Sara Kelly

“They don’t pertain to us,” he says, adding, “We’ve been doing this for a few years.” Protesters are an ultimately harmless side effect of doing prison business.

Besides, he says, “We’re from New York, so it doesn’t scare us.”

Welcome to Philadelphia, cradle of liberty, birthplace of Botany 500, homeland to Hall and Oates. And a damn steamy place, besides. Especially in mid-August, when some 5,000 prison workers, vendors, groupies and their respective families chose to hold their 131st Congress of Correction. One of two conventions the American Correctional Association holds each year, it’s an unrivaled networking and deal-making opportunity even for those whose business may on the surface seem unrelated to that of incarceration.

With such commercial exhibitors as Romaine Companies (makers of the ever-popular Shower Delicer enzyme shampoo), Correctional Cable TV, GlaxoSmithKline, “Soft Sheen” black hair care, Lexis-Nexis, Humane Restraint Inc., Verizon, TRW, Rit dye and Nescafé, and information tables from organizations such as the NRA, Habitat for Humanity, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and United Prison Ministries, the trade show is easily the Congress at its most surreal. But that’s hardly the highlight of this, the largest gathering of corrections personnel you’ll see outside of a George Bush fundraiser.

For the lucky corrections conventioneer, this trip to sweaty summertime Philly includes “The Philadelphia Story: An Overview,” a tour through the historic sites of our nation’s first capital, including the Betsy Ross House; Independence Hall; the Liberty Bell; and Eastern State Penitentiary, America’s oldest prison building and famous former home to Willie Sutton and Al Capone, perhaps best known today as the insane asylum in Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic thriller “Twelve Monkeys.”

For those who just can’t leave work behind, there are enlightening side trips to Eastern State’s modern-day descendants, the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (named for two guards murdered at the city’s now-defunct Holmesburg Prison, once known for subjecting inmates to gruesome medical experiments, now better known as the setting for the prison riot in “Up Close and Personal”), the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center (“located within the historic district” and “bound on two sides by buildings listed on the Historic Register,” brags the brochure) and the State Correctional Institution at Chester (proudly, the state’s first tobacco-free facility).

And then there’s the Corrections Film Festival, where video entries include first-place winners “Killing Time: HIV/AIDS in Prison,” from the Alaska Department of Corrections, and “A Strategy to Increase HIV/AIDS Medication Adherence in Correctional Settings,” from the Albany Medical Center’s AIDS Program. (Runners-up include “The Wildest Show in the South,” about the famous inmate rodeos at Louisiana’s Angola state pen, and the scintillating short titled “The Touch,” a “Justice Files”-type dramatization of the true story of a corrections officer who goes to jail after a female inmate seduces him — watch out, Susan Smith!)

The Congress of Correction opens officially in a Marriott ballroom. Though few of those assembled know what to expect from the evening’s headliners — a Washington revue called the Capitol Steps — the convention comes around but twice a year and the wine at dinner has everyone ready for a little much-needed corrections-style levity. “As a departure from the usual,” says ACA president-elect Charles Kehoe, “we’ll have a little fun tonight.”

Kehoe introduces this session’s theme: “Our principles: yesterday, today, tomorrow,” and wraps it up with a tidy Mark Twain quote: “Always do right.” Which is a good thing, considering how many of those assembled tend to lean in that direction naturally. And given that inclination, it’s puzzling that the somewhat left-leaning Capitol Steps are the evening’s entertainment. Apparently no one told them to lay off the execution jokes.

Laura Bush describes Dubya’s energy plan: “switching from electrocutions to lethal injections.”

Question: What’s a compassionate conservative? Answer: Someone who thinks the electric chair should be a La-Z-Boy.

The crowd howls with uncharacteristic abandon.

The crusty liberal theme carries through to the next morning’s keynote speech by former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who’s quick to add his unsolicited two cents about mandatory minimum sentences — particularly those that send more blacks and Hispanics to jail for small amounts of crack than white folks for much larger quantities of powdered coke. They’re “terribly unfair,” he declares between digs at current New York politics.

