Creativity

Gwyneth Paltrow received an award for her guest role on Glee at the Creative Arts Emmys in L.A. on Saturday, and Justin Timberlake was honored for the Saturday Night Live monologue for which he wrote the music and lyrics. But the night's big winner was HBO's chronicle of Atlantic City's heyday, Boardwalk Empire , which netted seven drama awards, including for casting and cinematography. The ceremony will be shown Saturday on ReelzChannel, and the Primetime Emmy Awards can be seen the following night at 8 on Fox.   That was fun, but . . . The real show Saturday was the taping of Comedy Central's Charlie Sheen roast with Mike Tyson , William Shatner , Kate Walsh , and a slew of comedians riffing on Sheen's high-profile antics, meltdown, and March firing from Two and a Half Men . "Charlie's meltdown was so bad, Al Gore 's making a documentary about it," said comic Jeffrey Ross . Asked Jon Lovitz : "How much [cocaine]

The climax of Toby Keith's rousing concert Friday night at the Susquehanna Bank Center was always a near-certainty, an assumed known quantity from the get-go. And we're talkin' since the date was announced, not just all through his well-paced 21-song set. On the eve of a weekend of 10th-anniversary 9/11 observances, it was inevitable: Keith would cap the night with his massive, pointedly patriotic 2002 fightin'-back hit "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). " And so he did, with uniformed soldiers brought up onstage to cheers of "USA!

It's a steamy spring afternoon and members of Pig Iron Theatre Company are in a boiler room at the Crane Arts Building's neighboring schoolhouse, kicking up dirt. "This would make a great stage for a performance," Quinn Bauridel, Pig Iron's co-artistic director, says at the foot of a furnace straight out of Dante's Inferno . Pig Iron and Bauridel have worked at the Crane before. The city's headiest avant-garde troupe staged the starkly forensic Isabella in the Crane's Ice Box Project Space on North American Street during the 2007 Live Arts Festival.

Sales of Beyond Knitting Concepts' fashion merchandise total just $600. Yet Aisha Alexander, cofounder of the venture started a little more than six months ago with a knitting buddy, confidently describes herself as a successful business owner. "It's all about your state of mind," the South Philadelphia resident explained. Yuri Schneiberg sees it differently. In fact, he's staking a new business venture on a belief that he's right. Success as a small-business owner requires much more than a positive outlook, Schneiberg said - it requires an education specially designed for entrepreneurs.

Syd Carpenter recently discovered "some amazing, wonderful news. Granny was a gardener!" Before you nod off, know that this revelation delighted Carpenter, a ceramic artist in West Mount Airy, because she's a gardener, too - quite an amazing and wonderful one, though not a food-grower like Granny. Actually, Granny had a fabulous name - Indiana Hutson, and, according to Carpenter's Aunt Mary, a prodigious gift: She was a minor celebrity in 1940s Pittsburgh, all because of her Victory Garden.

While I'm away, readers give the advice. On women who "grossly outearn" male partners: My husband was a junior high school teacher, and I "grossly" out-earned him. I understood that he was shaping minds, and the importance of his job far outweighed that of mine, which was in sales. However, it didn't matter to either of us how much money the other one made or what we did earning it - we were a team, and loved each other very much. - Happy in Dallas On mixing (art)

How Creativity Works By Julie Burstein Harper. 249 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by David Falcone When I was a child, in a forest not far from where I lived I would find in the early evenings just the two right stones and strike them together to create "the spark. " That spark was filled with the mysterious and magical. I can remember wondering about the origin of this little light that seemed to be hiding in the earth, willing to reveal itself only when someone special knew how to release it. Reading Julie Burnstein's Spark took me back to that time.

What do Jane Golden, executive director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and city native Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, drummer for the Roots, have in common? Aside from being artists, they are what Leadership Philadelphia president Liz Dow describes as important "creative connectors" in the nine-county region's cultural scene. Dow counts them among those who use art, culture, and design to build community and economic vitality. She hopes to identify more such people through phase three of Leadership Philadelphia's Connector Project, which launches Sunday.

The Arden Theatre does not consider your children second-class citizens, not even the youngest ones. As is the case with their world-premiere work The Flea and the Professor , they're happy to create new theater for them, based not on the most popular new spy series but rather on Hans Christian Andersen's mostly forgotten final tale, turning it into a musical, and presenting the finished product on the mainstage. The Arden respects your kids so much it commissioned a hot young playwright (Jordan Harrison, whose Kid Simple was recently produced by Azuka Theatre)

These past months have been a roller-coaster ride for Soulja Boy. Months after his third album, "The DeAndre Way," failed to make a big impact on the Billboard 200, his 14-year-old half-brother passed away. But the 20-year-old Internet imp has channeled the negative and turned it into positive, birthing a new mixtape "Juice," out yesterday. Soulja Boy recently talked to Billboard.com about his upcoming projects, teaming up with some of the original cast from "Juice" (the 1992 film starring Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur)