Almost everyone knows a snippet of Dorothy Parker's tart poetry.

Her advice to the lovelorn, for example:

"Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker."

Or, perhaps ...

"Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses."

Lots of people love the short stories by the brilliant, brittle and erratic Mrs. Parker of the Algonquin Round Table, stories like "The Big Blonde," "A Telephone Call," "Diary of a New York Lady" and a couple dozen more.

Lots of her admirers can recite great swaths of her longer poems, such as "Resume."

"Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live."

But few have put the bittersweet poetry to music as Niki Lee has. The Catonsville singer-songwriter has set a baker's dozen of Parker's poems to music for her one-woman show portraying Parker. The only wonder is why she is the first.

Parker knew what she was talking about, says Lee. She was a founding member of the Round Table at New York's Algonquin Hotel, that nonpareil collection of acerbic wits who drank their lunch throughout the Roaring - and pouring - '20s. She often out-witted her cronies, mostly theatrical people such as Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connolly, Charles MacArthur and George S. Kaufman, and possibly out-drank them, too.

Her wickedly barbed literary and theater criticism still delights readers generations after she detonated them. Of the early acting of the now sacrosanct Katharine Hepburn she wrote: "Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." The beloved "House at Pooh Corner" by A. A. Milne evoked this Constant Reader quip from her in the New Yorker : "Tonstant weader fwowed up."

Lee recites "Resume" at a table in the City Cafe in Baltimore, where she's been talking about her adventures in the life of Dorothy Parker.

"She tried to kill herself four times," Lee says. "I know she tried to slit her wrists. She OD'd on sleeping powders. She drank a bottle of shoe polish. And there's one that I don't know."

Lee uses "Resume" in a short song cycle.

"I do one song, actually a combination of one poem called 'Thought' and one called 'Penelope.' And after I do that, I kind of beat on the guitar in a percussive way and I recite 'Resume.' And then I sing one called 'Coda.'

"So it's three poems I put in like a little medley. So the first one is about love, the second one is 'Resume,' obviously about death, and the third one is also about suicide, not really wanting to live, 'Coda.' "

"Coda" is an astringent ballad that begins:

"There's little in taking or giving;
There's little in water or wine,
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine ..."

Lee is tall and lithe and her dark hair is frosted blond at the tips. She's 41 and has been singing professionally about 15 years. She wears two stones in her right ear, blue and white, and a gold hoop in her left. Dorothy Parker was small and dark and fragile, a quintessential New Yorker, both tough and vulnerable, and quite beautiful in her youth, with limpid brown eyes.

"She dressed impeccably," Lee says. "She wore gloves and hats, and people couldn't wait to see what she wore in the springtime.

"Then she got not very pretty. She turned very wrinkly and baggy, in her 50s and 60s. She was looking rough, because she drank so much and she never stopped drinking, either. I think I read somewhere she drank martinis like they were glasses of iced tea.

"She went through some weird phases, like this real leftist phase when she was in Hollywood, when she started wearing little babushkas and peasant skirts and stuff."

Lee began work on her Parker project in May. She had had a real Dorothy Parker Memorial Day.

"I was having a really rotten weekend," she recalls. "I went to the video store, and I normally don't pick out sad movies. I like happy endings.

"I thought I really just want a movie that portrays a woman's life that might be worse than mine at this very moment ... because that's going to make me feel better. I'm going to know my life is not that bad."

She picked "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" because of the picture on the cover.

"I had no idea who she was," she says. "I got it and I watched and I was mesmerized. I can't really tell you if it was a good movie or a bad movie. I was just mesmerized by the idea of this woman.

"She was brilliant and funny and accomplished and [yet] her personal life was a complete, total wreck. I just found that interesting and very kind of, ah, familiar.

"And I watched it again. I said, 'OK, now I've got to find out who this woman is.' "

Wheels set in motion

The next morning she punched up Dorothy Parker on her computer.

"I started looking at some of the funny things she said. And then some of the poetry. And when I sat reading the poetry, this one called 'Ultimatum,' I think might have been the first one I saw, I thought this looks like a song to me."

"Ultimatum" begins:

"I'm wearied of wearying love, my friend,
Of worry and strain and doubt;
Before we begin, let us view the end,
And maybe I'll do without ..."

"So I grabbed my guitar, and I stood in front of the computer and I just started playing what I thought it would sound like as a song. And I thought, 'That's weird. I'm going to get a book of her poetry.' "

Which she did and then almost immediately she called Penguin, the publisher in New York.

