CITY

So much of February is geared around Valentine's Day affairs and whatever Presidents’ Week has become that it is highly possible not to want to venture out this month; or, at the very least, do something that doesn’t involve love, chocolate, or government. And isn’t that a pity? The chocolate, I mean.

I’m actually going to contradict myself about this first event — the Philly Chocolate, Wine & Whiskey Festival on Saturday, February 18, at the Philly Expo Center in Oaks, PA –—and why? The whiskey, man. The whiskey. However, I wouldn’t suggest drinking too much, lest you find yourself the next day, February 19, at Citizens Bank Park Philadelphia Wedding Expo Indoor Event in glorious South Philly. If only the 2023 Sneaker Con at the Pennsylvania Convention Center came later than February 11 — all the better to run from the situation to begin with.

Philadelphia Motown’s (or Motown Philadelphia)’s finest, Boyz II Men, do double duty this month — performing as part of the 25th An- to enjoy Joyce DiDonato, Renee Fleming, and Kelli O’Hara, a holy trinity of singing actors. Roaming cameras put me in the thick of brilliant blockings (a character ages 30 years within a beehive of chorus members) and exquisite dynamics (Virginia Woolf struggles to compose herself while composing a novel). Sure, I missed the grand excitement of a Lincoln Center crowd. But those folks missed the grander feeling of sharing the stage of a grand event. (Seven Met productions will be broadcast this season at Miller, 23 N. 6th St., Allentown; 610-4326715; millersymphonyhall.org. Circle June 11 for a new Die Zauber-

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Geoff Gehman is a former arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown and the author of five books, including Planet Mom: Keeping an Aging Parent from Aging, The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the LongLost Hamptons, and Fast Women and Slow Horses: The (mis)Adventures of a Bar, Betting and Barbecue Man (with William Mayberry) He lives in Bethlehem. geoffgehman@verizon.net niversary event at the Hard Rock Café on February 8 in Center City and as headliners at The Met on February 11. Not enough great stuff has been said about Philly’s most commercially successful and soulfully harmonic trio. So, I’m saying it.

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A.D. Amorosi is a Los Angeles Press Club National Art and Entertainment Journalism award-winning journalist and national public radio host and producer (WPPM.org’s Theater in the Round) married to a garden-to-table cooking instructor + award-winning gardener, Reese, and father to dogdaughter Tia.

Saint Omer (Dir. Alice Diop). Starring: Guslagie Malanga, Kayije Kagame, Valérie Dréville. Marguerite Duras gets namedropped early in writer-director Alice Diop’s first dramatic feature, and what follows bears many of the alienating yet still headily stimulating effects of that inimitable artist’s work. A French literature professor named Rama (Kayjie Kagame) travels to the subprefecture of Saint-Omer to attend the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a Senegalese woman who is accused of leaving her deceased toddler to drown on the seashore. The trial occurs in what often feels like real time, with procedural rigmarole and the opaque glances of Coly and the white female judge