Palm

An unidentified woman enters Holy Cross Catholice Church in Mount Airy yesterday - Palm Sunday. A basket of palms sits on a pew in the church. The palms were blessed and passed out to parishioners, marking the beginning of Holy Week leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday next weekend.

WHY ON EARTH were the Academy Awards held on Palm Sunday this year? Doesn't Hollywood and the academy know that Palm Sunday is the beginning of Holy Week and commemorates the day that Christ rode into Jerusalem? This was not the appropriate time for Hollywood to honor its best in filmmaking achievements. The academy should have rescheduled the ceremony for after Easter. If they could reschedule it after Martin Luther King was killed, when Reagan was shot (holding it on the Wednesday after Easter)

Meet Betty Ann, Trish and Peggy, the palm-weaving sisters of Ninth Street. They're the Anderson girls, who grew up at Ninth and Montrose. Each spring, they revive an Old World tradition, weaving palms into sprays, crosses and hearts. Their creations will grace altars, doorways and grave sites this morning in celebration of Palm Sunday. Once, every mother and daughter in the Italian Market knew how to weave palms. Once, you could walk down Ninth Street and buy palms at several dozen shops.

Flyers center Eric Lindros took slashes and cheap shots from some of the NHL's toughest players in the recent playoffs and walked away with only a few scratches. But send him out to do some landscaping around his vacation cottage north of Toronto, and the finalist for the Hart Trophy as the league's most valuable player winds up needing a bandage. Lindros, who was involved in an incident in a Canadian bar a few seasons ago, caused a stir Wednesday night when he showed up at the NHL awards ceremony in Toronto with tape across his left palm.

The Palm opened only last month, and already the kvetching has begun. "I asked if I could get any other vegetable with lunch instead of potatoes, and he said no," an accomplished business luncher griped to me this week. "They've opened a New York restaurant, and they've brought the New York attitude with them. " So nice of you to notice, the Palm would retort if it had a voice. The Palm, now ensconced at the Bellevue hotel and shopping complex, is more formula than restaurant.

At St. John's Roman Catholic Church in Collingswood, Msgr. M. Joseph Mannion burns palm branches to create ashes for today's Ash Wednesday observation. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent.

If Marty Weinberg was the candidate of the Palm, why did John Street have his post-election unity lunch there? Is Weinberg now munching ribs at Big George's? Actually, it's Bill Clinton who munches ribs at Big George's. Street's exemplary dietary habits - fruit, vegetables, chicken and fish - would seem at odds with the marbled-steak-and-cottage-fries crowd that frequents the city's political hangout. But Street is no stranger to the Palm. The Palm is the "p" in power lunch.

Ted Leydon does not wear a turban or long flowing robes, and he is quick to admit that he cannot predict how long someone will live. He also cannot say if or when Mr. or Ms. Right will come along. But the Romanian-born palm reader is pretty good at telling folks if they look like their grandfather or mother, are easygoing or hot-tempered, optimistic or pessimistic. In a palmistry workshop in Phoenixville on Friday night, Leydon also was able to correctly tell Susan Davidson-Fisher that her blood type is Rh negative.

JERUSALEM - Hundreds of Christian pilgrims marked Palm Sunday in the Holy Land, holding masses and processions retracing Jesus' triumphant return to Jerusalem, while at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI also celebrated the start of Holy Week. Palm Sunday marks the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem, where he was greeted by cheering crowds bearing palm fronds, according to the Bible. Events in Jerusalem began with Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - revered as the site where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - They rallied by the thousands before dawn Saturday, but not for Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, or Rick Santorum. While four presidential candidates crisscrossed Florida in frantic anticipation of Tuesday's Republican primary, the women who gathered on Flagler Drive, overlooking the water and Palm Beach's bleached white skyline, were campaigning for a cure for breast cancer. Politics was secondary. At the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers filled the streets with a sea of pink regalia - fuchsia feather boas, flamingo tutus, sequined bras brazenly worn as outerwear, and a cacophony of T-shirt slogans including "Yes, they're fake.

