Love Affair

It was a day of romance complete with handsome male models, racy love stories and lush desserts. Just the perfect setting for those who fancy those steamy romance novels with those eyebrow-raising covers. You know, the ones with titles like Passion's Slave and Savage Thunder and eye-catching covers of bare-chested, brawny heroes with scantily clad maidens in their arms. It was the brainstorm of Darlene Atta to transform the Lenni Fire Company hall in Middletown into a romance readers' haven on Saturday.

From the start, Bryan Edwards and Myla Friedman didn't belong together. She was born in New York City, one of her father's four children. She was raised by her father, an insurance executive, and stepmother in a comfortable home not far from Princeton. She graduated from a private high school. Her friends say she was shy and seemed too busy to socialize. He was born in Philadelphia, also one of four children, and lived at different times with different family members.

EVEN BEFORE the head in the box arrived, I was feeling a little worn down by TV's love affair with crazed killers. OK, so it wasn't an actual head. But mounted on a Styrofoam stand, the bewigged and slightly cartoonish mask of Edgar Allan Poe, sent to promote Fox's "The Following," was an unpleasant reminder of the episode I'd recently screened in which a man wearing just such a Poe mask had set another man on fire. The next day, there would be genuine horror on all our TV screens, as reports began to come in about a shooting massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

I remember when I was a little boy, and then a young man, what it was like to feel totally connected to the idea of America, not just to the fact of its existence but also to its aspirations, to what it meant. And we knew, whether we were critical or not, that America meant that in society with all its problems, and in its commerce with all its sins, and in its government with all its blunders, America could be, with appropriate effort and consistency, the finest and most excellent answer to the question, "How can people live together and honor freedom and justice and opportunity?"

"A Man in Love," a drama starring Peter Coyote and Greta Scacchi. Written and directed by Diane Kurys. Running time: 108 minutes. A Cinecom release. At the Ritz Five. It's always a bad sign when a movie's minor characters interest you more than its leads. Such is the case with "A Man in Love," the new trilingual love story from the French director Diane Kurys ("Peppermint Soda," "Molotov Cocktail," "A Man in Love"). Long after we've concluded that actors Steve Elliott and Jane Steiner (played by Peter Coyote and Greta Scacchi)

More than 50 years later, they remain the standard. Aficionados say their names with relish and reverence. Duesenberg. Cord. Auburn. Those fast, sleek, luxurious, technically advanced touring cars of the late 1920s and the 1930s are the epitome of the American love affair with the automobile, the classics of classic cars. That affair was renewed last Sunday at the Franklin Mint on Route 1 in Middletown Township, as Duesenbergs, Cords and Auburns were the centerpieces of the mint's third annual antique automobile festival.

Two conspicuously unconventional productions opened on Broadway this week, giving a sluggish theater season a dose of adrenalin. The Gospel at Colonus, which opened last night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a celebrated mixture of gospel music and Greek tragedy that has already traveled the international circuit. Philadelphia saw it at the American Music Theater Festival in 1985. M. Butterfly, which opened Sunday at the Eugene O'Neill, is David Henry Hwang's play about an improbable man-to-man love affair, starring John Lithgow and staged brilliantly by John Dexter.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at the reaction to Princess Diana's death - long lines of mourners in cities throughout the world, heads of state fighting back tears as they expressed condolences, television anchors summoned from their vacations to authenticate the significance of the event. I had, after all, spent the previous two weeks in Wales and England and she had been on the front page of the English papers every day I was there. Every move she made, it seems, was newsworthy to the Brits.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2002, Ellen Gartner fell in love with a long-forsaken lady. Gartner's kids were 4 and 6 at the time, old enough to stay with their dad as she went with friends to see a show. She was sitting in the backseat of a car when she saw the object of her affection for the first time, though she had probably passed the place 100 times before. Through bare trees, and at the end of a long drive, she spied Federal-era brick and Victorian scalloping on a mansard roof, a graceful porch, and a spartan fieldstone center that seemed to reach back to Cheltenham Township's birth.

Can an aging sports stud whose anchorbabe fiancee is bigger than Oprah find true happiness with a wannabe singer engaged to marry a billionaire? Can a classic 1939 romance remade in 1957 and parodied to the point of tribute in a 1993 comedy find an audience in 1994? Stranger things have happened. In the '30s, Love Affair starred Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as the star- crossed lovers on a transatlantic crossing. In the '50s, the remake boasted Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.

