Big Time

Remember when the circus came to town? It was only days ago. The Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, with lion tamers and tall clowns, appeared at Crestmont Park in Willow Grove Wednesday through Friday.

Class No. 323 graduated from the Police Academy at the Mann Music Center yesterday morning. Among the 95 graduates was Officer Gary Capuano (above), who looks towards crowd gathered for the ceremony. Another new grad, Officer Joseph P. Murphy (left), poses with sons Joey, 7, and Joshua, 4.

Camden's exciting new Showplace at 1300 Admiral Wilson Blvd. has been bringing big names to the area for a couple of months already. Now it's expanding on its "big" policy, with some giant men and women in another field - wrestling. Talk about huge: How about 7-foot-7 Silo Sam? And D.C. "Mad Dog" Drake, a brute of a guy who's also the Camden-based National Wrestling Federation champ. The big event this week - possibly the kickoff to a monthly series of battles at the new venue - is a Tuesday night mega-card that will be taped for international TV release (NWF matches already are televised in Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Chicago, L.A. and the Baltimore-Washington area)

When the players arrive in the visiting hockey locker room, probably as big as some gyms they have played in, coach George White says: "This has carpeting. That's the only difference from ours. " The Ursinus team came to the CoreStates Center Wednesday afternoon to play a basketball game with Catholic University. Mostly, it came for the experience. White, the fourth-year coach who graduated from Holy Ghost Prep and then, in 1983, from Harvard, invited the Daily News to share the day. White played in the Palestra and Boston Garden.

How do you know when you've hit the big time? For the various incarnations of Tom Waits, the clues come in dribs and drabs. The first Waits to appear in the concert film Big Time is a drifter working as a ticket-taker and an usher in the theater. For him, the big time means just breathing the air of show business. Marked by a pencil-thin mustache and a collection of watches for sale on his right arm, he drifts off while pitching cards into a top hat or sitting behind the booth, and his hallucinations of song-stylist stardom bring us to another Waits - the gravel-voiced band leader.

Vaudeville faded from the nation's stages about 70 years ago, a victim of the new media of movies and television. Watching The Big Time: Vaudeville For The Holidays at the Adrienne, you wonder why something as much fun as vaudeville should have disappeared. This collection of original vaudeville comedy and music, fielded by 1812 Productions, is terrific entertainment. Conceived and directed by Jen Childs, 1812's co-artistic director, it's a smartly put together, exuberantly performed tribute to the vanished form.

They are sales managers, financial consultants, doctors, lawyers and graduate students. They only moonlight as professional athletes. Players on the Philadelphia Wings indoor lacrosse team, it's safe to say, have much more in common with ordinary people than with high-salaried baseball, football and basketball stars. Like actors, comedians or rock-and-rollers that have yet to hit the big time, they hold day jobs to get by and generally aren't recognized on the street. But as they step onto the field at 2 p.m. Sunday for their third contest of the 1990 season - after winning their first two games last month in defense of the Major Indoor Lacrosse League title - the Wings, like struggling musicians, actors or comics, are hopeful of better days to come.

The 76ers yesterday opened their rookie and free-agent camp, the annual showcase for dream-seekers and young men almost good enough to play in the NBA. There was the usual complement of that sort - rookies not drafted and players who have toiled a season or two in the bush leagues of professional basketball. But the attention at this camp is rigidly fixed on three men who have been in the NBA and are trying to make their way back. Their paths have been blocked for a variety of reasons, but each looks to the 1991-92 season and envisions spending it in a Philadelphia 76ers uniform.

FLEMINGTON, N.J. - There are no heroin kingpins in Hunterdon County, according to prosecutor Anthony Kearns, and he wants to keep it that way. Most people don't associate the mostly rural county of 130,000 with drug trafficking, but as the number of young prescription pill addicts turned heroin junkies balloons throughout the state, Hunterdon has become a battleground. The number of New Jerseyans between 18 and 25 who are in treatment for heroin addiction jumped 12 percent from 2010 to 2011, records show, and Hunterdon felt the brunt of that boom.

