At the Reading Market in advance of Thanksgiving, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer

Oh, that Philadelphia Inquirer. Oh, Kevin Ferris and your design team. You make waking up every fourth Sunday such a pleasure. Thank you for the glorious celebration of the Reading Market in today's Inquirer. I loved writing this piece and taking those photographs. I love being a Philadelphian.

The story can be read in its entirety here.

This essay is one of three dozen that will appear in LOVE: A PHILADELPHIA AFFAIR, due out from Temple University Press next fall. More on that here.

Read more...

Take a look at the Pumpple Cake

"Wait," I said to my husband.  "It's the Pumpple Cake!"

"The what?"

"The Pumpple!  You know — pumpkin pie baked inside chocolate cake, apple pie baked inside vanilla cake, vanilla buttercream frosting."  I was pointing by this time to a place just beyond the glass at the Reading Terminal Market, where lovely ladies in green Flying Monkey tee-shirts were slicing their world-famous cake-o-vention for an eager lunch-time crowd.  I'd read about the cake.  I'd heard it had been featured on Rachel Ray.  But I'd never seen it, and the baker must have noted my awe (and my raspberry camera) for she (without complaining of my cake-arazzi status) offered this photographic moment unto me.

I offer it, then, unto you.

Read more...

Crack of Dawn at the Down Home Diner

I'll be headed to New York City at the crack of dawn tomorrow, student essays in my bag, a client on the docket, and the chance, at long last, to meet someone whose words have always been dear to me.  I'll roll back home under the cover of dark.  I'll sleep past dawn on Saturday.  If all goes well I'll steal an hour from the weekend, maybe two, and read.  I have so many books here that are begging for a read.

Read more...

My father loves a good sausage sandwich, I told the man,

and so he helped me choose the right mustard and the right horseradish for inclusion in my father's birthday bag.  Condiments from Lancaster County.  Italian cookies from Termini Brothers.  A Penn cap for the Penn scholar.  A Penn pen to finish things off while seated at our new favorite restaurant in Berwyn. My mother was the best gift buyer in the whole wide world, and no one could ever fill her shoes, and besides, aren't early February birthdays hard, coming so soon after Christmas?

Still, I wanted my father's big day to be special, and so I asked the condiments man if I might snap a photo to show my dad just where his two new bright jars had come from.  I didn't get a picture of jars alone.  I got the man himself.  In action.

Read more...

In which I go on the perfect date with my husband

This year my husband surprised me at Christmas with plans he'd made for an entire evening out.  Philadelphia would be our destination—an upper room with views in the impeccable Loews Philadelphia Hotel, located in the former PSFS building; a matinee showing of Tango Fire; and a dinner at Amada, the Jose Garces (you might have seen him on the TV show, Iron Chef) tapas restaurant.  A night like this would be special by any accounting; it was and is especially wonderful for me—an evening like no other in my married life.

I love Philadelphia; you know that I do.  I loved our lunch at the Reading Terminal Market before the show, loved walking, in anticipation, up Broad Street, loved stepping inside the melting pot that Philadelphia has always been—so many different voices and languages in the sold-out audience of the Merriam Theater.  And of course, I love tango—fell at once for the passion and talent and acrobatics and commitment of the Fire dancers—and tapas are my favorite meal at any time; no one does them better than Jose Garces.

But if you look here, at these photos, you will find, between a picture from the Reading Market lunch and the view outside our hotel window, that something utterly unexpected happened during this already perfect afternoon and evening; the dancers from Tango Fire had come as well to Amada.  I had my little camera with me.  They acquiesced to a photograph.  So that there I am, happier than I can say, among the things and places and man I love.

Read more...