EVEN BEFORE the head in the box arrived, I was feeling a little worn down by TV's love affair with crazed killers. OK, so it wasn't an actual head. But mounted on a Styrofoam stand, the bewigged and slightly cartoonish mask of Edgar Allan Poe, sent to promote Fox's "The Following," was an unpleasant reminder of the episode I'd recently screened in which a man wearing just such a Poe mask had set another man on fire. The next day, there would be genuine horror on all our TV screens, as reports began to come in about a shooting massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

There are plays about adolescence and plays for adolescents. Theatre Confetti's inaugural production, A. Rey Pamatmat's Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them , aims high at adults, but its bull's-eye is a younger target audience. Plenty of plays with kids as their subject make an easy transition to adulthood: Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive and Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade are but two examples of adult works with children as their messengers. But despite what could, in certain circles, be considered "adult themes," Pamatmat's sincerity and the straightforward, episodic nature of his script keep Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them squarely within the realm of Hansel-and-Gretel-style child-fantasy fulfillment (that's the Grimm edition, not this year's bounty-hunting witch-chasers)

The theme of this week's class is desire . The "How to Write a Song" class, that is, taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon and English songwriter John Wesley Harding to a room full of impressively talented Princeton University undergraduates. Each week this semester at Princeton, two dozen students have split into small groups and written songs on a given emotional topic, such as loneliness , or remorse . Then, when the class meets on Tuesdays on the Ivy League university's idyllic campus, they perform it in front of their impressively credentialed, though not stern, taskmasters.

LET'S FACE IT, the real question here is: Does Rocky's cheesesteak live up to the high standards we natives set for this most Philadelphian of delicacies? The answer, in short, is no. The combination of machine-processed cheese and mayonnaise glopped onto the steak is distinctly un-Philadelphian. (Argentines have a love affair with mayo, so its presence here is not surprising.) These ingredients create a topping you'd be more likely to get at a bar in Davenport, Iowa, or Omaha, Neb., than on a steak from an authentic joint in the City of Brotherly Love.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Given the opportunity to say goodbye, Andy Reid ducked out the back and four days later resurfaced here of all places. The divorce was a long time coming and it got nasty at the end, with the chants and the papers bags and the banners. But when Reid chose not to have one final news conference it was as if he wanted to deny Eagles fans their chance at closure. Fourteen years is a long time in one place for any NFL coach, but perhaps nowhere as long as in Philadelphia.

The setup: After years of rumors, rhetoric and bickering, the 76ers, on Dec. 19, 2006, finally put their actions where their hearts were and sent Allen Iverson, one of the most beloved players, and the most exciting, in franchise history, and Ivan McFarlin to the Denver Nuggets for veteran point guard Andre Miller, former Sixer Joe Smith and two first-round draft picks. And on March 19, 2008, he came home. THE CITY of Philadelphia had a love affair with Allen Iverson.

IF SHE didn't know it already, Lisa DeBella will now: her husband of 17 years has been carrying on a 30-year love affair. But she needn't worry: the object of his affection isn't a woman; it's Philadelphia. How else do you explain why John DeBella, the 62-year-old WMGK-FM (102.9) morning-drive host - a native New Yorker, no less - has been in Philadelphia since the days when Ronald Reagan was president and Julius Erving and Moses Malone were the talk of the town? Why else would he have hung around even during the years when he was suffering professional humiliation and personal tragedy?

Stop the carousel; I want to get off. Not without sadness (and a curious twinge of betrayal), I'm dropping Glee from my DVR's to-do list. Three episodes into the fourth season, and I'm calling it quits. It's not just the changes in this year of the diaspora that sent Rachel and then Kurt to New York and the rest of the Class of McKinley '12 who knows where. I mean, I like some of the new cast members (Dean Geyer's Brody) and don't like others (Jacob Artist's Jake). But I will admit I miss Santana (Naya Rivera)

MANY PEOPLE never would have pegged Diquan Gilbert for eventual football stardom. Prominent among the doubters? Good, ol' Gilbert himself. Even now, though he routinely fashions eye-popping performances at outside linebacker (he also plays running back) for Communications Tech, Gilbert acknowledges that his love for football is exceeded by his mother's. He also confesses to this: When he was getting started with the sport, he was never in the running to win the Most Dedicated trophy.

It won't be long now before teens across the globe take to the streets in sackcloth and ashes in mourning over Kristen Stewart's swan dive from media grace. K-Stew, whose romance with Twilight costar Robert Pattinson has helped us keep at bay the horrors of a world engulfed in poverty, war, and famine, admitted this week that she had engaged in what she called a "momentary indiscretion" with her married Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders. The fallout has been shocking: Fans, for the most part teenage girls, have unleashed a fury of disappointment and outrage, a wave of hysteria not seen since Sigmund Freud set up shop in Vienna.