Staff Blog
“Let them eat Tastykake!”
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Eastern State Penitentiary has long been the perfect stand-in for the Bastille, the infamous French prison that fell on July 14, 1789, when commoners invaded the medieval fortress, snagging a cache of weapons and the 30,000 pounds of gunpowder stored there.
The Fairmount neighborhood’s Bastille Day celebration takes liberal poetic license with historical events, compressing Le quatorze juillet with the public execution of careless queen Marie Antoinette. Terry Berch McNally, co-owner of London Grill, plays the monarch for the 15th time this year. Meal Ticket tries to adhere to a no-blockquoting-press-releases policy, but we’ll make an exception for this because there is no way we could write the following any better:
A mob of enraged Parisian will storm Fairmount’s Eastern State Penitentiary (a stand-in for the Bastille) as McNally makes her way to the very top of the historic prison. Armed troops will capture and drag “Antoinette†to a real, functioning guillotine, ignoring her mocking cries of “Let them eat Tastykake!†as she tosses over 2,000 Philadelphia Tastykakes from the prison’s medieval towers. She will then be ceremoniously “beheaded,†capping off this Philadelphia-centric re-enactment of the revolutionary scene.
The mayhem kicks off at 2 p.m., with Marie Antoinette beheaded at 5:30 sharp. Attendees are encouraged to dress as French peasants or aristocrats, but no guarantees can be made for the safety of the upper crust.
Visit Eastern State’s Web site for full details of the three-day festival, which begins Thursday night with a French Fling bar crawl and winds up Sunday morning with Champagne brunches at participating restaurants.
Fairmount Bastille Day Celebration, Sat., July 11, 2-6 p.m., Eastern State Penitentiary, 2124 Fairmount Ave., 215-236-5111, easternstate.org
