Monopoly
Most popular
board game in world,
thanks to Germantown man
by JIMMY J. PACK JR.

To some, Monopoly is only a board game that you take out of the hall closet when there’s nothing else to do. To others, it’s a game so compelling that it requires the strategy of chess and the game-face of poker. Either way there’s no refuting the fact that Monopoly is the world’s most popular board game. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the version of the game known around the world.

The creator of this game, Charles Brace Darrow, was a resident of Germantown whose job was, like many others, lost in the sweep of the Great Depression. And though Darrow gets the credit for creating the Monopoly game we know today, he was not the person who deserves the credit for conceptualizing the game. And the roots of Monopoly also have a stronger connection to Philadelphia than just the man who brought it to us; we can thank the Quakers for that, and one Quaker in particular, named Elizabeth Magie Phillips.

Cookie Cutters really cuts the mustard (and the hair)
Hairstylist Amy Wolters cuts the air of a young customer in the kid-friendly surroundings at Cookie Cutters. (Photo by Pat Stokes)

By PAT STOKES
Sometimes the most seemingly upbeat, non-soul-searching kind of business, such as a hair-cuttery for example, can surprise you by revealing an unsuspected interior life.

This highly colorful fun place is located at 7932 Germantown Ave. in a traditional house with a porch reached by a few stone stairs and wood railing that lend an old-fashioned character, but inside all is up-to-date and then some. The cutting action takes place in a room full of bright colors, a storybook spot if there ever was one. Absent is the big barber chair, or the more sedate ladies’ chair and the big-mirrored wall.

Fulbright Scholar teaching African dance in Mt. Airy

Angela Watson teaches African dancing at the Moving Arts Studio in Mt. Airy
by PAMELA ROGOW

A physical education teacher at Angela Watson’s public high school in Tucson was known to go the extra distance, finding ways to enrich student experiences with outside dance performances of various stripes.

Early in her freshman year, the teacher presented a performance of African dancers. Angela was immediately enchanted. She had always danced, even at family gatherings when she was young, copying her older sister’s modern dance technique at home.

Her family was very poor and her parents in poor health, so others often stepped in to raise the children. Among her blessings were jazz and modern dance classes during junior high years, with trained teachers.

But the exposure to African dance changed Angela’s world. She took a one-day dance workshop and “I just felt at home,” she recounts.

Perplexing program from Chestnut Hill conductor
by MICHAEL CARUSO

Chestnut Hill’s Ignat Solzhenitsyn brought the 2004-05 season of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia to a close this past Sunday afternoon in the Perelman Theater with one of the most perplexing programs I’ve ever heard. This is all the more unexpected coming from a musician who, throughout this very season, has shown remarkable development when it comes to assembling rosters of pieces that both work convincingly within themselves on paper and succeed memorably in performance in regard to challenging and pleasing both players and listeners.

Sunday afternoon’s concert did neither. What’s worse, it didn’t have to turn out so badly because there were elements of the program that not only were admirable but that pointed to how the entire endeavor might have been a triumph.

The afternoon’s two substantial choices were Mendelssohn’s masterful Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64, with Curtis Institute of Music alumna Leila Josefowicz as soloist, and Schubert’s delightful Symphony No. 3 in D major. Both scores closed their respective halves with a feeling of rewarding culmination.