Inside the Epic Search for Philly’s Next Tuba Master

Curtis Institute of Music has only one tuba student. What does it take to make it? / Illustration by Pete Ryan

A young man sits alone in a room, a tuba on his lap, and blows it hard, huffing and puffing to play Snedecor’s Low Étude for Tuba Number 4. It’s a head-rattling piece in a profoundly low register — its lowest note is pedal C, which would be the fourth key from the left on a piano, and it requires Superman lungs and strategic breath control to nail. I’m watching a video with Craig Knox and Paul Krzywicki, the tuba instructors at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. They’re telling me what they’re hearing in this audition reel, submitted by a candidate who hopes to become the elite school’s next tuba student.

“He’s taking a lot more breaths, and yet he’s still running out of air at the end of the phrases,” Knox observes. “There’s a fluffy attack at the beginning of notes, where we would like to hear a nice clean front.”

“He’s not having as much fun as the other boy had,” Krzywicki says more bluntly, comparing this to a previous video. “There’s a certain degree of terror in his face, isn’t there?”

This month, Curtis’s sole tuba student, Ethan Marmolejos, will graduate, which has given rise to a global search. Curtis enrolls a total of around 160 students but just one tuba student at a time, because a symphony orchestra only has one tuba. In its century of existence — Curtis this year celebrates its 100th anniversary as one of Philadelphia’s truly world-class institutions — the school has admitted a total of 37 tuba students, making this one of the rarest study opportunities in the world. Mathematically, Penn State admits more students per day, though, granted, they don’t all play tuba.

Even other exclusive performing-arts schools don’t have just one tuba; Juilliard carries three or four. But entrée to Curtis is prized; tuition is free, covered by an endowment, and learning here is often the ticket to an illustrious career in symphony orchestras. About 45 percent of the musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra and 18 percent of those in the New York Philharmonic attended Curtis. The Curtis tuba student who preceded Marmolejos, Cristina Cutts Dougherty, became principal tubist for the Phoenix Symphony at age 25, replacing David Pack, who’d held the seat for 48 years.

“There’s no school in the world that has had such success as Curtis employing people in the orchestral world. No place even close,” Krzywicki says. It’s why, when the chance arises, music students stop what they’re doing to try to get in.

Knox is a Curtis grad — the fourth to become principal tuba for the Pittsburgh Symphony. Krzywicki, who played in the Philadelphia Orchestra for 33 years, was his teacher. Now, they’re deciding who’s next. The school has very rarely opened auditions to outsiders before. But my weird fascination with tuba players seems to have disoriented them, and they agree to let me chronicle the process.

To me, playing tuba as a life choice is an exquisite act of hope — proof there’s still a place in this clickbait-influencer world for the under-loved specialist in a field with a barely existent job market. Tuba players are like unicorns (which literally means “one horn”) without the sparkle. In an orchestra, they pull a heavy load with no glamour, hidden in the back, like a subwoofer behind the couch.

If a wailing saxophone is the cry of the soul, the tuba has been likened to another human expression: Novelist Peter De Vries called the tuba “the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.” Mockery and comparison to gastric disturbance is the tubist’s fate. In the children’s book Tubby the Tuba, “fat little” Tubby dreams of playing a lovely melody, but the more delicate symphony instruments laugh in his face. He retreats shamefully to a pond, ugly-duckling-style, where a bullfrog teaches him a beautiful tune that he carries back to the orchestra, and the instruments love it so much that they all join in (hijacking his solo!). In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to illustrate what a mega-nerd Steve Carell’s character is, he parades around his apartment playing a baritone horn, sometimes known as a tenor tuba.

I ask Knox what kind of oddball loner kid chooses to play tuba instead of being one of the 76 trombones in the big parade, or the dozens of violinists who flock around the conductor like angelic favorites. I suggest it’s like picking the road less traveled. He tells me he titled his tuba-performance album A Road Less Traveled.

“I think I was drawn to the fact that there’s just one of them,” he says. “It’s sort of your own realm. You’re in charge of taking care of business on that low end in the orchestra. You’re the end of the line down there.” When he played soccer in school, he recalls, “I was always the goalie.”

The tuba wasn’t invented until 1835, so Beethoven never wrote a note for it; Mozart never saw one. “Usually if you’re doing a Mozart symphony, the tuba just goes and has coffee,” says Jay Krush, a tuba artist in residence at Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance and the tubist for the Philadelphia Ballet. History’s first concerto for solo tuba, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, wasn’t written until 1954. Philip Catelinet, who played its debut for the London Symphony Orchestra, didn’t invite his own wife to the premiere because he assumed it would be ridiculed, confessing to a newspaper reporter, “I would rather suffer alone.”

I ask Knox for examples of tuba in popular music, and he earns his outsider stripes by not really coming up with anything. In movies, he does note, “It’s often sort of a quirky or villainous or threatening character. Curb Your Enthusiasm — what’s his name? There’s a tuba in his soundtrack.” Film composer John Williams is a tuba freak. He wrote his own tuba concerto, and the instrument is in his movies: the motif for Jabba the Hutt, the booming alien mother ship in Close Encounters. 

“It’s a foundational sound,” Knox explains. “I mean, you can have a couple of trumpets, French horns, some of these high-register instruments, and they can play a chord and sound really, really great. But then you put a tuba underneath that, with a firm bass resonance, and it just makes the sound 10 times fuller.”

What I discover is that when you start listening for tuba in a symphonic piece or brass quintet, you hear substance, gravitas, a pumping lifeblood and not mere intestinal disturbance. It feels more like a heart than a fart.

Let’s Get Ready to Rumble

Curtis announces the tubist opening on its website in the fall of 2023; Knox posts the info on Facebook, TubeNet, TubaForum, and other platforms where prodigies might be lurking. “We want to leave no stone unturned,” he tells me. With a December 15th deadline, applicants must submit videos of them playing five (for undergraduates) or seven (for graduate students) pieces Knox has selected to expose skills and weaknesses. Based on the video pre-screening, promising applicants will advance to stressful in-person auditions at Curtis — housed in a row of buildings off Rittenhouse Square that includes a mansion once inhabited by the school’s founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist — in mid-February, after which one winner will be chosen. Thanks to the tough repertoire and considering past auditions, Knox expects only 30 or so video submissions from around the world. In November, he’s surprised to see his Facebook posts have been viewed 88,000 times.

In his time at Round Rock High, near Austin, Texas, Miles Bintz played in the concert band and the marching band, at football games and state competitions. Now 20, he’s a sophomore studying tuba at Texas Tech. While practicing to audition for the Nashville Symphony last fall, he saw Knox’s TubeNet post about the Curtis opening — and though he’s already in college, he decided to go for it. “That’s the place to be if you’re going to be a classical symphony-orchestra musician,” he says. He rents the college’s choir room, records his videos, and submits his application.

Christian Jeon, 19, learned about the Curtis opening early. He studies tuba at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where his instructor is none other than Craig Knox. “Even before Craig’s Facebook posts, people were talking about, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s going to be an opening,’” he says. In 2022, Jeon decided to post a video of himself performing every day for a year. He thinks that helped him get good enough to win acceptance to the National Youth Orchestra after he’d been rejected on his first try. Last year, he played with the Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Knox and Krzywicki could select a graduate student, a transfer, a true freshman, or someone even younger; high-school-age kids have been accepted to Curtis. They take high-school classes locally or online while studying there, then get a college degree at the institute, staying for five years or more. Regardless, there’s still just one tuba spot. “It’s a crapshoot between the young player with potential and the older player who’s more advanced,” Krzywicki says of the decision.

Raphael Zhu, from Princeton, started playing tuba in fifth grade, joined the Philadelphia-based Young Musicians Debut Orchestra in seventh grade, and entered Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program in eighth. Now he’s in ninth grade, 14 years old. “I was talking with some of my friends who are in college now, so they’re a lot older, and they were talking about how the student at Curtis is graduating. They’re like, ‘Maybe you should audition,’” he tells me. “I’ve always heard about all the really young violin prodigies that go to Curtis. But until last year, I never thought about it.”

Over the holiday break, the tuba professors count the applications. There are 43 — the most they ever remember getting, from 19 states, China, Israel and Canada. Knox calculates that selecting one out of 43 yields an acceptance rate lower than those of Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Weirdly, all the applicants are male. I wonder if there’s lingering fallout from a sexual-abuse scandal involving a Curtis violin teacher in the 1980s — a disgrace the school hushed up until it finally broke as news in 2019. But about half of Curtis students now are female. I confer with Dougherty, and she says the lack of female applicants could be connected to the abuse revelations but adds, “The reality is that the road for women in our field is still more lonely and harsh than it is for men.” Instruments can become gendered as early as elementary school, and girls may be discouraged from even trying the big horn. Carol Jantsch, the Philadelphia Orchestra tubist who taught at Curtis, is a role model, but there aren’t many. A 2019 study of 40 top orchestras found tuba had the second-highest percentage of male players: 90 percent. (Timpani was 100 percent; harp was the most female.)

