March 6, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local Life

Becomes professional chef to maintain healthy lifestyle
Local opera singer loses 160 pounds on ‘raw diet’
by LEN LEAR

Michelle, after losing 160 pounds in eight months.

When Michelle Schulman sang “O mio babbino caro’ (“Oh my dear daddy,” an aria from the opera Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini) during an open mic night Feb. 14 at Arnold’s Way, a restaurant/food market at 319 W. Main St. in Lansdale (215-361-0116, www.arnoldsway.com), as well as “Habanera” from Carmen and “Zueignung” by Richard Strauss, the audience cheered as if the Eagles had just won the Super Bowl. But even though her glorious voice is of the spine-tingling variety you’d expect to hear at the Metropolitan Opera, Michelle had to go into the kitchen after the applause subsided to prepare food for the cafe’s customers — something Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Beverly Sills undoubtedly never had to do.

That’s because Michelle, 31-ish, A resident of Manayunk who has sung operatic arias at venues all over the Delaware Valley, is also a talented chef at Arnold’s Way, the region’s only exclusively raw-foods restaurant. Her journey to becoming a chef was not conventional but was literally an attempt to stave off premature death.

Michelle, a Northeast Philadelphia native who has battled an eating disorder all of her adult life, ballooned up to 425 pounds late in 2004, despite having tried dozens of diets, therapies and expensive “fat farms.” (When Michelle was featured in a Local Life article on April 8, 2004, about her operatic career, she weighed 375.)

“I was binge eating,” she said in an interview last week. “I had an uncontrollable addiction to food. One night I went to five fast food restaurants in a row, and each time I ate what for most people would be one complete dinner ... I could not sing any more because breathing had become such a problem. I could barely walk up a flight of stairs or walk to the corner. I had horrible back pain all the time, and I could hardly stand upright.”

Here’s a local teacher who does not mind being called a ‘yo-yo’
by SALLY COHEN

A yo-yo champion since his days at Germantown High, Lenny Belasco, a.k.a. Dr. Yo-Yo, is leading master classes at the Moving Arts studio on Tuesday evenings. Here he is seen “rocking the cradle.”

By the time he started at Germantown High in the late ‘50s, Lenny Belasco was already a local champion. Yo-yo was his game.

Those were years when kids could roam their neighborhoods without the tether of a cell phone or hovering of a chaperone, and unfamiliar men might wander onto schoolgrounds after hours to entice kids with games. One day, when Lenny was about 11, one did, at Fitler Elementary (now Fitler Academy), where Lenny Belasco went to school.

The Filipino man wore a sweater with patches. A wad of strings hung around his neck — honorifics, it turned out, from past yo-yo competitions or from teachers who saw that the student had mastered a new trick. The man started performing amazing tricks. The kids were mesmerized.

The man told the children that he would be back in the neighborhood the following Monday, on the corner of Manheim and Wayne. “Just get your parents to buy a  yo-yo,” which then cost 25 or 50 cents at the drugstore.

Scrapple too offal for human consumption (except in Philly)
by MIKE TODD

While we were at breakfast with my parents at a diner near their house recently, my wife Kara pointed to the side order section of the menu and asked, “What’s scrapple?”

A hush fell over the table as my family tried to think of the most delicate way to describe the local delicacy. Kara grew up in New York State, so she’s unfamiliar with some of the things that make Southeastern PA so special, such as Tastykakes and scrapple, two Philadelphia favorites that have somehow managed to stay mutually exclusive all these years, at least until somebody works out a palatable recipe for Scrapple-Filled Krimpets or Honey-Glazed Scrapple Buns.