Then, advocating the clearing of felony records for ex-cons who deserve a second chance, he adds, “Prison is not for torture. It’s in our interest that inmates don’t become recidivists.”

And it’s not being “soft on crime,” either. It’s being selfish. “It’s about protecting ourselves,” by getting former prisoners off the streets and into decent jobs.

Koch goes on to trash-talk Giuliani. (“He’s not a racist; he’s mean to everybody.”) And even poor, dead Mother Theresa. (She paid him an impromptu visit on his sickbed, then shook him down for two New York City parking permits. No word on whether she got the permits.)

But don’t get the wrong idea. The Congress of Correction isn’t just about blowing off six months of pent-up prison-generated steam. It’s also about sharing new findings and ideas — or rather, those hated professional-development seminars that all but the geekiest conventioneers skip.

I arrive at the “Ethical and Legal Aspects of Suicide” seminar just in time to hear Mike Pinson of the Arlington County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia’s D.C. suburbs explain, “It used to be we handcuffed the offender to a bench,” adding that now there are more humanitarian ways to keep a desperate man down — thanks largely to the progressive structure of his new jail.

Of course, he adds, if an inmate really wants to off himself, he’ll find a way to do it. Pinson tells the story of one poor schlump placed alone in an empty room and stripped bare, as is the custom with suicidal inmates. The guy tried to asphyxiate himself by making a rope of sheets, then tying one end around his neck and the other around his foot. He succeeded only in getting his sheets taken away, in addition to his clothing.

The point being, Pinson says, that someone found the man in time. Supervision, after all, is the key to preventing suicide. Besides, with more supervision comes more freedom and simple comforts. Take toilets, for example. Real toilets — not those seatless stainless steel jobs found in most prison cells — may not seem like such a luxury, but a little goes a long way behind bars.

“If you’ve got someone who’s depressed,” says Pinson, “that individual will feel better using a real toilet rather than squatting over a hole in the floor. It’s a human dignity issue.”

Of course, a real toilet requires direct supervision, and it’s hard to say which is more dignified — taking a dump in a hole, or having someone watch you mount the bowl.

With the sunrise Sunday comes another cheery topic: “Unique Health Care Needs: Caring for Older Offenders in Prisons and Jails,” which opens with some stark news from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ): While the state’s general inmate population has stabilized, the number of elderly inmates will soon outnumber the rest of the prison population by a projected 122 percent. This is due not just to higher penalties for repeat offenses, but for the same reason Social Security may soon be bankrupt: those pesky, resource-hogging baby boomers.

But before my mind can entertain more suicidal thoughts, another audience member beats me to the punch with a question about TDCJ’s “right-to-die” policy. Another one, apparently eager to redefine “extraordinary means,” asks how security staff know whether to revive an inmate who has collapsed or stopped breathing.

“We do CPR on everybody,” goes the answer. Though it may soon be too late for this crowd.

Which is why many of us also show up for a session benignly titled “Living Well So Your Job Doesn’t Kill You.” Here, a cute, young Ph.D. from the Federal Bureau of Prisons lectures about nutrition, exercise and stress management. Like a grade school teacher, she’s equipped with a packet of handouts on the food pyramid and a PowerPoint presentation to echo her lecture.

The first slide hits the screen (“There can’t be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” — Henry Kissinger) as she discusses the “suicide epidemic” among police officers. She explains biofeedback like a latter-day Wayne Dyer, and dons a “biodot” (like a stick-on mood ring) to check her stress level and attempt to lower it through mind control.

The convention-wearied crowd asks tepid questions about caffeine’s less pleasant effects and the amount of sugar in a can of Coke. And as she lists the warning signs of job burnout (pessimism, increased dissatisfaction or joylessness, a desire to escape, forgetfulness, increased temper, martyrdom, feeling indispensable, loss of interest in work and so on), they check off each in turn.

