Robert Torchia:  

Some of you may recollect that I moved to Merrick at a tender age after having been raised in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, among Mennonites and Amish. Getting abruptly plunged into such an alien environment as Long Island's South Shore was quite unsettling for me and that had bad consequences. I remember that my old grandmother back in Elizabethtown, PA, used to ask the names of my girlfriends and was extremely disapproving when they were clearly Jewish. "What kind of a name is that?" she would say in stern tones. Conversely, the parents of the girls would ask about the ethnic origin of my last name and drew the obvious conclusion that I couldn't be a nice Jewish boy. (I didn't know enough back then to claim I was Sephardic.) To make a long story short, after getting expelled by Yenerello from JFK for general acts of hooliganism I ended up in London, England. I returned to the USA after a huge battle with my parents and drifted around for a while spending much of my time racing bicycles in New York. Eventually I saw the great light and studied the history of art at Fordham University (BA), Columbia University (MA), and eventually managed to get a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia where I live. When I got my degree in 1990 the education market was horrible so I accepted a position giving art history lectures for a small luxury ...Expand for more