George Magazine, August 2000

Feature story on KWRU Director Cheri Honkala and her movie-star son, Mark Webber, called "She's a Super Welfare Mom". On news-stands now.

New York Times, July 16, 2000

Philadelphia Hopes to Be Star and Stage of G.O.P. Meeting

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

PHILADELPHIA, July 14 -- Before its recent downtown revival and upbeat remake as a major convention site, this city spent some years indulging self-abnegation in its advertising. "Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is," went the slogan, followed by a variety of punch lines about overlooked local attractions.

There is soon to be a great test in the form of the Republican National Convention of whether this city is safely beyond such gloomy habits. In two weeks, the first of 45,000 delegates, political attendants and news media from around the world will arrive to see for themselves whether the city's new renaissance gleam might finally eclipse the old put-down by one native son, the comedian W.C. Fields, who observed that, if nothing else, Philadelphia offers preferable shelter to the grave.

With the nomination of Gov. George W. Bush of Texas a foregone conclusion and the four-day Republican agenda a predictable exercise in free media exposure and party boosterism, one of the few honest novelties to be discovered by the conventioneers will be this city and the true extent of its proclaimed metamorphosis.

"I wouldn't say brotherly love; it's more like push and shove," said Jakai Bishop, a 20-year-old Philadelphian who prefers not Fieldsian misanthropy but a hip-hop lilt in her celebration of the spirit of hustle she now finds in her city. Ms. Bishop is laboring with an army of other overtime workers to transform the First Union Center from a high-tech sports arena to a first-class political hall.

Hammering and sawing the podium into place, workers report everything on schedule for the show that begins on July 31. The electrical workers in this fiercely pro-union Democratic city, after a jurisdictional skirmish or two, are finally snaking miles of fiber-optic cables into the sky boxes of the news media.

Souvenir gift packages are being assembled, with each delegate to receive a convention Barbie doll in red suit and red heels, just as Democratic conventioneers will receive blue-suited Barbies in August in Los Angeles. Contract laborers can be found scuttling at midnight along moonlit sidewalks to hurriedly drill handsome green bus kiosks into place for visitors who will be the city's first national political conventioneers since 1948.

The evening skyline is stridently patriotic with buildings already aglow in added hues of red, white and blue. Newly trained busboys, chambermaids and legions of other fresh recruits are polishing up the 4,500 new hotel rooms furiously built in the last four years in the city's gamble to become a top-tier convention city.

In sum, Philadelphia is exuding the anxious headiness of a theater production in the final throes of rehearsing a command performance for the nation. And, indeed and alas, a piece of rosy civic scenery did come crashing to the stage this week in the form of the televised snippet replayed round the world of some of the Philadelphia Police Department's officers flailing away at a fugitive suspect at the end of a bullet-punctuated street chase.

"You know, they don't have conventions in Ames, Iowa, or other places where there's no crime," said David L. Cohen, co-chairman of the convention host committee. With this variation on the theme that the show must go on, Mr. Cohen, a principal in the administration of former Mayor Edward G.

Rendell, which led the city's comeback, served notice that Philadelphia resolves not to slide back to the old self-abnegation.

"You're going to see another example of Philadelphians' maturity in this, their ability to deal with this incredibly difficult and wonderful city," Mr. Cohen said, predicting that the police incident would be investigated and the citizens would lose neither faith nor face in the process.

But out beyond the downtown towers where the power roosts, that piece of television videotape is giving an entirely different sort of hope to Cheri Honkala, director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a self-help neighborhood organization for the poor and homeless. "Those TV pictures finally offered a window on what poor people here have to deal with on a daily basis," declared Ms. Honkala, who said the videotape was prompting more calls from people interested in joining the union's protest march on the opening day.

Although a half-dozen protests in behalf of myriad causes are being planned for the visiting Republicans, the Kensington group is the one organization that has been denied a permit for its plan to march three miles through the city's heart, from City Hall to the convention hall. Ms. Honkala insists that her group nevertheless will proceed. If so, clearly an early test of the city maturity mentioned by Mr. Cohen will be at hand, with more than one television news helicopter watching.

"You know, people evolve," said Abdul-Rahman Salaam, a city native who lives in the Overbrook section. "There's social progress. We get to see things with a clearer vision." As a black man, he described the sense of pessimism, even despair, in years past in his neighborhood when political candidates routinely polarized the city -- a time summoned forth instantly for him by the television tape. "Some of those old ugly things creep back," Mr. Salaam said. "But believe me, this city is better, absolutely, positively, no question. I'd even say there's some spirit of brotherhood," Mr. Salaam said with a tinge of amazement at what he had just said about the city.

This affection of Philadelphians for their city seems even more at stake in the coming test than the concern for the city's new hotel and convention ventures and the outsiders' confirmation of a fresh image.

"The city's history always seems to include some event that held each generation back, from the 1790's and the yellow fever epidemic onward," said Kenneth Finkel, cultural director for WHYY, one of the city's public radio stations. A respected chronicler of city history and an unabashed Philadelphia lover, Mr. Finkel journeys back and forth to his Mount Airy neighborhood each day, carefully noting the masked-over graffiti and other touches of the approaching rendezvous with the Republicans and with the watching nation.

The tape of the police beating must unavoidably join the city's iconography, Mr. Finkel concedes. But, like the rest of this city, he wonders what lies beyond that. Will Philadelphia show itself safely beyond the old era of self-doubt.

"There's the sincerest hope that we are," he said.