it's what you want to know
Lindsey Renninger Schuster might just be the most photographed woman on the Main Line.
She takes multiple “mirror selfies” each day.
She stars in professional shoots up to 150 times a year.
She’s photographed incessantly on vacation.
Always camera-ready, she changes clothes five times a day.
No, Schuster’s not a celebrity, a socialite or even a model, at least not technically.
On Sept. 7, three days after her sons started the new school year at Radnor Elementary, Heidi Diskin ended her life.
She was 44.
We share this with you because Heidi would want us to.
“One hundred percent, she would want her story told,” said her husband, J.D., in a phone interview. “My hope is that what happened to Heidi can be a teachable moment. As terrible as this situation is, it’s an even worse tragedy if it doesn’t help others.”
To family and close friends, Heidi’s suicide was a sucker punch – a heart-wrenching coda to 20 years of pain.
To those less close, it seemed, well, inexplicable.
Because Heidi had made mental health advocacy and suicide prevention her life’s work. She’d started a brain health foundation, she’d spoken to countless groups, she’d even hosted a cable TV show about mental health. How could Heidi Diskin – of all people – have succumbed herself?
Polished to perfection, Life Time opens its “diamond” level club in Suburban Square this week.
All that’s missing?
Beds.
Not kidding. The “healthy way of life company” – now ensconced in the old Macy’s – wants to be your fitness center, your hair-and-nail salon, your restaurant, your spa, your babysitter – and now, your office.
Not just a “laptops-welcome-free-wifi” of office.
But a real one, totally tricked out.
Callin’ all wine-lovin’ ladies and DIYers: the coolest spot this side of The Buttery just opened in Malvern.
AR Workshop is a custom art studio where you make wood signs, photo frames, canvas pillows, tote bags and more.
Sipping all the way.
(Giving “craft cocktails” a whole new meaning, right?)
They called B.S.
Fed up because they don’t feel safe in school, thousands of Main Line students walked off the job Wednesday.
For 17 minutes or more, classrooms became ghost towns, the halls were mostly quiet.
There would be no repercussions. Lower Merion, Radnor and T/E Schools were of one voice: students would not be penalized for commemorating Florida’s fallen 17 and demanding #NeverAgain.
As a precaution, parents were cordially not invited to attend – forbidden, in fact, from entering schools that became “closed campuses” from 10 to 11 a.m. Local police stood at the ready, their services, thankfully, not needed.
It’s a Main Line mystery: Twin buildings – perhaps the most opulent ever built in these parts – sitting idle for years in the heart of Devon.
Unleased.
Unsold.
Ripe for the taking but no one’s biting.
What happened to this modern-day Taj Mahal, its hushed, lifeless halls worlds away from the bustling Whole Foods across the street?
Local Democrats are still pinching themselves – perhaps nowhere more so than in Tredyffrin, where the party’s candidates went 12 for 12 last Tuesday.
A sweep.
Three Democrats ran for township supervisor seats: incumbent Murph Wysocki plus Matt Holt and Kevin O’Nell.
All three won.
Four Democrats ran for T/E school board: incumbent Scott Dorsey plus Kyle Boyer, Tina Whitlow and Heather Ward.
All four won. (Whitlow and Ward ousted current board president Doug Carlson and Virginia Lastner.)
So, for the first time in township history, three of seven supes and seven of nine school board directors will be Democrats.
What a difference a decade makes.
Hang out with the Tankels’ in their Malvern living room and you’d never know this observant Quaker family was nearly destroyed by drugs.
Teasing and cracking jokes, they clearly love being together. Like the “normal” Main Line family they weren’t – for six harrowing years.
Truly, if walls could talk, the Tankels’ home would scream: of stolen money and pilfered pills, of school expulsions and shouting matches, of multiple car crashes and surprise drug tests, of Visine and baggies, of trust faithfully extended and repeatedly betrayed. All of it fallout from Eric Tankel’s addiction to pot, to pain pills, and ultimately, to heroin.
Six of his close friends died from their addictions.
But Eric, thankfully, is very much with us.
/>By all accounts, things were going swimmingly at the area’s fanciest new fitness “resort,” Life Time Athletic in KOP.
Until they weren’t.
On Saturday, Aug. 5, staff noticed the water level in the indoor pool had suddenly dropped a few feet and the decking in one corner had collapsed.
Uh-oh.
The club promptly closed the pool, drained the water and demolished it.
The culprit? A sinkhole – although management’s e-mails to members never used the “s” word, referring only to the pool’s “inadvertent” closure and “required repairs.”
Not the sort of splash Life Time envisioned when opened for its first summer season in June.
Ah, Valley Forge National Historical Park, the Central Park of the Main Line.
Walk, ride or hike its 3,500 acres and you can just smell the history.
But the Park’s not resting on its cherry laurels these days.
Far from it.
Thanks to its newly invigorated nonprofit arm, the Valley Forge Park Alliance, it’s marching forward with dazzling plans that will affect ALL of us – anyone who “recreates” in the park (90 percent of visitors), brings guests there, or even drives through.
