City Paper

So who was that willowy blonde photographed on Mayor Rendell's arm at President Clinton's inauguration? Well, all right, it could have been any number of willowy blondes. But in this case it was Mary Frangipanni, the Zelig of Philadelphia politics. She's the same woman pictured in the Jan. 26 Inquirer with bigshots at the 140th anniversary concert for the Academy of Music - and last winter at the meeting of the English Speaking Union. And the same one seen at the Academy Ball, the Gay News Christmas Party, the Shubert Festival Dinner.

They arrived on West Market Street practically overnight - either boons to civic neatness or threats to cherished freedoms - but few passersby had any inkling of their implications. It was hard enough to figure out what they were. "A bike rack," said Marquis Hilfiger knowingly, as he studied a specimen at 16th and Market Streets. The 33-year-old box factory worker is an ardent cyclist. The object was a 3-foot-high, 8-foot-long cast-iron railing that looked something like a park bench without the bench.

It would be an exaggeration to say "all eyes" of the music industry will be on Philadelphia the next few days - but not much. At least 1,500 performers and an equal number of industry professionals will be officially in the house for the seventh Philadelphia Music Conference. And several thousand more music lovers (like you and me) will be dropping in to enjoy PMC's nighttime club showcases, each featuring four or more acts striving at their very best performance level. Now the third biggest pop music conclave in the nation, PMC jump starts with a promising event Wednesday night at the Trocadero, "Decades of Philadelphia.

The alternative weekly in town, the City Paper, carried a big story recently about the changes under way at the Daily News and The Inquirer. I was making my way through the piece when I read one thing that knocked me dead. According to the article, the size of each Daily News page was getting smaller, which meant there would be less news on each page, which meant that sentences would be getting shorter. This triple-jump was longer than Michael Conley's record-breaker in Barcelona.

Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. and its unions aren't the only ones preparing for a possible newspaper strike. Suburban and weekly papers, television stations and other media outlets have been formulating plans to woo readers and advertisers if 3,000 employees of The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News go on strike after their contracts expire at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. The media outlets are planning to add pages of news, extra editions, longer broadcasts and - above all - luring advertising revenue that is now locked up in the city's two daily papers.

To slam, or not to slam? That's just one of the questions Philadelphia poets have been debating among themselves and in feuding letters to newspaper editors following a story about poetry slams in the City Paper a few months ago. In a slam, poets go head-to-head. After they read, audience members designated as judges call out a score. Others in the crowd boo if they think the score is too low, or cheer if they agree with a high score. Some poets say they don't like the idea of slamming at all. They say poets shouldn't compete against one another.

The editorial staff of La Salle University's weekly newspaper, the Collegian, spent Wednesday evening plotting a mildly subversive act. For more than a week, they had been negotiating with officials at the private Catholic university over a potentially embarrassing article about a marketing professor. Vinny Vella had the story first. On March 24, three days after the professor held an off-campus symposium using exotic dancers to demonstrate a point, Vella, the paper's executive editor, received a tip. A junior majoring in communications, Vella, 20, assigned the story to Luke Harold.

MAYOR Nutter basically said to heck with taxpayers: "$17 million more in cuts - but that's all. " Well, that's not good enough, Mr. Mayor! Surely there are further cuts that can be made without compromising public safety, but does the mayor have the stomach for them? How many millions of tax dollars are wasted every year? Look no further than the city's broken pension system (Deferred Retirement Option Plan in particular) to find a significant cause of our financial woes. Just a few weeks ago, the City Paper did a story on DROP, calling it a "Billion $ Boondoggle.

City and local high-tech leaders said yesterday they planned to wage a multimedia marketing campaign aimed at convincing college students in the city to stay after graduation. More than 51,000 degrees are conferred each year by the region's colleges and universities, according to a recent report by the Pennsylvania Economy League. But many of those graduates don't hang around Philadelphia - one recent estimate by the state placed the percentage of departing grads as high as 40 percent.

Driving a soft-pretzel truck definitely qualified Tom Murphy as a slacker, although it could be argued that his slacking was small potatoes. It wasn't until Murphy, 28, lost his job that he became worthy of the moniker Major Slacker. The stroke of slacking genius, however, came when he decided to use his hiatus from gainful employment to fulfill his lofty aspiration to teach himself French. All the better that he wanted to learn the language so he could read the works of Marcel Proust in their original form.