November 30, 2006 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Online Editor Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or ©2006 Chestnut Hill Local Winner of One |
Local Life‘Cradles
to Crayons’: a Case of kindness in Wyndmoor
When seven-year-old McKenzie Case and her six-year-old sister Olivia heard about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, they wanted to do something to help the children of New Orleans. With the help of their mother, Jennifer Case of Wyndmoor, last fall they organized a multi-family yard sale selling books, toys, bikes, strollers and household items. Calling their event “Kids4Kids,” the girls raised $2,000. “When I saw my children counting the money and heard them telling each other, ‘This will help someone have a house,’ well, it just gave me goose bumps.” Jennifer Case was incredibly moved by the initiative and enthusiasm of her young daughters. “I saw what this was doing for the kids, and it made me feel so good.”
Mt.
Airyite was national champion
When Mt. Airy resident Rhonda Montes (nee Rhonda Yancy), now in her mid-40s, was an honor student at Martin Luther King High School in the late ‘70s, she was also making headlines with her feet. For two years in a row Rhonda was the city’s fastest female sprinter. In the 10th grade she was the city’s 100-yard dash champion with a time of 10.6 seconds, and the following year she added the 220-yard crown with a time of 24.4 seconds. She was also the national junior sprint champion.
‘Preservation
Potpourri’ Saturday raises funds for Historical Society
From its humble beginning in 1984, this year’s Chestnut Hill Historical Society’s 23rd Annual Preservation Potpourri will take place on Saturday, Dec. 2, 7 p.m., at Guildford, the glorious Wharton Sinkler estate in Wyndmoor.
Former Mt. Airy playwright
cooks up theatrical pancakes
“I like watching audiences,” Michael Hollinger, a playwright and former Mt. Airy resident, said. “I like being in the back of a theater when a particular moment is about to happen, that something funny, exciting, suspenseful or moving is about to take place.” He has the opportunity with his play, Incorruptible, whose Drama Guild production ended a run Nov. 25 at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown (FUMCOG). As a child in York, Pennsylvania, Hollinger, now 44, was involved in community theater with his parents. He was an actor and worked backstage. He started writing short skits in junior high, and in York’s Central High School, would ask to write plays instead of research papers. In college, he wrote several plays that were produced, including a full-length musical that he directed. (Hollinger earned a bachelor’s degree in Viola Performance at Oberlin Conservatory — but that’s another story — and an MA in Theatre from Villanova University.)
Masterful rendition of ‘Four
Seasons’ by Philomel
The Philomel Baroque Orchestra opened its 31st season this past weekend with a trio of concerts highlighted by performances of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Although the last of the three took place in Chestnut Hill’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church on Sunday afternoon, where I usually catch Philomel, I took advantage of a day and evening off from teaching to hear the first concert on Friday night, which was played in Old Christ Episcopal Church in Society Hill, a structure contemporaneous with the music of Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel, one of whose scores was also programmed. Although Vivaldi’s music in general, and The Four Seasons in particular, can sound perfectly convincing when played on modern instruments — given players’ sensitivity to baroque performance practices, of course — it never comes across quite as effectively on modern instruments as it does on violins, violas, cellos and the like constructed according to the fashion of the baroque period, itself. In the case of The Four Seasons, for instance, the timbral tone painting and the coloristic theatricality intended by the composer are seriously muted by the more homogeneous tones of modern instruments. There’s a silvery yet tawny clarity to gut-strung strings that their vibrato-laden metal-strung descendents simply cannot duplicate or replicate. There’s a pipey edge to a wooden recorder that no metal flute can approximate with its plush sounds.
Hiller guarantees 200-point
hike in SAT ‘game’
J. Avery Snyder, founder and director of Educational Services, doesn’t need a hook or shtick to draw in business. Only a few minutes after arriving at the Wyndmoor branch of the ES offices, this writer, who is certainly not a Ph.D. candidate in higher mathematics, was, under Snyder’s direction, solving the hardest-level SAT problems, and doing so with ease — and a few tricks. (As for his problem solving methods, Snyder asked me to go off-the-record. He didn’t want to give too much away, I guess, despite the fact that the methods are mostly common sense.) Since founding the test preparation service in 1979, Snyder has helped students from high school and beyond on their tests. He even guarantees results. The best advertisement we have is word of mouth,” explained Snyder. “We guarantee at least a 200-point increase [in SAT scores] and averaged a 241.1 point increase per student last year.”
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