THE LIST

VALLEY

— GEOFF GEHMAN

My nickname for the Blue Mountain Bowl is The Gods’ Steeplechase. Running between Route 100 in Fogelsville and Hawk Mountain in Kempton, this slaloming, fishtailing cornucopia contains farms, forests, orchards, vineyards, streams, ponds, meadows, prairies and a dizzying number of panoramas. Blissfully free of McMansions, warehouses and tourist traps, it’s the greater Valley’s last paradise, the best territory to cruise mindlessly yet mindfully. Attractions abound: bucolic Leaser Lake, a kayaker’s wet dream; an Asian pear orchard owned by Lutron, a pioneer maker Leaser Lake of dimming devices; a twohill automobile graveyard, a crazily picturesque public sculpture. Old Philly Pike spirals to a glorious climax: a teardrop-shaped cemetery ringed by corn, soy beans and bird houses; serenaded by birds and winds; centered by a tree pointing a finger to heaven, and bosomed by the Blue Mountain. Welcome to my peace pad, my nirvana shrine. The Bowl’s top pit stop is Wanamakers General Store, an old-fashioned institution with new-age flourishes. Opened in 1886 by a Civil War veteran who witnessed the Confederacy’s official surrender, it specializes in homemadesandwiches

Wanamakers General Store

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Geoff Gehman is a former arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown and the author of five books, including Planet Mom: Keeping an Aging Parent from Aging, The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the LongLost Hamptons, and Fast Women and Slow Horses: The (mis)Adventures of a Bar, Betting and Barbecue Man (with William Mayberry). He lives in Bethlehem. geoffgehman@verizon.net

CITY

— A.D. AMOROSI

I love August. It is the month I got married, and the month I was born, not in that order. At least one of the handsome Hemsworth brothers has a birthday in August, as does Demi Lovato, Barack Obama, Dua Lipa, and Michael Jackson. It’s hotter than hell in August, but at least it’s not July. And for the most part, it is usually the very last month of the year when I have to watch grown-ups wearing shorts—those long shorts, to boot. Not my thing, your legs that is.

This might not seem like a big deal to you, especially since Jay-Z’s Made in America two-day music festival will follow into the same space like ten days later. Still, as of August 21, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway’s 2022 renovation from the Eakins Oval into The Oval XP will close for the season. Billed as an urban oasis before the Philadelphia Museum

of Art, this idea of a reimagined public space made no sense to me unless it had ties to the Museum itself. That would have meant grim, earless Van Gogh-like self-portraits rather than The Oval’s current smiling Selfie Station, and a very still, 100-foot-tall Marcel Duchamp-esque ready

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A.D. Amorosi is a Los Angeles Press Club National Art and Entertainment Journalism award-winning journalist and national public radio host and producer (WPPM.org’s Theater in the Round) married to a garden-to-table cooking instructor + award-winning gardener, Reese, and father to dogdaughter Tia.