City Beat June 2014

June ICON Magazine City Beat 2014

    

 At the 113^th PAFA Annual Student Exhibition we noticed an emphasis on “art for art’s sake.” One student had constructed a large open plot of plastic kitchen utensils, a sort of faux Midtown diner for Barbie dolls. The bizarre walk-through display reminded us that one cannot go beyond a certain degree of logic in art. We noticed a preponderance of paintings, namely facial portraits, duplicating the kind of theatrical staging common in photography. “They don’t seem to be well painted enough to be convincing,” our artist friend, Noel G. Miles, suggested. “The larger fact doesn’t change: Expression still counts. What you are trying to convey still counts.” The best student pieces focused on conceptuality, or a tight unity of theme, rather than Gehry like incongruousness.  We saw excellent black and white “draftsman” renditions (reminding us of the work of Georges Rouault), and were fascinated by student Lauren Pellerito’s sculpture of two tree roots in a light “embrace.” We spoke with students Matthew Carrieri, Santiago Galeas and former student, Chuck Schultz (who dedicated a painting in our name). The annual student exhibition attracts a diverse, mostly upscale crowd (think The Philadelphia Story and Devon Horse Show). We heard from Hieke Rass that Chase Utley (Phillies) and his wife were in the building browsing for art for their new home. When we spotted Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest (they get around) shaking hands with people as they waited to board an elevator, we couldn’t help but think how tiring it must be to be Gerry with so many people offering to shake your hand. Does Gerry even remember their names in the morning?

From PAFA we headed to Tops bar on 15^th Street where the student exhibitors went to hang out after the show. In this smoking den of artistic indignity, we spotted wannabe Guillaume Apollinaire’s, aspiring Georgia O’Keeffe’s, a few posers, and even an artist named Kyle, who happened to be a dead ringer for Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Seeing so many drunken artists made us want to bump into a jock or a vacuous cheerleader type. The paneled bar somehow called to mind the legendary Tin Angel on South 2^nd Street, where we wound up a week or two later (thanks to an invite by Randy Alexander of Randex Communications) to hear a live concert by Kenny Davin Fine, a super buff physician who sings best when he taps into his Kabbalah Jewish roots (and forgets Dylan). Fine talked at length about the delights of a gluten free diet and ended the evening with a song.

 In 2010 we attended groundbreaking ceremonies for architect Frank Gehry’s underground addition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gehry talked about a new museum loading dock, gallery and storage area. The audience was charmed by the always informal, quip-happy 1989 Pritzker Prize winner who seemed to be at the peak of his architectural celebrity. Yet the launching of the 81 million dollar underground utility space project had an anti climatic feel: the buried addition would never be a “seen” addition to the city’s skyline. Since 2010, appreciation for Gehry’s work has taken a nosedive. “When did Frank Gehry become a joke?” many now ask, referring to the architect’s cold, skeletal structures, especially his proposed design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, which has been compared to everything from a Nazi concentration camp to an unfinished overpass. As a friend remarked, “The best feature of the Gehry project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that it is virtually all underground, which means that no one outside of the building really has to see it. If only every city that is afflicted with the latest Gehry monstrosity could be so lucky as to not have to look at the results. “

In another bizarre PMA-related story, we received a series of emails from a local writer who told us to be on the lookout for two major (coming) law suits charging art critic Edward J. Sozanski (deceased) and former PMA CEO Anne D’Harnoncourt (deceased) with conspiracy. Conspiracy to do what, we asked? How does one sue dead people, unless of course the suit involves the institutions they were once associated with?  “This is no joke,” the reporter assured us, “you will read the story when it breaks.”  

We braved a crowded Route 38 bus to attend the 7^th Annual Centennial Celebration in Fairmount Park’s Horticulture Center to support park conservancy. The long and winding road to the Center is far from the bus stop, so we hiked on foot to the crowded Stephen Starr-catered event. We love Fairmount Park, especially Valley Green, though we wish there was no graffiti on the rocks and trees there. Can an event ever be too large? We were guzzled up by the swirling mass of people, some of whom included the mayor and his wife, Gerard H. Sweeney, Patricia Kind, John K. Binswanger, Darrell L. Clarke, and reps from the Phillies, Peco, Bank of America, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and countless others. At one point we felt carried along, even pushed by the crowds, like someone being lifted and passed over the heads of people at a rave. Serenity returned when we stood face-to-face with Laura Krebes (Cashman and Associates), who got us a dinner spot next to Al Spivey, Jr., Chief of Staff to the Majority Leader (City Council), with whom we discussed the politics of Frank L. Rizzo. The butler-style hors d’oeuvres reception and dinner reminded us of a Federico Fellini fashion show:  lines of synchronized marching servers, silver trays in hand, crisscrossing the maze of revelers like models on multiple runways. The highly dramatic evening ended with terrific rain and wind storm that unfurled the edges of the massive white dinner canopy, forcing us to ditch Septa and hitch a ride into Center City.              

We danced briefly with Blanka Zizka at the Wilma’s Annual Theater Lovers Fete, a fundraising party honoring Virginia and Harvey Kimmel, who have supported the theater in various ways since 1998. The multi-tiered event included a reception, a special stage show for participants, and a fundraiser-auction dinner held in the Doubletree Hotel. We were almost introduced to Harvey and Virginia Kimmel but the couple’s long receiving line prevented that from happening. Our friend Will Jordon arranged a seat for us at his center stage table when his friend—a woman named Rothschild, no less-- had to leave early. Look for The Wilma’s production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, directed by David Kennedy.

Opera Philadelphia’s Don Giovanni at the Academy got bad Inquirer reviews, but for us it made us think of the time we visited Mozart’s home in Vienna, as well as stories of how the composer would travel back and forth from his home to Saint Stephen’s cathedral, a few blocks away. (The cathedral is still riddled with bullet holes and shell cashing from WWII.) Mozart, a devout Catholic, ended Don Giovanni with a virtual catechism lesson, a fact that doesn’t seem to deter the opera’s secular popularity in 2014. The composer was much abused by his father as a child. The abuse was so great, in fact, that Father Mozart would drag little Mozart by the hair (or hand) through the streets and public markets. It’s no wonder then that Don Giovanni ends with the anti-hero being dragged to hell.       

            

        We visited Palmerton, Pennsylvania and noticed the town’s inactivity and the quiet. It was a Saturday morning, after all, a time when many towns are alive with activity.  We saw very few people walking about. If you are sick of inner city congestion, chronic Septa detours on weekends (thanks to marathons and street festivals), standing room only “seats” on the Frankford Market El, and unrelenting stop and go traffic (not to mention angry drivers and honking horns), this peaceful river town will soothe your spirit. The mountains certainly add a dimension of beauty along with the Lehigh River and Aquishicola Creek. The sight of the famous Blue Mountain Tunnel that cuts through the Kittatinny Ridge has a western Colorado feel. It is also takes you to the turn that goes into Palmerton. We remember the Blue Mountain tunnel from childhood, but that’s another story.

