THE LIST

VALLEY

— GEOFF GEHMAN

Eric Knight with Lassie

Have you ever sat on a chain-sawed stump placed specifically by a stream to make you absorb water-on-rock percussion? You can at the Jere Knight Nature Trail, a heavenly haven where the sun paints skyscraper trees and winds rustle leaves like a didgeridoo. The best loop of the 1.6-mile preserve is the Pursell, which spirals past ravines, rivulets, a concrete satyr embedded in a tree hollow, a bench by a beautiful farm field, a grassy knoll and a stump resembling a fairy throne. Another path leads to a meadow frequented by butterflies with stained-glass wings, a nursery of American chestnuts, an ancient white oak with wildly gnarled Medusa-like limbs and a memorial to Jere Knight, a pioneer environmentalist who helped save Cooks Creek, which runs below the bronze plaque listing her many virtues (poet, editor, friend). Jere was my good friend; I spent many hours in her nearby house discussing her late husband, Eric Knight, author of the 1940 novel Lassie ComeHome, the best-known, most beloved story of the unbreakable bond between two- and four-legged creatures. (2844 Slifer Valley Rd., Riegelsville; 215-345-7020; heritageconservancy.org; jereknight.com)

Godfrey Daniels is the first club that made me feel I belonged. Way back in 1981, five years after the music room opened, I embraced an intimate den with rustic walls festooned with posters, instruments and a vintage buzz of subterranean homey blues. Every one of the 100 seats is a stone’s throw from the stage—even the corner

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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 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.

CITY

— A.D. AMOROSI

Having not yet outrun summer’s swelter, it’s nearly impossible to imagine that a breeze—even but one Autumnal wind cooler than 99 degrees —can be achieved as we head into the heated live happenings of fall. But that’s September in Philadelphia. Still dense. Still damp. Relentless. That’s not a happy portrait, but at least it’s accurate, temperaturewise, in a literal and figurative sense. Ugh.

Tyler the Creator. Photo: Carlos Gonzalez / Star Tribune

Because Beyonce’s new house music album, Renaissance, didn’t sell as much as Lady Bey had planned, her husband, Jay-Z, is holding a self-charitable event during the Labor Day Weekend. September’s Made in America festival, held across two days in and around Philadelphia’s Art Museum area Oval, will play host to Tyler, the Creator, the number one album artist of 2022 and a star of Bullet Train, Bad Bunny, and other helpful hip hop, pop and dance music artists looking to lend the Carters a helping hand. Now that there’s no more Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon, you have extra dough to spare.

Know how you weren’t totally OK with Tom Hanks’ oddball Dutch accent as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis movie? You really will set to twitching when you watch Netflix on September 28 and catch Blonde, director Andrew Dominik’s (The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, many a Nick Cave documentary) much-anticipated new film on the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe, and one based on author Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of the same name. The so-called ‘blonde’ is played by Cuban actress Ana de Armas who reportedly spent nine months training with a dialogue coach to nail Monroe’s breathy voice, but still has an accent that is uniquely off point. Having seen its trailers and spoken to its director, de Armas’ off

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