Attic

Musical chairs, a game that was de rigueur in my partygoing rounds during grade school, used to fill me with trepidation. To be left standing while everyone else was seated (snugly and smugly in their chairs) was the ultimate humiliation. Maybe this is why there was an extra pleasure in being an onlooker while the dancers of the ZeroMoving Dance Company played the game in Karen Bamonte's The Attic, a dance that was performed for the first time last night at the Port of History Museum at Penn's Landing.

Bensalem police said they took two fugitives into custody after finding them hiding in the attic crawl-space of a home in the 4500 block of Remo Crescent Drive Tuesday morning. Police said that one of the fugitives, a 17-year-old whose name was withheld, had twice escaped from authorities. The other, Joseph Taggart, 19, of no fixed address, had escaped Aug. 26, from the Bucks County Rehabilitation Center, where he was being held on charges of simple assault, theft of services, disorderly conduct and violating parole, police said.

David Douglas had known about the family letters for a long time. But it had been years since anyone had lifted them from the little, black tote bag in the attic, undone the plastic wrap that kept them dry, and read the marvelous passages written amid the turmoil of the Civil War. They were the words of Leonard Williams, a captain in the 2d South Carolina Cavalry, to his young wife, Anna, at their modest Greenville, S.C., farm. The bundle of 135 letters describe the Confederate officer's hopes and fears over four years of the bloody war. They talk of the innermost details of military campaigns as well as routine life in the camps - the scourge of fleas, sore backs, and staving off hunger by eating the crackers they found in deserted Yankee camps.

Far from the novel's page-turning excitement, the film Flowers in the Attic provides all the thrills of watching an exterminator work. You can understand why the book was so popular. It tapped into every child's fear of a parent's death - and suggested there was a fate worse than Dad dying, namely Mom's indifference. Plus, it offered just about every imaginable Gothic-novel situation: the gloomy grand manor, hidden secrets locked in the attic, slow poisoning by arsenic, child abuse, incest and disinheritance - all shrouded in cobwebs, infested with mice and presided over by Monster Mommy.

For close to 50 years, it sat in a corner of an attic, just another dusty, forgotten piece of wood with an obscure name stamped into it: Momen Clemente. That piece of lumber - a Roberto Clemente bat from the seventh game of the 1960 World Series - was among memorabilia auctioned Thursday night at the National Sports Collectors Convention at Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It sold for $41,825. Other items up for bid included a loving cup given to Honus Wagner in 1917 ($44,812.50)

Lying dust-covered in a New England attic, a white silk banner carried in the Grand Federal Procession in Philadelphia 200 years ago might have been lost forever if not for the march of progress bringing the Blue Route past the doors of the Leiper House in Wallingford, Delaware County. The recently discovered six-foot-square banner, carried in the historic parade by tobacconist Thomas Leiper, may be the only one remaining of the 60 banners used in the procession on July 4, 1788, to celebrate the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, said James Green, curator of printed books for the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Mary Beyer, who left the security of 20 years as a civilian employee with the Navy to open a consignment gallery in Wayne, recalled recently that the Smithsonian Institution is referred to as "the attic of the United States. " She likes to think of her new store as the "attic of Delaware County. " And the evidence inside the 2,300-square-foot store at 163 W. Lancaster Ave., which is primarily culled from local homes, makes her point. Consignment Galleries, a franchise that cost $25,000, falls somewhere between an antiques shop and a thrift store.

Question: We have an attic with a set of steps that pulls down from the ceiling. In the winter, we keep an insulated foam dome in the attic that covers the folded steps and the trap door that they are attached to. This helps to keep the heat in the house and to keep the cold air in the attic. My question is, should we leave the foam dome in place in the summer? My thoughts are that heat needs to escape and we should move the foam dome off of the folded steps and door. But then I'm concerned that the heat going up to the attic will also pull our air-conditioned air along with it. Answer: Warm air rises and cold air falls, but since your attic gets hot in the winter, you might want to have the dome in place to keep the warm air in the attic and not leaking into the space around the folding stairs where it might add to the efforts of the air-conditioning.

Delaware State Police might call it "America's Worst Home Video. " A 50-year-old Lewes man was arrested after police found him hiding in an attic videotaping vacationers in the house he had rented to them. John M. Kwiatkowski of North Heron Drive was charged with burglary and five counts of invasion of privacy. He appeared before a magistrate yesterday in Georgetown and was released after posting $6,000 bail. State police said Kwiatkowski rented out his neatly furnished home in Lewes to five people.

Question : My wife and I recently bought a house in central Pennsylvania where the three bathroom fans are vented into the attic. There are no vents coming through the roof. We notice unsightly black mold growing around the gable vents and believe it to be from moisture in the attic. What would be the best way to tie three fan vents together and vent them? Through the roof? Through the soffit? Was venting fans into the attic common in the late 1970s through 1980s? Answer: There is considerable debate on venting through the soffit, since many experts believe there is a chance for moist air to find its way back inside through soffit intakes or cracks.