Who would not want to escape to a place like this? Of course, for any city sophisticate, the ‘John Boy Walton’ beauty of this town doesn’t erase the fact that it is also a cultural wasteland. Forget rock concerts, jazz festivals, theater, opera, art galleries, and museums. You might be able to hang out at the local Subway restaurant with its plastic orange chair Kabuki theater seating area, or hunt out a local Dunkin Donuts, or go bowling, but aside from this your only option is a pastime like rafting. Or staying at home and weeding your garden. There’s Palmerton hospital in case you break an arm, have an allergic reaction to a bee sting, or come down with food poisoning.  If your imagination is rich enough you might be able to fantasize about what goes on in the large gothic Victorian house that sits alone on a mountain top and which seems to be the town’s crowning glory.  The site of this house from a distance is impressive. It reminded us of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, or even the house in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

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Living in the New Security State

One of the greatest job opportunities for a young person today has to be in the security field. That’s right. Forget software technology, insurance, real estate, sales or becoming a lawyer. The security industry is the future.

Let’s review. Going to law school is no longer a guarantee of getting a position with a reliable law firm. There are just too many lawyers. In the last decade, I’ve met more out of work lawyers, or ex-lawyers, or law school dropouts than I can count.

What about becoming a funeral director? That can work but only if you do not have a fear of death, or dying. While there are no lawyers in my family, we do have funeral directors (the Donohoe Funeral Home Empire are relatives on my mother’s side). The death industry is a lucrative business, even with the popularity of cremation (somebody has to stoke the fires and gather the ashes). But it takes a special personality to work with dead people, especially in a culture where so many people are even afraid to attend funerals.

How about real estate? While jobs in real estate may seem to be booming, most of these "jobs" are part time and dicey at best. Becoming a real estate agent these days is as common as becoming a mail order minister. In my own family, there are 4 or 5 real estate agents (and the numbers are still growing). These real estate nieces, nephews and one sister-in-law had high hopes when they first got their license but once that happened, they discovered just how crowded the field is. For the most part, real estate jobs are a lot like babysitting jobs. Weeks can pass without any activity, but then there’s a high cycle and all systems are go. In the interim, the agents stay glued to their cell phones twenty-four seven.

"She’s showing another house," I’ve heard my brother say many times, referring to his absent wife when I’d call on weekends. Real estate house showings know no boundaries—Sundays, holidays, even Christmas and Thanksgiving are all fair game "show" days. It’s the potential buyer, after all, who sets the schedule.

The security industry, of course, has become big business since the nation went on a security roll after September 2001. There’s airport and Amtrak security, TSA body friskers, yellow vested agents pacing tarmac airfields, highways, parking lots, shopping malls, gas stations, vacant lots and isolated, overgrown-with-weeds Conrail yards. Go to a department store like Macy’s and you’ll see more security agents than customers. Yes, Virginia, the world has become a barbed wire camp, and with the new security conscious world there’s a preponderance of public cameras, both hidden and visible.

In the Riverwards now there are scores of somber dressed in black security guards in the local Rite Aid, CVS, the various Dollar Stores and Dunkin Donuts. There are security guards where there didn’t used to be security guards. There’s even a yellow vested security guard stationed in front of the Clothespin near City Hall. This guard stands mannequin-like watching people as they loiter or wait for buses.

Where are there not security guards, is perhaps the right question to ask, although whatever answer you might give will be sure to change by next year.

Security jobs are lonely jobs where there tends to be a lot of standing and watching. Persons with weak knees (or eyes that cannot focus) need not apply. Ditto for fidgety types who can’t (and won’t) stand still. When security guards do move around, presumably it’s to patrol or "shadow" a shopper who seems suspicious in some way. The trick for the guard is to do this without appearing to harass or follow someone outright, which might cause offense. One local store not far from my house has a stationed guard near the front entrance, so that the guard is the first person you see when entering the store. As soon as the sliding glass door opens, you are confronted with a badge. This is a constant reminder that we live in that barbed wire society, and it’s depressing and disheartening.

While these individual guards may be nice people, their role is to regard every customer as a potential thief and suspect, even if a customer happens to be a habited nun or an elderly woman in a flowered sun hat who walks with a cane. Even people in wheelchairs are prime suspects. Everybody is a potential criminal. Given this situation, how are we (the customer) supposed to react when we enter a store and come face to face with a guard who smiles and says hello but whose eyes seem to suggest that we may just be a shoplifter posing as "someone nice?"

Accepting the new security state as an unfortunate inevitability suggests that we have come to terms with the fact that we live in a rotten society where nobody can be trusted, and that we should just accept the fact that the same guard who smiles and nods to us when we enter a store will also watch us as we shop.

Yet it is getting to the point where entering a store often involves forced ritual eye contact with a guard, even if you may not want to acknowledge the guard with a "Good morning."

"It’s a psychic energy drain," as one friend of mine commented. "I might say hello to the sales clerk, but I don’t want to have to say hello to all of the guards in every store I visit. This makes it seem like passing through US Customs. I just want to go into a store without being "inspected." And I don’t want to go out of my way to smile and say ‘hi there’ when I just rolled out of bed."

One may blame the rowdiness of certain neighborhoods or cities for the new security state.

"Are the people in this neighborhood prone to violent outbursts, or what?" I heard someone say, as they entered the local WAWA on a weekend night and counted four or five Philadelphia policemen standing in a row with their backs against the take-out sandwich counter. Seeing four police officers guarding an almost empty store was an extremely odd sight indeed.

Are things so bad in the Riverwards that it takes three or four Philadelphia police officers to "guard" a WAWA, where at first glance the worst "criminal" offenses there seem only to be insistent panhandlers (Mother Teresa’s people), post-midnight drunks in multicolored Mohawks, lines at the gas pumps, or giggling girls rushing in for take-out snacks?

One can only presume that WAWA knows what they are doing, but the negative effect of seeing so many police guarding a WAWA can be misleading.

"Is your neighborhood turning into a slum?" a friend from out of town asked me several weeks ago. "Do you risk life and limb when going out for a cup of Hazelnut coffee? Has there been a shooting there?"

"No," I replied, "this neighborhood has always been super safe, and I know that most people here would like to keep it that way. "

Perhaps what I should have said is, "The guards are just standing around and waiting for that unknown something that may come down the pike…"

Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle Get Married in Philadelphia City Hall

Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle get married in City Hall

Weekly Press • Wed, Jun 04, 2014

By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

The big news last week was that marriage for same sex couples became legal in the state of Pennsylvania. This was something I didn’t expect to happen until 2020, if only because Pennsylvania can be a far more conservative state than most. (Pennsylvania, after all, is still in the business of selling wine and spirits, and it doesn’t look like liquor privatization here will be happening anytime soon.) An even greater surprise was the fact that Governor Tom Corbett said he would not challenge the new ruling. Corbett, a Republican, was expected to challenge any change in the definition of marriage, but like so many politicians today he recognizes that same sex marriage is here to stay.

