Dance

I hear the swagging before I find it. The pulsating and the applause, the eight-counts too big even for the basement terrain of the massive, gargoyled Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus, where I have come. I'm here to find the kids who are going to put on a weekend show - the West Philly students who, thanks to a program called CityStep, have been practicing all year to amaze their family and friends with the dances they've learned from a couple dozen incredibly devoted Penn undergrads.

By Andrea Camilleri Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli Penguin, 288 pp., $15 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky Fifteen books into his Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (with several titles yet to be translated from Italian/Sicilian/Camillerian into English), Andrea Camilleri manages both to offer readers the pleasures they've come to expect, and to vary the ingredients and add enough emotional depth to keep the series from growing tired. In book 14 ( The Age of Doubt )

CONGRATULATIONS to Alison Young , who won the fifth annual Dancing with the Philadelphia Stars on Sunday night at the Crystal Tea Room. Young, the vice president of External Affairs for the National Constitution Center, danced the foxtrot with Paul Samuelnas from the Studio on Take the Lead on Pine. Young was clad in floor-length pink spandex, covered in rhinetstones. She had no dance experience before. Q102 DJ Maxwell came in second with the waltz, while Fox29's Kacie McDonnell came in third with the tango.

If there's one thing Ira Glass knows, it's that you can't put a dance performance on the radio. The public radio journalist, who hosts NPR's popular weekly newsmagazine This American Life , was hit with that truth - and the resulting conundrum - two years ago when he fell in love with a performance by New York choreographer Monica Bill Barnes' modern dance ensemble. "I was struck by how the aesthetics of her show matched the tone and feeling of the radio show I do," Glass, 54, said this week in a phone interview.

I RA GLASS is the Jessica Simpson of public radio. Not the new, pregnant designer Jessica Simpson. The old, singing, can't dance a lick Jessica Simpson. That Jessica used to surround herself with dancers to hide her own immobility. And that brings us to Glass. The "This American Life" host will present the world premiere of "One Radio Show, Two Dancers," a night of stories and dance, courtesy of Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass , Saturday and Sunday at the Annenberg Center.

Susanne V. Wood, 78, a dance historian, died Tuesday, April 9, from complications of dementia at Rydal Park Health Center in Montgomery County. Born in Germantown, the daughter of Susan Stauffer and Emil Vollmar, she moved around the country as a young woman before zeroing in on her passion - dance. She graduated from Holy Family High School in Auburn, N.Y., and attended St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind. She graduated from Katherine Gibbs School in New York City. In the mid-1950s, she began studying to become a dancer, part of the corps de ballet with the Washington School of Ballet and at the Ballet Russe School in New York.

Anthony DeVuono, 97, a tap dancer who dazzled audiences with acrobatic moves in the 1940s and 1950s and operated a dance school in South Philadelphia for 50 years, died Sunday, March 31, at his home in Columbia, Md. In the 1940s, Mr. DeVuono and a friend, Sam Perna, were known as the Vanderbilt Boys, a dance duo. The pair performed in theaters and nightclubs from coast to coast, combining precision tap dancing, acrobatics, and comedy skits....

S HANA HEIDORN, 42, of Pennsport, owns Society Hill Dance Academy, which she started in 2002 on 2nd Street near Pine. She opened a second location in Manayunk in 2008. The school specializes in ballroom and Latin dance. Heidorn also runs a nonprofit called the Philadelphia Dance Foundation, which brings ballroom and Latin dance to inner-city schoolchildren in Philadelphia. Q: How did you come up with the idea for the academy? A: I moved here in 1995 to work for a dance school.

Penn Dixie Productions Animal Animal Mammal Mine . This dance-theater piece - inspired by the changes wrought by the Pill, enriched by interviews with 50 childless women, and involving an installation by sculptor Martha Posner - creates a vision of female fertility and ecological collapse. (Underground Arts, April 10 to 20.) Taller Puertorriqueño Sounds of Rhythm and Resistance . With a nod to the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and a stomp to Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, Pleneros de la 21's music foments Kulu Mele African Dance and Drum Ensemble and Familia Rojas' multigenerational ensemble to dance the drums.

Villanova's 1985 NCAA Tournament championship remains a watershed of local college basketball. Not quite so well-remembered these days is the 1971 Wildcats squad that came within one game of winning the whole enchilada. On March 27 - after beating Fordham, Penn (by a 90-47 margin) and Western Kentucky - the Jack Kraft-coached 'Cats lined up at Houston's Astrodome against the juggernaut that was John Wooden's UCLA Bruins squad (featuring three future NBA standouts, Henry Bibby, Curtis Rowe and Sidney Wicks)