Question: We have an attic with a set of steps that pulls down from the ceiling. In the winter, we keep an insulated foam dome in the attic that covers the folded steps and the trap door that they are attached to. This helps to keep the heat in the house and to keep the cold air in the attic. My question is, should we leave the foam dome in place in the summer? My thoughts are that heat needs to escape and we should move the foam dome off of the folded steps and door. But then I'm concerned that the heat going up to the attic will also pull our air-conditioned air along with it. Answer: Warm air rises and cold air falls, but since your attic gets hot in the winter, you might want to have the dome in place to keep the warm air in the attic and not leaking into the space around the folding stairs where it might add to the efforts of the air-conditioning.

The book chosen for next year's One Book, One Philadelphia tells a story many American families keep hidden in the attics of memory. For that reason alone, it's a very American tale. It's Julie Otsuka's Buddha in the Attic , a fictional retelling of the personal odysseys of hundreds of Japanese "picture brides" who sailed from Japan to the United States in the 1920s to marry men, most of them itinerant Japanese workers without other options, who had arranged for a wife to be sent over.

The stop-motion action is nonstop and deliriously bent in Toys in the Attic , a 2009 Czech feature that has been retrofitted with an English-language voice cast led by Forest Whitaker, Joan Cusack, and Cary Elwes. Jirí Barta's blend of live action and handmade and computer effects puts a Toy Story slant on The Perils of Pauline by way of 1984 and any number of dystopian nightmares. But the plot is the least of it in a film whose transporting aesthetic is a tattered brocade of industrial grunge and old-fangled whimsy.

For close to 50 years, it sat in a corner of an attic, just another dusty, forgotten piece of wood with an obscure name stamped into it: Momen Clemente. That piece of lumber - a Roberto Clemente bat from the seventh game of the 1960 World Series - was among memorabilia auctioned Thursday night at the National Sports Collectors Convention at Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It sold for $41,825. Other items up for bid included a loving cup given to Honus Wagner in 1917 ($44,812.50)

New York Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano went 1 for 2 in the All Star Game on Tuesday, fouling out to third in the first inning and singling in the fourth - and setting a record for consecutive days, and volume, of being booed. Seems the fans in Kansas City were unhappy with Cano leaving hometown hero Billy Butler of the Royals off the American League team for the home-run derby, and didn't think it was enough to let him know, often, how displeased they were during the slugging display on Monday.

CAPE MAY - Honeybee populations may be shrinking around the world, but that wasn't the case at Victoria Clayton's circa 1866 house, where a bee expert spent much of Thursday removing a huge wax honeycomb and 30,000 of the buzzing creatures from an attic crawl space. Clayton and her boyfriend, Richard White, with whom she owns the former bed-and-breakfast on Washington Street, noticed an unusually large number of bees in their well-tended flower and herb gardens this spring. They also spied a constant stream headed toward a third-floor laundry vent.

DEE TORRENCE says she, too, was locked in a closet by Linda Ann Weston. Shuttered for two weeks in a bathroom closet in Killeen, Texas, Torrence says, she saw Weston's other captives - Weston's niece, Beatrice; Tamara Breeden and Edwin Sanabria - in an attic above the closet. There was no ladder to get to the attic, but she saw the three and could talk to them, she said. "Piggy," she said - referring to Beatrice - and Breeden had cigarette burns on their faces; their tongues were burned by a spoon.

EgoPo Classic Theater, under Lane Savadove's direction, launches its Festival of Jewish Theater with The Diary of Anne Frank at the Prince Music Theater Cabaret. How do you review an excellent production of a terrible play? Especially when that play is iconic? Well, here goes. The story, as everyone knows, is about a 13-year-old Jewish girl who, with her parents and older sister, hides from the Nazis in an attic along with another family and a dentist. Eight people, living in fear and hunger, alert to every noise, getting on one another's nerves.

JUST FOR LAUGHS For the second time, Philadelphia Comedy Month unites improv, sketch and stand-up. The first week is devoted to the Philadelphia Improv Fest (today-Sunday), where the funnies are made up on the fly. Up next is the premeditated word with the Philly SketchFest (Oct. 10-16). Finally comes a new venture: City Spotlight (Oct. 17-23), highlighting the best and brightest from around town. For a schedule, check phlcomedy.com. TWO FOR ONE Celebrated novelists Anne Enright and Julie Otsuka discuss their latest works: Enright's The Forgotten Waltz explores the impact of forbidden attraction on two marriages; Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic follows a group of Japanese women brought to San Francisco in the early 1900s as mail-order brides.

Upper Darby police have yet to close their inquiry into last month's odd death of engineer Peter Stelzenmuller. That is partly due to how and where Stelzenmuller was found: clad in a scuba suit in the corner of his attic. Investigators are also intrigued by the bizarre history of Stelzenmuller's girlfriend, Edythe Maa, who reported finding his body Aug. 18, Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said. In 2008, Maa was working as a dominatrix when her boyfriend, a New York lawyer, was fatally shot near her Philadelphia apartment by an angry former client.