Steel This Magazine. FALL 2019
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STEEL THIS FALL 2019
A SIGN IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS a benign gesture sparks a debate about race and highlights some pittsburgher’s fragility
6 DUMP STAR MEDIA local media collective gives a voice to filmmakers
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16 DINNER IS SERVED cenacolo’s chefs help you step up your game
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STORYBURGH a spotlight on the ties between homelessness and addiction
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CONTRIBUTORS:
Publisher - John Dubosky Creative Director/Graphic Design - Kelli Koladish Editors - Susan Cunniff & Karen Mundie Photography - Brian Volinic, Joshua Sweeny Writers - Amy Maurine Edwards, Loretta Millender, Skipper Anderson, Edward Banchs, Dana Colecchia Getz, Randy Garcia, Michael Thornman, Varsha Mathur, Alyse Horn-Pyatt and Teake Zuidema of Storyburgh, Miss Macross, Ernie Pantusso, and Stacie Benjen Sales - John Dubosky and Melissa Ursu Crossword Puzzle - Written By: Brian Herrick Edited By: Daniel Finan
MEDIA & PUBLISHING PARTNERSHPS: PublicSource, Storyburgh, and Word Association Publishers
NANCY'S REVIVAL KITCHEN GETS A GRANT how a citizens bank grant helped expand an employee empowerment program
MISS LORETTA'S CORNER lawrenceville gives lessons on life, death, and everything in between
IS RECYCLING IN PITTSBURGH A SOLUTION OR ONLY A PATCH? PublicSource investigates rubbish removal in the steel city
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME PINBALL? pinball expo 2019, one of the industry’s biggest events, happens this october
CUTE CAFE a selection from pittsburgh poet, miss macross
MATTERS OF THE HEART relationship coach varsha mathur speaks on toxic relationships
THE GEORGE A. ROMERO ARCHIVE when there’s no more room in hell, the archive of george a. romero moves to the university of pittsburgh
SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDER, THE DREARINESS INDEX, AND YOU sara makin let’s us know all hope is not lost in one of the darkest, dreariest places in america
THE POWER OF THE POCKET an excerpt of audrey n. glickman’s new book about the inequity of women’s clothing
PITTSBURGH REAL ESTATE tips from local real estate experts to help you sell your first house
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DUMP STAR MEDIA; ACCESSIBLE, EQUITABLE, INCLUSIVE, AND CAMPY By: Amy M. Edwards
Arriving at the North Side’s Pittsburgh Community TV Studio on a Thursday morning in late July, I spotted a big bushy brown wig set atop a Styrofoam mannequin head. Next to it, a svelte, sunglass-obscured young man bedecked in paint-splattered 70’s polyester was fiddling on his phone in the blinding summer light by the entrance. This must be the place. I had volunteered to help with Production Assistance for a three hour filming of Rob Boss, a Bob Ross parody and signature production of Dump Star Media, an independent media production company based in Pittsburgh, PA. I walked up to the bizarro 80’s painter (and his wig), who I quickly recognized as Alistair McQueen, Executive Producer and star of the show, and re-introduced myself. Squinting in the sun, I asked him if he remembered me from when we had worked together at Pittsburgh Filmmakers years prior. He did. Arriving shortly thereafter to meet us was another production assistant and Meg Koleck, Executive Director of Dump Star (and also former Pittsburgh Filmmakers employee/co-worker). We were buzzed inside and Alistair laid out his props in the green room. The modest yet completely adequate community TV studio housed three cameras, a video screen, professional lighting rigging, and two staff members in the control room to assist with recording.
“Rob Boss, a Bob Ross parody,” Meg stated, followed by, professionally and matter-of-factly, “Penis painting.”
special focus on artists whose stories and labor are underrepresented in American culture. We also create our own content that calls attention to the absurdities of cultural norms by exploring societal constructs and, “otherness.” Historically and currently, our society erases and exploits the talents of the queer community, people of color, female artists, and other marginalized groups.”
The techs smiled. “Alright then, let us know when you’re ready,” and headed to the control room adjacent to the studio.
Dump Star Media believes in the importance of equity, representation, and lifting the voices of those who have previously been stifled.
On that day, Dump Star was shooting three episodes of the parody show in advance for their monthly release (always at midnight on the first of the month). The Rob Boss’ pastiche painting was executed in real time by Alistair with his bespoke, bejeweled latex apparatus, a specialty crafted, and wearable penis paintbrush. We watched him paint that day, passion and acrylic flowing nonstop from the tip of his artistic enhancement, for three hours of filming. As Meg fed lines and checked the framing of the shots, I came to admire his commitment, flexibility, and staying power.
Helping on set was fun, but there is so much more to Dump Star Media’s mission and production canon that is worth exploring. I followed up with Executive Director, Meg Koleck, to dive deeper into Dump Star. Our conversation is as follows:
“What are we filming today?” The techs asked as we set up. Alistair assembled his easel, paints, and drop cloth, and then removed his pants while Meg and I adjusted the wide frame and close up cameras on his mark.
