Porsche

Delaware Avenue, move over. Cherry Hill is threatening to burst onto the dance floor with an all-under- one-roof night-club complex. Right there on Route 70, where that trendy nightspot named after former 76er Rick Mahorn has been for two and a half years. It's got a new owner, and it's about to get a new look. Or perhaps we should call it an olde look. Because Mahorn's - the rocking joint where bouncers began using metal detectors to check the guests after a murder in the parking lot in 1992 - is set to become an over-30 night club called Klub Excalibur.

With Gov. Bill Clinton and just about every other presidential aspirant riding to the rescue of the middle class, a fair question arises: Which middle class? As recently as 10 years ago, most Americans shared a pretty clear image of what life in the middle class looked like: Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud in a nice tract house on Elm Street, a Chevy or a Ford in the driveway, a barbecue in the back yard, a washer and a dryer in the basement and a street filled with kids. That snapshot, so clear, simple and powerful, represented what social analyst Ralph Whitehead calls the "expanding middle class" that burst out after World War II and grew until the early 1970s.

Pam Shriver, president of the Women's Tennis Association, was discussing whether life on the road for female players will change in the aftermath of Magic Johnson's disclosure that he has the AIDS virus. "There's a big difference between men and women (players) when they travel," said Shriver, 29. "A lot of women are much younger than (professional) guys 21 to 30. Most of us have guy coaches. The chances for date opportunities would be greater if we didn't travel with a guy. They're always around.

I would guess that a large body of the people who followed the musical career of Miles Davis over the last 4 1/2 decades believed they were involved in a love-hate relationship, when all the time it may have been a cosmic bait- and-switch game. Just when we - oh, I was one of them - had made up our minds to buy Miles Davis' music as the siren song of a genius, he would jerk the cord and disappear into something utterly different that sounded to us like Muzak From Hell. Miles would alibi that he could never hark back to his old music, even for a momentary retrospective, because it bored him. And just when we'd begun to think we had detected a glimmer of merit peeping out of his new product, by George, he would pull the old Lucy-with-the-football trick again.

As a smart kid growing up in West Oak Lane, he was known as "Reds" for his hair and "the menace," after the mischievous Dennis of the comic strips. Years later, as a roguish Philadelphia defense lawyer, Dennis H. Eisman said the first nickname kept him out of trouble: "I could never do anything crazy. They'd know I did it - the kid with the red hair. " The second nickname, "I don't know if I've lived up to," he said. Yesterday when word of his apparent suicide traveled like electricity through the city's legal community - and in some cases across the country - many friends found it impossible to believe for so spirited a man. "That's not the Dennis I knew," associates said over and over about the incident in which police said Eisman apparently shot himself with his gun inside his silver Porsche in a Center City parking garage.

"God bless you, Pelle. And pray for us. " - The Rev. John Casey, in eulogy of Pelle Lindbergh at the Spectrum, Nov. 14, 1985 Time has passed, careers and lives have carried on, and what is it we have learned? Whenever Bob Froese opens a newspaper and reads that a fellow athlete has been arrested for drunken driving or has been clocked in his sports car on a dark interstate at 120 mph - whenever he is confronted with the eerie spectacle of history repeating itself - he asks himself precisely that question and wonders: "How can they forget so easily?"

Morning practice had ended at The Coliseum sports complex in Voorhees, N.J., and center Ron Sutter sat in the Flyers' locker room with beads of sweat dripping off his chin. While his teammates stripped out of their uniforms and disappeared into the steaming shower room, Sutter wiped his face with a towel and remembered Pelle Lindbergh. "All of us told Pelle that he had better slow down in that car or it would kill him," Sutter said. "Guys were afraid to drive with him. " Sutter shook his head and added with a sad smile: "He was still a kid and kids have got to learn: You drink and drive and you can get dealt some bad cards.

John W. McPartland Sr., 53, of Folcroft, a longtime Inquirer pressman, union stalwart and classic-car enthusiast, died Tuesday from injuries received in a car accident off Route 13 just south of New Castle, Del. Mr. McPartland, a journeyman pressman who worked at the newspaper for 35 years, was killed along with a passenger, Gisela M. Pama, 48, of New Castle, Del., when his silver 1982 Porsche and a truck collided at 4:42 p.m. Tuesday, said Delaware...

Fans of mystery and suspense films won't be thrilled by "Deceptions," a made-for-cable movie premiering 8 p.m. Sunday on the Showtime network. But if you're primarily interested in seeing "Knot's Landing" star and Cosmo model Nicollette Sheridan climb out of swimming pools, or "L.A. Law's" Harry Hamlin with said cover girl's French-manicured talons raking across his sweaty back, by all means tune in. Because that's the only reason for this ripoff melange of several good, sexy dramas, from "Body Heat" and "Dressed to Kill" to "Miami Vice.

Except for one little shop, it's Lee Zwick's block. All of it. His Elegance by Edythe shops stand in a line, their pricey wares shielded from the glare and the noise of Bustleton Avenue by bouffant burgundy awnings. At the curb stand the cars - a Mercedes, an Audi, an Eldorado, a Continental, a Jaguar, a Volvo, a Porsche and a Saab convertible. A stately Bentley is at the rear, lodged between Trans Am and Corvette. The drivers are long gone. Clearly, some serious shopping is going on here.