By the Congress of Correction’s last afternoon, all comers — protesters included — are clearly pooped. After days of escalating confrontation with conventioneers, and ultimately, cops, a protester who goes by the name Spam (for his nasty e-mailing habit, apparently) has a hard time resisting laughter when he describes the scene of his group’s last anti-convention action.

“People got really beaten up,” Spam says. “But on a lighter note, when people went to the ACA with their demands, the ACA members started singing. And the actual climax of weirdness came when one of them started singing Kenny Rogers’ ‘The Gambler,’ like trying to get a call-and-response thing going among the crowd. Some people are trying to read these very serious demands, and they’re going, ‘You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em …’”

Indeed, six days at the Congress of Correction could drive the mildest to crime. Even those who spend their working lives with inmates might find more peace behind prison walls.

One of them, a shrill, suited poster girl for burnout, guards a trade show booth displaying wooden furniture made by prison inmates. When I linger, waiting for her pitch, she offers me a bar of soap instead. The travel-size slab isn’t fitted with rope, but rather imprinted with the shape of Pennsylvania, and inside that, the words “Big House.”

“I’d like the soap,” I say, stammering over journalistic ethics, “but I can’t. See,” I say, glancing down at my orange warning-sign-styled press badge, “I’m a journalist.”

She laughs heartily, pauses, then steps back to compose herself. “Well, you are!” she finally explodes, prompting me to wonder who’s closer to a total meltdown: corrections conventioneers, protesting puppeteers or the people who write about them both.

A smiling greeter clad in black-and-whit e evening attire ushered us into the Ben Franklin-founded Philadelphia Free Library. Inside the white marble great hall, Hubbard’s candy-colored volumes sent more sober tomes packing. Posing as a married couple, an accomplice and I claimed a table for fou r in a basement hallway outside the building’s bathrooms. Some 80 eager buffet grazers and a blissed-out guitarist strumming white noise outside the men’s-room door transformed the place into a South Bend church social circa 1969.

We weren’t seated l ong before a suited man approached as much to check us out as to proselytize. He asked how we’d wound up there. By invitation, of course. He asked if we’d read “Dianetics,” which true believers and snickering cynics know as the Church of Scientology’s bib le.

“Parts,” I admitted. Which was true. In fact I have my very own copy, complete with Post-its marking favorite spots.

But even if a would-be INPEX attendee couldn’t find the way in, ample excitement was readily available in the ExpoMart parking lot, which for these five days took on the unmistakable air of a county fair — minus the 1,000-pound pig and throngs of threatening 4-H kids. Here, local thugs bent on demonstrating the Waterless Carwash wandered the aisles with cans of spray foam. When they weren’t busy spraying and wiping, they passed the afternoon looking like a pack of menacing tailgaters.

Meanwhile, some 50 yards behind them, a South African agriculturist inspected twin towers of hay in preparation for another demonstration of Matt Moolman’s Burnfree Survival Hydrogel Fire and Trauma Blanket. Lending new machismo to the milquetoast invention business, Moolman threw a blanket soaked with Australian tea tree leaf oil over his head and followed a line of baby powder between stacks of burning bales.

Those who actually made it to the exhibit hall were treated to a much more cerebral brand of invention entertainment. Here, there was a palpable anxiety, a hopeful, performance-based nervousness emanating from the exhibitors as people walked by eyeing their wares and — so they imagined — sizing them up for a career-saving stint on the QVC home shopping network.

This is where Indiana inventor’s son Doug Boes caught my unthinking eye and purloined two minutes of my time. “You and I both know that your husband has too many tools,” he said as he whipped out the Tool Buddy, wheeling it abruptly forward, unfurling its many wrench-drenched arms, displaying its versatility.

I pondered the significance of this line: was he admitting to voyeurism? Had he thought through the possibility that my husband might be, for instance, Rosie O’Donnell?

This is where some advance preparation would’ve come in handy.

