it's what you want to know
The chorus to save Oakwell – Stoneleigh’s Villanova “sister” – from school district buzzsaws is practically deafening.
And we’re not just talking about cars honking for picketers outside Lower Merion School District’s Ardmore offices each Friday.
When doctors at CHOP diagnosed Matthew Cramer with “classic” Autism Spectrum Disorder, his mother, Julie, a physician herself, had to excuse herself.
“I was retching,” the Merion Station dermatologist tells SAVVY. “I was absolutely sick to my stomach.”
“It’s not cancer,” her husband, Warren, had reassured her. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“It sort of is,” Julie countered. For a long time, she couldn’t even say the word, autism. “I used the A word instead,” she says.
Ten years later, Julie says the full word without flinching. More than that, she’s eager to share her son’s remarkable journey.
The Main Line seems smitten with its new baby, the upscale lifestyle center Devon Yard.
And why not?
She’s six acres of delightful: verdant and lush, our new bundle of joy.
And a surprisingly small bundle she turns out to be.
After that that four-year township tug-of-war, Devon’s new “town center” consists of two stores (albeit grand ones), two restaurants and an event space. Period.
Still, every detail disarms: the breathtaking courtyard, the vintage flourishes, the unexpected touches of whimsy.
Here’s what you need to know before you go:
Don’t bother searching for Cal Stone McMillan in Conestoga’s 2103 yearbook. The only McMillan listed is brainy trumpeter Caroline, and well, she’s long gone.
Because Caroline, in trans parlance, is Cal’s “dead name.”
In print and in person, Caroline has been largely erased – birth certificate, passport and driver’s license all say “Calvin” now. Calling Cal “Caroline” would be “deadnaming,” disrespectful because it signals non-acceptance.
Along with the masculine name, there’s a manly physique, a strong handshake, a deeper voice, a beard.
With recent school shootings very much on their minds, some Tredyffrin-Easttown Middle School parents are taking aim at T/E’s response to an alleged threat of gun violence and bullying.
They sent e-mails, made phone calls, met with school officials.
Then, scores of them showed up at a school board meeting Monday night.
The district was ready. Message received, loud and clear.
The Superintendent announced the creation of parent focus groups to evaluate T/E’s threat-response policy and suggest changes as needed. He said the district will also explore “best practices” of other districts across the country and review relevant research.
And the day after the meeting, the principal of T/E Middle School sent an extraordinarily detailed e-mail to parents explaining how, as a parent himself, he takes students’ safety personally.
The hubbub started in early February. It simmered, then boiled over last week after a TEMS family, the Nissenbaums, told their story to the AP.
And it ran in newspapers across the country.
Just in time for Halloween: scary times at the King of Prussia Mall.
Last Saturday afternoon, a woman returning to her car in the garage between Nordstrom and Lord & Taylor was held up at gunpoint. Police say an armed man hopped in her backseat as she opened her car and pointed a gun at her head, demanding her purse.
He then sped off in the SUV he had allegedly just hijacked from an 87-year-old man in Delaware.
So, yeah, an armed robbery at 3:30 p.m. on a weekend afternoon at one of the busiest malls in the country.
But wait; it gets worse.
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.
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.
It will be fascinating to see how the Main Line responds to Kirna Zabête, just open near La Colombe in the new Bryn Mawr Village.
Because its 3,000 square feet are unlike anything we’ve seen in these parts. (And you know we get around.)
Kirna Zabête (KEER nah Zah BETT) is an exuberant paean to high fashion.
A boutique for serious fashionistas that – with touches of warmth and whimsy – doesn’t take itself too seriously.
In a word: wow.
We’re blown away by what a bunch of brewpub newbies just pulled off in downtown Berwyn.
They took a drab old furniture store across from the train station (RIP Pearl of the East), gutted it, and turned it into rustic-chic La Cabra Brewing, suddenly the hippest spot in town.
OK. Not so suddenly.
