"It's like stepping into Eagles Nirvana," Liotta said. "If this were the Eagles Hair Mobile, it would be equally cool."
The Eye Mobile's exterior is a portrait gallery of Eagles stars wearing glasses, including wide receiver DeSean Jackson, defensive end Trent Cole, tight end Brent Celek, kicker David Akers and Jermane Mayberry - the former Birds' offensive lineman (1996-2004), who donated $100,000 in his rookie year to get the whole thing started.
Mayberry, who is legally blind in his left eye due to a childhood affliction that went untreated until it was beyond repair, wanted to prevent schoolchildren here from suffering a similar fate.
"Put a fist over your eye," Mayberry told a Daily News reporter, speaking from Austin, Texas, where he and his wife are Jehovah's Witness ministers. "That's how I see out of my left eye. I can see movement. I can see color. I can't see details."
As soon as he signed his Eagles contract, Mayberry insisted on making sure economically disadvantaged children here received first-class eye care.
"I was really adamant about giving the kids glasses with nice frames," Mayberry said. "My first pair of glasses was hideous. I was 16, 17, and I hated wearing them. You can give kids glasses, but if they're not stylish, the kids won't wear them."
Mayberry said he was "blown away" by how deeply committed the Eagles were to the Eye Mobile, years after his tenure here.
Ristine feels the same way. "It's not like you buy Eagles tickets and you get a pair of glasses for your kid," she said. "They're doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.
"Health-insurance companies treat kids like numbers. But on the Eagles Eye Mobile, every kid is treated like a human being who deserves a chance."
One of the Eye Mobile's original partners, Wills Eye Institute, returns this year in the person of Dr. Alex V. Levin, chief of pediatric ophthalmology and ocular genetics, a Philly native who left to practice medicine in Canada for 17 years after "seeing patients turned away in this city because they couldn't afford care or had the wrong insurance.
"It turned my stomach," he said. "I couldn't practice medicine that way.
"In Canada, everyone has equal and open access to health care," Levin said. "When I was recruited by Wills, I told them I could not come back to Philadelphia - where 14,000 children fail a vision screening every year and never see an eye doctor - unless I could deliver health care the Canadian way.
"The Eagles Eye Mobile program fits me like a glove on a hand."
