Pearl

I had already been to Pearl, it seemed, before I'd ever walked in. But it wasn't a Little Pete's flashback I was having when I cracked the door at 1904 Chestnut St. No, that greasiest of greasy-spoon coffee shops had been transformed into something at the complete opposite end of the Pretension Spectrum. Pearl, at first glance, was all too familiar - as a caricature of the prototypical Old City lounge re-created off Rittenhouse Square. It's a slick hybrid of nightspot flash and culinary trends that co-owner Scott Stein began to perfect at Red Sky, the austere Market Street lounge-eatery he recently sold.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Former Bartram star Earl Monroe, who played at Winston-Salem State, heads a 10-member class that will be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame on Nov. 18. The class, which was announced Tuesday in Kansas City, is New York Knicks heavy with former Georgetown great Patrick Ewing and Grambling's Willis Reed. Also named were Kansas star Clyde Lovellette, North Carolina's Phil Ford and Wyoming's Kenny Sailors. Also inducted will be Joe B. Hall, who followed Adolph Rupp as the coach of Kentucky, and Dave Robbins, who won more than 700 games at Virginia Union.

Pearl , a pan-Asian restau-bar three years in the works, has opened in a former Little Pete's at 1904 Chestnut St. The project from David, Scott and Sean Stein of Old City's Red Sky, with lawyer/club promoter Brett Perloff, is a two-story affair designed by DAS Architects (Rae, Rat's, Le Bec-Fin). First floor includes a white dining room and bar. There are a dark lounge, DJ booth, plus private room overlooking Chestnut Street on the second floor; four large "pearls," or seating areas, allow for bottle service for groups.

Earl Fleming patrols his neighborhood domain on a three-wheeled bicycle and operates out of his cluttered, mint-green house where the phone constantly rings with neighbors asking for help or offering it. He is "Earl the Pearl," the de facto mayor of the West End, according to Woodbury's real mayor - and lifelong West End resident - Donald Sanderson. "He's a very civic-minded man," Sanderson said of Fleming. "People know if they don't want to go to their councilman, they can go to Earl, and they know Earl will go to the right person or place.

"Puttin' on the Ritz," a fashion show, was presented at the Woodhaven Center, a Temple University residential program for the developmentally disabled. The fashion show, presented on Sept. 24, raised $540 for retarded adults in PEARL (Program Enhancing Aging Residents' Lifestyles). PEARL provides activities for residents ages 40-63 who are severely mentally retarded. Among the activities are swim therapy and classroom projects. The Woodhaven Center is at 2900 Southampton Rd.

Making hay while the sun shines, a worker spreads straw on a newly plowed lot at Pearl and Front Streets in Camden. The lot was home to a building demolished for Rutgers University's Camden campus last month. Next step is the laying of grass seed, fertilizer and a protective straw covering.

In Used People, a man and a woman set out to gingerly discover if it's true that love is always better the second time around - only to find they keep tripping over the baggage they brought along from the first trip. Beeban Kidron's beguiling blend of comedy and drama certainly takes up themes that have been used many times before. But with an A-list of Oscar winners at her command and a suavely amusing script from Todd Graff, the young English director proves that even the most threadbare material can be dressed up to look like a new suit.

The latest new play to emerge from Venture Theater's remarkably fertile Playwright Connection program gets my vote, hands-down, as the most entertaining and satisfying production to arrive on a local stage at this early moment in the theater season. I'm willing to give odds that few in its class will have matched or surpassed it by season's end. The play, "A Part of the Family," premiered last night at Stage III of Temple University Center City and will be with us through Nov. 3. Marla E. Schwartz, who makes her professional playwriting debut with this production, prefers to describe her play as a comic drama.

I confess. I watch QVC. Mostly for professional curiosity - honest - I'll hang in there when they pitch electronic products, which is one of the things I write about at the Daily News. (The hosts usually have done their homework about a product's special features, and the shopping channel's discount prices are a good gauge of the marketplace.) I also watch during the special jewelry sale hours - but only when my favorite pitchperson, Molly Daly, comes on. Usually it's late at night, (midnight to 3 a.m.)

Once when I was working as a long distance operator at AT&T I leaned over and asked a fellow worker if she had a tampon I could have. She strained way over her console and whispered back, "No, sorry. " Then she strained even farther to the woman across from her and really quietly whispered to ask if she might have one for me. That woman turned red and just shook her head and looked away. Next thing I knew, everyone at the console was shushing and whispering and covertly searching their purses.

