Beach Party

It's A Shore Thing! That is the theme of the 20th annual Saint Mary Hospital Ball, which will be April 24 at the Hyatt Regency in Princeton, N.J. About 550 are expected in the main ballroom for a lavish beach party featuring beach balls, umbrellas and sand castles. The beneficiary of this year's event is Saint Mary Hospital's Well Child/ Sick Child Center, which is expected to open in May in the Bensalem Square Shopping Center, the center that houses the hospital's Mother Bachman Maternity Center.

Kindergarten students who attend The Kids' Place school in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District recently celebrated the end of a study of the ocean and sea life with a beach party. Using two tons of donated sand, the students built a sand castle. They also participated in milk-carton sailboat races and made their own ice cream. FUN DAY The Baldwin School, a private all-girls school in Bryn Mawr, recently hosted its 16th annual Special Athletes Fun Day for 100 students from the Devereux Institute and the Melmark School.

Should you get lost on your way to the beach tomorrow evening and find yourself in the 1500 block of Sansom Street, you're in luck. Just pop into the Samuel Adams Brew House, 1516 Sansom, where a beach party will be getting under way starting at 8 p.m. Patrons are expected to dress accordingly. Shorts, sandals and sunglasses are suggested. The first beer is free for everyone wearing a Hawaiian beach shirt. The Brew House will be decorated with beach chairs, beach balls, sand buckets, shovels and such.

Even those who enjoy cold weather have become weary of winter's icy grip. The snow, slush and gusty winds have kept many homebound and cabin fever has sometimes led the best of families to act like a pack of caged animals. Members of the student government at Camden County College decided that enough was enough. It was time to take Mother Nature into their own hands and for one evening relive those lazy, hazy days of summer. And so the students hosted a beach party in the college gymnasium Saturday night with all the trimmings - hot dogs, candy, ice cream, pretzels and doughnuts.

With spring officially here, it's not too soon to be thinking about beach parties. This, at least, is the way two local clubs - the Chestnut Cabaret and Pulsations - see it. The Cabaret at 38th and Chestnut Streets will host a "Beach Party/ Barbecue" today starting at 5 p.m. Balloons, beachballs, a raft - even a lifeguard with sunguard on his nose - will create a beachy atmosphere, and patrons, are encouraged to arrive, naturally, in swimwear....

Abe Brengauz, a jeweler from Kiev, Ukraine, went to open his shop here Saturday morning and found the typically deserted block of Main Street transformed into a tropical beach. "They make like beach party," Brengauz, who has lived in the borough for almost a decade, said of the street, which featured fake palm trees, volleyball nets, and 600 tons of sand. "This is good, good for the town. " In the predawn hours Saturday, borough police and local organizers cordoned off Main Street between Swede and Cherry Streets and dumped an estimated 20 truckloads of soft New Jersey sand over the asphalt.

Everybody was being careful - police, the politicians, the people who could not stay away from the beach. But the caution killed a party that usually brings thousands of black college students and others to this beach community every summer. The annual beach party is an informal part of the Greekfest weekend activities, which begin in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park with the Greek Picnic. But concern about trouble and overcast skies throughout yesterday put a damper on the celebration.

He met his future wife when they were sixth-graders in New York. They stayed best friends through high school, went off to college and fell in love that freshman summer as they walked in the rain on a Long Island beach. And she was with him early yesterday when he died, surrounded by family, in his Overbrook Farms home. Funeral arrangements were still pending for Dr. Frederick W. Capshaw, 53, president of Community College of Philadelphia, who died of kidney cancer that was diagnosed last October.

VENTNOR, N.J. - Here's a riddle: Why did Mike Cunningham and Bob Shelley cart two grills, a smoker, a hundred pounds of charcoal, and 70 pounds of meat to the beach Saturday? Answer: Because they could. During one of only a scant number of weekends each summer, in one of the few Jersey Shore towns that ever permit barbecuing on the beach, the friends invited 40 or so other friends to celebrate Labor Day weekend eating on the sand. With the roar of the sea only steps away and the salty, consistent breeze presenting a bit of a fire-starting challenge, the two arrived at the New Haven Avenue beach by 8 a.m. to survey the situation and set up. They joined dozens of others up and down the beach barbecuing Saturday in the Ventnor section of an area south of Atlantic City known as Downbeach, which consists of the towns of Ventnor, Margate, and Longport.

Samuel C. Bookbinder 3d, 69, a member of a Philadelphia restaurant dynasty who loved being the host, died of a cardiac arrest Dec. 24 at his home in Gulph Mills. In the 1930s, Mr. Bookbinder's father, Samuel, opened Bookbinder's 15th Street Seafood House. Because he had fallen in love with an Irish waitress, the elder Bookbinder had been banished by an aunt from working in the seafood restaurant his family had opened near the waterfront in 1898. After their father died in 1975, Mr. Bookbinder and his brother, Richard, owned and operated the 15th Street Bookbinder's.