Still, Dougherty had a great experience studying with Knox and Krzywicki. “The effect they both had on my confidence and sense of self was remarkable,” she tells me. “If all the aspiring women in my field got to study with them, the world would be a better place.”

The instructors spend close to 20 hours apiece watching the student videos before comparing notes. They know what they’re listening for, like figure-skating judges waiting for daring leaps. “This, for me, is really just to screen out people who clearly aren’t ready,” Knox says, and cues up examples of great and not for me.

Watching Jeon play the Vaughan Williams concerto, Knox says, “The clarity of articulation is really important here. He hit every note right on the money. You’re gonna hear some other people who essentially fake a lot. They sort of poke at the notes.” Krzywicki is impressed by the video of Zhu: “I would have never guessed a 14-year-old kid would come in and play like that,” he says. 

The instructors narrow the field to 16, including Bintz, Jeon and Zhu, and invite the group to Philadelphia for winner-take-all Sweet 16 madness. Nothing will matter except their short performances in front of the judges — not reputation nor résumé. “That’s the real world, isn’t it?” Krzywicki explains. “When a job opening happens in an orchestra, you’re judged based upon what you do on the stage for those 10 or 15 minutes.” 

There Can Be Only One

The next challenge is getting to Philadelphia with the huge F tuba and even bigger C tuba required to play the audition pieces. Many tubists drive long distances to avoid flying with fragile, grossly oversize instruments. Bintz considers a 26-hour road trip from Lubbock but ends up making plane reservations. He checks one tuba in baggage and buys a seat for the big one.

Once you arrive, you can start worrying. “Curtis is a very scary place to enter when you know nothing about it,” Dougherty tells me. “It looks like a big mansion — all these chandeliers and pictures of old guys staring at you. I think in my first audition, that really freaked me out. I felt like there was no way I would be good enough.”

This year’s auditions don’t take place in Field Concert Hall, where Leopold Stokowski taught, but in a modern building that contains performance spaces, dorms and a cafeteria. Jeon has no idea what to expect; he says he imagined “like a huge orphanage-type thing.” Bintz envisioned a sprawling campus.

It’s still imposing. Gould Rehearsal Hall, the size of a small gymnasium, is an acoustically precise room with wainscoting tilted back three degrees to make every sound resonate. It’s set up with a lone chair and music stand for the tubist, facing a table where Knox and Krzywicki sit in judgment. Fear works against you. “Once you’re nervous, the tension doesn’t allow you to move your air without some restriction. And that’s bad news for the tuba,” Krzywicki says.

The 16 candidates arrive on a February morning. Each will play for 15 minutes. Selected finalists will audition again in the early evening. “It’s a gruesome day,” Krzywicki acknowledges. 

Bintz is first and grabs his big horn, nailing the Snedecor étude. On a lively Bach bourrée adapted for tuba, Knox requests “firmer intonation … a little more clarity at the front of the notes.” He does this frequently, asking players to change things up, testing their ability to adapt to instruction. “I felt like I was making some of the best sounds that I’ve made in a long time,” Bintz says afterward.

Jeon, up next, shines on the Vaughan Williams concerto. “I played close to my best, in my opinion,” he tells me. “There are some things that obviously could have gone better. But I was very happy.”

As the candidates play, one by one, a wet spot develops on the floor where they empty their spit valves. “It’s just nerves; they’re not playing that long,” Krzywicki tells me.

When it’s Zhu’s turn, the judges ask him to fill his lungs and play with more force, seeming to suggest he’s too small for his instrument. Krzywicki asks about his parents’ size, pondering future growth. “I felt like their biggest concern may have been that I couldn’t put up enough sound,” Zhu explains to me. 

Then the candidates wait nervously, crammed silently with their giant tuba cases in the front lobby. Tuba players are hard to excite. They’re like the placid Brad Pitt character in Ad Astra, whose heart rate never rises above 80. In the big room, Knox and Krzywicki give the names of four finalists to Shea Scruggs, Curtis’s chief of enrollment, and he walks downstairs for the announcement. Bintz is in. “I kind of jumped. I didn’t really expect it,” he says. Jeon is in. Zhu isn’t. Nobody smirks or cries. Bintz and Jeon shake hands. Others put their heads down and roll their tuba cases out onto Locust Street. The more auditions you go on, the more you learn not to take it personally, Shakespeare said. No, sorry, it was Paula Abdul.

“There were a handful of players who were shaky. I could tell they weren’t playing up to what they normally do,” Knox says.

The finals don’t start until almost 5 p.m. Curtis’s dean, Nick DiBerardino, and current tuba student Marmolejos join the judges’ table. Knox changes up the repertoire. There’s an excerpt from Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 that sounds like a sad “Frère Jacques” and includes a low note held for an inhuman 24 seconds. Jeon adds a little sauce on the end of this. “I wasn’t completely confident in my counting, so it’s better to be safe and hold it for longer than you have to,” he explains.

Knox asks the candidates what they hope to get out of Curtis. He hands them sheet music they’ve never seen before. At one point, Krzywicki pulls up a chair right next to Charley Pollard, a tubist from Miami, to observe his face while he plays. By 8 p.m., it’s over. The judges decide within an hour — they don’t even leave the room. But the decision won’t be disclosed for a couple of weeks. “I was just, every day, furiously checking my email,” Jeon says.

The decision message arrives in early March: The winner is … Jeon, Knox’s Carnegie Mellon student. “I screenshotted it,” the young player says. “Told my parents and friends, my high-school teacher. … ”

“The fact was that Christian just sort of blew away all the older kids,” Krzywicki says. Bintz, named first alternate, will stay at Texas Tech. “We’ll see where life takes me,” he says philosophically. Though Jeon is a transfer, he’s offered four full years at Curtis, so the judges might not do this again until 2028. They plan to keep their eyes on Zhu. “Paul and I agree he played better than many of the graduate applicants even though he was 14,” Knox says. “It’s hard to predict. But, you know, I hope maybe we hear him at the next audition.”

And so the world will have another Tubby, a musician hoping to sit without fanfare in the back of a major orchestra. The website Priceonomics did an analysis of the job market for tubists and calculated that “even if you were the best tubist in the world there’d be only a 10 percent chance you’d have a chance to apply to audition for a major symphony orchestra this year.” Dougherty tells me there are currently no scheduled auditions for full-time orchestral tuba jobs in America.

Marmolejos, who’s graduating this month, has been looking. “I’ve gotten some second places,” he says gamely, “have gotten in some final rounds. It’s a pretty tough world in terms of employment. There are probably 20 orchestras in the U.S. that pay above $50,000 a year. Sometimes, almost 200 people show up to these things, and they only choose one.” Unicorns aren’t easily deterred, though. “It’s been great,” he says.

Published as “The Battle of Big Horn” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Guy Raises $46,000 to Annoy University of Pennsylvania Protesters

University of Pennsylvania protesters, who were targeted by a GoFundMe campaign threatening to pay a mariachi band to play next to the protest 24 hours a day. (Getty Images)

While riot police have moved in on protests on other college campuses across the country, Penn is still trying to figure out what to do with its now two-week-old protest encampment. There, opponents of the war in Gaza hold up signs. And they use a megaphone to get their message out. Well, Penn might not know exactly how to solve this dilemma, though the school has stepped up its response a bit this week. But one person who says he’s a Penn student came up with an idea that’s certainly original.

A person by the name of Rob Martinez organized a crowdfunding campaign on the GoFundMe platform. His goal? Maybe to raise money to provide humanitarian relief to people in Gaza? Nah. Evacuate family members from Gaza, as this Philadelphia GoFundMe campaign is working to do? Nah. He said he wanted to hire a mariachi band to play next to the encampment all day and night.

Now, music has long been a part of protest movements, and, indeed, there have been drummers and other musicians participating in the University of Pennsylvania encampment. But Martinez wasn’t going to use the mariachi band to join the protest. He was going to use the mariachi band essentially to protest the protest.

On the GoFundMe campaign page, Martinez explained that “these protesters should be serenaded for their efforts, just as they have constantly serenaded my efforts to study for finals with a megaphone and drum set.” He said he would spend the money raised to hire a mariachi band to play continuously until all funds were depleted.