Corbett didn’t challenge the ruling because the so called "gay thing" is no longer a liberal or conservative issue. The roots of this can be traced back to the days when Barry Goldwater ran for president against Lyndon Johnson. At that time, Goldwater said that he supported civil rights for homosexuals, an absolutely revolutionary thing for any politician to say in the 1960s, but especially for a conservative Republican. Years later, when Dick Cheney ran as George W. Bush’s Vice Presidential candidate, he made it clear during a debate that he supported same sex marriage. That announcement drew sighs of shock and disbelief from many Republican social conservatives who saw the acceptance of marriage equality as part of the liberal social agenda. The fantasy then seemed to be that Republican conservatives didn’t have gay children—or, if they did, they bound and gagged them in the family china closet.

After Cheney announced his support for marriage equality, more and more Republicans began to talk about their gay children and family members. Suddenly the idea that "the gay thing" only happened to liberal Democrats went flat like a bad tire on I-95. Sexual orientation, after all, is no respecter of political party or religious affiliation: A Baptist minister can have a gay son just as easily as a Broadway playwright can. After all, having your child "turn gay" has nothing to do with how you raise that child or what values you instill in him or her. Forget about "educating" a child to like the opposite sex; that’s like training a pigeon to crawl onto your lap and meow like a cat.

While thinking of last week’s marriage ruling, my thoughts turned to poet Walt Whitman, famous for his volume of poetry Leaves of Grass.

In the late 1980s, I took a tour of the Walt Whitman house in Camden, New Jersey, and got into an argument with the elderly tour guide. "Mr. Whitman was not a homosexual!" she said, angry that I had the gall to bring up the question. In an attempt to reason with her, I held up a 1982 issue of Partisan Review magazine [containing the essay, "Whitman and the politics of Gay Liberation"] and asked her to put the magazine inside Whitman’s desk. She took the magazine out of politeness, though I’m sure she destroyed it the moment I walked out the door. She then went on to mention that Whitman’s nurse, Mary Oakes Davis, had been in love with him. "Well, that may be true," I said, "But one of the fun—or agonizing-- things about life is that many people can fall in love with us but that doesn’t mean that the love has to be returned. Unrequited love is probably more common than the returned kind."

The guide then suggested that Whitman did return the love but to me this only indicated that he might have been bisexual. I was taken aback when she then quoted Whitman’s infamous line to John Addington Symonds when Symonds confronted the poet on the homoerotic content of the Calamus poems in Leaves of Grass.

"…I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid influences—which are disavowed by me and seem damnable."

Wow, spoken like Billy Sunday in a preacher’s tent.

On the surface, these words seem pretty clear, even if Edward Carpenter, a contemporary of Symonds’, knew that Whitman was telling a bold face lie. Carpenter blamed Whitman’s cowardice on the social atmosphere of 1891. Carpenter actually came out and said that he slept with Whitman and he gave details of the encounter to a writer named Arthur Gavin. As for the poet’s off-putting letter to Symonds, Charley Shively in his book about Whitman, Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Comerados, states that, "Whitman wasn’t ready to join Symonds in a crusade for gay rights," although he was quick to praise Symonds’ poem, Love and Death, which honored two Athenian male lovers "who sacrificed themselves in the war against Sparta."

"Comrade love," Shively continues, "was thus presented as less selfish than family love, which was concerned with procreation more than community….Whitman’s problem with Symonds was that the Englishman wasn’t enough of a democrat."

Whitman was being smart and discreet. He also didn’t like labels. Had he come out and joined Symonds’ crusade, it’s unlikely that his poetry would have maintained its broad based appeal.

Whitman had special male friends like ex-Confederate soldier Peter Boyle [a thin Irishman who was the poet’s primary companion in Camden for 15 years]; Warren Fritzenger [the male nurse who took Whitman along the Camden waterfront in his wheelchair]; William Sydnor [a guy who drove a Pittsburgh streetcar]; David Fender—"a redhaired young man," Whitman wrote; John Ferguson, "tall and slender," and Willy Hayes, "a drummer in a marine band." There was also Walter Dean, whom Whitman met in Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker’s Department store (John Wanamaker, the so-called King of Merchants, banned Leaves of Grass from Wanamaker’s bookstore). But I have only scratched the surface.

I left the small, Mickel Street house that day not having convinced the housekeeper that Whitman was gay, even though thousands of other visitors—famous academicians, poets, critics, writers—had all heard the same talk from this [otherwise gracious] elderly lady who went out of her way to insist that the old bard was as heterosexual as John Wayne. Unfortunately, I did not ask the guide if she had any comments on Oscar Wilde’s famous remark when Wilde was asked by George Ives in London whether the American poet was "one of the Greek Lovers." Ives asked the big question after Wilde’s visit to the poet’s brother’s house at 431 Stevens Street in Camden (now demolished), where Whitman lived from 1873 to 1884.

Wilde at that time told Ives, "Of course, I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," but he didn’t say any more. The "Of course" speaks volumes.

Literary history is full of stories about how Whitman dealt with women who wrote him love letters, including unflattering and shocking descriptions of Mary Davies (the woman praised by the tour guide) as a woman who preyed on widowers for their inheritances. Poet Allen Ginsberg, when I interviewed him by phone in the early 1990s, was full of Whitman lore, of how he had slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with Whitman, and so on and on. While I’ve never been a fan of sexual bragging rights, investigating a "chain link fence" like this can be fun.

If Whitman were alive and well today, there’s little doubt that he would have been one of the first in line at Philadelphia City Hall to apply for a marriage license. Whitman loved City Hall and I’m sure he would have made the trek via high speed line with Peter Doyle to tie the knot. I don’t think the Good Gray Poet, as he was called, would have wanted a lot of congratulatory marriage fanfare either. His poetry indicates that he knows the ups and downs of relationships, so he would harbor no illusions about marriage. "Perpetual honeymoons exist only in dreams," he might even suggest. While he would have been proud of Pennsylvania’s new openness, at the same time, I’m sure he would urge everyone to move on and begin to concentrate on the world’s real problems, which have nothing to do about how or "who" we love.

ICON CITY BEAT May 2014

We sat near Inquirer theater critic Toby Zinman at the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective’s (PAC) production of Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play about two warring queens, and sensed that she was going to give the Dan Hodge-directed work a high grade. It’s talent that counts, not the theater space. PAC is in a far more humble space than the Wilma’s rustic beginning theater on Sansom Street. The Broad Street Ministry (PAC’s home base when the company is not using other venues) might as well be a basketball court sans stage. It must be difficult for actors to have an audience so close to their field of action. We were seated in the front row and had to be careful not to stretch out our legs and possibly trip Queen Elizabeth (Krista Apple-Hodge) or Mary Stuart (Charlotte Northeast) as they paced and gestured. More leg shifting occurred when the ensemble of Elizabethan characters came and went in a flurry of busyness. The Tudor-evoking interior of BSM was more than suitable for this particular play even if we had to pay close attention to the Elizabethan dialogue. A quick recitation of Elizabethan English can produce indecipherable language puzzles. Act II was so dazzling, we didn’t even hear the police sirens on Broad Street. 