Pearl Jamand Philly-raised Santigold are among top artists who will perform along with Jay-Z at the Budweiser Made in America festival over Labor Day Weekend. Dirty Projectors, Skrillex, Afrojack, Odd Future and Mike Snow are also performing over the two-day event, Sept. 1 and 2, along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. We reported the lineup's biggest names Monday morning at PhillyGossip.com after noting that an apparent Ticketmaster goof had prematurely listed acts online Friday.

AW, SHUCKS! "Who steals oysters out of the back of a truck?" asks Jason Cichonski, owner of Ela (3rd & Bainbridge), who was among restaurateurs who didn't get his delivery Wednesday following the Rittenhouse Square theft of a box of Pacific oysters. "There's a lot of worse things that can happen to you," oyster distributor Paul Appleby said of what he says was the pilfering of about 90 pounds of oysters from the back of his Ford F-350 on 18th Street near Locust. Appleby, who owns West Chester's SeaFresh Oysters, said he parked, made deliveries to Parc and Dandelion, and returned to his truck.

Now in its third season, the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra is finding itself a niche doing typically classical things with less-than-typical participants. Oriented toward African American musicians, founder/music director Jeri Lynne Johnson is creating audiences that seem new to Haydn and Mozart - and doing so with concerts that are first-class on every level. Though some listeners Saturday at the packed Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral could be heard quietly humming along with Mozart's beloved Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, others applauded between movements - showing not just appreciation, but that lots of listeners were new to classical concerts.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Former Bartram star Earl Monroe, who played at Winston-Salem State, heads a 10-member class that will be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame on Nov. 18. The class, which was announced Tuesday in Kansas City, is New York Knicks heavy with former Georgetown great Patrick Ewing and Grambling's Willis Reed. Also named were Kansas star Clyde Lovellette, North Carolina's Phil Ford and Wyoming's Kenny Sailors. Also inducted will be Joe B. Hall, who followed Adolph Rupp as the coach of Kentucky, and Dave Robbins, who won more than 700 games at Virginia Union.

PEARL FARRELL was seldom seen without a smile. That smile was no doubt an outward expression of her deep spirituality, as well as the loving support of her family that made her cheerful after a long life of challenges met and overcome. "God has smiled on me," she would say. A friend told her family, "Every time I see Miss Farrell she has a nice smile on her face. " Pearl Farrell, a longtime clothing examiner for the former Defense Supply Center, which made military uniforms in South Philadelphia, a dedicated churchwoman and family matriarch, died Feb. 21. She was 85 and lived in West Philadelphia.

HONOLULU - Clarence Pfundheller was standing in front of his locker on the USS Maryland when a fellow sailor told him they were being bombed by Japanese planes. "We never did call him a liar but he could stretch the truth pretty good," Pfundheller said. "But once you seen him, you knew he wasn't lying. " The 21-year-old Iowa native ran up to the deck that Sunday morning to man a five-inch antiaircraft gun. Seventy years later, he remembers struggling to shoot low-flying Japanese planes as smoke from burning oil billowed.

  He was six years old then and doesn't remember that Dec. 7 in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Marvin Baughman later saw newsreels with unflattering caricatures of the enemy. And he witnessed a B-25 bomber crash at a cemetery near the family farm in West Chester in 1944. Baughman never imagined that a decade after World War II, he'd be stationed at a former kamikaze base, renamed Johnson Air Base, in Japan, and that he'd get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Japanese side of the "date which will live in infamy.

The much-anticipated auction of two paintings to benefit the Pearl S. Buck Foundation of Perkasie, Bucks County, came up short Sunday when only one of the paintings sold and sluggish bidding on the second failed to meet its reserve asking price. The foundation had hoped to realize between $350,000 and $550,000 from the two oil-on-canvas works by American impressionist painter Edward Willis Redfield. Instead, the foundation will get just $200,000 - paid by an unnamed buyer who bid via telephone.

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, I was inside our hangar installing self-sealing gas tanks in the PBY's wings when "all hell broke loose. " A squadron of Japanese dive-bombers attacked our hangar, followed by another group of aircraft that strafed the planes just outside. ... With the help of my shipmate, the two of us managed to get hold of a .50-caliber machine gun. ... Facing the bay and the mountains in the direction the Japanese planes were coming from on their attack run, we fired off a number of rounds and, in the flurry of retaliation by our squadron, downed one of their planes.