Philadelphia City Paper Archives

Orson Welles once described himself as kingly, an actor of epic vocal quality whose opportunities were forever rooted in the regal. This suits the 62-year-old Solomon Burke, too, an ideal at one with his origins as minister, bishop and crown prince of R&B; and gospel music. His latest album, the high and...

Life has been tough for a couple of sons of bosses. by Brendan McGarvey This time last summer, he was the swaggering mob boss on the front page of the morning newspapers. His smiling, confidant visage was broadcast nightly on the local evening news programs. This summer, Joseph “Skinny Joe” Merlino is...

Former Eagles mascot Dean Schoenewald is still crazy after all these years. part 1 | part 2 As kids attendance during Shark weeknight games soared, trouble lurked in the Shark den. “You gotta imagine that it irked some people,” recalls Schoenewald. “After [they’ve] worked for months, 15-hour days, this clown comes in...

A local man was kept off a recent flight because of a book he was carrying. Everyone knows it is a bad idea to try and board a plane carrying a box cutter, a flight manual written in Arabic, or a sack full of mysterious white powder. But with ultra-tightened airport security,...

The Savoy Company celebrates 100 years of taking on Gilbert and Sullivan. There’s a story some members of Philadelphia’s Savoy Company like to tell, more often somberly than with a smirk. Up until 10 years ago, in an almost bacchanalian climax to their annual season of Gilbert and Sullivan productions, they would...

Apparently a simple apology was too high a price to pay. There’s an odd little comment at the end of Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.’s (PNI) statement, released last Friday, about the multi-million-dollar settlement of the libel suit brought by former Inquirer reporter Ralph Cipriano. The one-page release quotes Inquirer Editor Robert Rosenthal, whose...

Though Robert DeNiro’s is the biggest name associated with Meet the Parents, the smartest thing the film’s creators did was snare Ben Stiller to play opposite him. As Greg Focker, the anxious boyfriend who’s scheduled to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time on the occasion of her sister’s wedding, Stiller draws on...

In a perfect world, alterna-elitists would learn to stop worrying and love sleek teeny-pop: Mandy, Britney, Christina, ’N Sync. Pain is pain. Being alone, withdrawn and despised is not just the province of punk rock. These squeaky-clean stars, in their own daft way, project adolescent concerns (even if the one guy in...

Once a Pulitzer-winning machine that dominated the region, the Inquirer today is losing readers faster than any major paper in the country. What went wrong? Whenever he reaches the point of looking back on his time as editor and executive vice president of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert J. Rosenthal probably will not...

The Navy says it never happened. Sailors who served on the ship in question say it never happened. Even some investigators once intrigued by the decades-old story eventually came to the conclusion that it never happened. And yet debate over what was unimaginatively dubbed The Philadelphia Experiment rages on. Marshall Barnes stands...