I’ve seen so many worthy GoFundMe campaigns not get the kind of support you’d think they would. The GoFundMe campaign to help cover funeral costs for a man killed in a hit-and-run in Kensington the other day has a goal of $10,000 but is only up to $3,136. A local woman trying to get help to pay for her dog’s critical surgery has only raised $225. Someone in Philly in a bad predicament needs $10,000 to save her home but so far has received just $325. But launch a GoFundMe to hire a mariachi band to play 24/7 next to a protest encampment, and you can raise $46,657.

A screenshot of the GoFundMe campaign to annoying the University of Pennsylvania protesters using a constantly-playing mariachi band

That’s right. Over the course of a week, Martinez raised $46,657 for his “cause.” That would probably cover about 120 hours of round-the-clock performance by a mariachi band.

Alas, there will be no mariachi band, which is a shame, since we kind of like mariachi music. (Though I guess 24/7 of any music could become burdensome.) After receiving unprecedented support, Martinez called the whole thing off. A GoFundMe spokesperson told me that the platform would refund all donors at Martinez’s request.

“As much as I tried to bring this event to fruition, I am only one student,” Martinez explained to me on Thursday afternoon. “It grew to a scale that I could not handle all by myself … Between getting permits, bands … And [figuring out] how to safely put this event on … It just became too much for me to handle in one week.”

Hopefully his finals are going okay.

Inside the Major Staffing Shakeup at WMMR

Former WMMR employee “Pancake” with WMMR DJ Pierre Robert (Photo courtesy BP Miller/Chorus Photography)

Check phillymag.com each morning Monday through Thursday for the latest edition of Philly Today. And if you have a news tip for our hardworking Philly Mag reporters, please direct it here. You can also use that form to send us reader mail. We love reader mail!

“Pancake” and Other WMMR Workers Lose Their Jobs

Wednesday was a “terrible fucking day” at WMMR, Philadelphia’s long-running rock-and-roll radio station. That’s according to one source from Beasley Media Group, the huge Florida-based company that owns WMMR and several other stations in the Philadelphia market. The Beasley source confirmed what we had already heard: that at least three people working with WMMR had just lost their jobs.

One of those three people was the WMMR producer and on-air personality known as Pancake. His real name is Chris Ashcraft. Pancake got his start at WMMR in the late 2000s, when he was an intern for Pierre Robert. More recently, Pancake could be heard exchanging witty banter with Pierre Robert, in addition to calling in reports to the Preston & Steve Show about things like a beheading in Bucks County, where Pancake resides.

Two other people no longer working with WMMR include Greg Monaghan, a graphics specialist, and Todd DiFeo, who worked in the promotions department. Both Monaghan and DiFeo worked at WMMR as well as the other Beasley Media Group stations in the area.

One Beasley staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their own job, called the layoffs “corporate bullshit.”

It’s been a busy week in the Beasley Media Group human resources department. Beasley also let go Jen Scordo and Pat Egan from 97.5 The Fanatic.

“We are realigning our core business operations to reflect the current economic conditions in order to best serve the needs of our valued audiences, advertisers, and shareholders into the future,” a Beasley representative said oh-so-corporately in a statement.

All of this comes less than two years after Beasley turned WMMR on its head by firing the popular DJ Jaxon. That’s when WMMR also eliminated all live overnight programming, opting for cheaper automated programming.

“We’ve been live and local 24/7 and used that for all the good it brings us for 54 years,” one WMMR source told us back then. “But corporate ownership simply doesn’t care. And that’s the real punch to the gut. They are completely profit-driven. And they don’t care about history or legacy. They don’t care about what the station and the people who work there mean to Philly and to the listeners. They care about one thing and one thing only: money.”

Back in 2022, we also learned that Beasley had even considered ending its long, long relationship with its most famous personality: Pierre Robert. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. And Pierre Robert secured a new deal with WMMR earlier this year, extending his contract for four years.

As for other WMMR talent, all on-air staff at the Preston & Steve show remains safe. For now.

Over In Kensington…

It took city workers just a few hours to completely dismantle the homeless encampment on Kensington Avenue on Wednesday. The one-block stretch of Kensington Avenue is now free of tents, sleeping bags, trash, and, most notably, people. It’s not exactly clear where all those people have gone. And activists are asking the city for transparency in the process. 6 ABC has this report on what happens next, though the city isn’t exactly providing a lot of answers.

Local Talent

It’s graduation season, so you know what that means: Famous and semi-famous people speaking at local college commencements. Former Temple University student and now Hollywood mega-talent Quinta Brunson came back to Temple on Wednesday to talk to the Class of 2025. She told them, “Kids at UPenn got nothing on you.” Well, other than much, much higher tuition. But I’ll leave the jokes to the comedians. Brunson’s full speech is here.

By the Numbers

$1,500: Minimum it will cost you to have Marc Vetri and Lidia Bastianich cook for you at the Friends of Marc dinner next week. Well, actually $3,000, because tickets have to be bought in pairs. Only 100 seats are available.

$40,000: Franchise fee you’ll have to pay if you want to open the next Philadelphia location of Tapster, the pour-your-own-drinks bar that opened in Center City last August. I dunno. A bar without a bartender just feels so wrong.

900: PECO customers targeted in an aggressive new scam. If somebody calls you telling you they’re on their way to shut off your electricity because your last payment didn’t go through, they are almost certainly lying. Should this happen to you, hang up the phone and call PECO directly. And if PECO tells you the call was bogus, call your local police department.

And From the Wait-We-Can-LOSE?!? Sports Desk …

The Phils didn’t get on the board first for a change in yesterday afternoon’s game against the Blue Jays at CBP, since the Jays got a run off starter Aaron Nola in the second on a pair of singles and a steal. The Phils got it right back in the third, though, as the Jays’ Chris Bassitt gave up walks to Bryson Stott and Edmundo Sosa, a Johan Rojas single, and a Kyle Schwarber sac fly. It was quiet after that until the sixth, when the Jays got two more on a brace of singles, a double and another single. That brought in Matt Strahm for Nola, and he promptly pitched a single: 4-1 Jays. Apparently there was some sort of Hulu problem, but that only affected folks who didn’t have to work in the middle of a Wednesday, and what kind of people are that?

hey @NBCSPhilly @hulu_support
how come i’m supposupposed to be able to watch the Phillies game but it’s all blackout!?!?!?
I watched it on HULU LIVE on the MLB CHANNEL up until the 6th inning then an error came up saying the game was BLACKOUT …. that was me watching the game pic.twitter.com/gZZxZu3tpc

— JLMc74 (@jennmc915) May 8, 2024

Seranthony Domínguez came on for the seventh and got it done, and in the bottom half, Brandon Marsh singled and Nick Castellanos doubled off the wall, which was the end of Bassitt. Zach Pop (high on the Great Baseball Name list) took his place with one out, and Stott pushed a run around with a sac fly before Kody Clemens, pinch-hitting for Sosa, struck out.

Orion Kerkering pitched the eighth and let another run across on a walk and two singles. A J.T. Realmuto double in the eighth went wasted; Alec Bohm led off the last-chance ninth with a single off Jordan Romano, Castellanos eked out a single, and damn if Stott didn’t double and make it 5-3. Two on, two outs, Whit Merrifield at the plate … and a pop-up for an out. Well, I guess we were due — overdue, really — for a loss.  End of game, end of winning streak — never change, Phillies fans.

Seasons over. Damnit

— Nate Graeff (@17_30NATE) May 8, 2024

They’re off until Friday, when they begin a road trip with a visit to the Marlins, 7:10 start.

All Philly Today sports coverage is provided by Sandy Hinsgton.

Meet the Baker Behind Philly’s Dreamiest Cakes

Ashley Huston of Dreamworld Bakes / Photograph by Mike Prince

You’ll know a Dreamworld Bakes cake when you see one. Exploding with color and festooned with flowers, fruit dipped in glitter, and maybe a mini disco ball or two, Ashley Huston’s cakes are celebrations unto themselves.

Huston has spent years developing her signature style, first baking birthday cakes for her family and friends before fielding requests from their family and friends. Then, in 2020, Huston turned what was then a casual side hustle into her micro-bakery, Dreamworld Bakes. By 2022, it had become a full-time operation.

Now, the baker fulfills custom orders and sells her cakes all over Philly at pop-up events and stockists like Riverwards Produce. And later this year, she plans to open her own space in Kensington at 2400 Coral Street, once home to Franny Lou’s Porch. Huston hopes to open sometime this summer and plans to operate as a cafe, bakery, and cake studio, offering savory and sweet breakfast and lunch items — and, of course, cake.