When attending an invention show, as I learned last weekend, you’d do well to establish a few ground rules first — otherwise things can rapidly devolve into chaos. These rules are already familiar to the seasoned carnival-goer, but for those of us who can’t recall the last time a total stranger demanded two minutes of our time while brandishing something called the “Tool Buddy,” just a few quick affirmations may mean the difference between an enlightening romp and an invocation to a Javanese mob riot.

Savvy invention show attendees should shape a set of rules around their own definitions of personal space and tolerance for product televangelism. Here are mine:

1.) Do not, under any circumstances, make eye contact with exhibitors — unless an exhibitor is flaunting large amounts of chest hair, has a limited command of English or is hawking something you can make private jokes about at his expense.

2.) Approach exhibition staff as you would approach your typical traveling carny or child star from “Diff’rent Strokes” — which is to say with extreme caution.

3.) Steer clear of inter-inventor conflict. Do not, as I did, allow yourself to become a pawn in the raging class struggle between the old man who sells the electric water-bottle hoist and the one who sells the home distillation system.

And whatever you do, do not ask for a ride on a motorized suitcase.

By the look on his face as things were winding down last Saturday, you’d hardly know that Belgian inventor Luc Deprez was the show’s emotional favorite. With a presentation only slightly less fiery than that of safety-blanket mastermind Moolman, Deprez spent most of the show sitting unsmilingly in his booth. His silence may have had something to do with the poor performance of his “mobile traveling case” in a race against another inventor’s motorized leg cast. Or it may have had something to do with his not speaking English.

Good thing the literature, describing his invention as a “portable and mobile suitcase assuring itself the transport of the passenger,” was in English. Otherwise, attendees may never have known that it is indeed possible to ride a motorized suitcase as easily “through carless streets as through busy urban traffic.”

When asked for his take on the show, Deprez said two of the few English words he seemed to have memorized: “Comedy Central.” Indeed, the folks from Comedy Central arrived as INPEX opened to tape a segment on Luc Deprez and his embarrassing ride-along suitcase, available with either steering wheel or voice-activated controls.

“Could you imagine,” read the product description, “Saturday-morning shopping in a couple of years … you step onto your suitcase and say ‘to the supermarket,’ upon which the DGPS-programmed suitcase would take you to your destination?” How could Comedy Central resist?

INPEX rep Kelley Crowley, who works for the show’s sponsoring Invention Submission Corporation, said that while the excitement generated by the riding suitcase rivaled that of the fire show, Deprez had a hard time controlling his 12-mph ride during demos. His English-speaking companion added that the product still needs work.

With any luck, Deprez will be back again next year riding his suitcase to teary-eyed victory against an amputee. Perhaps Doug Boes will return with an all-new selection of buddies for handy types of all sexual orientations and marital statuses. Maybe veteran inventor Frank Groth, the man responsible for the Chip Clip, will be back with his Drink Tag adhesive beverage labels, or just to give the place a sense of seasoned distinction. And maybe dear old bottled-water hoister Kerney Sheets will make peace with distiller designer John Smith.

Sadly, though, even with minds powerful enough to conceive a voice-activated suitcase and bodies brave enough to ride one, this year’s crop of INPEX inventors won’t likely yield much recognition. The odds of inventing a successful product, says the Invention Submission Corporation’s Crowley, are akin to winning the lottery.

Pittsburgh-based ISC is surprisingly forthcoming with the harsh realities of the invention business. Between 1994 and 1996, the company’s literature states, it signed submission agreements with 4,385 clients. Of those, 37 received licensing agreements for their inventions, and just 12 made more money on their products than they paid to ISC.

Getting a product to market, concludes the pragmatic Crowley, is “like trying to be a rock star.” Except your groupies are mostly graduates of the ITT Technical Institute.

