SEE WHAT YOU MISS when you don't stop to smell the roses. You miss a November sky like this over 30th Street just before the city drops into the night. Is it just me, or do we live in a beautiful city? Or WHAT?!!!
COME ON, PATTI, give it up. Is that you I saw on the corner of 34th and Mantua this morning bringing color to the sunlit clouds? I could hear the music. I could feel the glory of a new day. I just had to take your picture. Patti Labelle has been singing on this corner for years. Of course, she changes her clothes from time to time on this mural. But sometimes she's dressed perfect for the day.
Continue reading "Is that who I think is singing glory to the day?" »
THE MAYOR OF PHILADELPHIA presided over a same-sex till-death-do-us-part commitment ceremony in City Hall over the weekend, and I can't help but wonder why. Why now? Why in City Hall? Why not somewhere, anywhere, else? And why did one of the grooms feel comfortable enough to explain to TV cameras afterwards, "We just got married today. And if you saw how much money we spent, you'd know it was a real wedding." As if that was what the larger significance of the event rather than the fact that John Street is a lame duck.
Continue reading "Quacks like a duck,limps like a duck. . ." »
HY LIT WAS LAID TO REST in a burial plot beside his beloved wife Maggie, who had to wait more than five years for the love of her life to join her in death. Hy and I used to visit Maggie's grave in West Laurel Hill Cemetery. It's in a lovely spot beneath some trees on the sloping lawn closest to Belmont Avenue. I believe Hyski has found the peace that eluded him in his final years.
Continue reading "Yo, Adrian, Hyski's moved to the neighborhood" »
BACK IN THE DAY, which these days means a mythical time that could have been 50 years or 50 weeks ago, there was a man, who died Saturday, named Hy Lit who everyone agreed was the most famous deejay in Philadelphia. Flash Master Hy was the real deal. Before you hungry cats were making up names for yourselves a hungry young jewboy named Hyman Aaron Lit from 5th and Sigel in South Philly was on the radio calling himself "Hyski O'Roonie McVautie O'Zoot." And getting away with it. At a gig at North Philadelphia's Uptown Theater back in the day Hy Lit walked on stage to introduce the next act -- and back in the day it could have been name-groups like the Tempations. the Tops, the Supremes -- and a guy shouts out, "You ain't Hy Lit! Hy Lit's black!" And Hy Lit said, "Thank you."
I AM NOT GOING TO REVEAL the names of any of the handsome young men in this photo from my 40th high school reunion, except for the black guy. I'll give him up in an Ardmore minute. That's Mike Holland, who used to play a little ball back in the day at Lower Merion High School when we were seniors togther in 1967. All of us graduated and dispersed into the Summer of Love, and when we gathered last Saturday night after four decades none of us looked like Flower Children, let alone spring chickens.
THIS IS GREEN AWARENESS WEEK in Philadelphia and where in America would it be more fitting to promote green solutions than in the City of Brotherly Love, so named by William Penn because he encouraged brothers to sleep in the same bed to cut down fuel costs on cold winter nights.
TONY SOPRANO SHOWED UP at the 40th annual reunion of the Lower Merion High School's graduating Class of 1967. We walked out of high school into the Summer of Love and 40 years later we returned to find ourselves looking more like aging mafioso than flower children.
But you know what? Everyone looked great.
BACK IN THE DAY my friend Tony Wood, the Inquirer's weather columnist (yes, it's a good gig if you can get it) wrote a piece predicting that this autumn would be particularly spectacular vis-a-vis the changing colors of the trees-a-trees. "Back in the day" wasn't that long ago, but I gotta tellya, I think Woods left us hanging. (And if you write to him, call him Woods. He loves that.)
LISA NUTTER STARTED HER HUSBAND'S election night victory party with a joke. The crowd at the Warwick Hotel in Center City had listened respectfully through two introductory speeches from the mayor-elect's pastor and his father, and the enthusiastic assembled were positively kvelling to see the victorious candidate in the flesh when the senior Mr. Nutter began his introduction, "And now please welcome the next mayor of the city of Philadelphia . . .!" and amid the cheers and applause, Michael Nutter's wife stepped forward, took the microphone into her hands and shouted, "SIKE!"
AS A WHITE MAN in the city of Philadelphia I have the confidence of walking down the street without the same fear as a black man walking down the same street or a cop walking into a Dunkin' Donuts. I don't expect to get shot by a white man or by a black man or by a cop in the ordinary daily business of my life. I live in that dreamy reality of being a white man walking the streets of Philadelphia where the odds are that I will come home safe to my family today, tomorrow, next week and next year. And all because of the color of my skin and the color of the uniform that I do not wear.
I MET HENRY ALEXANDER on my way to Lisa Richette's viewing, which is the word used by lace-curtain Philadelphia Catholics instead of wake. It's called a viewing because the idea is that those who come to pay respects to the deceased before the funeral mass get to "view" the corpse, which makes more sense than calling such a specific occasion a wake, which sounds not only creepy and counterintuitive, but explains the necessary presence of alcohol.
