Byron

Darrell Kenyatta Evers remembers vividly the night his father, Medgar Evers, was killed. "My sister and my brother and my mother were watching TV, sitting on the bed," he said. The date was June 12, 1963. The family was at home in Jackson, Miss., watching President John F. Kennedy talk about a "moral crisis" in America, explaining to the country the precepts that would become the Civil Rights Act a year later.

Flight Behavior A novel Barbara Kingsolver Harper: 436 pp., $28.99 Strange things are happening in Appalachia. The natural world as we know it is coming to an end, overheated by human greed. "Global warming" is a dangerously loaded expression in the rural, Republican-loving, God-fearing Tennessee of Barbara Kingsolver's didactic and preachy new novel, "Flight Behavior. " The people of the fictional Feathertown have been taught by talk radio that it's a big-city scam concocted by Al Gore.

At a packed political forum at Morehouse College — Atlanta's storied and historically black school for men — a moderator posed a question that cut to the sensitive heart of things on a campus that has produced Martin Luther King Jr. (Class of '48) and current GOP darling Herman Cain (Class of '67). The question: "Does Cain represent the modern Renaissance man of Morehouse?" A charged murmur rippled through a crowd of about 100 undergraduates. Traditional African American notions of social justice are part of the very DNA of Morehouse, founded in 1867 to educate recently freed slaves.

Byron Herman rolled out of his dorm bed, yanked on snow pants and a beanie and stumbled across the parking lot to his 8 a.m. math class. By late morning, the 19-year-old Tehachapi student was on his snowboard, cutting crescent shapes into a mountain slope glistening under ice-blue skies. What was unusual about this scenario last month was that Herman attends not a select academy or elite university, but Cerro Coso Community College, a public two-year institution with a campus in Mammoth Lakes.

Keegan Bradley shot a one-under-par 69 in a round that started and ended with bogeys, good enough for a three-stroke lead after two rounds in the Byron Nelson Championship at Irving, Texas. A day after setting the TPC Four Seasons course record with a 60, also with two bogeys, Bradley went into the weekend at 11-under 129. That is the lowest 36-hole total at the Nelson since 2001. Tom Gillis, who shot 63 in the first group of the day off the No. 10 tee, and Sang-Moon Bae were tied for second.

Rose Tarlow has become almost a cult figure in the world of interior design. Not for decades has a West Coast designer had such a broad impact on interior decoration. Long in advance of the '90s trend toward simplicity and character, Tarlow moved away from highly polished pieces in favor of well-worn but noble antiques.

Jason Allred, a recent Pepperdine graduate, received the inaugural Byron Nelson Award on Thursday in Dallas. The award will be presented to the men's college golfer who displays excellence on the course, in the classroom and in the community. Allred, an All-American last season, was a two-time Cleveland Golf All-America Scholar and a three-time West Coast Conference All-Academic honoree.

The Robert Mondavi Winery has agreed to acquire Byron Vineyard & Winery in Santa Barbara County, The Times has learned. The deal would further expand Mondavi's extensive land holdings along California's Central Coast. It follows the 1987 purchase by Mondavi of more than 1,000 acres of vineyards in Santa Barbara County. No purchase price was announced, but sources said the transaction amounts to more than $6 million.

The clarinet was one of the premier instruments in jazz for the first half of the 20thcentury. Vital to New Orleans music, it was the instrument of choice for such major swing bandleaders as Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. The instrument fell on hard times after bebop arrived, however, surfacing occasionally via the work of Buddy DeFranco, Jimmy Giuffre and a few others.

"Still," said my companion, "it's worth the whole show to hear Derek Jacobi read 'So, We'll Go No More a Roving.' " You will gather that there are problems with "Byron--Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know" in its American premiere at the Doolittle Theatre. There are so many problems that one hardly knows where to begin. So let's choose a moment of communication.