According to Meg and Alistair, “Dump Star Media produces, promotes, and exhibits the work of independent media artists with a
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Q: Hi, Meg, thanks for sitting down to talk. What else does Dump Star have in the works right now? A: Hi! Thanks for asking. We are working on several original projects right now. We’re making a television pilot called, LunchTime!, starring Mildred the Lunch Lady, Pittsburgh’s Best Bartender 2018, and World’s Best Lunch Lady. Mildred is an 86-year-old lunch lady with
lots of spunk and lots of lunch. This fall we’ll be releasing weekly LunchTime! videos--’Mildred Mondays,’ to use as teasers while we work on the pilot for LunchTime! Both Mildred the Lunch Lady and Rob Boss are played by Alistair McQueen, Dump Star Media’s Executive Producer. Dump Star Media is currently run by Alistair and me, but we hope to hire more staff as our budget increases. We’re also in the process of re-releasing older projects like, The Nomi Darling Show, a sketch comedy variety series, as well as various short films we’ve made over the years. We take some client work, too. Dump Star Media is producing a music video called, Occupy All Sheets, by local musician, Snugglzs. We have a few more things up our sleeves, so stay tuned! Most of Dump Star Media’s original productions are queer, camp comedies, but we do not exclusively serve this demographic or limit ourselves to one genre. We’ve produced documentaries, educational videos, promos, music videos, and more. We also provide professional consultations, tutoring sessions, facilitate workshops, work for hire as creative producers, and will soon host events.
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McQueen as Rob Boss
Q: Why is it important to you and Dump Star to be able to highlight underrepresented groups in film and production?
Q: What was the transition like from working at Pittsburgh Filmmakers to running your own production company?
A: Great question. The film industry often underrepresents and misrepresents groups of people, consequently erasing their presence and exploiting their stories for the sake of marketing. People benefit from seeing their communities and identities represented on screen and behind the scenes. It’s important for everyone to have their voice heard and know that there is an audience ready to embrace them.
A: In my experience, being a Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ employee made me feel like I was a deeply connected member of the independent visual arts community. My job was to show up at a place I loved, work with incredible people, and help the organization function by doing whatever tasks I had day to day. It was the best. That’s how it feels with Dump Star Media. There’s ownership and a focus on community in my work, and I like that.
Having input from people of various backgrounds and experiences builds better, more responsible productions, as well as more accurate, thoughtful representation. Storytelling is central to the human experience, so we should be producing and consuming stories that reflect a wide array of experiences. Dump Star Media’s doors are open for collaboration and sharing our platform with organizations and people from all walks of life.
Dump Star Media incorporated in September 2018, around the same time Pittsburgh Filmmakers (PF/PCA) was restructuring. In the face of those big changes, I wanted to make sure Dump Star Media was forming its own entity and expanding its network while still maintaining a strong relationship with the artists from the Filmmakers’ community. We were able to do that and I still work with many people from Pittsburgh Filmmakers in various settings.
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Q: Is it ever challenging financially or otherwise to do this equitable work in an industry that is predominantly white, male, and affluent? (Hi, funders!)
making them heroes with strong personalities that steal the show. This style of storytelling critiques society by exploiting cultural norms. Dump Star Media expands upon this work.
A: Of course! There are challenges around every corner. Whew! It is not easy, and nobody said it would be. We are aware of the correlation between privileged people and the folks who are granted opportunities and funding for their media projects, which can be influenced by bias.
Dump Star Media often uses comedy to make our commentary easier to consume than if it were told in a dramatic tone. What we’re doing feels fun and palatable, or perhaps strange and distasteful, but we are always examining culture and calling attention to the societal inconsistencies and absurdities that end up hurting our shared socio-political growth. Camp comedy is self-aware and meant to push boundaries; it’s a great tool to stimulate critical thinking in a non-confrontational manner. We are taught to ignore what isn’t pretty, not to stare at it. Trash filmmaking challenges these notions by glorifying ugliness in a way that calls attention to our own ignorance. We invite our audience to have fun by laughing at themselves while also considering who is the butt of the joke and why it’s funny.
