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FRIDAY

Mystery novelist Martha Grimes wrote of an extreme cure for writer’s block: “The chain pulled at her ankle…[S]he had wandered from the window to the filing cabinet, and her fingers were feeling across the smooth surface for the key. It had happened before, this all-but-unconscious trek to the cabinet; thus, she had to put the key to the bicycle chain up on top and out of reach….She recalled reading a comment by some writer…if somebody held a gun to your head, you’d write.” Magee, the pulp-novelist hero of George M. Cohan’s “mystery of errors,” Seven Keys to Baldpate, agrees to a similarly absurd contrivance: He accepts a bet that he can write a book in 24 hours. The bet lands him in a deserted summer resort in the middle of winter—and literally under the gun. Find out who wins at 8 p.m. at the Fitzgerald Theatre, 603 Edmonston Drive, Rockville. $12. (301) 545-5660. (Pamela Murray Winters)