a boy wrote several pieces about him for The Baltimore Sun. Apparently Cherry was every bit as intimidating as a corrections officer as he was on the football field, on the wrestling mat and on the lacrosse field.

Inmates didn’t intimidate Stanley Cherry; Stanley Cherry intimidated inmates.

We could use about 15 or 20 corrections officers like Cherry now, especially at the Baltimore City Detention Center.

You’ve no doubt read— or seen a television news report— about what a hot mess, the Baltimore City Department of Corrections (BCDC) is. Federal officials announced the indictment of 25 people on charges of smuggling drugs, cell phones and other contraband into the facility.

Thirteen of those indicted were corrections officers. All of those corrections officers are female.

They are accused of helping members of the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) prison gang with its smuggling operation. Four are alleged to have had sex with Tavon White, supposedly the BGF leader inside the BCDC.

A fifth corrections officer is accused of having sex with another BGF member. The four accused of having sex with White allegedly became pregnant with his children, one of them twice.

I confess to having absolutely no understanding of what was going through the minds of any of these 13 young women. The upside of helping incarcerated gang members would be what, exactly?

The upside of having sex with them, getting pregnant and then bearing their children would be what, exactly?

I might not understand, but BGF members certainly do. According to a story in the April 28, 2013 edition of The Baltimore Sun, “Corrections department investigators discovered BGF documents outlining that new recruits are trained to target female officers with ‘low self-esteem, insecurities and certain physical attributes.’ Gang members believe such officers can be easily manipulated.”

 I’d love to see BGF members try to manipulate a Stanley Cherry, or a corrections officer like him. It couldn’t and wouldn’t be done.

Cherry was an old-school kind of corrections officer, one that would guarantee an inmate who stepped out of line that the dislocation of a body joint would soon follow.

Had Gary D. Maynard, Maryland’s secretary of public safety and correctional services, had 15 or 20 tough male corrections officers working for the BCDC, he would have saved himself the embarrassment of having to take the blame for the hot mess that exists there now.

He has taken the blame, but has he learned his lesson? Let’s see what kind of corrections officers he picks to work at the BCDC in the near future.

It’s time to determine which of us is the real screwball: Dallas Dance, superintendent of Baltimore County public schools or Gregory Kane, curmudgeonly columnist with an attitude.

About a month ago Dance gave a speech in Baltimore County. He told his listeners that the time had come to up the ante when it comes to educating America’s youngsters.

Dance is only responsible for those in Baltimore County, but he’s already decided that, if a high school diploma from that locale is to mean anything at all, it should mean that all students graduate fluent in a foreign language. Yeah, he said it!

Dance wants students to start learning a foreign language in elementary school, not middle school. The goal is to give students an edge that will allow them to compete for—and find— better jobs and earn higher incomes.

The superintendent is on to something. I’m just surprised that few have challenged him on the notion of having Baltimore County students— or American students in any city, county or state, for that matter— graduate high school fluent in a foreign language.

There are some that feel it’s a struggle for American schools to graduate high school proficient in English, which is supposed to be our native language.

So no one’s used the “n” word, “nut” to describe Dance for proposing high school students graduate bilingual, but I sure got the treatment several years ago.

I was still a columnist at The Baltimore Sun. Unlike Dance, I didn’t write a piece suggesting that American students graduate high school bilingual, fluent in a foreign language.

I wrote a piece suggesting that Americans require our high school students to graduate fluent in at least two foreign languages, not one. No wonder I got called a “nut.”

However, I still think my proposal is better than Dance’s. If American students have the aptitude to learn one foreign language, then that means they sure as heck have the aptitude to learn at least two.

In my column in The Sun, I suggested that the foreign languages might be French and Spanish. Then I got an e-mail from a guy on the West Coast. He is an Asian American who e-mailed me regularly. (He’s a conservative living in the San Francisco area, so he immediately had my deepest sympathy.)

