Creativity

We will never know how much Basil Fawlty, the hilariously misanthropic and inept innkeeper of Torquay, might have been helped by one of John Cleese's inspirational talks, and that's undoubtedly for the best. Life at Fawlty Towers might have been less hellish if Basil had learned to loosen up and stop insulting those German tourists, but Cleese's legions of fans would have been the losers. But, Cleese reflected yesterday, listening to a speech on creativity in business wouldn't have done Basil a bit of good anyway.

Monika Steinberg, director at the Institute for Creative Education, enjoys posing this riddle to teachers at the start of her creativity seminars: There's a man at home. He is wearing a mask. There is a man coming home. What is happening? Josephine Iadevaia and Susan Polk, two teachers who attended Wednesday's institute seminar at the Education Information and Resource Center in Sewell, sat silently in their chairs for a minute. They were pondering Steinberg's riddle. Both were dumbstruck.

After two years of research, the husband-and-wife team of John and Sylvia Baer have concluded that the increasingly popular core curriculum in schools stimulates creativity. In February, John Baer, who teaches education at Rider University in Lawrenceville, and Sylvia Baer, an instructor of English literature at Gloucester County College, presented a paper on "The Impact of the Core Knowledge Curriculum on Creativity" at the annual meeting of the Eastern Educational Research Association in Orlando, Fla. "A core curriculum, what some would call a standard body of knowledge, has been developed in many states to promote a systematic education," John Baer said.

Learn how you and your children can become more creative during a seminar at Children's Learning Center from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. Gail Jones, an early childhood educator, will speak to parents of the learning center and their guests. The program, said Jones, will help parents foster creativity in their children. The program is free and will be held at Children's Learning Center, 748 Stoney Hill Rd. in Yardley. For information, call Pat Miiller at 215-498-8048. OPEN HOUSE Childtowne Montessori Preschool and Day Care Center will hold an open house from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

A kid raised in a blue-collar home in Los Angeles, who got into trouble in school, who managed to scrape his way into an acting and directing career, and then went on to create a world-renowned film festival that changed the fortunes of independent filmmakers . . . . . . Even a person like that, even a person like Robert Redford, can screw it up. Redford's faults: hiring badly, impatience, inability to communicate, ineffective relations with...

Author Dan Wakefield, whose novels Going All the Way and Starting Over were turned into movies, will talk about injecting creativity into daily life during a free public program at 7:30 p.m. next Friday in the chapel at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, 625 Montgomery Ave., Bryn Mawr. Wakefield also will lead a workshop titled "Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography" from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 31 at the church ministries center. The $25 workshop admission fee covers lunch. Wakefield, a novelist, journalist and screenwriter, has written extensively about his spiritual rebirth.

Tenor saxophonist David Murray will share the billing with poet/playwright Amiri Baraka when the Painted Bride Art Center continues its Kuumba celebration of Afro-American creativity tomorrow night. At 33, Murray has established himself as a leading figure among jazz's tenor sax players. His style can be blusteringly gruff or seductively romantic, in the tradition established by Coleman Hawkins and carried on by Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler. In addition to his reputation as a player, Murray has gained considerable attention as a composer, arranger and band leader.

In Jude Burkhauser's studio is a colored-pencil sketch of the torso of a woman, nude, crouching, the skin of one breast peeled off in a moon-shaped slice. The work, New Moon Slice, is dark, haunting, disturbing. It also is empowering, the artist says. Burkhauser, a breast-cancer survivor, is convinced that art has life- affirming powers - spiritual powers that help the ill focus on healing. So she is heading a local drive, part of a national movement, to develop a registry of women who have used the creative process in overcoming breast cancer and to exhibit their works.

Homing in on the creative process, the Pew Charitable Trusts announced yesterday a new funding program to support the development of new choreography by artists in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Repertory Development Initiative will make grants totaling $440,000 over three years. An additional $185,000 will go toward the cost of administering the program. A total of 14 grants will be awarded each year, starting Sept. 1. Professional dance companies may apply for grants up to $20,000 per year, and individual choreographers and dancers will qualify for as much as $10,000 a year.

Inside the Center for Engineering Education and Research at Villanova University on Thursday, the tools in use included toilet-paper rolls, tissue boxes, Popsicle sticks, and glitter glue. Some of the school's biggest brainiacs wore headpieces fashioned from pipe cleaners while they sang a children's song. The goal was to encourage free-spirited creativity among a group traditionally boxed in by methodology and math. And, just possibly, to inspire the next Steve Jobs - whoever he or she might be. As the world absorbed the news of the death Wednesday of Apple Inc.'s cofounder, and wondered what would become of the U.S. technology sector without Jobs' extraordinary vision, Villanova's College of Engineering spent two hours trying to get 28 sophomores to think more like Jobs and less like engineers.