Here, Huston shares more about her plans for the brick-and-mortar Dreamworld Bakes, the importance of representation as a Black baker, and her love of edible glitter.

I was born in … Arizona, but my family was from here so I moved back when I was fairly young. I grew up in Philly for the most part — raised in different parts, mainly the Northeast and North Philly. I call myself a Philly girl for sure.

I learned how to cook from … my dad. He was like, “You’re gonna be self-sufficient and we both have to work,” but also food was an important way he connected with his mother, and he taught that to us. I wasn’t really encouraged to pursue food. It was like, “We cook food because we have food. Don’t get a job and do that — it’s not practical.”

Before I began my culinary career, I thought … I was going to be an artist but that was very impractical, too. I stopped [doing art], but now I see that baking is my art. That sounds cheesy, but that’s honestly the way I see it.

I went to school at … Temple.

I studied … finance because I was good at math and that seemed like what I should do. I was 18. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t want to do that.

When I graduated … I got into the Peace Corps and was a teacher for a few years in Tanzania. It was a great experience, but I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher either.

I did some hopping around after, and then I was like, “Okay, now you actually have to make a decision.” I was a little older, a little bit wiser, a little bit more independent, and able to speak with my own voice at that point. And I said to myself, “Just go, try to cook.” I came back and told everyone I was going to try to do this.

Dreamworld Bakes cakes / Photograph by Mike Prince

I got into baking because … I love sweets. I have a sweet tooth. My family also grew up with a lot of sweets in the house. Probably more than there should have been, so I always had that interest.

When I was in high school, I was always the one who wanted to make everyone’s birthday cake. I wouldn’t even say I was a cake person per se, but cake has always been what you use for celebration. So it was a great way for me to learn how to make things from scratch.

I started cooking in Philly as … a line cook at South Bowl then North Bowl and from there I found myself always going back to the sweet side. It’s more my speed. I wanted to learn more about coffee and working in a bakery or cafe, which was always my dream. So then I became a barista. I wanted to get a full map of the food industry. I was still making cakes on the side for people, and at that point it was just a hobby for friends and family. But from there, their friends and family would ask, “Can you make me a cake?”

Dreamworld Bakes began as … a little side hustle. Then, in 2020, I guess I had more time on my hands. So I was baking a lot more. That’s when I started Dreamworld as the brand. But even then I didn’t really pursue it until 2022. That’s when it became my full-time job because I was out of a job. I needed to make money. My relationship was ending. My dad had just passed. There were all these crossroads popping up in my life, and I asked myself, “What are you going to do?” And if there’s any time to try and see if this would have some legs, it would be now. That’s when I started doing more pop-ups and markets and using all my connections with people I know in the industry and being like, “Let me come sell cake.”

I have always looked at cakes as … an empty canvas to fill out. When I first thought about cakes this way, I thought, “Is this crazy? Am I putting all these crazy things on top of cakes?” And then I realized no, it’s not that crazy. People have always put plastic toys on kids’ birthday cakes.

One cake I’ve made that means a lot to me is … the Baby Spice. It was for my former neighbor, Emma, and my first-ever wedding cake. We did a few tastings, and I came up with this idea. It’s my most popular cake now. Everyone says, “I want that Baby Spice thing” — which essentially is a cardamom cake with passionfruit curd and mango chai mousse, and a tonka bean buttercream.

My vision for the cafe … is to expand what Dreamworld can offer. I want it to be a good place for the community — where people can come in and have breakfast or lunch and make good memories.

On the menu … we’ll have some sweet stuff, savory stuff, options to get you throughout the day, as well as cake. I want more people to be able to get Dreamworld on a regular basis. Eventually I want to do some Sunday brunch and some dinners as well — maybe not all the time, but a few here and there.

The vibe will be … very Ashley for sure.

Inside you’ll find … a green kitchen. I love green kitchens. I plan to have a really sick bathroom that you can do a lot with. I really like to liven up small spaces. Green tile, lime-washed walls. Dark walnut is up there in that color palette and then probably some sage green. I don’t want to do too much with it because I think my cakes do so much. I don’t want to clash with that. We’ll just wait and see what happens.

Ashley Huston outside of where she plans to open her brick-and-mortar. / Photograph by Mike Prince

Opening a start-up is … very tricky. I secured partial financing from the Business Accelerator Fund, an emerging CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) based in Philadelphia, and still need more. Right now, everything I get in goes toward paying for overhead and tackling little things.

My advice to other business owners opening their own place … this is probably very cliché, but if you have a dream don’t give up, especially at the hardest parts. Nothing worth fighting for comes easy.

I feel like I’m very much in it now. I’m losing a lot of sleep and I’m crying all the time, but I feel like I’m so close. I think that’s when a lot of people choose to give up or have to for other circumstances. Hopefully, I don’t have to be one of those people.

My advice would be just to keep going. Keep trying. Get through the hurdles. Go through the different renditions of something. But also give yourself space, and probably get some sleep.

What excites me the most about having my own place is … realizing my dreams. Since I was a little girl, it has been my dream to have a place where people can come and enjoy my food.

I had a really hard life. I mean, I grew up in Philly. Philly is pretty rough. I grew up in the hood — the hood is even harder. It’s really hard, I think, for people to have the opportunity to chase their dreams and then be successful. So if I’m able to do that, it’s proof that you could get out and make something of yourself.

I want to be seen as … a Black woman known in the food and baking industries. There are definitely Black people and Black women in food, but I feel like society always boxes us into one group. Like, you have to cook one type of food. There’s an archetype of what a baker looks like and, no offense to anyone, but they’re white women. If you don’t fit that type, you’re not going to get something good. I want to show people that’s not true, especially other young Black women who are like, “I want to be a baker, but I don’t see anyone on the TV that looks like me.” That’s probably my biggest motivator.

Also, I really do enjoy feeding people. I love it when people say this cake was the best cake they’ve ever had. It makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my purpose here — like I was meant to cook.

My signature move is … throwing flowers and glitter on everything. When I found edible glitter, I said to myself, “Oh my god, this is dangerous. I’m going to put it on everything.”

See what goes into a Dreamworld cake in the video below and follow Foobooz on Instagram for more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Mayor Parker’s Kensington Crackdown Begins

A homeless encampment in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia in 2023, months before Mayor Cherelle Parker would send teams in to clear out the encampments (Getty Images)

Check phillymag.com each morning Monday through Thursday for the latest edition of Philly Today. And if you have a news tip for our hardworking Philly Mag reporters, please direct it here. You can also use that form to send us reader mail. We love reader mail!

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Kensington Crackdown Begins

Previous Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney basically did nothing about Kensington, just as he basically did nothing about lots of other problems during the latter part of his tenure. But our new mayor, Cherelle Parker, is clearly determined to make changes and to address the Kensington issue. Police and other officials have been doing a little bit here and there over the last few months. But Wednesday morning brought about the biggest action we’ve seen yet.

We originally heard that the city would be clearing one of the main homeless encampments in Kensington — the one on Kensington Avenue from notorious McPherson Square up to Allegheny Avenue — beginning on Wednesday morning around 8:30 a.m. But it seems they took action sooner, since no one appeared to be living on the block as early as 7 a.m.

It’s a little unclear where all those people went, or where others the city forces to move will go. Officials in Montgomery County have expressed concern that the city might relocate people from Kensington to Montgomery County towns, the way that some southern states have taken those who have crossed into the country illegally and sent them to northern cities, including Philadelphia. “We don’t need an influx of outsiders,” Pottstown’s mayor told WHYY. It’s also unclear whether these concerns are based in reality or just some good old suburban paranoia.

What is clear is that somebody needs to do something about Kensington. But not everybody is convinced that Mayor Parker is taking the right approach. Some on social media have compared her law-and-orderness to the tenure of Frank Rizzo. And then there’s this incendiary (and let’s be honest, hyperbolic and unfair) poster that sprung up on the streets, declaring that Mayor Parker wants drug users dead.

The situation in Kensington is a developing one, and we’ll get you more when we have it.

By the Numbers

200+: Charges filed against Scott Grondin, 42, the alleged ringleader of a major gun- and drug-trafficking gang. I think that’s one charge per face tattoo.

8 feet: Height of a cowboy boot that has popped up on the sidewalk in the Italian Market, becoming a weird little tourist attraction. Fortunately, we have Stephanie Farr of the Inquirer to help us get to the bottom of this.

5: Speaking of the Inquirer, that’s the number of staff members just laid off by management. And it sounds like the union representing Inquirer employees is pretty fired up about it.

Local Talent

Big congrats are in order for Wynnewood resident Tyshawn Sorey, who just won the Pultizer Prize in Music for his composition “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith).” What? It’s not on your playlist? You can listen to it here.