This palm-sized peeler has three rotating blades, so with a flick of your wrist, you can julienne carrots or create fancy zucchini ribbons that would make a culinary school instructor proud.   - Ashley Primis Joseph Joseph Rotary Peeler, $12 at Sur La Table, the Promenade, 500 Route 73 S., Marlton, 856-797-0098, and King of Prussia Mall, 484-612-0040, josephjoseph.com.

NOTE: THIS STORY HAS BEEN CLARIFIED. HOW DID BELEAGUERED and bankrupt Lenny Dykstra afford a $700+ meal at the Palm Friday night? NBC 10. Through a trade arrangement with the high-end steakhouse, the station provides guests of its Sunday night "Sports Final" with dinner at the Palm. The former Phillies star took full advantage of the hospitality when he and an attractive blonde drank two bottles of $150 red wine, then had salads and surf-and-turf, in addition to crab cakes and assorted desserts to take back to their room at the Ritz-Carlton.

VENTNOR, N.J. - Harry Hasson is more comfortable running a business and working silently in his garden or studio than talking about what he does or who he is. But the garden gives him away. It does not hint. It shouts to all who enter: This is a guy with a lot going on and it's all playing out here. In this unconventional garden on the busy corner of Ventnor and Oxford Avenues in Ventnor, Hasson creates abstractions of beauty and beast in wood and stone. He celebrates water, life-giving and sustaining through setback and sadness.

LAST MONTH we told you that somebody had sliced a caricature of 610 WIP's Angelo Cataldi off one of the walls full of famous faces at the Palm (200 S. Broad). We now know the whereabouts of the missing cartoon. On our desk. On Wednesday afternoon a large envelope addressed to Your Humble Narrator arrived with no return address bearing six Purple Heart stamps and an East Falls postmark. Inside was Cataldi's face, with plaster from the Palm's wall on the back, under a sheet of clear plastic.

The Maui Invitational annually has featured the best teams in college basketball looking for a way to balance the relaxing ambience of the 50th state with the intense competition at the Lahaina Civic Center. When St. Joseph's plays its first game in the tournament today against seventh-ranked Texas, the Hawks will see how well they have managed to keep the beaches and palm trees in proportion to free-throw shooting and defense. That was of some concern to coach Phil Martelli before the Hawks left for San Francisco, where they spent two days before heading for Maui.

Earl L. Cahan, 95, an arbitrator for the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, died Saturday of heart failure at home in the Dorchester, in the same elegant suit he wore to the Palm, where he had dined earlier in the evening. Mr. Cahan was raised in Germantown and graduated from Germantown High School. In 1929, he moved to the Chateau Crillon, the first high-rise on Rittenhouse Square, built in 1929 by his real estate mogul father, Louis. Mr. Cahan lived at the Chateau while earning a bachelor's degree in 1933 from the Wharton School and a law degree in 1937 from the University of Pennsylvania.

IF YOU WERE playing "Family Feud" and the category was "Reason Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards might end up in a hospital," do you think anyone surveyed would say "Fell out of palm tree"? That would be way, way down on anyone's list. But Keith's fans gathered yesterday outside a New Zealand hospital where he was believed to be undergoing treatment for a mild concussion reportedly suffered when he fell like a coconut on his coconut while vacationing at the exclusive Wakaya Club resort on a small island of Fiji.

South Jersey Democratic power broker George E. Norcross III and his wife, Sandra, have bought a $10.9 million home on luxurious Everglades Island in Palm Beach, Fla. The sale of the one-story, 6,000-square-foot, Bermuda-style home - one of several residences the Cherry Hill millionaire owns - was completed Monday. He also has a home in Loveladies, N.J., on Long Beach Island. Originally listed for $11.5 million, the house includes a cabana, a sunken pool, and sweeping views of the Intracoastal Waterway, according to the Web site of Martha A. Gottfried Inc., the real estate brokerage that handled the sale.