Philadelphia

May is going to be a busy month for the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. Commissioners will hold three hearings on three consecutive days in Philadelphia. First up: a review at 2 p.m. May 7 at the National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St., on the revised expansion plans for the SugarHouse Casino. It's been four years since the Sugar- House folks got the OK from commis- sioners to expand their waterfront casino on North Delaware Avenue. And it's been two years since City Council and the planning commission also signed off on plans.

A Philadelphia woman pleaded guilty Monday in Montgomery County Court to taking a $3 million bust of Benjamin Franklin from a Bryn Mawr home where she worked as a house cleaner. The bust, by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, was recovered, but had been damaged in the theft. Andrea Lawton, 47, pleaded in Judge Carolyn Tornetta Carluccio's courtroom to one count of burglary and one count of criminal conspiracy to commit burglary, at what was supposed to be the beginning of her trial on those charges.

Mozart's The Magic Flute can be counted on for whimsy of the highest order, but not necessarily for magic. And when you notice during a performance that this is an opera whose main characters undergo tedious fire-and-water rituals just to get married, the piece as a whole isn't always working. Opera Philadelphia's current production, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music, was reasonably resourceful even if the singers were a bit green, in what amounted to a middling encounter with the least stageable of Mozart's major operas.

Will Olympians scull on the Schuylkill, spike beach volleyballs in Wildwood, pole vault in Fairmount Park? Mayor Nutter would like to think so. On Monday, he told the U.S. Olympic Committee in a letter that the Philadelphia region is "enthusiastically" embracing the prospect of bidding on and hosting the Olympics and Paralympics in 2024. "I am honored to confirm our wholehearted commitment and interest in working with the USOC to bid on the 2024 Games," Nutter wrote to Scott Blackmun, chief executive of the committee in Colorado Springs.

Steve Burns is a part-time waiter. He does carpentry, too. But his real job is poetry. The Sicklerville resident, 23, volunteers for Apiary, a print and online literary magazine as energetic and eclectic as the Philly poetry scene it nurtures. From the current issue, available free in the literature room at the Parkway branch of the Free Library: I lost my Philly accent somewhere in the outback returned with a tan and an easy disposition "Apiary is a medley of everything," says Burns, who reviews readings, tours independent bookstores, and conducts interviews for his "Captain Steve" column.

Sometimes it's great to be away from the main office. Like, for example, when the home office is the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, where a court decision, pending legislation, and political paralysis are calling into question the board's ability to function. "It's a lot of uncertainty," Dennis Walsh said with the understatement of a man well-practiced in dodging political land mines. On Friday, Walsh, 58, was sworn in as the new regional director of the NLRB.

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.

In a sign of budget cuts rippling nationwide, the federal Public Defender's Office in Philadelphia has laid off five employees, closed its Allentown branch, and ordered the rest of the staff to take 10 unpaid furlough days by October. The layoffs this month include a veteran lawyer who ran the Allentown branch, an aide there, and three more in Philadelphia. Thousands of area federal workers are bracing to learn whether they will be affected by $85 billion in automatic budget cuts that kicked in last month.

It was a rare sight. Not long ago, a woman stood at the entrance to the Kimmel Center before a sold-out Philadelphia Orchestra concert, holding a sign: "Need one ticket. " A few weeks earlier, a couple called the box office the day after a performance of The Rite of Spring and made a $10,000 gift. Points of contact like these represent the kind of passion the orchestra must stoke if it is to survive, yet they remain all too infrequent. More than nine months out of bankruptcy, it's still a struggle to get past living hand-to-mouth.

Jasper Yeates, born in Philadelphia, was once the most prominent lawyer in Lancaster County. He was a delegate to the state convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution, and served more than 20 years as a state Supreme Court justice. Yeates earned a bachelor's degree from the College of Philadelphia in 1761, and shortly thereafter went on to study law. After his admission to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1765, he started his law practice in Lancaster. In addition to his legal duties, Yeates served as captain in the Lancaster militia.