"I have this idea. I want to put Dorothy Parker's poetry to music," she remembers telling them. "Do I need to buy the rights to anything?"

She was told to call a law firm in Baltimore.

"That's where I live," she said, surprised. It turns out Gordon Feinblatt handles the rights because it represents the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Just before her death in 1967, Parker had bequeathed her estate and the rights to her works to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with the stipulation that when he died the estate would go to the NAACP. He was assassinated a year after her death.

Lillian Hellman, playwright friend and kindred spirit, was her executor, but she did nothing. Parker's ashes remained in a lawyer's desk drawer for 20 years. Eventually they were brought to Baltimore where they are interred in a small memorial at the NAACP headquarters in northwest Baltimore.

Niki Lee bought the rights to turn Parker's poems into songs for $400. Nobody else seems to have even asked.

"I'm only the second person in Baltimore to ever even call and inquire about Dorothy Parker," Lee says. "That's what they told me."

She started writing the songs in a sudden burst of creative energy.

"I was having a good time," she says. "I went into this weird trance for about five days, in my room, in my pajamas. I sort of forgot to eat. I had to remind myself to go to the john.

"I just sat there and wrote song after song, turning page after page, just to see the poems I could relate to or that looked like they could be structures of songs.

"So I wrote 13 songs in about six days. I've never done anything like that in my life. Then when it was done, it was done. And I had no clue what I would do with them after that."

She thought she'd just interject them into her performances. She had sung for about 10 years with her second husband, Lenny Williams, a jazz pianist, around Washington in places such as the Park Hyatt and Blues Alley.

"We had a successful little duo," she says. "We did a lot of cabaret stuff, and we recorded a record and CD of jazz standards."

They're no longer married. These days Williams composes music for the "National Geographic Explorer" TV series. Lee sang on New Year's Eve at the Four Seasons Hotel, near Georgetown in Washington. About 10 days ago she opened with some of her Parker songs for Lloyd Cole, a "literate pop singer," at the Ramshead Tavern in Annapolis.

Feeling the rhythm

She sang her Parker songs for the first time in September at the Baltimore Book Fair, and did the one-woman project as a work in progress at the Fells Point Creative Alliance's space in Highlandtown.

"It's an old auto parts store on Conkling Street," she says. "It's sort of a warehouse kind of place, very New York-looking. It's really kind of cool. There are tables and couches and a real bar."

She did her songs and a piece adapted from a Parker story "Arrangement in Black and White," a sardonic satire on race relations.

"It's very powerful," she says. "And I was excited doing it and people really liked it."

The creation of the show evolved from Lee's reading of the stories as well as Parker biographies and books. She started reading the stories as monologues and then began writing her own monologue during a bout of Christmas depression.

"I was sitting in my kitchen, and I thought, 'There are a lot of people who are feeling this way, sad and lonely and confused.'

"When I started writing it, it turned into her, what she would have said. And I had her talking to a bottle of Scotch as her friend, that seemed to make sense because she was lonely and spent a lot of time alone, and she drank a lot.

"So I made this little scene between her and a bottle of Scotch," Lee says. "I decided to be her voice, like whiskey thoughts."

But Parker's personality remains elusive.

"Even her close friends didn't think they knew her very well because she was very secretive about a lot of things," Lee says. "I latched on to her vulnerability. That mask she put on to be tough in a man's world.

"She was a writer, and she wanted to live in that man's world. She couldn't show she was soft on the inside. But it just comes screaming through in all her stories and poetry and everything: her vulnerability, her clinginess, her neediness for men."

A lot of Parker's poetry was about lost men, if not lost love.

But Lee remains unclear what kind of feminist she might have been, if any kind.

"I don't know if she's a feminist or not, maybe by default. I don't think she set out to be a proponent of women's rights.

"She was so left in all her leanings, though, politically. She played a big part in raising money during the Spanish Civil War. Which then led to her being blacklisted later. She didn't even let that get her down, really."

And Parker and her poetry and her quips and cracks remain remarkably contemporary.

"That's the thing about people so on the edge," Niki Lee says. "She drank too much. She had sex too much. She just was over the top in everything. And those are the kind of people who live on. Because their energy is so explosive, I don't think they can be contained to one time period.

"Their energy just keeps getting recycled because it was so intense. I think," she says.

"For good or for bad."