Sorey, a father of two and Penn prof, has described the song as an “anti-concerto” for saxophone and orchestra. It’s very, very soft. And it’s very, very slow. As in 36 beats-per-minute slow. The folks who give out the Pulitzers praised the work as a “introspective saxophone concerto with a wide range of textures presented in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle.” If you’re wondering what makes this an anti-concerto, concertos are usually very much spectacles with lots of razzle-dazzle and pizazz. This is certainly not that. Check out this New York Times piece on Sorey for more.

Philly is doing alright in the Pulitzer department. You may remember that South Philly playwright James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play Fat Ham, which enjoyed a stint on Broadway last year followed by a sold-out run at the Wilma. (You can read my interview with Ijames here.) So what’s Ijames up to these days? The Public Theater in New York presents his play Good Bones this fall. And next year, he directs August Wilson’s King Hedley II at the Arden.

If you know of more talented Philly folk I should be writing about, send them my way.

Reader Mail

Speaking of local talent, I had some negative things to say on Tuesday about Kevin Hart’s fumbling of the host job at the Tom Brady roast, which you can watch on Netflix, should you want to waste three hours of your life. And as I often do when I voice my own opinion, I asked readers to weigh in with their thoughts. I’d say those thoughts came in at about 75 percent in favor of Hart being the funniest thing on earth and 25 percent siding with me.

This person, who humorously signed the email Kevin Hart and sent it from kevinhart@gmail.com, definitely wasn’t a fan of what I had to say:

Kevin Hart was fucking hilarious during the roast. Everyone I’ve spoken to about it agreed. He made it so much better by just being loose and having fun with it. Have you ever watched a roast? The man made Kraft and Belichick take a shot together. Do you have any inclination how funny that is in the professional football world? Assuming your sense of humor is the Office reruns or New Girl, I’ll guess not, d!ckhead.

I admit to enjoying Office reruns!

And From the Are-We-Having-Fun-Yet? Sports Desk …

Cristopher Sánchez was on the mound for the Phils in the opening round of their series with the Blue Jays last night, and though he allowed a lead-off single, he promptly racked up three straight outs. In the home team’s half of the first, José Berríos gave up a single to Bryce Harper and a double to Nick Castellanos that scored Harper, but Nick then got picked off second base for the third out. Sánchez had a one-two-three second inning before Bryson Stott singled and stole second and a Kody Clemens homer made it 3-0 Phils.

The fourth inning was interesting. With one out, Edmundo Sosa was hit by a pitch, Clemens tripled him in — guess he likes the big leagues! — Garrett Stubbs walked, Kyle Schwarber was also hit by a pitch, Whit Merrifield struck out, and — quick, who’s on first? — Bryce Harper did this.

BRYCE HARPER WITH HIS 3RD HOME RUN IN THREE GAMES AND THIS ONE IS A GRAND SLAM

THIS IS AGAINST THE MLB’S ERA LEADER COMING INTO TONIGHT

THIS PHILLIES TEAM IS ON A ANOTHER

HARPER IS BACK IN MV3 FORM

THEY ARE HOT! pic.twitter.com/2rx4ZFaKWr

— Philly Sports Sufferer (@mccrystal_alex) May 8, 2024

That made it 8-0 Phils, and they weren’t done yet, though the Jays did pick up a run in the seventh, before Spencer Turnbull came in for Sánchez for the final two frames.

Shocker another Phillies pitcher had a good outing pic.twitter.com/w4cIeYv0B0

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) May 8, 2024

In the eighth, Stott singled, Sosa tripled to score Stott and then scored on a Clemens ground-out, and it was 10-1 Phils for the final — the team’s 11th straight home win, tying the CBP record.

The hottest club in @MLB is: pic.twitter.com/ro7Z7AJlFk

— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) May 8, 2024

They’ll face off again this afternoon, with a 1:05 start.

All Philly Today sports coverage is provided by Sandy Hingston.

A New Orleans Hotel Inspired This East Passyunk Rowhome Makeover

Colorful florals in the dressing room and bedroom of this East Passyunk rowhome makeover / Photography by Brian Wetzel

When a former client contacted­ Michelle Gage to see if she was interested­ in breathing new life into a tired East Passyunk rowhouse she was ready to purchase, the Chestnut Hill interior­ designer immediately agreed. Here was a client with a genuine appreciation­ for design — one who wanted the two-story, 2,300-square-foot property to have polish. “She grew up in New Orleans and wanted­ the house to look like a boutique hotel there called the Chloe,” explains Gage, who incorporated several pieces from the owner’s­ former home into the new jewel-toned aesthetic.

There were a lot of factors to consider within the narrow space to make the home feel like a luxe boutique hotel.” — Michelle Gage

A planned face-lift was scrapped in favor of a full gut renovation. Gage says she really had to consider the transitions between rooms on the first floor: “The line of sight extends from the front door to the kitchen in the back. You can’t make the patterns too bold when you see six rooms at once.”

The primary bedroom

There’s nothing garden-variety about the two-tone florals in the House of Hackney wallpaper, with a bedspread from the same designer. Gage worked with Urban Loft for the window treatments.

The dressing room

The designer’s favorite room was created as part of a new bedroom suite (complete with a custom coffee bar!). The owner’s existing Villa & House dresser and chair and vintage chandelier and rug were incorporated into the space. Gage sourced the mirror from Anthropologie.

The kitchen

Purple reigns — by way of Benjamin Moore’s Nightfall Sky — in the kitchen, which was gutted and fitted with custom cabinetry by Philly-based Steven Kumpf Woodworks.

The lounge

Interior designer Michelle Gage had to consider the transitions between rooms on the first floor of this rowhome makeover.

The dining room was reimagined as an inviting lounge, decked out in Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper and with Benjamin Moore’s Blue Nose for the custom built-ins framing the center doorway. The rippled detailing of a Selamat credenza softly complements the oversize portrait that hangs above.

Published as “Habitat: Southern Hospitality” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Everything You Need to Know About Fishtown’s New Sushi Speakeasy

SBB ikura / Photograph courtesy of Sushi By Bou

Howdy, buckaroos! And welcome back to the Foobooz food news round-up. With Mother’s Day just around the corner, everyone in the industry is focused on getting prepped for one of the single biggest services of the year. But just because the industry’s attention is elsewhere, that doesn’t mean we don’t still have a few quick things to catch up on before we all get on with our weeks. So let’s kick things off with …

Mysterious Omakase Sushi Speakeasy Opening in Former Omakase Sushi Bar

Sushi By Bou made a name for itself in New York City by opening small sushi pop-ups in strange places. Basement storage rooms, mop closets, hotel rooms — they’ve done all of those, each with its own, unique theme. But now, in their first foray into the Philly market, SimpleVenue (the company behind Sushi by Bou) and Glu Hospitality are teaming up to open their brand-new omakase sushi speakeasy in the same place that they had a different omakase sushi restaurant (Sushi Suite, also marketed as a “sushi speakeasy” experience), which opened over the bones of the old Omakase by Yanaga space behind Izakaya Fishtown (back when that place was called Izakaya by Yanaga).

That’s confusing, right? Put simply, they’re opening a new omakase restaurant in place of their own existing omakase restaurant which, previously, had taken the place of a totally different omakase restaurant. None of which feels very mysterious or speakeasy-ish and would, in fact, be the exact opposite of transforming underutilized real estate into revenue-generating spaces — which is the stated raison d’être of SimpleVenue. I mean, this could not possibly be a more utilized space. You guys were literally utilizing it yourselves just last week.

Anyway, none of that is really important. What is important is that the new Sushi By Bou will be replacing Sushi Suite behind the closed door at Izakaya Fishtown beginning May 10th. And frankly, the place sounds kinda cool.

The theme for this particular iteration of the concept is ’90s hip-hop, so we’re talking big murals, graffiti and vinyl on the walls, and a killer throwback soundtrack paying tribute to some of Philly’s finest hip-hop icons. The menu will be $60 for a 12-course, 60-minute omakase experience. Want booze? They got that, with sake and cocktail pairings. Want something fancier? They got that, too, with an upgraded, 17-course “Bou-gie” option for $125 that includes five extra seasonal courses. It’s basically a funked-up and pared-down version of the whole Sushi Suite experience meant to get people in and out quicker, and at a lower price point.

But speaking of Sushi Suite …

SimpleVenue and Glu aren’t done with that concept at all. Almost every seat for the $185, 17-course, and hand-picked sushi experience was booked during Sushi Suite’s run in Fishtown, and no one is going to turn their back on that kind of money, so it looks like Sushi Suite will be moving into a new, larger location in Center City later this summer.

