Author: ruhlwrite

Tony De Pace, tanned as a pancake, has just come back from Disney World.     If you didn’t know that, the Mickey Mouse mugs on the cluttered coffee table and large framed photos of the celebrated Florida amusement park that are perched prominently on the bookshelves would have clued you in. This was his 20th trip; he’s been going since he was 30, which was nearly four decades ago. “Disney World brings out the little child in me,” he says, grinning.     Actually,…

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The first thing you see in Mark A. Thomas’ apartment is the Roland digital piano. It’s big and black, and you have to dance around it, as Dick Van Dyke did with that pesky ottoman, to get into the living room without tripping over it. Mark’s official occupation is artist. Actually, it would be more accurate to call the living room an office because, aside from a dark brown faux-leather slouch couch, a 70-inch flat-screen TV and a computer with dual flat-screen monitors, its only…

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It happened a little more than two years ago, but Allen Schulz says it seems more like a lifetime. In March 2014, he was in Pittsburgh to see a performance of his latest composition, , a 15-minute work for cello and piano. Allen’s a composer. It was doubly exciting because Allen’s friend had played the cello part to perfection. To celebrate, they went out to dinner. As they were standing in a dark alley chatting afterward, Allen suddenly clutched his chest and fell to the ground. Before…

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What Antri Papanikolaou remembers most about her 16th birthday is that it was the last one she ever got to spend with her mother. Antri is an occupational therapy teacher. They drove to Philadelphia, where Maria was going for cancer treatments, and stayed the night in a Ronald McDonald House. Maria, who had been diagnosed with melanoma, didn’t make it long enough to see Antri turn 17. “She died a month before my birthday,” Antri says. That was a decade ago, and a lot of things have changed…

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YEAHHHHH BABY! Finally, The King of Falafel & Shawarma is in his castle. Fares “Freddy” Zeideia — OK, you know you can’t help yourself so just call him The King — is a big guy so his YEAHHHHH BABY! is a lion’s roar. The King of Falafel & Shawarma on Broadway. These days, The King has a lot to YEAHHHHH BABY! about because after 14 years of cooking street food out of a truck, he finally has a restaurant to call his own. His eponymous King of Falafel &…

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