Are some events in the city considered too grand for press coverage? We’re thinking of the Grand Season Finale Gala and Concert honoring Marguerite and H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest at the Kimmel Center. Though we put our press bid in early, ticket sales for the cocktail dress attire soiree, which included dinner and a concert in Verizon Hall, soared so high we were informed that there wouldn’t be enough food to feed working staff or event organizers. We sat this one out but were happy to learn that the Gala raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Curtis. Of course, the best way to avoid a food planning glitch is to invite press before ticketing begins or, barring that, invite press to the opening cocktail party, but not the dinner. 

We did eventually find a cozy welcome at Art Unleashed 2014, the University of the Arts’ fundraiser that supports student-artist scholarships with the sale of artwork from students, faculty and alumni. No food shortages plagued Hamilton Hall. We didn’t find writer Camille Paglia (a UArts Professor of Humanities and Media Studies), but we met the very open, Harvard-bred president, Sean T. Buffington, the Pope Francis of academics who hosts student events like Pizza with the President. 

Don Juan made us think of the “large cast” anti-conformist, anti-Hollywood Robert Altman films. In this Blanka Zizka-directed work, a Mother Divine character appears when Don Juan arranges to spend a night in the Divine Lorraine Hotel. Later, Mother Teresa appears to the beleaguered vet, only in Vogel’s world she is a “Missionary Position” atheist. The play, while hugely engaging, is not without a feminist catechism lesson or two regarding the soldier’s treatment of women. The poignant ending—Don Juan holding a handmade cardboard sign, Help a Homeless Vet—was sadly all too familiar.  

Vogel’s Mother Divine reminded us of our visit to Mother Divine’s Gladwyne mansion several years ago when we were guests at a banquet. The white banquet table sat about 60 people. A swan on a lake of glass was the centerpiece. Women outnumbered men about ten to one. Mother sat at the head of the table; beside her was a setting for (the long dead) Father Divine. Dinner began when she rang a large hand bell. A female cook in a white uniform produced the platters from a small kitchen. Platters holding salads, vegetables, condiments and sauces set the pace for more complicated dishes offering meats and fish, rice, potatoes, breads, and more vegetables and meats. When platters are passed from one diner to another, they must never touch the table. Diners must also not hold two platters at the same time, so the synchronization of the plate passing had the movements of a dance. While this was happening, we listened to an old audio tape of a Father Divine sermon. The mostly elderly crowd—men in suits and women in Peace Mission uniforms with a beret and a jacket embossed with a V—combined eating with the singing of hymns. A few elderly white women, European by birth, clapped their hands in sing-song fashion between mouthfuls. 

The city’s official Benjamin Franklin impersonator, Ralph Archbold, greeted us at the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Franklin-Lavoisier Prize Ceremony. We hadn’t seen Archbold since his stroke in June 2010. This got us thinking about “unofficial” Franklin impersonators who seemed to multiply when Archbold was out sick. At the CHF affair (which honored chemist/historian Fred Aftalion), we also met (impersonator) Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), called the Father of Chemistry, who at the age of 28 in 1771 married the 13-year-old Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze. When we shook Monsieur Lavoisier’s hand, we warned him that times have changed, and that there are now retroactive laws that make one liable for prosecution for courting underage children. When Lavoisier asked if he could be arrested today for his 1771 marriage, we said that anything was possible, and that even Franklin, given his licentious behavior in France, might be put on a list. At that, Lavoisier shook his head and said he was just thankful that his wife, Madame Paulze, did eventually grow up to become an excellent assistant in his lab and that she had also done a marvelous job publishing his memoirs. 

At the Veni Vidi Lantern Theater Company’s 20th anniversary party, we chatted with Nick Stuccio, President & Producing Director of Fringe Arts, and then spoke with a nice couple about poet Walt Whitman’s intense dislike of Shakespeare. We mention Shakespeare because we were part of the audience at a Lantern town hall discussion (The Social Canonization of Past Political Leaders) based on the company’s February production of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, of course, is a writer that people either love or hate, but the lovers were out en masse that evening, as most of the lengthy questions from the gallery reminded us of the art of the monologue. Audience interjections started early, barely ten minutes into the start of things. What happened to the tradition of the moderator opening the floor for questions? Are we a city of aggressive talkers? We’re looking forward to the Lantern’s production of Tom Stoppard’sArcadia, but in 2015 it is back to Shakespeare again with The Taming of the Shrew, when, we’re sure, the talkers will be back in force. 

There’s nothing like spring in Manayunk (or Paris), especially when it’s the grand opening of a new gallery. The Bazemore Gallery (4339 Main Street) is so smartly Feng Shui we felt comfortable the moment we walked in the door. Owner/artist Lenny Bazemore was all smiles as he arranged photo ops, introductions and kept the champagne flowing. We joined Philly artists Keith R. Breitfeller and Brian David Dennis while checking out acclaimed Hong Kong artist Justin Y’s first U.S. solo exhibit. There are no art galleries in Old City or Center City quite this beautiful. Bazemore, an artist himself, has installed a small, live garden on the wall. It’s framed like a painting to complement an iconic large woodcut of the Manayunk canal salvaged from the basement.

Legendary Philadelphian Miss Emily Bache, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin who often appeared in Ruth Seltzer’s Inquirer Society columns, is no longer on the scene, but if we could bring her back we’d take her—like Dante took Beatrice—to see The Art Gallery at City Hall. The occasion was a Bike Racks and Bicycle Art exhibition with a special Bike P’ARTs exhibit in room 116 and on the upper floors. In a City Hall that once had about as much ambience as a Prussian work camp, it’s nice to see a touch of the Parisian. Though the art in City Hall concept began in 1984, it was largely a forgotten affair, attracting only city employees. In 2010, Mayor Nutter transformed the space into a full-scale art gallery. The current exhibit (until June 2014) emphasizes themes of sustainability in the urban environment. We found two admirable works by Regina Kelly Barthmaier and Kendall Wilkens. Wilkens’ piece is a Victorian ball gown made out of chains and other bicycle parts. Though it’s doubtful that Miss Bache would wear the Victorian bicycle chain ball gown (much too Marquis de Sade for a sedate lady), she’d certainly be impressed with the gallery’s first class reception. We urge The Print Center to swing by and pick up party pointers.   

