Until now, Fox 29 anchor Dawn Stensland has been silent about her private struggle coping with the recent arrest and conviction of her husband, Larry Mendte, for breaking into the e-mail account of his former co-anchor, Alycia Lane. The January 2009 issue of Philadelphia magazine features an exclusive interview with Stensland by editor at large Vicki Glembocki in which the anchorwoman speaks for the first time about her husband’s relationship with Lane. Stensland reveals new details while speaking about the pain the Mendte family endures, her recent miscarriage, and why she has been able to forgive her husband, but can’t yet forgive herself.

Among the story’s highlights:

• Stensland tells the magazine she believes Mendte when he says the relationship between him and Lane was inappropriately close, and included kissing, but the two did not have sex.

• Stensland says Mendte bought Lane a gift from Tiffany for “more than $1,000.”

• Glembocki writes: “On New Year’s Day 2005, Larry had asked Dawn to come up to his office.” There on his computer were “several e-mails in Larry’s inbox between him and Alycia, many with flirtatious subject lines that, Dawn says, ‘broke my heart.’”

• Stensland reveals that she suffered a miscarriage in October 2008.

• Asked to respond to these and other assertions made by Stensland in the article, Lane’s lawyer, Paul Rosen, calls Mendte a “lovesick, obsessed stalker” and advises Stensland to get a divorce.

Click here to read a preview of “Dawn’s Dark Days” and here for Alycia Lane’s response, and look for the issue on newsstands starting Monday, December 29th.

So what brings you to the Philadelphia area this weekend?
Probably a car.

Funny. Let’s try this again. You’re performing, of course, at the Lenape Regional Performing Arts Center on Saturday. What can people expect?

The first half, I’m going to be doing music from — well, my thing is Chorus Line, The Way We Were — and we’re bringing in a wonderful singer by the name of Mark McVey, who used to be the star of Les Miserables. He’s going to be doing some things by Richard Rodgers. And then the second act is all gonna be Christmas songs. So it’s a combination of Hamlisch and Christmas.

I read in the almighty Wikipedia that you were originally on track to be a concert pianist, but that you had stage-fright issues. Is that right?
Yeah. That’s pretty good. But I think the "track" was more in my father’s mind than in any other mind. I don’t think I ever got close to the track. The point was that I went to the Julliard School of Music as a youngster and showed a lot of talent. Though the idea would have been to become the next Horowitz, I was sure, very early on, that I was not gonna be the next Horowitz for a lot of reasons. Number one, I didn’t think I had quite that talent. Number two, yes, I had a tremendous amount of stage fright playing other people’s music. And number three, it wasn’t really the love of my life. It wasn’t the thing I was passionate about. What I seemed to be passionate about was writing music, playing popular music; I was more in that world.

You’ve scored so many films, and at least according to what I’ve been reading, you haven’t scored a film since the the mid-’90s —
No. I just did one. It’s called The Informants, with Matt Damon. It’s directed by Steven Soderbergh. It will be in the movies … it will be out there in September.

Why the gap in scoring?
Well, I stopped because I was doing so many of these concerts and stuff. That was the main reason, and I got back in because I don’t think you could possibly — I think you’d have to be a nitwit to say no to Steven Soderbergh.

You have, of course, composed some incredible, well-known scores for movies — The Sting and The Way We Were come to mind. But are there any movies that wish you hadn’t done? Like the ’80s sci-fi flick D.A.R.Y.L.? Or, perhaps, TV movies like Women and Men: Stories of Seduction or The Return of the Six-Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman? Are there any that you are embarrassed about?
If you have to have the standard that they all have to be The Way We Were, they all have to be The Sting, they all have to be A Chorus Line, you’ll probably write five things in your life. I’m more of a workhorse.

You’re one of only two people in history to have won an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer Prize. [Note: The other is Richard Rodgers.] And, so I’m wondering, what challenges you? It seems like you’ve done everything.
What challenges you, I think, at this point, is just to keep doing and get some good stuff going, and I’m hoping to write a ballet score. That’s the thing that’s on my mind. Actually the thing that’s really on my mind is my vacation, but that’s a whole other story.

