Sarah Stolfa: The Regulars Revisited
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Gallery 339
339 South 21st St.
Philadelphia , PA 19103
215-731-1530
INQUIRER: Place the book in front of McGlinchey’s comically nonchalant owner, Ron Sokol, and bartender Alia Burton, and the missing details are quickly filled in, in eccentrically McGlinchey’s style un-de-referencing:
“Look at Artie, ha-ha.”
“Trevor, he died.”
“Sheldon, that’s my brother.”
“Mike’s a trombone player. Meghan, she goes to Temple.”
“This one was murdered two months ago.”
“This guy was here when Anne Marie worked, he was in love with the Irish girls.”
“This guy is a real freak. Is this the foot-fetish guy?”
“That’s the guy who used to work for the Bulletin. He’s dead now.”
“Anyway,” Sokol sums up, “what’s the difference, the book’s about Sarah.”
Maybe so. Stolfa, who used to be in a rock band in Washington and has the de rigueur shoulder tattoo of the creative indie type, already has a lot of buzz around her. In addition to the Times award, she snagged blurbs by Jay McInerney and Richard Ford for the book and was provided (courtesy of her publisher) with a cranky but notable introduction by novelist Jonathan Franzen, who, it turns out, hates bars, doesn’t hang in them, hated Philly when he lived here, was a failure during his time here, thinks it’s still the ’90s in Philly, and didn’t like Stolfa’s photographs the first time he looked at them. With intros like that, who needs critics? MORE