Winnie

(Above) Singer Kenny Loggins and some of his pals have some fund during Winnie the Pooh Friendship Day at Penn's Landing yesterday. The festival was held to celebrate the true meaning of friendship. (Below) Dennis Gallagher takes a picture of wife Maria and their 8-month-old son Matthew.

Risa Sumanga of the Temple University Marching Band dresses up as Winnie the Pooh during practice yesterday afternoon.

"There's something important we have to talk about. " Katie made that remark often to her husband, Winnie, in their 35 or so years of marriage, but when she says itat the beginning of Gorked! (A Love Story), the circumstances are a bit out of the ordinary. Katie, you see, has been dead for five years, and Winnie has entered the seeming oblivion of advancing Alzheimer's disease. The "something important" Katie has to say is that it's time for Winnie himself to die - or as the irreverent wife puts it, employing a slang term for dying that hospital personnel use among themselves, it is time for her husband to be gorked.

j THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE By Amy Tan Putnam. $22.95 There is a story in Chinese mythology about a rich, lucky man named Zhang. He betrayed his devoted, hard-working wife, Guo, and squandered his fortune in a love affair with the lovely Lady Li. Much later, he repented his evil ways and killed himself out of remorse. As a reward for his change of heart, the Jade Emperor made Zhang a minor figure in the celestial hierarchy. He became the ever- watchful Kitchen God, who observes the behavior of the Chinese people to determine if they deserve good luck or ill. His wife, Guo, received no recognition for her fidelity and love.

Yeah, dirt doesn't come cheap these days. Or, possibly, the minuscule stage of the Mask & Wig Theatre simply may not have the engineering specs to accommodate the volume of dirt needed to cover Sheila Bader all the way up the traditional mound of dirt is missing from the current production of Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" by the Philadelphia Area Repertory Theatre. PART's creative staff has chosen instead to deposit poor Winnie within a bulwark of papier-mache boulders somewhat resembling the rocky coast of Maine, an expedient that ain't quite the same as burying her in a mountain of mulch.

"If life and death did not both present themselves to us," Samuel Beckett told an interviewer in 1961, "there would be no inscrutability. . . . It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable. " Darkness and light battle to a virtual standoff in Happy Days, the spare, existential 1961 tragicomedy that was to become the last full-length play that Beckett would write. Their eternal struggle is brought to rich and satisfying life in the Philadelphia Area Repertory Theatre (PART)

Anyone who has ever felt stuck in an impossible situation (a marriage, a job, a town, a life - and who has not?) will identify easily with Samuel Beckett's courageously cheerful heroine in Happy Days, who is, quite literally, stuck. Fiona Shaw, in a major production transferred from London, is singing Winnie's song at Brooklyn Academy of Music with fierce power. The initial soundscape is almost as unsettling as the landscape: harsh, loud white noise mingled with random melodic music in a wrecked world - rocks, hunks of concrete, rubble - within the magnificent wreck of the Harvey Theatre, BAM's crumbling signature venue.

  One of the most satisfying things about going to the theater is being fooled. If you go, I'll bet that's one of the reasons. It has to do with real people right in front of you, creating a world and getting you to buy in. At the Wilma Theater, where Alan Ayckbourn's comedy My Wonderful Day starts off quietly and gets funnier and funnier as it plows forward for 90 minutes, I was completely bamboozled - and what a great feeling when...

The 1964 "Mary Poppins" film score may be the most beloved and popular work by Richard and Robert Sherman, but it is hardly their only effort. Here's a sampling: Movie scores "The Parent Trap" (1961) "The Jungle Book" (1967) "The Happiest Millionaire" (1967) "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968) "The Aristocats" (1970) "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971) "Snoopy Come Home" (1972) "Charlotte's Web" (1973) "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (1977)

The Nutcracker isn't the only tale in the toys-that-come-alive-as-humans- sleep category. The Velveteen Rabbit, the story of a stuffed being whom love makes whole, takes place, in part, during some nighttime revelry. The Philadelphia-based Mum Puppettheatre, often on international tour, is home at its new 49-seat Manayunk studio for five final performances of the bunny-and-his-boy tale, at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. today and Saturday. There's an additional show at 4 on New Year's Eve. Using every sort of home-grown and exotic puppet under the sun - Indonesian rod puppets, for instance - plus masked actors, the Mums stay, well, mum. Silent, quiet, nonverbal.

It was an unassuming spot, and we probably would have walked right past it if we hadn't known what we were looking for: a clump of about five dozen trees perched on the top of a blustery hill. But when we walked up, there was no mistaking it: There before us lay the Enchanted Place, also known as Galleons Lap, a resting ground for childhoods the world over. It's the spot where Christopher Robin, no longer a little boy, and his beloved companion Winnie-the-Pooh came to say their fumbling goodbyes: "Being enchanted, its floor wasn't like the floor of the Forest, gorse and bracken and heather, but close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green.

