Maria Chabot was 26 years old and Georgia O'Keeffe was 53 when the two women met in New Mexico in 1940 and quickly became friends. Chabot, an aspiring writer, began spending summers at the famous painter's Ghost Ranch. Later, she organized the restoration of O'Keeffe's decaying adobe house in Abiquiu.

The Three Athenas and A Royal Flush at 516 Magnífico Artspace

There's something serenely calming about the three towers Rachel Stevens has installed in the front chamber of 516 Magnífico Artspace. Suspended from long, white hooks, The Three Athenas stretch 24 feet from ceiling to floor, but they never quite make it all the way down, hovering just slightly, an inch or so above the floor. If you ask nicely, the gallery's administrators will even lift up the metal and fabric hoops and let you step inside so you can stare up into Athena's hollow interior, or out through the white mesh like a bird trapped in a cage.

Karen Fox (left) and Frank Melcori in The History of Pantalone … Before the End

Harwood Art Center

Frank Melcori and Karen Fox do some serious clowning in a new bit of nontraditional movement theater taking place starting this Friday at the Harwood Art Center. Melcori plays the clown Pantalone. Fox plays the clown Akira-me. Both move around in a lonely, post-apocalyptic world, bringing life to their layered, idiosyncratic, experimental allegory. Expect The History of Pantalone ... Before the End to be more Beckett than Barnum & Bailey. The show runs Fridays at 8 p.m. through Feb. 27. $10. 242-6367.

It's hard to write a good short story. Honestly, most of the short stories I read last year, whether in magazines or collections, left me stone cold bored. Many of them felt limp, calculated and wimpy. They read like they were written by talented writers who had spent more time in creative writing seminars trying to please their professors with cute sentences than in examining their own lives and the world around them.

What sort of fiction might one expect from a scientist? Meticulous? Wooden, perhaps? In the case of astronomers, imagination plays as important a role as scientific rigor in their work.

The latest installment of Parrish's Louis Kincaid mystery series finds our hero trying to solve a mystery surrounding a woman's bullet-riddled corpse discovered in the mangrove swamps of south Florida. Rumor is that sharp dialogue and a tense plot make for one of the best Kincaid mysteries yet.