Poor Richard's Scorecard

The 11 Things I Learned Vacationing at Disney World

You don't spend a week in the happiest and most magical place on Earth without learning a few things. Here's what I picked up last week in Walt Disney World:

For a Few Blessed Days in October, a Break from Soccer Games and Saturday Cartoons

It's fashionable around these parts to bash our brothers and sisters just up the Jersey Turnpike, but the fact is there really is no place in America like New York, for better and for worse. Over the weekend it was for better, as Mrs. Poor Richard and I spent a couple of nights in Manhattan to celebrate our anniversary.

We enjoyed the full range of Gotham experiences--well, from the perspective of married, middle-ageish parents--including:

In Praise of Seeing Movies as They Were Meant to Be Seen

The Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., is one of a dying breed. Single-screen movie houses are being killed by the multiplex, and not just in the suburbs. But there's nothing quite like seeing a film in a place like the Uptown. The screen is wide and curving, the view from the balcony commanding, the atmosphere evocative. I can't say it made Inglourious Basterds a better film, but it certainly rendered my viewing of it more pleasant. Yes, there's a lot to be said for watching a DVD while ensconced on your couch, and for the variety of showings at the local 16-screen venue. But the movie-house experience takes you back to a time when going to the movies meant you were going to be completely and utterly immersed in a new world for a couple of hours. Your troubles faded away. The only here and now was the story unspooling on the magnificent silver screen in front of you. | PRS

Boston, San Francisco, and Baltimore Tamed Their Urban Highways; Why Can't Us?

Last Friday my family and I spent the day in Baltimore. We zipped across the harbor on a water taxi, ate lunch and dinner at waterside restaurants, people-watched, and walked to and from our hotel with absurd ease. We pointed out attractions we hoped to attend in future years, when the girls are older and interested in different things. On Saturday morning I went for a run along the perimeter of the harbor, which was lined with all manner of restaurants, museums, shops, and upscale residences. Throughout our entire time in Charm City, I was struck by how accessible and welcoming and fun the Inner Harbor is--and how Philadelphia continues to lose a golden opportunity to showcase its waterfront.

SCHLEPTA Leaves Its Grimy Mark on the World Series Trophy

Let us not let the toasty glow of civic pride fostered by the Phils' World Series title, a feeling well captured by Bill Lyon in his terrific front-pager yesterday -- Bill, it's been great to have you back these last couple of weeks -- allow us to forgive SEPTA for its abominable performance Friday.

Yes, I was among those eager parade wannabes who watched train after full train whiz by while I stood, increasingly angry, along with hundreds of other phans clad in Phillies red, on a crowded suburban Regional Rail platform. And, yes, when I heard about the hours and hours it took those lucky enough to make it downtown to finally get home, I felt relieved that I hadn't been able to make it, for who knows whether I would have walked in my front door in time to take my girls trick-or-treating?

SEPTA reps claim that all available train cars, subway cars, trolleys, and buses were in use and filled to capacity, and that the service did the very best it possibly could.

Which could very well be true. Let's take that statement as a good-faith plea that SEPTA could not have improved its parade service Friday at all.

Two thoughts, then:

Back Open for Business

Catching up on Philadelphia's busy week after returning from vacation

What the hell?

I go on vacation for just one week -- one goddamn week -- and the Phillies go in the tank, 3 cans Mendte, the Sixers draft a coaster, the Flyers resign a key young player, and Daulerio takes over Deadspin.

It's enough to make a guy want to stay home.

Until he remembers the taste of the lobster roll at the Sesuit Harbor Cafe, the view teeing off under the windmill at the Highlands in Truro, the sight of his daughters dipping their feet in Cape Cod Bay, the experience of actually reading, cover to cover, a work of fiction containing not one illustration, and the smell of the water while strolling through the lapping tide at 10 at night. And then he realizes that the world can go to hell in a handbasket so long as he can swig Smuttynose Shoals Pale Ale while cleaning up in the beach house's outdoor shower. | PRS

Citizens Bank Pork

Tony Luke's, McNally's get deserved shout-outs in today's Times

The New York Times sent its cheap-eats restaurant reviewer to various baseball stadiums to assess ballpark food, and he filed this mostly accurate report from Philadelphia:

... [T]he prize for vernacular food probably goes to Citizens Bank Park, the four-year-old home of the Philadelphia Phillies. Most of the action takes place in Ashburn Alley (named for the Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn), a brick promenade behind center field where fans can practically hang over the visitors’ bullpen or dine under the giant Liberty Bell sign that lights up and rocks back and forth when the Phillies hit a home run.

Ashburn Alley is home to hoagies, Chickie & Pete’s crab fries (French fries dusted with Old Bay seasoning) and two of the city’s respected cheese steak purveyors, Rick’s Steaks and Tony Luke’s. Tony Luke’s had the better cheese steak of the two (though their other locations are notably superior). Even better is Tony Luke’s juicy roasted pork and provolone sandwich [see photo above; dare you not to start salivating], dressed with tender broccoli rabe, as good a meat sandwich as there is in the majors.

Also not to be missed is the Schmitter sandwich from McNally’s, an outpost of an 87-year-old Germantown tavern at the end of Ashburn Alley. It’s not named for the Phillies legend Mike Schmidt, but rather, I was told, after a long-gone McNally’s customer who always ordered it with Schmidt’s Beer, the now-defunct Pennsylvania brand.

The Schmitter packs, from top to bottom: melted cheese, a generous squirt of a “special sauce,” griddled salami, more cheese, sliced tomato, fried onions, griddled steak and another slice of cheese, just to help keep the beef in place. It was the unhealthiest thing I encountered on my cholesterol-gathering trip, an unholy alliance of meats, cheese and mayonnaise tucked into a Kaiser roll. It was also impossible to stop eating after the first bite.

Hard to argue with any of that, really, though of course McNally's is not in Germantown but Chestnut Hill, on Germantown Avenue. That aside, I do have one other quibble: For a city that prides itself on certain specific culinary offerings, it's a travesty that the only soft pretzels served at Citizens Bank Park are the abominations known as SuperPretzels. The country's very best soft pretzels, crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, with just the right amount of salt to pack a little zing, are baked here in Philadelphia, but we have to settle for teeth-rattling, flavorless twists of barely warmed, iron-like dough? Please.

And, hello, when is anyone going to wake up and realize that there's a mint of money to be made by selling TastyKakes at Citizens Bank Park? | PRS