  One of the most satisfying things about going to the theater is being fooled. If you go, I'll bet that's one of the reasons. It has to do with real people right in front of you, creating a world and getting you to buy in. At the Wilma Theater, where Alan Ayckbourn's comedy My Wonderful Day starts off quietly and gets funnier and funnier as it plows forward for 90 minutes, I was completely bamboozled - and what a great feeling when...

The 1964 "Mary Poppins" film score may be the most beloved and popular work by Richard and Robert Sherman, but it is hardly their only effort. Here's a sampling: Movie scores "The Parent Trap" (1961) "The Jungle Book" (1967) "The Happiest Millionaire" (1967) "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968) "The Aristocats" (1970) "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971) "Snoopy Come Home" (1972) "Charlotte's Web" (1973) "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (1977)

HUGE. 9 tonight, ABC Family. I'VE WAITED A long time to see Winnie Holzman, the creator of "My So-Called Life" and the Tony-nominated writer of Broadway's "Wicked," do another show about adolescent girls. Now she has. And happily, it's "Huge. " Developed by Holzman, who's always worn her inner teen on her sleeve, and her daughter, Savannah Dooley, and based on a young-adult novel by Sasha Paley about kids at a weight-loss camp, "Huge" is the latest addition to ABC Family's collection of shows targeted to tween and teen girls.

CANNES, France - Jennifer Hudson has visited the film festival here twice, the first time in 2006 with a 20-minute highlights reel from the film version of "Dreamgirls. " That was before "Dreamgirls" won her a supporting-actress Oscar. Posh, influential festivals and the component parts of hype machinery were relatively new to Hudson then. In fact, when the producers told her she'd be going to Cannes, she says, "I was, like, 'You mean Canada?' " She came back to Cannes this week. This time, Hudson had a bodyguard, an enormous Gallic Lurch-like fellow with a surprisingly mellow disposition.

Winnie Lawrence Kensill, 75, who gave her adult life to the work of the Methodist church in North Philadelphia, died of breast cancer Wednesday at the Keystone House hospice in Wyndmoor. The congregation of Mid-Town Parish United Methodist Church last year celebrated her 50 years of service as a teacher, program leader, community advocate, and all-round encourager to the people of the church. For the last decade, Mrs. Kensill led seminars for Methodist clergy from across the Philadelphia area on healing the wounds of racism.

Anyone who has ever felt stuck in an impossible situation (a marriage, a job, a town, a life - and who has not?) will identify easily with Samuel Beckett's courageously cheerful heroine in Happy Days, who is, quite literally, stuck. Fiona Shaw, in a major production transferred from London, is singing Winnie's song at Brooklyn Academy of Music with fierce power. The initial soundscape is almost as unsettling as the landscape: harsh, loud white noise mingled with random melodic music in a wrecked world - rocks, hunks of concrete, rubble - within the magnificent wreck of the Harvey Theatre, BAM's crumbling signature venue.

Julian "Winnie" Winston, 64, an industrial-design teacher at the University of the Arts, folk musician, author, and leading homeopath, died June 12 of prostate cancer at home in Wellington, New Zealand. "Winnie Winston . . . was an important figure in the folk-music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He played banjo and pedal steel guitar. . . . He recorded with Steve Goodman, David Bromberg, Rosalie Sorrels and David Grisman, and made records under his own name," radio host Terry Gross said Thursday on her show, Fresh Air. Raised in Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Winston was the son of art teachers.

"There's something important we have to talk about. " Katie made that remark often to her husband, Winnie, in their 35 or so years of marriage, but when she says itat the beginning of Gorked! (A Love Story), the circumstances are a bit out of the ordinary. Katie, you see, has been dead for five years, and Winnie has entered the seeming oblivion of advancing Alzheimer's disease. The "something important" Katie has to say is that it's time for Winnie himself to die - or as the irreverent wife puts it, employing a slang term for dying that hospital personnel use among themselves, it is time for her husband to be gorked.

Her freedom-fighting reputation tarnished in recent years by allegations of murder, torture and kidnapping, South African antiapartheid activist Winnie Mandela received a hero's welcome in Philadelphia yesterday during a meeting with black female activists, her first stop on a weeklong tour of Philadelphia and New Jersey. Mandela, a member of the South African Parliament, delivered the keynote address for "Black Splendor Weekend," held by the Philadelphia Congress of the National Political Congress of Black Women.