It is with great pride and purpose that Ensler invokes the “V” word. Like a precocious child, she repeats those telltale three syllables guaranteed to get a rise out of the grown-ups. “I say ‘vagina,’” she explains, “because I want people to respond.” And they respond, she says, because they know they shouldn’t. Since learning the word’s liberating power for herself as an adult, Ensler has hardly tired of its cryptic joys. “I say it in my sleep,” she boasts. “I say it because I’m not supposed to say it. I say it because it’s an invisible word — a word that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”

“The Vagina Monologues” is comprised of roughly 15 thematically linked pieces (the number varies depending on whether you count the “vagina facts,” dedications, explanations and musings that punctuate the interviews). A foreword by Gloria Steinem attempts to connect the vagina with the core beliefs of world religions (i.e., Tantra’s central tenet is man’s inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman’s superior sexual energy). Doubtless, “Monologues” suffers in translation from performance piece to text. But to help ease the transition, Ensler has appended a few paragraphs of context to most selections.

Two, “Jewish Queens accent” and “English accent,” are introduced with a semblance of stage directions. Others launch directly into diary entries or unbroken lists of interviewees’ responses to Ensler’s questions. “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?” asks the author. “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?” “What does a vagina smell like?” The responses range from pithy to banal. “Yum, yum,” “Oh, yeah” and “Is that you?” say interviewees who mentally dress their “sexy”- and “wet garbage”-smelling vaginas in everything from “a pinafore” to “a slicker.”

“The Vagina Monologues” is by turns confessional and voyeuristic. It’s hard to know, for instance, just how to respond to the tragic tale of a Bosnian rape camp survivor (“… they took turns for seven days … smelling like feces and smoked meat, they left their dirty sperm inside me …”) when juxtaposed with a vignette about a woman who experienced her first orgasm in a hands-on tutorial called “The Vagina Workshop” (“I felt connection, calling connection as I lay there thrashing about on my little blue mat …”). Ensler is, at the very least, egalitarian in achieving her mission. She treats such subjects as lesbian sex, birth, rape and child abuse with equal candor and respect. Whether her evenhanded treatment of such conflicting subjects shortchanges both is a matter best left to sex researchers and therapists.

In its annual tribute to all that is right and good about show business, the Philadelphia Weekend Film Festival picked its 11th year to go stark-raving Seventeen magazine crazy on us all. After a decade of kneeling at the altar of such esteemed filmmakers as John Schlesinger, Sydney Pollack, Richard Brooks and Arthur Penn, this year the Fest heads opted to honor … Kevin Bacon. With some 30-odd (some very odd) films under his belt, the man was clearly ripe for a retrospective.

Bacon, a Philly-born local hero and son of Ed Bacon, Philly’s foremost urban planner and famous guy in his own right, humbly expressed his gratitude to the town that had provided him with the dramatic laboratory in which he developed his many talents, ultimately becoming the leading character in a cult trivia game. “It was the best thing for an actor,” Bacon said. “The people I bumped shoulders with for years were the people I portrayed in film — although ‘Sleepers’ was the first time I got to use the Philly accent — and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to offend anyone …”

Then came the tears. Bacon got choked up telling the story of his mother’s first gift to him — a box of old clothes. At first I didn’t quite understand what he was getting at, thinking it a loosely veiled confession of transvestitism. But Bacon was quick to set the record straight, explaining that the clothes were simply props for characters he might someday dream up.

Bacon’s unassuming performance was enough to make me bow my head — out of reverence, I first thought. Soon afterwards, however, I realized it was stomach cramps. A full weekend of cinematic reverence offered just a little more than I wanted to know about the man whose toe-tapping virtuosity in “Footloose” not only launched my decade-spanning dependence on Converse All-Stars but may have also played a part in my decision to attend Pepperdine, a fundamentalist Christian college (and future Kenneth Starr home) that forbids such sinful acts as dancing and voting Democrat.

Even though the Patrick Swayze doppelgdnger who is best known for playing weaselly little guys you’d like to shoot into outer space only recently made his behind-the-camera debut (directing wife and blond Julia Roberts doppelgdnger Kyra Sedgwick in the Showtime drama “Losing Chase”), Dr. Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia University, had little trouble finding fodder for her multimedia lecture. “The Work of Kevin Bacon, Actor & Director” explored “so many facets of Kevin Bacon,” she could hardly bring herself to stop the projector.