We ended the month at the Philly Farm & Food Fest at the Convention Center where we went from food demos, to samplings and lectures. The event is a project of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and Philadelphia Fair Food, the latter co-founded by Ann Karlen and Marilyn Anthony. We sampled vegan scrapple, cheeses, nuts, and gourmet coffees. There was a Local Libations Lounge offering tastings of Dad’s Hat Rye Whisky, Asian Pear Wine and other alcoholic treats. This was easily the most popular event, but participants had to listen to an extended talk before being allowed to go to the tasting table, and then they were only treated to a thimble-size sample. Because of antiquated (and never-to-change) Pennsylvania liquor laws, only very small amounts of spirits can be distributed by exhibitors. 

People in the Street, not Historians and Politcans, Saved DREAM GARDEN

Maxfield Parrish and Dream Garden: Art, Curses, Love and Politics Edward Bok Weekly Press • Wed, Apr 23, 2014 By Thom Nickels Contributing Writer Recently, I gave a talk at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts on the history of Philadelphia’s famous mural, Dream Garden, located in the lobby of the Curtis Building on Washington Square. The story is a fascinating one. The story begins with a man named Edward Bok. In 1887, Bok became an advertising manager at Scribner’s Magazine. Two years later, he was at the Curtis Building on Philadelphia’s Washington Square as editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Bok transformed the magazine from a fluffy woman’s magazine into a best-selling publication that campaigned for women’s suffrage, pacifism, and the protection of the environment. Because Bok believed that good art should find a place in public buildings, he asked Cyrus Curtis of Curtis Publishing if he would include a mural in what was then the new Curtis building. Bok wasn’t thinking of the lobby, at least not yet, but of the large public dining room on the building’s top floor. He hired Fred Maxfield Parrish to paint a series of seventeen panels between the windows there. The five year long project resulted in panels depicting a series of gardens with youths and maidens frolicking in colorful costumes. Bok then turned his attention to a large blank white wall in the lobby of the Curtis Building. The wall measured over one thousand square feet. The space seemed to call for a mural, much the same way that many outdoor spaces today call to Jane Golden and the Mural Arts Project. Bok wanted to find another artist, and rather than re-employ Parrish, which would have been the logical thing to do, he looked elsewhere, as if trying to find someone better. He traveled to London and visited with English artist Edwin A. Abbey. Although Abbey was working on a project for the capitol building in Harrisburg, the two men struck a deal. Abbey was given the okay to paint anything he wanted to paint for the Curtis Center. Abbey’s idea was a theme based on “The Grove of Academe,” with Plato and his disciples lounging around in philosophical ecstasy. Bok returned to America, but the very day that Abbey started the project in London, he fell over dead, as if cursed by a competing artist’s voodoo spell. Bok then went on a talent scout hunt and found a Wilmington artist named Howard Pyle. Pyle was a good choice because he also happened to know a lot about Plato. But the hoped for connection never came about because when Bok tried to telephone the artist at his Wilmington home, he was told that Pyle had just died an hour earlier while traveling in Italy. Sometimes life is like that, unpredictable, cruel and only sometimes fair. When a third artist, Boutet de Monvel, a famous decorative master, agreed to do the project, Bok invited Monvel to Philadelphia to inspect the space at the Curtis building but almost immediately after arrangements were made, Monvel died in Paris. Now it was time for Bok, who was beginning to feel cursed, to take stock. He started to think collectively. He asked six of the leading mural artists in the county to submit a full color mural proposal on any subject of their choosing. The six anonymous submissions were then submitted and analyzed by a panel of judges. But this time the curse manifested itself in the form of six blatant rejections. He then remembered a glass mosaic curtain by Louis C. Tiffany he’d once seen in Mexico City’s Municipal Theatre. He recalled the look of favrile glass set in cement and how that produced a marvelous luminosity. Bok contacted Tiffany and got him to agree to a partnership but they still needed an artist to provide the preliminary sketch. Bok went back to Parrish and asked him to come up with a sketch for Tiffany despite the fact that Parrish had never worked with glass or mosaics. Parrish’s preliminary drawing was approved. Six months of planning and thirty skilled artisans and over one million pieces of glass later, Dream Garden was given a New York exhibition where it was viewed by over seven thousand people. Art critics at the time were thrilled: they said the mural went way beyond the limited expression of a painted canvass. It took six months for the mural to be disassembled in New York and then reassembled in Philadelphia. Parrish was born in 1870 in Maryland into a family of Quaker physicians. He went to Haverford College but then transferred to PAFA in 1892. In 1894, he got his first commission to paint the Old King Cole mural in the new Mask and Whig Club. After that, success came to him easily. Once he became a seasoned artist he called himself “a mechanic who loved to paint.” His first magazine cover illustration commission was in 1895, and from then on it was a roller coaster ride. A passion for gardening caused Parrish to insist that a reflecting pool be placed in front of Dream Garden when it was installed in the Curtis Center. His idolization of youth in Italianate landscape settings seemed to reflect aspects of his romantic life. He had two love affairs of note, both with much younger women, while maintaining his status of a married man. Sue Lewin was a 16 year old farm girl when Parrish and his wife employed her to look after their two children. Parrish was 32 or 33 at the time, an age difference that in today’s world would almost certainly catapult his name into a scandalous Philly.com breaking news headline. Lewin became Parrish’s model, but she was no random castaway. A journalist once asked Lewin if there was something to her association with the artist and she said, “I’ll have you know that Mr. Parrish has never seen my bare knee.” Sometimes political white lies are necessary, because the exact opposite of this proved to be true when, sometime after both their deaths, workers in Parrish’s Plainfield, New Hampshire home found revealing photos Parrish had taken of Lewin. Lewin remained with Parrish until his 90th birthday when she asked him to marry her. When he refused to do that, Lewin went off and married somebody else. Another love, Nancy Roelker, was just 21 years old when she met the 66 year old Parrish in 1936. Parrish’s letters to Roelker survive, but Parrish destroyed Nancy’s letters to him, fearing a scandal. In the early 20th century, almost every home in America had a Maxfield Parrish print. Parrish’s work saturated the market. He was Andy Warhol before there was an Andy Warhol. He did covers for Life, Collier’s, and Harper’s Weekly Magazines, posters and ads for Hires Root Beer and General Electric. He was commissioned to do murals for office buildings and hotels. In a way, his work—canvasses depicting eternal blue skies—reflected the Age of Innocence, although his popularity began to decline in the 1930s. And it really sunk after WW II. In the beginning of the 20th century, he was as popular as Van Gogh is today. After WW II, American art began to be noticed on the world stage, and Parrish became known as mainly an illustrator, banished by art critics to second fiddle status. Norman Rockwell, who once had a sustained artistic legacy and even a museum near Washington