I hate to admit it, but I’m a fan of karaoke and find myself in karaoke bars once and awhile, and one of the songs people really like to bastardize is "The Way We Were," and there’s also that great scene in Naked Gun, the shower scene, where they’re singing the song …
Yes, I love it.

And there’s always your version of "The Entertainer" on ring tones. Do you get tired of it? Are they overplayed to you?
No, I don’t care. It’s really weird, because people think for some reason that… there must be some composers who really do care about that kind of stuff or get very upset if they play something wrong. I don’t know, to me, once I put it out to the world, it’s the world’s. And I’m just happy they’re playing it, ya know? It’s never bothered me, and I’m being very honest with you. They can screw up the melody, they can screw it all up … it’s fine. The thing is, if something has become iconic enough that someone wants to screw it up, I figure it’s done pretty well.

Take a look at that luscious baby to the right and imagine it 1,261 times larger — that’s the size of the special Butterscotch Krimpet cake Tasty Baking Company CEO Charles Pizzi will be presenting to Metrocorp chairman D. Herbert Lipson and president David Lipson on Tuesday to honor Philadelphia magazine’s 100th anniversary.

Everyone’s invited to come by the rotunda of the Shops at Liberty Place at 1 p.m. to meet Kirby the Krimpet (we’ve assured him he’s not on the menu) and share a piece of history with us.

Joining a handful of U.S. manufacturers who have jumped into the absinthe game since the federal ban on the so-called “Green Fairy” was lifted about a year ago, Northeast Philly’s Philadelphia Distilling, makers of the shockingly good Bluecoat Gin, say they will begin bottling their own version at the end of next week, making this the first time that the heady brew has been manufactured (legally) on the East Coast in nearly 100 years. Expect Vieux Carré Absinthe Superieure ($55) on shelves just before Christmas.

Philadelphia native Tom Wilson — you know him as Biff from Back to the Future — brings his clean standup act to Helium Comedy Club this week. He called me from his home in Los Angeles to discuss rooming with Andrew Dice Clay and Yakov Smirnoff, bathing in manure, and not joking about Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s Disease.

What part of the city are you from?
I grew up in Overbrook, 64th and Jefferson. Then, before high school, we moved to Villanova. I went to Radnor High. My family is still all around. The Blue Route kind of decimated my neighborhood, so I have sisters and brothers in Phoenixville, cousins in the Northeast and New Jersey. I fully expect my family to show up at the shows in droves.

And when did you head west?
I left Philly when I was around 22. Moved to New York, studied acting. And if you wanna be an actor, you have to wind up in L.A., so that’s what I did.

Is that when you roomed with Dice Clay?
[Laughs] When I first moved to L.A., Andy Clay, yes. And Yakov Smirnoff was my other roommate. At the same time. All in the same place. I taught them both about America. We were living a situation comedy. I was using a wipeboard for ideas for jokes. When I’d go out, Andy would erase everything. He would take down my 3×5 cards and destroy them. And then he’d draw on my board the most horrifying gynecological stick figures you could ever imagine. And that was his idea of being funny.

Read the rest of the interview.

The posting on the Inky’s Insider blog yesterday afternoon had it right: President-elect Barack Obama might have been among the guests at a dinner Gov. Ed Rendell was hosting later in the evening at the historic City Tavern. But, in fact, he never showed up — and the restaurant’s marketing director, Paul Bauer, says it just “blows his mind” that media all over town got it wrong.

Yes, 32 attendees at the National Governors Association meeting, along with security and staff, dined on lobster pie and venison medallion. (Rendell had his usual — barbecue basil shrimp and rack of lamb.) And with all the hubbub — “We had state police and dogs all over the place,” Bauer reports — those drawn to the vicinity by the blog post and a subsequent Twitter link could see that something was going on. But Bauer says not a single reporter covering the story checked in with him to see if Obama actually appeared. “Fox News said one of its reporters, Julie Kim, would call me to confirm. She never did — but she reported the story all night long.”

Bauer said he was “shocked” at how the story “got out of hand”: “It kind of makes you wonder about what else they’re reporting on.”