Before the assembly of 200 mostly older women in brightly colored business suits who’d each paid $480 ($395 double occupancy) to spend the weekend in one of Philadelphia’s fanciest hotels, hobnobbing with the man who broke into show biz with a thankless role in 1978′s “Animal House” (and “broke through” in 1984′s “Footloose,” a film that “established his physicality”), Insdorf recounted a career of theatrical genius.

Not long after “Animal House,” Bacon appeared in “Friday the 13th.” For some inexplicable reason, Insdorf declined to talk about his role in the horror flick, moving on instead to “Diner,” in which Bacon played a “self-deprecating but brilliant preppie guy” called Fenwick. The accompanying film clip had a pudgy-faced Bacon looking a bit like Ron Howard as Opie Taylor, feigning his own death with the help of a ketchup bottle. The good doctor cut the clip short in the interest of time — it’s amazing how quickly time passes when speaking of Kevin Bacon — and because “Diner,” after all, would be that evening’s midnight movie.

Insdorf moved on. 1986 brought us “Quicksilver,” another ready venue for Bacon’s physicality. And in 1987, she explained, Bacon portrayed his first villain, in a film called “White Water Summer.” This little factoid came as a big surprise to me: I thought of Bacon as a bad guy from the very start, ever since he corrupted that poor farming town with bad choreography in “Footloose.” Then again, I was pretty shocked to learn that “Footloose” was actually considered a musical: At 13, it had seemed pretty darned serious to me.

But then again, so had “Three’s Company.”

Insdorf was actually the second speaker of the afternoon to perform a dramatic reading of Bacon’s CV. The first was Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, who presented the prodigal actor with an official Philadelphia “proclamation.” Rendell made the weekend’s most valiant attempt to put the starry-eyed affair into proper perspective — noting that just last Thursday, he’d presented a similar award to the founder of a bug and insect museum.

Undaunted, the bashful, diminutive Bacon posed for photo ops with the mayor and endured several tongue-in-cheek closing references to his fourth career (after actor, director and dancer) as musician. (He and brother Michael have formed a folkie duo called the Bacon Brothers — they’re headlining next month at the Sands, Atlantic City.) He even sat silently as a festival emcee dubbed him “a new Gene Kelly for a new century of film.” But somewhere, in a place only Kyra Sedgwick can see, you can bet a second gray hair was taking root.

Americans blow nearly $50 billion a year on fad diets and weight-loss schemes, Fraser writes, the best of which don’t work, and the worst of which can result in heart attacks or strokes. She fleshes out all those horror stories you’ve heard — women who’ve died from dieter’s tea, or who’ve lost all hope of controlling their bowels after undergoing intestinal bypasses — with her own sad diet tales. She describes her teenage run-in with the calorie Nazis at Weight Watchers and the hypnotist who programmed her, at age 13, to associate pizza with bony pork gristle and chocolate chips with rat turds.

Fraser is a stalwart researcher, tracing woman’s changing form from Victorian days — when America’s most fashionable females tipped the scales at 200 pounds — all the way to the current Kate Moss backlash that has angry fat advocates spray-painting “Feed Me” on bus shelter advertisements. Though not a single diet icon escapes Fraser’s criticism, her reporter’s instinct prevails, and her attacks are balanced by moments of humanity. Consider this morsel from her conversations with Richard Simmons: “He broke out alternately into tears and Broadway songs as we talked.” Or from breakfast with the voluble Susan Powter: “Powter orders with enthusiasm … and eats with real gusto, which is a rare quality in a woman, one that I admire.”

Fraser spurs readers to rebellion by recommending that they “boycott the diet industry.” Weight, after all, is “not a matter of health or discipline but a weapon our culture uses against us to keep us in our place and feeling small.”