American students learning French and Mandarin, he told me, would make better sense than their learning French and Spanish.

We both agreed on the French. Next to English, it is probably an international language. (Most of the world’s amateur athletic bodies have French names. I’m not sure why, but I suspect colonialism’s legacy has quite a bit to do with that.)

More people in the world speak Mandarin, my Asian American pal reasoned, than speak Spanish. China, the country where Mandarin is spoken, is a rising economic, military and industrial power, he contended, much more so than any Spanish-speaking nation on the globe.

He’s absolutely right, of course. With the rising tide of immigrants— legal and illegal, not that America’s open borders crowd wishes to make that distinction— that speak Spanish coming to our nation, it might make sense to have American high school students graduate speaking Spanish.

However, considering the rising impact that the People’s Republic of China has— and will continue to have— on the world then the better choice is, indeed, Mandarin over Spanish.

That will benefit American students whether their native tongue is English or Spanish. The bottom line is that a world in which it might become a necessity to speak, or at least understand, Mandarin is in their future.

Well, Balti-morons, are you missing former State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy yet?

I’m not sure the state’s attorney we have now, Gregg L. Bernstein, quite cuts the mustard.

Recently a Baltimore Circuit Court judge chided Bernstein’s office for committing a Brady violation in the case of Michael Maurice Johnson, who was found guilty of murdering Phylicia Barnes.

Johnson is guilty no more. The judge ordered that, because of the Brady violation, he be given a new trial.

That was way back in March. Fast forward to this month, when 45-year-old Matthew Hersl was killed after being struck by a car.The details of Hersl’s death are especially tragic. He had worked at City Hall 28 years. He had just left work when the accident occurred.

That accident never had to happen.

According to police, a man was allegedly zooming down I-83 at 100 miles per hour when he took the Pleasant Street exit. Still speeding, he tried to make a left turn when the car careened out of control, allegedly striking a pole and Hersl. The driver was treated for minor injuries then cops sent him on his merry way.

That changed earlier this week when State police, not our BPD, arrested a

43-year-old man named Johnny Johnson and charged him with manslaughter by automobile.

Oh, that’s not all— Johnson is also charged with homicide by motor vehicle while impaired by drugs; driving under the influence of drugs; driving under the influence of a controlled dangerous substance; possession of heroin; possession of cocaine; and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Given all those charges, doesn’t it boggle the mind how cops let the suspect just walk?

But enter Bernstein on Wednesday, April 10, according to a report in The Baltimore Sun, saying that no weapons or drugs were found in the suspect’s car.

On Monday, April 15, state police said drugs were found in the suspect’s car.

This poses quite the dilemma for Bernstein, doesn’t it? We should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t lie when he said no drugs were found in the suspect’s car.

Then that means Bernstein was misinformed. Is that really much better? It diminishes not one iota the egg we should all see smeared on his face.

 Hersl’s death— like Barnes’ murder — are both high-profile cases and we have seen Bernstein’s office in recent weeks stumbling in both.

I can’t, for the life of me, imagine Jessamy letting the suspect just walk away without being charged, given the nature of the crime and the fact that we now know drugs were allegedly recovered from the suspect’s car.

Bernstein campaigned as the anti-Jessamy, accusing her of being an incompetent state’s attorney. He rode into office all but dancing on the graves of the seven members of the Dawson family, who died in their home after a drug dealer torched it.

Jessamy never had a Brady violation in a major case on her watch, and she was state’s attorney for over 16 years.

Bernstein’s only been in office a little over a year, and he already has one.

How can he continue to misstep this way, and not be called on it by the local media?

You know the ones I’m talking about. Yes, I am referring to the folks at The Baltimore Sun, where I was previously employed. And I’m also talking about local talk radio show hosts, who dogged Jessamy every chance they got but gave Bernstein a pass in these two latest incidents.

Are these people not paying attention? Is no one watching? Where, in Bernstein’s case, is the sense of moral outrage that was directed at Jessamy?