And there’s a second Sushi By Bou location already in the works, but no location has been announced yet.

Now what’s next?

There Are Two New Members of the Bird Gang

Bird Gang Silver Tequila / Photograph courtesy of BOLTD

So here’s a weird coincidence. In the same column that I talked about the opening of Sushi Suite in Fishtown, I also talked about the initial release of Bird Gang Spirits — a collaboration between the Eagles and local bottler and distiller, BOTLD. And now here we are this week, talking about the replacement for Sushi Suite and announcing the next round of Bird Gang spirits.

It’s strange how these things work out sometimes.

Anyhoo, Bird Gang already had vodka and bourbon available, the bottles decked out in their finest kelly green, and available at BOTLD locations in Rittenhouse, Midtown Village and King of Prussia, or online. But now they can add two tequilas to the mix — a standard-issue silver, and a chile-infused spicy variety. Both are 80-proof, both are imported from the historic Orendain Distillery in Jalisco, and both are available for pre-order right now (though they might not ship for another week or so). Check it out right here.

Pub & Kitchen Team About to Hit the Main Line

It looks like the Pub & Kitchen family is about to get bigger. The team’s casual Italian concept, Trattoria Carina, has been up and running for a few years now at 22nd and Spruce (in the old Fitler Dining Room space), and they’ve been killing it there. So naturally, the P&K team is looking to make another one.

Carina Sorella — that’s the name of the new spot. And it’ll be opening at 864 West Lancaster Avenue in Bryn Mawr. It’ll be Italian — I know that much. But there isn’t much else in the way of details just yet.

One thing I do know: It looks like the place is going to be opening pretty soon. They started hiring for all positions back at the beginning of April (had a job fair and everything), and posts on Facebook, Instagram, and on Pub & Kitchen’s Instagram feed have all said that the new spot will be opening very soon.

Needless to say, I’ll be keeping an eye on the place.

Meanwhile, Right Down the Street …

Luisa Sandwich, a skandi-style open-faced sandwich with chicken salad, blueberries, and fresh greens. / Photograph courtesy of Pinwheel Provisions

Right next door to the new Carina Sorella location, Bryn Mawr’s Pinwheel Provisions has a new menu, a new chef, and some new sandwiches to talk about — all of which is good news.

Anjali Gupta’s healthy, multi-accented lunch spot at 860 West Lancaster Avenue used to be a place focused on supplying the Main Line with frozen meals freshly made from local produce and grab-and-go foods for making meal times easier. And while that is still a major component of Pinwheel’s business, Gupta has recently picked up chef Colin Mason (ex of Fork, Kanella, Lola’s Garden and elsewhere, and fresh off his gig as chef de cuisine at the Pullman) to update her menu for spring and to add a whole new line of fresh, healthy, international sandwiches to the board as a draw for lunchtime crowds.

The new menu draws on influences from Italy, Denmark, India, Morocco, Great Britain — all places that take their lunches seriously. There’s minted pea soup, za’atar-roasted carrot salad with toasted chickpeas, a British ploughman’s sandwich with ham, cheese, tomato chutney and mustard butter, Bombay toasties with spiced potato filling, and a Scandinavian-style open-faced sandwich with chicken salad, blueberries and red onion.

The newly expanded space also has room now for fresh pastries from local bakeries, ice cream from Milk Jawn, and some international pantry items. Now that the weather has turned nice, there’s shaded outdoor garden seating for about a dozen people, too. If you’re down, you can see the new menu and check out Pinwheel’s expanded hours here.

Now, who has room for some leftovers?

The Leftovers

It looks like local distiller Stateside Vodka is upping stakes and pulling out of its home in Olde Kensington. The Philadelphia Business Journal is reporting that they’ve already found a new location in Northeast Philly that’ll give them acres more room for both production and office space. You can read all about it right here.

Meanwhile, after some pretty long delays, the Southeast Asian Market at FDR Park opened over the weekend. Saturday was its first day back, and at least for now, it looks like the schedule will be Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., until the end of October.

If you’re planning on going, remember three things: Go slow, pace yourself, and bring cash. The market is bigger than you think. You will want to eat half of everything you see. So let’s be careful out there, okay? And maybe check out this piece by Chloé Pantazi-Wolber on the history of the market’s beloved lemongrass cheesesteak before you go.

Speaking of cheesesteaks, guess who else is back in the game this week? After months of renovations and operating out of a giant food truck, Pat’s King of Steaks will be reopening on Wednesday in its original home at 9th and Passyunk.

The South Philly staple has been dark since January while it underwent a major remodel. And when it comes back this week, it’ll be doing so with a youthful glow, boundless energy, and a new breakfast sandwich.

No, for real. For the first time in like … ever, Pat’s is adding an egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich to the board, mounted on an Aversa roll and stacked with bacon, sausage, pork roll, or steak. There’s also an option to get everything on a single sandwich, plus onions and hash browns — which is good to know in case of some kind of emergency where I need to raise my cholesterol, blood pressure, and pants size all at once and immediately.

Every day, from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. — that’s when you can get breakfast at Pat’s. I also hear that they’ve added a chicken cheesesteak to the menu, but I don’t think anyone will notice. I mean, it’s Pat’s, right? Even the cows order steak sandwiches when they come here.

Anyway, you can find all the details on the grand opening here. I imagine the line is already forming, so we’ll see y’all down there.

South Philadelphia Mom Finds Loaded Gun at Queen Village Playground

A loaded gun found at Weccacoe playground in the Queen Village neighborhood of South Philadelphia (photo provided)

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South Philadelphia Mom Finds Loaded Gun at the Weccacoe Playground in Queen Village

Monday morning was relatively lovely, in terms of the weather. Certainly a good enough day to take your kid to the playground, right? And that’s just what one South Philadelphia mom did. She walked her 18-month-old son to the Weccacoe Playground in Queen Village before she was due to drop him off at a nearby daycare. Things quickly took a turn.

It was around 8:30 a.m. when they arrived at the playground. She was keeping a close eye on him, in no small part because the boy picked up a dead bat at a different playground just a week earlier. Rabies treatment ensued.

She watched the boy as he was climbing on a piece of playground equipment. From below, the mom, who asked us not to use her name, noticed a beverage can on the platform.

“I said, ‘Don’t touch that can!'” she tells me. “Kids love to pick up everything.”

And then, seconds later, she saw a gun of some sort. The mom isn’t acquainted with guns. She wasn’t sure if it was a real gun or a toy gun. But it looked real enough. So she immediately grabbed her son and called 911.

“I was like, ‘I hope this is a water gun or some kind of joke’,” she recalls. She says she waited at Weccacoe Playground for about 30 minutes before a cop showed up.

“[The cop] climbed up and said, ‘This is a real gun,'” says the mom. The police officer went on to say that the gun was a Glock, and that it was loaded. Thirteen bullets in the magazine, and one in the chamber.

Now, if you’re not familiar with guns, I need to tell you that the brand of this particular gun is important. Most handguns have a “safety” on them, a switch you have to manually flip to get the gun to fire. A Glock doesn’t have this type of safety. That means that if you pick up the gun and squeeze the trigger, the gun will fire. I learned this myself a few years ago at a Delco shooting range, where my friend handed me a gun, telling me it was a Glock. “Where’s the safety?” I asked. “It’s a Glock,” he replied. “No safety.”

The Philadelphia Police Department says it is investigating the incident at Weccacoe Playground but didn’t provide further details. A police department spokesperson went on to say that anybody who finds a gun shouldn’t touch it and should immediately call 911, just as this woman did. The police didn’t offer up this information, but it might be worth noting what is probably obvious: Don’t let anybody else near the gun. And if, due to circumstances, you have to pick it up to secure the situation, handle it minimally and keep your finger away from the trigger.

The PPD spokesperson went on to say that parents need to have a discussion with their children about gun safety and what to do if they see a gun. This website provides some useful tips on how that conversation might go.

As for the South Philadelphia mom in this particular scenario, she says she’ll still be taking her son to playgrounds. “But I’ll be watching him like a hawk,” she adds. “You never know what is going to happen.”

Local Talent

The Netflix special that everybody seems to be talking about is the roast of Tom Brady. It’s the first celebrity roast in a very, very, very long time. And it’s also, for some godforsaken reason, three hours long. The biggest problem with the Tom Brady roast, though, is Philly’s own Kevin Hart. He was the roast master, as they call the host of a roast. Hart is a funny-enough comedian during his stand-up shows, but that doesn’t mean that he’s the right person to host a three-hour event that was originally broadcast live. (Note: I’m not the only one who holds this position). He, uh, fumbled jokes and segues. And, frankly, in this particular case, the guy just wasn’t very funny. He probably needs to stick to making really bad movies. Feel free to disagree with me using this link.