Square, suffered a similar fate—Rockwell, in fact, considered Parrish to be an artistic mentor. Until the summer of 1998, Dream Garden rested comfortably in the lobby of the Curtis Building, attracting tens of thousands of visitors who would view it without fanfare and then shuffle off to view Independence Hall or the Liberty Bell. It was just one more nice Philly attraction. Dream Garden was still attracting visitors despite the fact that Parrish’s artistic reputation had been demoted by those “art scholar squirrels”. Dream Garden in the 40s, 50s, and beyond was pretty much taken for granted in a city already filled with a lot of art. In the late 1990s, before the proposed sale of the mural was announced in the press, I worked in the Curtis Building and can say that many people who worked there at that time knew next to nothing about Dream Garden. The Dream Garden lobby was mostly regarded as a pretty walk-through area where one might only occasionally glance at the body contours of a blue mosaic nymph or naughty satyr. There were no adoring crowds, no multiple clicks of cameras. Before the 1998-Steve Wynn controversy, Dream Garden was another “taken-for-granted Philly treasure,” another addition to a list that ranged from historic houses to personalities. Dream Garden moved to center stage in July of 1998 when it was announced that an anonymous buyer wanted to remove it from the lobby of the Curtis Building. This was breaking news, and attracted considerably more attention than what passes as breaking news today. The impending sale was the result of the actions of Elizabeth C. Merriam, of Wynnewood, wife of real estate developer John W. Merriam, an early Gerry Lenfest-like figure who gave millions to area institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, University of the Arts, PAFA and Bryn Mawr College. Mr. and Mrs. Merriam lived in a Victorian mansion worth upwards of 119 million called ‘Maybrook,’ Mr. Merriam, who died in 1994, left a will specifying the sale. Later, Elizabeth would tell the press, “All I wanted to do was carry out his [Mr. Merriam’s} intentions.” When a friend who worked with me in the Curtis Building suggested that we do something about the sale, we tried to decide what that something would be. We were sitting in a café near the Warwick Hotel and came up with the idea of a 1960s style protest with hand made placards. We would walk back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the Curtis Building from noon to 1 p.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the crisis was resolved. The next day we bought flagpoles and duct tape, printed flyers and designed the protest signs. Our first day of protest was to be July 27. We told some people about the demonstration but not too many because we didn’t want to be talked out of it. Several people we told spoke up and told us, “It’s a done deal. The situation is hopeless.” In some ways it seemed like a ludicrous idea; two people do not a demonstration make. Or do they? On the afternoon of the first protest, we were driven to the site by a friend, who did not stick around to see what would happen. As I wrote in ‘Coming together to keep a ‘Dream’ alive,’ for The Inquirer, “…Our two person protest attracted immediate attention. Cars honked; tourists in horse-drawn carriages asked for fliers; Curtis Center office workers, couples, artists, students, kids of bicycles, elderly couples, parking meter attendants and others told us how shocked they were at the sale.” Many asked what they could do. We told them to come to the protests on Wednesday or Friday. By the end of the first protest, scores of people had promised to come Wednesday with friends. During that first two-person protest, we attracted the attention of Inquirer photographer Peter Tobia. The next day the picture of the demo appeared on page one of The Inquirer. I’d given Tobia my phone number as the contact number for the Arts Defense League, the name we decided to call our group. That Tuesday, July 28th was a watershed moment. My phone did not stop ringing. Many callers were from outside the city, and nearly every caller wanted to know what they could do to help. The second protest attracted nearly 70 people, plus a large chunk of the news media and the city’s civil disobedience squad. People helped with the petitions and promised to bring more friends to Friday’s demonstration. Suddenly the idea of keeping Dream Garden in the city seemed a very real possibility. We expected over 200 at Friday’s demonstration, but then Mayor Rendell suddenly announced at a news conference that Steve Wynn had backed out of the deal. Dream Garden would not be broken up into pieces or sections and shipped to a casino. We collected almost 700 signatures during that 3-day span. My friend and I were shuffled in and out of TV studios—Fox News, Channel 48, NBC 10, Channel 6 and 35. It was through the roof even if there was no WHYY or Marty Moss-Coane. A few television interviews were conducted in front of my apartment on Pine Street, and with each broadcast more people wanted to help solidify the Arts Defense League. There were other art works in the city that needed saving, we felt. Some of the people who joined us envisioned a new organization along the lines of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia with a Board of Directors, a President, Secretary and Treasurer. They asked to be given something to do while taking it upon themselves to write politicians and city agencies as ADL representatives. Get your photo and phone number published on page one of The Inquirer as the co-founder of a new organization, and see how quickly people flock to you with their own ideas about how the organization should be run. What was once so manageable—a simple two-person consensus—was slowly morphing into a large committee where dissenting views always threaten to hamper progress or bring about schism. A reporter from People Magazine telephoned me one night at my job in the Curtis Center, and said he wanted to interview me for the magazine. This created an exciting opportunity but in the end proved to be a disaster, because his wish to interview only me made it necessary for me to tell him that my friend and I were in this together. So while he did eventually interview both of us in an Old City restaurant, when I told my friend about the initial request of a single interview this set off a chain reaction of suspicion and distrust that in the end got this marvelous opportunity---a full feature in People —canned. As a result of the protest and the mayor’s action, on July 29, 1998 the Historical Commission notified the Merriam estate its intention to designate Dream Garden as an historic object under the City of Philadelphia’s historic Preservation ordinance. The Merriam estate appealed the historic designation, and so began three years of very costly litigation. In 2001, the Pew Charitable Trusts agreed to provide 3.5 million for purchase of the mural, as three of the 4 beneficiaries of the Merriam estate transferred their respective interests to PAFA. PAFA then agreed to keep Dream Garden in the city, promising to use its “best efforts” to keep it in its site in the Curtis Building. Until 2001, our group attended numerous hearings and testified at Historical Commission meetings, although as time went on-- and as heavier organizations with a board of directors weighed in--references to the Coalition for Philadelphia Art seemed to diminish. CPA eventually folded, a victim of the passage of time. Today, of course, I’m less than amused when I read references to that early grassroots effort to safeguard Dream Garden. I’m thinking about minimalist references to our efforts like—petition gatherers, a group of demonstrators or even time-warp phrases like, “the public also protested the sale of Dream Garden.” It is important to remember that the public did not also oppose the sale of Dream Garden, but that they were the first to protest the sale, and as such, were the ones to draw in the… politicians, who came later.