MOST SEE a glass skyscraper with sparkling lights. A Drexel University professor saw a screen with pixels. Dr. Frank Lee and his team announced plans Wednesday to transform the 27-story Cira Centre in University City into the world's largest Pong game. Organizers anticipate hundreds will gather on the Art Museum steps across the Schuylkill to watch and line up to play April 19 and April 24 during the third annual Philly Tech Week. The idea is deceptively simple: remotely commandeer the roughly 20 by 20 grid of LED lights tucked into the building's facade - usually used to display static graphics like the Phillies logo - and allow players to go head-to-head in the arcade classic using controls ripped from old-school cabinet sets.

This morning on 94 WIP, cohost Al Morganti introduced "the man responsible for Wing Bowl being in the Big House" - Ed Rendell. "How prominent in my obituary is it going to be that I moved Wing Bowl to the big stadium?" Rendell asked, referring to what is now called the Wells Fargo Center. The popularity of the annual event - scheduled for Friday - has exploded since its debut in 1993 featured just competitors in a hotel ballroom. By Wing Bowl IV, people were being turned away from an overflowing Electric Factory, while the area was beset by parking nightmares, Morganti recalled.

Zachary Downer grinned through a mouthful of braces and tried to catch his breath backstage at Swarthmore College's Lang Center for the Performing Arts. Moments ago, he'd completed his contemporary solo dance in front of a panel of judges, leaping and rolling around the stage in a manner that suggested talent far beyond his 15 years. Still to come was his classical ballet solo. And later that night, Downer would learn whether he'd join the handful of dancers selected to compete in the finals of the biggest student ballet competition in the world.

Food marketers can toil in the trenches for years before cinching the kind of deal that basically fell into Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby's laps. The food/housewares giant Williams-Sonoma has three sauces branded with the name Vedge, the couple's upscale vegan restaurant in Center City. They are to go on sale this week ($14.95) at more than 150 stores in the United States and the Middle East, and starting Jan. 17 on its website. The arrangement began simply. In the spring, a Williams-Sonoma executive visiting Philadelphia had a good meal at Vedge and called, said Shannon Gomes, a Williams-Sonoma spokeswoman.

Connecticut made the big move, and maybe, someday, it still will pay. The state built a 40,000-seat stadium and millions were poured into moving up from I-AA to the Big East, from on-campus bleachers to a place closer to Hartford. A decade later, the Huskies are still waiting for their invitation to the big time. National titles in men's basketball, more of them in women's basketball, a Big East title in football. . . . Still waiting. There still is a very good chance UConn will fill one of the openings in the Atlantic Coast Conference if the ACC is raided by one or more of the other big-boy leagues.

An opportunity missed? Or the luckiest of breaks? That may always be the question at Villanova as the school charts a new course, forming what is essentially a new collegiate sports league centered on basketball, leaving dreams of big-time football behind. Has Villanova lost its chance to be a major player on the national college sports stage? Will it become increasingly difficult to reach the Final Four in basketball? Will the school slip back toward mid-major status? Or is Villanova winning the college sports lottery, staying strong in hoops, playing natural rivals, while not chasing football dreams?

SEVEN MEMBERS of the "Harlem Boys," a violent drug gang that operated in the Bartram Village housing development in Southwest Philadelphia, were convicted by a federal grand jury Thursday and face long prison terms. The men were part of a gang of 20 named in an 89-count indictment and charged with attempted murder in aid of racketeering, robbery, carjacking, assault and threats in aid of racketeering, drug and firearms charges. The jury found the seven defendants guilty of violating RICO conspiracy laws and conspiracy to distribute 280 or more grams of cocaine.

WHEN IT COMES to college football programs, "Burger" is looking for steak. While there's nothing wrong with competing at the Division II or III level, especially if the experience provides great fun and is accompanied by a solid education, every kid would love to get a taste of the big time. Jaryd Jones-Smith, aka Burger due to his bulk, is a tackle prospect at West Catholic High. Because he's large (6-7, 320) and surprisingly mobile, and because the scouts see amazing possibilities (in part because he won't turn 18 until September)

Stephen Procida filled two hours explaining his love of carpentry - a passion, he said, fed by the thrill of turning middle-of-the-night ideas into creations that "wow" customers. His "babies" is how the South Jersey furniture-maker referred to the tables, cabinets and chairs he coaxes from planks of pine and spruce. He gets "emotional" when they leave his Washington Township store, Capture the Southwest, Procida said. Then came the shocking confession about high school woodshop.