Boy, 7, admits to Alaska fires JUNEAU, Alaska - A fire marshal in Alaska's capital city says a 7-year-old boy has admitted setting five arson fires over a little more than four months. Juneau fire marshal Dan Jager told the Juneau Empire that the boy caused about $1,000 in damages by setting fires in restrooms at an elementary school and a legislative building, plus a downtown grass fire and two fires at a store. Jager says the boy told him he used a lighter. Surveillance footage at the legislative building recorded the boy entering and leaving the bathroom at the same time as the fire there.

VENTNOR, N.J. - Here's a riddle: Why did Mike Cunningham and Bob Shelley cart two grills, a smoker, a hundred pounds of charcoal, and 70 pounds of meat to the beach Saturday? Answer: Because they could. During one of only a scant number of weekends each summer, in one of the few Jersey Shore towns that ever permit barbecuing on the beach, the friends invited 40 or so other friends to celebrate Labor Day weekend eating on the sand. With the roar of the sea only steps away and the salty, consistent breeze presenting a bit of a fire-starting challenge, the two arrived at the New Haven Avenue beach by 8 a.m. to survey the situation and set up. They joined dozens of others up and down the beach barbecuing Saturday in the Ventnor section of an area south of Atlantic City known as Downbeach, which consists of the towns of Ventnor, Margate, and Longport.

ATLANTIC CITY has had a long history of treating laws pertaining to alcohol sales and consumption with indifference, if not outright scorn. But there has been one location that historically has been as dry as rural Utah: the beach. Despite it's "no-brainer" status, the concept of saloons on the strand took almost 150 years to be realized; it wasn't until the summer of 2002 that booze could be legally sold and imbibed there. Early on in the legal-beach-bar-era, as many as seven casinos set up seasonal nightclubs on the sand.

The Paul Green School of Rock Music, where kids 8 to 18 learn to be rock stars, is catching like a catchy tune. It started in Philadelphia, then branched to Downingtown, Chester County, and now there are satellite schools nationally. Rock School, a documentary to be released on DVD Tuesday, details life at the School of Rock in Philadelphia, where it all started, but it includes students from the Downingtown branch. Local students who saw the documentary when it played at movie theaters over the summer offer their views of the film.

The palm trees, the reggae band, and the beach made Trina Suazo feel as if she were on a Caribbean island. But instead of spending several hundred dollars in airfare, it cost only gas money and $6 in tolls to reach her tropical getaway, and she plans to make the 2 1/2-hour trip from her Staten Island home to Atlantic City more frequently this summer. Atlantic City has found another way to stand out in the crowded gambling business and attract young non-gamblers, like 34-year-old Suazo: the beach bar. The Atlantic City Hilton, Bally's, Trump Plaza, Resorts and Caesars casinos all will have beach bars this summer.

Samuel C. Bookbinder 3d, 69, a member of a Philadelphia restaurant dynasty who loved being the host, died of a cardiac arrest Dec. 24 at his home in Gulph Mills. In the 1930s, Mr. Bookbinder's father, Samuel, opened Bookbinder's 15th Street Seafood House. Because he had fallen in love with an Irish waitress, the elder Bookbinder had been banished by an aunt from working in the seafood restaurant his family had opened near the waterfront in 1898. After their father died in 1975, Mr. Bookbinder and his brother, Richard, owned and operated the 15th Street Bookbinder's.

In this, the "Coastline of No" - as in no running, no ball playing, no biking, no barbecuing - the City of Cape May's proposed beach and promenade rules are breathtaking in their scope. Fishing banned from the last jetty where it had been permitted. Kayakers tossed from Cove Beach, where they have navigated waves for decades. No carrying surfboards down the promenade. Bicycle hours cut back to exclude those high-traffic times of 4 to 6 a.m. No "rough athletics" in the surf. Only the dogs make out better.

The irreverent fun of Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963) is the overlay of 1960s bawdiness on this 1740s Henry Fielding story of a randy bastard child (Albert Finney) adopted by that pillar of rectitude, Squire Allworthy (George Devine). According to Hollywood lore, Richardson was unhappy with the stuffy costume drama he shot. So he used lightning edits and an ironic voice-over to give it the pep and wit of Fielding's 18th-century novel about whether nature or nurture makes the man. The results won Tom Jones an Oscar for best picture, catapulted Finney to international stardom, and still amuses audiences today, although Susannah York's 1963 coif looks as anachronistic as a peruke at a beach party.

Those critically reviled teen sex comedies of the '80s, from "Gorp" to "Hot Dog" to even "Hardbodies," don't look so bad in retrospect. They were the innocent "Beach Party" movies of the R-rated generation. "Wet Hot American Summer" (VHS: priced for rental; DVD: $26.99) remembers this and has many of the 1980 summer camp details right: the white afros, the bad T-shirts, the 30-year-olds playing teen-agers. But it's written and directed by the guys behind the maddeningly uneven sketch comedy show "The State," and they haven't gotten any better.

Welcome to the beach. And now, sit down and be quiet. Without your dog, or any other pet. Don't even think about bringing a ball to play with - there will be no ball playing of any kind. Or Frisbee throwing. And put away that cooler. No picnics or "intoxicating liquids. " Don't set foot on the beach after 10 p.m. or before 6 a.m. Don't walk on the seawall or any of the bulkheads. Don't blare your radio or plan on a beach party. Or a bonfire. And change your clothes at home, please!