Where Do Dead Philly Journalists Go?

The Local Lens Published • Wed, Apr 30, 2014 By Thom Nickels Where do dead journalists go? Presumably they go where everyone else goes, but in the tightfisted, competitive fishbowl world of Philly journalism, once they disappear they are gone without a trace. Of course, there is the obituary, and/or the accompanying news story surrounding the event, but after that there seems to be a great silence. As a working journalist myself, why should I expect more? The answer to that is that I really don’t know. I’m thinking of Philadelphia Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski, who died suddenly in his home in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a couple of weeks ago. Sozanski wrote art criticism for The Inquirer for three long decades, and was a familiar face among Philly writers and reporters at press events at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and other institutions. I saw Sozanski often at PMA, beginning in the early 1990s when opening press events for exhibitions were a bigger deal than they are today. In those days, press events for major PMA exhibitions included a 3 course lunch (with wine) in the museum dinning room while journalists listened to an array of speakers. At the conclusion of the luncheon, everyone went home with the official exhibition catalogue, which was often an expensive art book costing upwards of 35 dollars in the museum gift shop. Philly journalists do not constitute one, big happy family; it is more like a disconnected, dysfunctional hierarchical family, which is to say that at those old time press events, you had Inquirer writers hanging with Inquirer or Daily News writers, while the scribes for the city’s alternative weeklies grouped together in lower cast huddles. Occasionally, writers who wrote for both publications would mix with both groups in a kind of cross pollination bliss. Magazine writers constituted their own special hierarchy, oblivious of newsprint’s "who’s who." But press event seating arrangements changed radically whenever a writer from The New York Times, or a foreign publication, visited. Suddenly the Inquirer writers would be seated off to the side, as if they wrote for supermarket tabloids. It was, in general, a good lesson in humility for all. After Sozanski’s death, Stephan Salisbury wrote an Inquirer piece about Sozanski in which he stated that the critic was "not distracted by institutional marketing efforts or the city’s cultural boosterism." This is no small accomplishment, given the pressures to produce good reviews. Salisbury quoted Joseph J. Rishel, PMA’s senior curator of European painting before 1900. Rishel described Sozanski as being "very thoughtful and very shy." He also stated that Sozanski was "wary of institutional pressure on his critical writing." During these press events I don’t think Sozanski and I exchanged any words beyond a cursory hello. Originally I interpreted this as an Inquirer "attitude" but that later changed. The art critic was indeed a shy person. Going to press events and observing the habits of fellow journalists is like going to the zoo and familiarizing yourself with the habits of different animals. You learn to embrace the weirdness. At some of those early press events, I’d see Sozanski with Inquirer food critic Rick Nichols, never suspecting that years down the line people would confuse my name with his. "You’re Rick Nichols, right?" "Not exactly—I am an N-i-c-k-e-l-s, spelled like the Buffalo nickel. And it is Thom, not Rick." My mind is on Sozanski because I just attended another PMA press event. Sozanski’s absence was noticeable. I last saw him over a month ago at another museum event, his last one as it turned out, and I thought to myself then that he didn’t look so good. In fact, for several months whenever I’d see him at these affairs I would think the same thing: He does not look good. And yet, I noticed that he also seemed a bit friendlier, a far cry from his former 1990s self when he would barely surface from those press event Inquirer buddy huddles. At the latest press event, which showcased the work of fashion designer Patrick Kelly, I looked at the assembled journalists and saw quite a few faces I had never seen before. There’s always a new wave of what some veterans call kid journalists, first timers with Staples-purchased pads and pencils. The majority of them you will never see again but there will always be one or two who will go for the long haul. Among the veterans was Carol Saline of Philadelphia Magazine, who showed me her own Patrick Kelly-like suit made from buttons purchased at the museum store, and Bobbi Booker from The Philadelphia Tribune, who talked up the Pen and Pencil Club. As I listened to Museum CEO Timothy Rub talk about Patrick Kelly, I thought to myself how nice it would have been to have heard a word or two about Sozanski, who had probably chalked up more hours roaming the halls of PMA than even the guards who have been stationed in the exhibition rooms for years. Nobody did speak of Sozanski, of course, not even "we" journalists, which struck me as noticeable, though not necessarily bad or good. This was about fashion design, after all, although it was still a press event, and because of that…I couldn’t help but think that the Sozanski spirit was near and called out for some kind of acknowledgment, perhaps a moment of silence. The world of dead journalists is a big world. But nobody remembers a dead journalist like a living journalist, and that’s because so much of the public really doesn’t even read bylines. Most people just go straight into a column or article without bothering to see who wrote it. That’s why I can be called Rick Nichols, when the only restaurant review I’ve written in my life was the time I ordered steak tartar not knowing what it was, or at least thinking it was an off shot of New York strip steak when it was really raw steak mixed with spices and horseradish. Sometimes I wonder if people even pay attention to journalists. Not too long ago I attended an event and happened to speak with an official and was referred to as Thom Cardwell. Now, I happen to know Thom Cardwell, but I was using T-h-o-m in my work long before Cardwell came on the scene, and yet here was another Rick Nichols moment. Of course, the minute the ID mishap occurred, I realized I knew why: I had forgotten to take off my long winter scarf and was wearing it like Cardwell is known to wear his large scarves. While it is certainly true that nobody has control over their legacy after death, a journalist can be alive and still be called dead. I am sure that I am not the only writer who has heard, "Are you still writing?" What people mean when they say this is that they haven’t seen your stuff in print, and so they wrongly assume that you’ve gone on to another career, like selling shoes or driving a trolley car. My answer to this question is always, "Yes, I’m still writing… are you still reading?" As for Sozanski, I guess what I’m saying is that I wish, in an ideal world, that journalists were a little more like a close knit family, and that when one member dies there would be a reverent gesture done in their memory-- a group hug, a dance, or maybe even a howl at the moon. But that might be too much to ask in today’s dysfunctional world.

ICON City Beat Column April 2014: Dancing Buddhist Monks, Women in Yoga Pants, and Dreams of Anne d’Harnoncourt

 April City Beat 2014

A Buddhist wall tapestry hid PMA’s iconic top- of- the- stairs statue of Diana at the opening press event of Treasures of Korea (till May 26). We watched as Korean Buddhist monks danced to ceremonial bongs, our gaze transcendentally fixed on two monks in boxy headdresses holding bouquets of flowers. We assumed the “flower monks” were women but when they removed their head gear suddenly they became two men holding hands. The ritual dance reminded us of the Dalai Lama, even Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, and set the tone for a more ‘home schooled event the following week: PMA’s homage to the Rocky Balboa cult. As museum president Gail Harrity told reporters about the museum’s first time ever screening of a Rocky film, we knew that the old “closed” museum world was over. We sensed some change coming about a month ago when we had a nighttime dream of a very happy  accepting our offer of a cherry pie baked years ago by Picasso but frozen after his death and now thawed so that Anne could use it as art distribution food. What is this if not modernist surrealism in the extreme? The “sensurround” museum experience seems to be taking hold everywhere, as our recent visit to the Penn Museum also indicated. At Penn we viewed over 200 objects at Native American Voices (till May 2014), ate Native food (mini buffalo burgers on crackers) and marveled at a long head-to-toe ceremonial headdress that had us thinking of the famous chiefs we knew in childhood—Sitting Bull, the Delaware Chief Tedusyscung, and of course Philly’s own Chief Halftown.