Oh, and speaking of the Tom Brady roast, Brady himself had some not-so-nice things to say about Philadelphia when it was his turn to roast his roasters.

By the Numbers

$10 million to $12 million: Funding that the organizer of the Philadelphia Sports Museum is seeking to get the thing off the ground. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because said organizer has been talking about this for the better part of the decade. This time, though, he has the support of Comcast Spectacor.

4: Streets in Philadelphia that will now see the same kind of traffic-enforcement crackdown that’s happening on North Broad Street. Police made the announcement on Monday in response to all those people out there openly shirking the laws of the road. You know who you are! The new zones of enforcement include the following: Castor Avenue between Rhawn Street and Oxford Circle; 300 to 2600 Cottman Avenue; 7000 to 8600 Henry Avenue; and 6900 to 8000 Ogontz Avenue. Everywhere else, feel free to go about your Mad Max business.

$300,000: Value of jewelry, purses and other merchandise thieves made away with at Queen May Jewelry in Cape May on Sunday, just before 3 a.m. The store posted surveillance video of the heist on its Instagram page. Sorry for the store, but I gotta say: How can a store with that much vintage Louis Vuitton sitting around not have better surveillance cameras than the ones I have at home?

And From the Sweet-Sweep Sports Desk …

The final game of the Phils’ series with the Giants took place at CBP yesterday afternoon, with Zack Wheeler on the mound for us. Local kid Mason Black, the Giants pitcher making his first major-league start, had his proud parents in the stands. Jung Hoo Lee and LaMonte Wade Jr. led off the first with singles off Wheeler, but Bryson Stott squelched the threat with a fine double-play from shortstop, where he was subbing for the injured Trea Turner, with Whit Merrifield at second for Stott.

That was pretty much it till the fourth, when Black walked Nick Castellanos and Stott back-to-back with two outs and Merrifield singled Nick home. Wheels, meantime, was racking up the strikeouts; he’d wind up with 11 total. Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto led off our fifth with singles, and Bryce Harper homered both in: 4-0 Phils.

How Bryce Harper's 3-run dinger sounded on Giants TV pic.twitter.com/Pf0mo4tySO

— Nick Piccone (@_piccone) May 6, 2024

Brandon Marsh doubled up the right-field line, and Castellanos whacked him home with another double, putting an end to Black’s outing. In came Erik Miller, who got three straight outs. In the sixth, a Stott error with one out put Thairo Estrada on first, and he got to third on a single by Wade. Johan Rojas made a nice catch on a fly ball for an out, but Estrada scored: 5-1. Wade took second on a passed ball, but Wheels got the K on Michael Conforto to end the threat. Luke Jackson came in for Miller, and Bryce led off the bottom of the seventh with a single and got to second on an Alec Bohm ground-out; would tonight end Bohm’s 18-game hitting streak? It did. But Schwarbs homered off the foul pole in right field to make it 6-1, and Orion Kerkering finished it off that way.

Zack Wheeler after 8 starts:

4-3 1.64 ERA, 63/13 K/BB, 0.89 WHIP pic.twitter.com/84sgiIH8Gg

— Alexandre Lores Sports (@lores_alexandre) May 7, 2024

That’s another series sweep, and 10 home wins in a row. The Toronto Blue Jays pay a call on us tomorrow, with a 6:40 start.

What Else Ya Got?

Get a load of this dickwad at the Met Gala last night. And enjoy the replies.

Ben Simmons is playing no games. An early contender for best-dressed man at the 2024 #MetGala pic.twitter.com/eX9s02zbtU

— Complex Style (@ComplexStyle) May 6, 2024

Pfft.

All Philly Today sports coverage is provided by Sandy Hingston.

Gass & Main: The Pinnacle of Middle-Class Fancy

BBQ burnt-end rainbow carrots at Gass & Main / Photography by Aaron Richter

I’ll never forget sitting in my car in a parking lot in Audubon and eating chef Dane DeMarco’s Cowboy Tots for the first time.

This was when DeMarco was at Burgertime, their first solo swing at Restaurant World after years spent running the kitchens­ at South Philly Tap Room, American Sardine Bar, and Sonny’s; after lockdowns and pandemic side hustles, after burnout, after soul-searching, after walking away completely and then coming back with this little burger joint with a videogame theme, focused on an anarchic love of junk food and pure American­ excess.

Dane DeMarco, owner and chef of Gass & Main

I liked Burgertime a lot. It’s closed now — a tough decision for DeMarco, who was seeking a better work-life balance for their family. But the way it examined life through every chaotic burger and hot dog topped with Fritos and peanut butter stuck with me. Biographical cuisine can be a delicate tightrope to walk. Get it right, and you build a kinship with your guests. But miss out on the universality of your theme, and you become the person at the dinner party who just can’t stop talking about themself.

DeMarco got it just right at Burgertime. And that same flavor­ of an examined life carried over onto the menu at their latest restaurant, Gass & Main. Here, the stories­ told are more complex and nuanced, shaped by suburban dinner tables and old back issues of Gourmet magazine. They’re told in the form of house-made chips with French onion crème fraîche and caviar, deviled eggs with smoked cheddar­ and horseradish balanced over a bowl of field greens, or mac-and-cheese made from truffled gnocchi and a smooth blond Mornay­ topped with black truffle peels and a dusting of herbed breadcrumbs.

Because that’s just chips and French onion dip, get it? It’s just Mom’s Tuesday-night mac-and-cheese. It’s just pork and beans, except here, it’s a pork rib eye, grill-marked like the kitchen used a protractor, glazed in apple butter for a shot of juicy sweetness, and then set atop a mound of smashed red-skin potatoes and surrounded by a moat of homemade bacon-braised baked beans that taste exactly like the ones you get out of the can — except inexplicably better in every conceivable way.

Trying to re-create memory like this — only glorified and illuminated — is dangerous. You have to understand deeply both the thing you’re trying to evoke and how that thing, already idealized in recollection, can somehow be improved. And over and over again, DeMarco and their crew nail it. The beef cheeks, with their chunky mashed potatoes, fried shallots, horseradish, 10-hour red wine braise and red wine gravy, come to the table halfway between Julia Child’s classic beef bourguignon and whatever stewed beef you ate growing up. The grilled shrimp over an explosion of winter citrus play like a flashback to summer days by the ocean if you eat inside Gass & Main’s cozy dining room or at the small tables that line one wall of the kitchen.­ But the same plate eaten outside, on a warm spring evening, at one of the tables set on the pedestrian mall, tastes like anticipation and a promise of warmer days coming.

Grilled shrimp with winter citrus

Then there’s the kitchen’s BBQ burnt-end rainbow carrots. I have no idea what moment DeMarco is memorializing on this plate, but I also just don’t care. I have seen (and suffered) a hundred different chefs trying to make carrots into center-plate stars. Ninety-eight of them have failed, some so horribly that I can still taste their misfires years later.­ This plate is one of the two I can remember succeeding: orange, yellow and purple carrots, dry-rubbed like ribs, grilled and roasted until soft — the texture of fatty pork. You can cut them with a fork. And they come dressed with microgreens, pickled jalapeño, a pimento spread loose enough to be a sauce or dressing, and a splash of caramelized barbecue sauce that I didn’t even notice until the carrots were almost gone. This dish is smart. Counterintuitive. Snarky in its vegetable-izing of a BBQ classic. Most important, it’s delicious. I wouldn’t send you to New Jersey after something that was less than mind-alteringly good, but this single plate is worth the trip all on its own.

Gass & Main’s dining room

The rest of it? That’s just Dane DeMarco growing up. It’s the way they look back now at years and dishes­ and flavors gone by and reconnect them to this present moment. It’s a chef talking not just about themself, but about all of us who came up in the age of recipe boxes and family dinner tables, chips and dip, beans and wienies. It’s about moving on and, at the same time, never forgetting where you came from.

3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly

Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “The Pinnacle of Middle-Class Fancy” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

No, Really: Year-Round School Is Coming to Philadelphia

Mayor Cherelle Parker, an advocate of year-round school in Philadelphia (Getty Images)

Check phillymag.com each morning Monday through Thursday for the latest edition of Philly Today. And if you have a news tip for our hardworking Philly Mag reporters, please direct it here. You can also use that form to send us reader mail. We love reader mail!

No, Really: Year-Round School Is Coming to Philadelphia

Seen here is Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker demonstrating the face that a Philadelphia schoolkid makes when you utter the phrase “year-round school” within earshot of them. I’m kidding, of course. This is actually a photo of Mayor Parker delivering a commencement speech at Lincoln University this weekend.