WHEN photographer Christine Alix walked into a print room at the University of Pennsylvania last May and saw dozens of prints covering walls and floors in dramatic splashes of color and surrealistic design, she was stunned. There amid the display was Sarah Dekker, the beautiful young woman who had created the work, probably looking humble and a little baffled by her accomplishment, as if to say, "Did I do all this?" "Sarah is so completely humble, but never fails to create diverse bodies of work that are nothing short of stunning," Christine said.

Periodically and cyclically, the economy will stink, even more so for people who are less experienced, educated or trained, the youngest members of the work force. The Depression walloped one generation. The recession, oil shortage, and stagflation whipped mine. Many classmates avoided the job market, or the pronounced lack thereof, by diving into grad school and further debt, which drove them toward more lucrative professional if not necessarily innovative endeavors. As The Inquirer's special report "Struggling for Work" makes clear, these are days of diminishing economic returns for the "millennial generation," adults 18 to 34, entering a challenging and rapidly changing marketplace.

EVAN MALONE had it good. His grandfather, Daniel Malone, an engineer for RCA/GE and later a maker of military systems and parts, had a workshop in his home "with all kinds of deadly stuff I tinkered with as a child. That's where I first caught the engineering bug. " Today, Evan Malone is doing unto others with NextFab Studio, a marvel of a shared workspace and prototyping station loaded with high-tech machinery, insights and enthusiasm. Now celebrating its second anniversary in a ground-floor space at the University City Science Center, NextFab has proven so popular it's about to expand into a second location on the west side of Washington Avenue "five times as big," shared Malone last week.

The man who wrote the music for Cabaret and Chicago , Curtains and Kiss of the Spider Woman , and more than a dozen other shows - to say nothing of "New York, New York " - leaned against the side of an upright piano in a Center City rehearsal room and broke into a smile. "Yes, yes," said John Kander, to the dozen men on folding chairs who had just finished another run-through of the song called "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey!," which opens The Scottsboro Boys, a musical about a true travesty of American justice, about racism and anti-Semitism, hatred and hypocrisy, told in the form of a minstrel show put on by blacks with a white "interlocutor," or onstage ringmaster.

Melissa Cohen Designs educational toys for kids MAJicCreative.com     I didn't think I'd be in the toy business my whole life," says Melissa Cohen. But as a creative who generates ideas and develops products for many toy companies, Cohen is all over the toy business. She's had a hand in creating at least 90 toys that will be on display in Manhattan in February at Toy Fair 2012 – 15 are debuts. The founder of MAJic Creative is a virtual idea-generating machine.

As federal and state governments pull back on child-care aid and struggle to find affordable ways to help families with problems of elder care, family advocates are looking to the private sector for more help. They're urging employers to let caregivers have more flexible schedules to ease the burden of looking after young children and frail parents. Doing so can actually pay off for both the worker and the employer, as suggested by researchers writing for the Future of Children's Work and Family project, a collaboration between Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

Eric Kimmel's children's book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins is a story that, aside from being engaging, is also gently subversive and proudly ethnic. In Gas & Electric Arts' staged adaptation, Jacqueline Pardue Goldfinger adds live music, puppetry, and another layer of engagement with an Alice in Wonderland backstory that connects the book's wandering Jewish hero with a present-day audience of youngsters. Jewish history is, of course, filled with some pretty rough stuff, and Hershel of Ostropol (David Blatt)

Have the Roots outdone themselves with undun ? Quite possibly. And if the 10th studio album by the Philadelphia hip-hop and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon band is not their best - and, really, the group has worked at such a high level since 1999's Things Fall Apart that choosing one album above all others is a fool's errand - it is in many ways their most ambitious. undun (Def Jam ***1/2) shares its name with a Guess Who song, but wears its seriousness on its sleeve (the CD or LP sleeve, that is, if you buy the physical product)

Art is everywhere - on walls, on easels, stacked on the floor - in the Center City home of Ed Bronstein and his wife, Sophie. There is so much art stored on the first level of the house that the line between home and studio is blurred, with studio winning out handily. "I definitely spend a lot of time and take up a lot of space down here," Bronstein says. An architect with a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, he veered off into art at age 44, and now, at 67, is a fully committed painter.

Architects, hairstylists, graphic artists, fashion designers, urban planners, multimedia makers, product designers, and more are expected to turn out for the seventh annual DesignPhiladelphia celebration, opening Thursday. In partnership with the University of the Arts and in coordination with National Design Week, America's largest design party isn't relegated to Philly studios full of easels and laptops or boardrooms struck by PowerPoint lightning. Instead, there are outdoor shows and street happenings, private workshops and public forums occurring Thursday through Oct. 23, all geared toward presenting how design - in ways big and small - affects our everyday existence.