Local Life
Fascinating characters everywhere you look
by PAGE RANDOLPH BANKS
How fascinating people in our town are, when one looks just beneath the surface! Just driving around, I’ve often thought of taking pictures of the people I see — keeping a kind of diary with notes I’ve taken on their personal backgrounds. It could be people I’ve briefly encountered or people I network with in some respect. Filling in their backgrounds, I probably will be asking folks some personal questions.
When my mother started aging, she used to say that one of the (few) advantages of becoming older was that you had more freedom to say and do outrageous things. People either thought you were amusing and admirable or else approaching senility. Both acceptable. What she did, of course, was frequently embarrassing. For instance, she was fond of telling people of another color or culture, “You people have come such a long way!” Or such things as asking a nice young man, “Are you still going with that awful girl with the frizzy hair?” And you can imagine the types of answers she was likely to get.
New chef on Hill shines ‘a light in the darkness’
by Ann Barr
Carl Grear and the Seventh Day Adventist Church, 8700 Germantown Ave., are on a mission: they want to make Chestnut Hill residents healthier. Grear, the new chef at Expressly Vegetarian Café, located in the church’s basement, likens the mission to being a “light in the darkness.” But the multi-talented Grear has been hired to do more than feed your belly something healthy; he wants to lead you to wellness.
Grear is perhaps uniquely qualified to expand the mission of the café, which was started as an outreach of the church in 2001. On any given day, customers can stroll into the café and chat with this tall, serene gentleman in the chef’s hat. “People really like the hat,” notes Grear, who has worn a variety of hats in his life, all of them relevant to his current position not just as the café’s chef, but as the director of wellness at the church.
Originally from northern California, Carl Grear started out studying to be a Seventh Day Adventist minister at Oakwood College in Alabama. From there he went to Pacific-Union College, but after graduation no longer felt certain about being a minister. Instead, he studied hotel and restaurant management and went on to study for a time with an Austrian pastry chef. “The emphasis of my education,” explains Grear, “was classic French cooking with an emphasis on sauces and soups. This works especially well with vegetarian cooking.”
Novel set in Northwest Philly an impressive debut
by JIMMY J. PACK JR.
There’s something exciting about reading a novel set in the area in which you live. The last Philly-set novel I read was Drop by Germantown native Mat Johnson. In Drop, Johnson contrasts a bleak Philly with a grass-is-always-greener-over-there view of London, England.
In a new novel by Elkins Park native Edward Schwarzchild, Philly is yet again a center for conflict. In Responsible Men, the debut novel for Schwarzchild, readers are invited into the world of a con-man whose past lies in the transformed neighborhood surrounding Fifth and Cheltenham, and though you can’t go back home again, you certainly can revisit the old ‘hood and learn a lot about yourself.
The protagonist of Responsible Men is Max Wolinsky, a man full of conflict that makes Schwarzchild’s novel an attention-grabber. Wolinsky has returned home to Philly for a Bar Mitzvah after exiling himself to Key West for a year. And while it’s important for a man to get his bearings straight after a divorce, Wolinsky left behind his son, Nathan, with a mother who’s more wrapped up in her new life with her new man — the former gardener for the Wolinskys.
