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.

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.

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: We purchased a 1960 stone/stucco ranch house of about 3,500 square feet 10 years ago. We did a complete renovation: new low e-glass windows, wall insulation, and on the exterior where we re-stuccoed. We also installed a geothermal heating and A/C system and had attic insulation blown in. In short, we tried to make the house as energy efficient as possible. The attic gets extremely hot and we are considering an extraction system for the heat. At a recent home show, we gathered information on solar versus electric roof fans.

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.

Step into the front parlor of the James-Lorah House in Doylestown and you feel you've stepped back in time. Built in 1844, the Victorian home at 132 N. Main St. is ornately decorated with mahogany furniture, Brussels carpets and lace curtains of the era. But it is what the attic holds that the women of the Village Improvement Association have turned their attention to recently. The 400-member women's club, which founded Doylestown Hospital in 1923, owns the house. It was willed to them in 1954 by Sarah M. James, one of the club's charter members.

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.

Andrea Clearfield's Center City living room is part Swiss chalet, part Craftsman-style attic, an impossible cone-shaped space held up with dark timber beams and accented with a Mercer tile fireplace. It's nothing for the successful composer to invite a hundred or so strangers up to her third-floor lair to listen to musicians perform, from willowy pianists fresh from Carnegie Hall to grizzled folkies singing boxcar blues. All she asks is that guests remove their shoes before plopping down on her beige carpet.

  Question: Recently, we had a new standing-seam metal roof installed on our home. The installation included removal of three layers of asphalt shingles from the one-quarter-inch-thick sheathing. Immediately, we noticed that the house felt considerably colder. I suspect that is related mainly to the removal of the three layers of asphalt, which absorbed heat from the sun and served as additional insulation to the attic. My questions pertain to adding more insulation to the attic, which is unfinished and not used for storage.

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.

My appeal for comment on the solar vs. electric whole-house fans brought mostly off-the-topic responses and few thoughtful ones. I'll share one from John Avery of Dayton, Ohio, a building-envelope-technology specialist: "I would recommend you install the necessary number of solar fans on your roof. Why add another source of electric use when the technology is there? "You can buy a solar fan for a tad over $200 at the big-box lumberyards. Installation is pretty straightforward.