But back to this whole year-round school business. I first wrote about Parker’s dreams for year-round school in Philadelphia way back in May 2023, when she was a candidate in the mayoral primary. Part of her logic for year-round school was this: “Our children are no longer working the farms during the summertime.” True enough. She called the way we do things now — meaning giving kids and teachers the summers off — “antiquated” and “outdated.”

Candidate Parker has since become Mayor Parker, but she hasn’t forgotten about year-round school. At a City Council hearing last week, Philadelphia school district head Tony Watlington said he’s currently working with the Mayor’s Office on a pilot program involving 20 schools in Philadelphia, as first reported by WHYY.

Now, don’t start throwing tomatoes at Mayor Parker and Watlington just yet, kids. If all goes according to plan, year-round school won’t go into effect until the 2025-’26 school year.

And even when year-round school does go into effect, it’s not like the kids will be going to school every week of the year. They’ll still get off for holidays, and, Watlington explained, there would be additional “small breaks built in.” But as for that three-month-ish summer vacation, it sounds like that’s headed the way of AOL Instant Messenger.

Back when Parker first pitched the idea of year-round school in Philadelphia, she was short on specifics. For instance, how much would year-round school cost taxpayers? Which 20 schools are we talking about? How many school buildings could even host year-round school, considering the lack of air-conditioning and other logistical issues? She didn’t have any of those answers.

I reached out to the school district this morning, just to find out which 20 schools will be part of the pilot. And they weren’t even able to provide that.

“It’s still extremely early in the process,” said a school district spokesperson.

College Cancels Michael Smerconish

Michael Smerconish has done several college commencement addresses in the past, as he recalled for us during this recent interview. And he was scheduled to do one this year at Dickinson College, out yonder in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But now, he’s not. The college just canceled him, both figuratively and literally, after some students lost their shit over something he wrote in 2004. And here’s what Smerconish himself has to say about the whole messy thing.

Local Talent

I know what you’ve all been wondering: What on earth has become of Susan Noles, the Delco woman who kept us all entertained for weeks on Golden Bachelor? Yeah, I’ve so been wondering the same thing. Can’t sleep at night. The answer is that she’s now dating a man who recognized her at Marshalls and asked for a selfie. You would already know this if you were a subscriber to the dating-themed podcast Noles now co-hosts.

By the Numbers

$23 million: Projected cost for this finally-about-to-be-under-construction business and cultural center in the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood known as Africatown. I’ve been hearing about this for years and am glad to see that it’s actually underway. Though a bit of a red flag did go up when I saw who one of the developers behind Africatown is: Chaka Fattah. Yes, the disgraced former U.S. Congressman who went to federal prison for his misdeeds. Court records show that he’s still on federal probation. Development in Africatown is a great idea. Hopefully Fattah doesn’t figure out a way to screw it up.

47:33: Time of the fastest runner in yesterday’s Broad Street Run. That would be Kevin McDonnell from Cherry Hill. The fastest woman, Amber Zimmerman, came in at 52:52. She’s a Philadelphia PhD who’s been training for the Paris Olympics of late. There was also a non-binary category, now in its second year, which saw Winter Parts finishing first at 52:39. And in the wheelchair race, Miguel Vergara won. He rolled across the finish line at the 34:14 mark. All grueling, yes. But the alternative is riding the perpetually pee-scented Broad Street Line, so maybe this whole running thing isn’t a bad idea after all.

$1 million: Average selling price for a Toll Bros. home these days. The Montco-based McMansion-maker is aggressively building new McMansions to make up for what is apparently a massive McMansion shortage in the region.

And From the Rockin’-It Sports Desk …

The Phils were in their City Ugly unis for Friday night’s home game against the Giants, so it serves them right that they went down 2-0 early, as starter Aaron Nola gave up way too many walks and a double in the second inning. The Phils countered with three in the third off Giants starter Jordan Hicks, though, as Kyle Schwarber reached first on an error, Bryce Harper walked, Alec Bohm singled, J.T. Realmuto walked, and Brandon Marsh singled. And they made it four in the fourth as Turner singled, stole second, and then stole home on a passed ball, though he had to leave the game with an injury.

Matt Strahm came in for Nola in the fifth, and it was Seranthony Domínguez for the sixth, and they both got it done. Then, in the seventh, the Giants racked up three straight singles off Orion Kerkering with no outs. He got a double play, but a run scored anyway: 4-3. Quite the milestone …

First run Kerkering has allowed in his #MLB career. #Phillies

— PositivePhilliesVibes (@PhilliesVibes) May 4, 2024

Jeff Hoffman struck out the side in the eighth, but in the ninth, José Alvarado gave up a single and a grounder that put a pinch-runner on second with two outs, then notched a final strikeout. Woo!

Saturday’s game started late with a rain delay, which gave us extra time to absorb that Turner could be out as much as six weeks with the hamstring he pulled stealing home in the series opener. That meant the return of Kody Clemens from Lehigh Valley.

The teams finally took the de-tarped field about 70 minutes late, with Ranger Suárez on the mound, though it was still raining. He walked the first batter, then got two strikeouts and a fly-out. Keaton Wynn — perfect baseball name, BTW — walked Schwarber to start us off, and Schwarbs took second on a passed ball.

J.T. walked, too, and Harper singled, after which Bohn got beaned by a pitch for an RBI. Another single, by Marsh, made it 2-0 Phils with the bases still loaded. One more on a double-play grounder by Castellanos, a bobbled hit for Stott makes it four, and a single for Sosa. Reboot that lineup! And that was the night for Wynn, replaced by Mitchell White. OMG, a single for Johan Rojas before a final ground-out. All righty, Phils up 5-0! Realmuto led off the second with a triple and scored on a wild pitch that drove the catcher out of the game. Bohm singled — making his streak 17 games long.

Alec Bohm is the first Phillies third baseman to have a 17-game hit streak since Mike Schmidt in 1979. pic.twitter.com/WVef2rWCUV

— Luke Arcaini (@ArcainiLuke) May 5, 2024

A Marsh walk to load ’em again … you know what? Let’s pick up this game a few more innings in. Suárez made it through the sixth before José Ruiz came in for him with the score 13-3 and whacked the first batter. Bohm had come out with a hurtin’ hip, and the rain was still pouring down. But did they call the game? They did not. Seranthony pitched the bottom of the ninth, and he held the line for the — gulp — 14-3 final win.

Guys being dudes.
pic.twitter.com/EDAtolAgGc

— Phillies Nation (@PhilliesNation) May 5, 2024

On Sunday, the Giants got the jump in the first inning on a single and a double off starter Taijuan Walker. The Phils got it back in the second, though, as Bohm reached on an error, Stott walked and stole second, and Edmundo Sosa singled off their starter, Logan Webb. And in the third, after Schwarbs walked and J.T. singled, Harper hit a whopper of a homer to make it 4-1. It was only the second off of Webb this season. That wasn’t the end of it, either; after Castellanos singled, Stott doubled him in. When Marsh stole second in the fifth off reliever Sean Hjelle, it was the Phils’ fourth heist of the night. Speaking of Marsh …

Brandon Marsh mic'd up is a treat 😂🔊 #SundayNightBaseball pic.twitter.com/HJOHoSsRhC

— MLB (@MLB) May 6, 2024

In the seventh inning, Thairo Estrada whacked a two-run homer of his own, and that was it for Walker (who promptly slammed shit around in the dugout); Gregory Sosa came in to spell him and hit the first batter, Austin Slater, then walked Nick Ahmed but got out of the fire unscathed. Michael Conforto tripled off Hoffman with one out in the eighth on a ball Rojas just barely missed catching before two Ks put an end to that. It was Alvarado in the ninth, and goddamn if he didn’t give up a solo homer to Jakson Reetz. There was another long fly to end the game, finally: ninth straight home win for us! One last game in the series, tomorrow afternoon at 4:05.

What Else Ya Got?

Some cool news in a cold world: Delran’s own Carli Lloyd and her husband are pregnant via IVF.

Any Doop News?

You betcha. The Union played D.C. United on Saturday in Washington and went down 2-0 in the first half, with Andre Blake out with yet another injury and Oliver Semmle in the goal, not that it was all his fault. But Alejandro Bedoya had a beautiful goal in the first-half overage, and in the 79th minute came this gorgeous strike by Jack McGlynn:

https://twitter.com/PhilaUnion/status/1786931716914905487

So the Union walked away with one point, averting disaster. They play again Wednesday, away at NYC.

All Philly Today sports coverage is provided by Sandy Hingston.