At Treasures of Korea we chatted with Edie, an occasional “art forum” PAFA panelist, who suggested we check out a leggy female journalist in tight yoga pants (a current urban style), running sneakers, and a bulky knit sweater top—by no means an outfit that would warm the hearts of Parisians, at least according to author Edmund White, who writes in his latest Paris memoirs that when the women of Paris leave their homes they dress as if they’re going onstage. “Why do some Philadelphians dress like that?” Edie asked, to which we had no answers. The journalist in yoga pants reminded us of the men in bib overalls we used to see at play openings, and even the shirt-hanging-out-of-the-trousers crowd prevalent today among men trying to hide weight gain. The topic of How Philadelphians Dress resurfaced at a Curtis Institute fundraising event at 1600 Locust, where we accompanied Drexel University’s Vanessa Bender to mix with friendly music loving cultural high rollers, including Charles B. Finch, Director of Special Events at Curtis, and Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest.  While we didn’t spot a single woman in yoga pants, or a man with his shirt hanging outside his trousers, we did see one radical hot fashion trender:  a young male in a shrinking before your eyes petite suit that looked as though it had been painted on his body. It reminded us of the Barbra Streisand song, Sam You Made The Pants Too Long, only in this case the reverse was true. We first glimpsed the petite suit look about a year ago when we mistook it to be a Krass Brothers of South Street-style tailoring mistake.    

We celebrated Jewish kosher culture at a culinary food fest at Vie (600 N. Broad Street), where Kashrut-sanctioned hor d’oeuvres, chef samplings and specialty wine pairings brought us face to face with some of the best looking beards we’ve seen since our visit to an Orthodox Christian monastery. The event raised funds for two non-profits, Philadelphia North and Lubavitch of Bucks County. The music was all Middle Eastern, and reminded us of our first Jewish wedding and the excitement we felt then watching the groom being lifted up on a chair, Priapus style, and then passed over the heads of the crowd like a buoy at sea. In the crowd we spotted former television icon Marciarose Shestack (a judge in the sweet category), but couldn’t find Nancy Glass (also a judge), one-time co-host of KYW-TV’s Evening Magazine.  From kosher beards we went to (the closing of) Other Desert Cities at The Walnut, staring Krista Apple-Hodge (she’ll play Queen Elizabeth in Mary Stuart at the Broad Street Ministry in April) and Ann Crumb (daughter of composer George Crumb) who played, Silda, easily our favorite character in the play. This tale about a disaffected writer-daughter of a Palm Springs California family whose book about her dead brother promises to destroy the family name, had more Jewish references than the play Tribes at the Suzanne Roberts earlier last month. This got us thinking about family identity, and why both playwrights felt it necessary to have characters frequently identity themselves as Jewish. In real life, of course, families never refer to themselves as Irish, Italian, German, Greek or even Serbian, especially when sitting around talking about their dysfunctional selves...

 The acting profession is divided on whether to call female thespians actresses or female actors. Krista Apple-Hodge calls herself an “actor,” (as does Whoppi Goldberg and Gena Davis) but many women in the profession like the word actress because they don’t want the word to defer to men. ‘Female actor’ is somewhat in vogue, but to us it is as sloppily PC as calling a princess a prince or a duchess a duke. And, as so many have observed: Why not give women the dignity that that their separate identity deserves?  One UK Guardian writer put it this way:  “What’s next? Replacing mummy and daddy with male parent and female parent?”   

              

Picasso (sans cherry pie) once said, “I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries.” At PAFA’s Open Studio Night, we kissed Heike Hass, helped ourselves to coffee and cupcakes, then went on to explore the open studios we did on a scale of one several years ago when PAFA grad Roman Sierra  (now a successful painter in Detroit), invited us into his cubicle. The many open studios covering several floors of the building made us think of a large Farmer’s Market. Some students attracted large crowds, while others waited for visitors the same way that boardwalk gypsy fortune tellers sneak longing looks at passers by. The popular studios were those exhibiting Bo Bartlett, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth-style realism, while the less crowded ones accented abstraction or the macabre. In one cubicle we spotted painted (decapitated) doll heads; in another, miniature penis wire sculptures placed on the wall like light fixtures. One enterprising student generated a circus atmosphere with a life sized transgender doll and its heart shaped red lips, Orphan Annie hair, Mae West bosom and large plug-on satyr’s ceramic erection. His charisma notwithstanding, we wondered who would ever buy such a thing. One visible change was the propensity of male nudes, something that was not the case at PAFA student shows just five years ago.     

For Women’s History Month, we headed to the Rosenbach Museum for a Pearl S. Buck Wine and Readings event. Sponsored by Pearl S. Buck International, we were one of four featured readers who entertained guests from a selection of the author’s books. The mini Bloomsday-like event gave guests plenty of space between readings to chat with Docent, Susie Woodland, a Pearl Buck impersonator, say hello to Rosenbach Director Derick Dreher or other guests like Lisa Heyman, Aaron Ron Hunter, and Philly artist Noel Miles. We were there to celebrate the life and writings of the 1938 Nobel Prize winner who experienced her fair share of critical derision at the hands of stuffy scholar squirrels and literary snobs. Despite these battles, Buck would prove to be ahead of her time: In 1966, she predicted the transformation of communism, was a staunch advocate for birth control and women’s rights, and was one of the first public figures to call people from Asia Asians, rather than Orientals. We have to wonder if Buck were alive today whether she’d be given a top slot in the politically tiered Philadelphia Book Festival, the city’s annual celebration of literacy featuring area authors with new books to promote. Would organizers (who seem connected to the scholar squirrel network) assign her to read at the library’s Central branch, or relegate her to a small branch like Torresdale or Tacony, where the audiences for the festival number in the low single digits?       .   

   

            The mayor wants to sell the Philadelphia Gas Works to a private corporation in Connecticut, the UIL Holding Corporation, for 1.86 billion dollars.

            What a bombshell. The New Deal style political grassroots Democrat had become an urban version of Governor Tom Corbett. Welcome to a Philly nightmare.

  If the mayor’s proposal materializes, the city will be giving up its 178-year ownership of PGW.

            He says the city needs to sell PGW to rescue “the city’s ailing pension fund,” and that sale of PGW would inject 424 million into the city’s pension fund. The pension fund, however, affects only a miniscule group, while the vast majority of Philadelphians have no connection to the fund because they do not work for the city. This tells us that PGW is good for Philly because, as a non profit public utility, it benefits the entire city with gas rates that, although still high, would be three times as high if a private corporation like HIL (which exists only to maximize shareholder value) gains control of PGW.

    Pension funds all over the country are dying out or being drastically reduced. In some cases, such as in Detroit, city pension funds have been radically cut. Philadelphia’s pension fund is, by comparison to other cities, extremely generous. There have been no cuts, although according to the mayor there is an 8 billion dollar pension fund deficit.

           

             UIL promises that it will not raise gas rates for customers for 3 years after the sale, and that it will keep discount programs for low income seniors and others. An additional promise was made that PGW employee retiree pensions will be respected. 

                         Will a private corporation be as benevolent or as generous as PGW when people are late or don’t pay their bills? Can a “for profit” company ever be as “benevolent” as a not for profit company?

            Can you name one large private corporation that has ever put people before profits?