July 17, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local Life

New Redstone Grill very big, very good, very pricey
by LEN LEAR

The “romantic flatbread,” like everything else tasted by the Local’s hard-working diners, is delicious and pricey ($12).

And the beef goes on: The mall-ification of America continues unabated, like a fire truck racing to a four-alarm conflagration. Case in point: in case you thought the Plymouth Meeting Mall simply did not have enough stores, you will be pleased to know there is a mammoth expansion taking place.

For example, on July 21 a 32,000-square-foot Dave & Buster’s operation will open to the public in the north end of the mall, facing Hickory Road. According to a press release, there will be an enormous dining room and an “amazing variety of cools (sic) bars.”

And on the off-chance that your kids are somehow tempted to, say, play some kind of game or sport in an actual schoolyard (do they even have actual schoolyards in the suburbs?), Dave & Buster’s is determined to squelch that temptation with “Our famous Million Dollar Midway full of the latest mind-blowing interactive games and stimulators ... ” (I’d watch out for some of those “stimulators” if I were you.)

What a great country! Buy 12 doormats, get one free
by JIM HARRIS

This is where we’re headed, folks, according to Jim Harris. We proud American consumers keep buying so much useless, disposable stuff that we don’t even have room left to store it all, so we may have to start carrying lots of it around with us, as performance artist/beat-poet Phil Throckmorton does in his performance piece known as “DeFunks.”

Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. That’s a lovely, lofty thought expressed by John Lennon in “Imagine,” but let’s face it, we humans need our stuff.

We are the ultimate pack rats, running to and fro, buying, borrowing and stealing stuff to add to our already overstocked stockpiles. You can tell how old a horse is by its teeth or a tree by its rings, but a person’s age is most accurately reflected by the amount of stuff that he or she has. 

Communism and capitalism are both about stuff — who gets it and how much they can have. Buddhist monks have stuff. Even homeless people have stuff. They push it around in shopping carts as if it were a status symbol, and guess what, it is! In America, “The Land of Stuff,” you are defined by what you have. If you own a fancy sports car, you are more venerated than if you had designed and built it yourself. 

Whether rich or poor, we spend our lives acquiring stuff — so much that we have to rent space at public storage facilities to store the stuff that we can’t stuff into our homes. Yet, still we continue to hunt and gather. Junkmen prowl the streets before dawn, scavenging the stuff that people throw out. Bric-a-brac junkies cruise the yard sale scene, often showing up before the announced starting time to get the best bargains. These lunatics will haggle to shave a penny off the price of a 30-cent item. It’s all about the thrill of saving money, because money is also stuff that we love to accumulate.

Mary Pugh of Erdenheim is a voice for horribly abused kids
by PAULA M. RILEY

Mary Pugh

Four years ago, Mary Pugh, 47, of Erdenheim was looking for a new volunteer experience. An attorney, wife and mother of four girls, she had been very involved in many child-related volunteer activities but wanted to try something different.

She found just what she was looking for when she became a child advocate for MCAP, Montgomery Child Advocacy Project.

MCAP was started by former assistant district attorneys, Wendy Demchick-Alloy, Esq. and Risa Ferman, Esq. (now Montgomery County District Attorney). As prosecutors with experience in sex crimes, child abuse and homicide units, they had witnessed first-hand the need for victim representation in cases involving child abuse and neglect.

When Pugh first volunteered with MCAP, she was assigned four cases. As a child advocate, it was her role to help each child through the challenging circumstances of each abuse or neglect case. In addition to being overwhelmed by the confusing legal arena, the children became intimidated by the process since the accused were often those closest to the child — a trusted family member, friend or loved one.