Inqlings: Lamont quits gig on WNTP
Things are screwy in the real estate world, yes, but this one's a head-scratcher: Talk-show host Jay Lamont is gone from the radio after less than two months.
Things are screwy in the real estate world, yes, but this one's a head-scratcher: Talk-show host
Jay Lamont
is gone from the radio after less than two months.
On April 3, talk station WNTP-AM (990) picked up Lamont's call-in show, All About Real Estate, for a two-hour shift on Saturdays. Lamont had hosted for 31 years on the old WPEN before he was jettisoned last Labor Day because the station wanted to stay true to its sports format.
Lamont's last WNTP broadcast was his seventh, on May 15. He gave no indication of any problems. Contacted this week at his Ocean City home, Lamont told me only that he had resigned. A station rep said Lamont "decided to not continue his show."
Buyer's remorse?
He's back on the market.
Foxx drama
Jamie Foxx
is part of a team developing a show for TNT called
Miss Philly
, a drama about the city's first female African American police commissioner, and if the show is green-lighted, the city would be in line to get production work.
Sharon Pinkenson
of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office is headed to L.A. next week to talk about this and other potential projects as well as to attend the annual Produced By conference run by the Producers Guild. (The impetus for
Miss Philly
has not been disclosed, but last year, Foxx got to meet the Philly PD and the DA's Office after a stalker tried to get into his Center City hotel room.)
Briefly noted
Wilmington's WJBR-FM (99.5) has hired
Dave Cruise
to sit beside
Jill Quale
on its morning show. Cruise, a WBEN-FM alumnus, had been working part time at sister station WXTU (92.5).
Former Eagles coach Dick Vermeil will talk about fine wines (not defensive lines) at 6:30 Thursday night at Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill with CBS Radio exec Marc Rayfield. The wine-tasting/
discussion, a benefit for the arboretum, will include bottles from Vermeil's Napa Valley estate. A few seats ($85) remain; info at 215-247-5777, Ext. 121, or www.morrisarboretum.org.
Anne Mahlum, founder of the Philly-bred nonprofit Back on My Feet, will appear Friday in the 8 a.m. hour on NBC's Today show. Pepsi is donating $50,000 to the cause, which inspires homeless people to take up running to boost self-esteem.
Crimson, White & Indigo - a new DVD covering the entire July 7, 1989, Grateful Dead concert at JFK Stadium (the last rock show at the South Philly venue) - will be screened for free at 8 p.m. Monday at Old City's National Mechanics (22 S. Third St.).
D.C. doings
The Washington Post reports that last weekend, two moving vans bearing Eagles logos unloaded the stuff of new Redskins QB
Donovan McNabb
into a $2.1 million house in Great Falls, Va. McNabb put his Moorestown spread on the market earlier this month for $2.5 million.
Lou Scheinfeld, the Flyers exec who put singer Kate Smith and the team together during the Stanley Cup heyday in the 1970s, has been invited to speak at Thursday's first-day ceremonies for the Smith stamp at the Lincoln Memorial.
Call it Harold & Kumar Go to the White House. Two dozen students from Philadelphia Futures' Sponsor-a-Scholar Program got a tour from Kalpen Modi, associate director in President Obama's Office of Public Engagement. Modi, better known as actor Kal Penn (House, 24, Harold & Kumar), taught two courses at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2008.
Separate checks
The Melrose Diner in South Philly is in the middle of a renovation, which is being accomplished amid the usual tumult of the 24-hour operation. While you may have spotted new decorative finishes here and there, and new restrooms, the redo has been accompanied by an earthshaking policy shift: After 70 years, patrons no longer have to share booths with strangers, a forced intimacy that many found irksome.