Dump Star Media actively works to cultivate a more inclusive community by acknowledging the systemic problems in our culture and how we may be contributing to them, as well as how we can work to combat erasure, oppression, and inequity in our work. We strive to reduce barriers that prevent people from joining the filmmaking industry, which is notably hard to break into. We ensure that we are creating safe spaces and invite crew members with little or no experience to assist on sets where they can be trained on the job and make professional connections. We also create work-for-trade agreements to help build relationships while cutting production expenses for both parties. It takes a lot of work to make progressive strides in this industry, and we want to be part of that movement. We do not have all of the answers, but we consider ourselves allies and are always learning. We’re excited to live in a world where these models are common practice. Q: Tell me (briefly) about your experience at Camp John Waters (I’m sure we could talk all day about this alone). A: Alistair and I are inspired by John Waters, so it’s very special to attend an event curated by this cult icon. While all of the campers are heavily influenced by Waters, this event is driven by the community. We aren’t groupies, we are misfits and weirdos who found each other through artwork that represents and validates our identities and perspectives. Dump Star Media’s name is an homage to trash filmmaking, a subgenre of B-film popularized/ coined by John Waters. Waters celebrates and empowers marginalized groups of people by
Q: Any advice for young, aspiring filmmakers and creatives? A:
-Assign yourself homework and study your craft, including theory. -Kill your ego, but not your self-worth. -Filmmaking is collaborative, so keep that at the forefront, not competition. -Make a list of all of the art-related projects you’re doing and keep it up to date. -You’re doing great. Everything takes time.
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Q: What was the most delectable preparation of corn that you have consumed yet this summer? A: Elote, hands down. There’s nothing better than corn on a stick. For episodes, production shots, services available and more, check out: https://www.dumpstarmedia.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/gooddogdemi/ videos https://www.facebook.com/dumpstarmedia/ https://www.instagram.com/dumpstarmedia/
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WILKINSBURG DINER AWARDED SMALL BUSINESS GRANT FOR EMPLOYEE AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT By: John Dubosky
Jordan Robarge told me that his diner, Nancy’s Revival, in Wilkinsburg, was starting a new kind of training for their employees. He was given twenty grand from Citizens bank to help grow his colleague’s skill sets, and I wanted to check it out first hand. So, in August I stopped out at one of the classes to take some notes. On a hot summer afternoon, I stepped into the diner as the class was about to start. Problem solving was on the syllabus for the day. A semicircle formed, and just like that, I got sucked into an ice-breaking improv game. After the dust settled on the call and response improvisational exercise, it was time to form smaller groups and go through a work sheet on problem solving. The class worked together to diagnose problems and go through a systematic categorization of pros and cons, potential solutions, and outcomes based on said solutions. This class is part of an employee empowerment program that Jordan Robarge has developed
at Nancy’s Revival, a revitalized diner in Wilkinsburg at the site of the old Nancy’s East End Diner. Earlier this year, a friend told him about Citizens Bank’s Small Business Community Champion Award. With the syllabus sketched out and his employees in mind, he applied for and won Pittsburgh’s $20,000 grant. In February of this year, Citizens Bank made a pledge to award various levels of sponsorship to business owners in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Their campaign is an effort to encourage business owners who could demonstrate that an investment in their company could benefit their employees and the community around the business. Robarge was already in the thick of running his food truck, Revival Chili, which is aimed at transitioning ex-convicts from street life and the prison system to self-empowerment and potentially, entrepreneurship. “It’s been the mission of our business from the beginning to take people that have previously
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spent time in jail and train them to leverage the skills that they already have. They can become an entrepreneur, or use those skills to better themselves in life, increase their socioeconomic value and status,” said Robarge. Nancy’s Revival doesn’t follow the same hiring guidelines of only employing people coming out of prison, but hires its employees from its own neighborhood, Wilkinsburg, one of Pittsburgh’s less economically-developed areas. Robarge’s history of helping ex-convicts and people from disadvantaged economic groups stems from an arrest he experienced in college for underage drinking, and the subsequent difficulty landing a good job with that blemish on his record. “I was lucky and privileged to have attended a top college and earn an engineering degree. It was eye opening to not receive job offers because of my conviction for underage drinking. It really inspired me to dedicate my life to helping provide employment to others in similar situations.”
He’s planning to use the money and the skills he’s built with his food truck to expand a lifeskills and business-focused series of classes from the diner to the Wilkinsburg community at large. His classes are part of an arching series of phases in which the employees at Nancy’s Diner are involved. The first phase that Robarge refers to as, “Stability” is initially landing the job, becoming good at it, and creating an equilibrium between job and home life. “We want to make sure your living situation is good. You can worry about less so you can focus on yourself more in a sense,” said Robarge. He said this initial part of the work experience lasts 4-6 months. The program’s second phase is a series of classes aimed at personal and professional development with a focus on self. Some areas of focus are finances and gaining a deeper understanding of one’s self in relation to the world around them. “The first class is getting to know yourself followed by self confidence. Then we get into decision-making and some of the other stuff that falls into self in a social setting and getting to know yourself better. These skills can be applied in most areas of one’s life. A lot of people, once they’ve spent time in jail, or even people that are from low-income communities, can have a scarcity mindset which, in part, can be attributed to a low selfconfidence. We’re trying to decrease self-doubt and increase-confidence,” said Robarge.
And this is where the award money comes in. “Classes were just going to be for employees initially. I was going to give handouts and bring in my tv from my house and hook my computer up or something along those lines. With the money, I’ve bought a projector and a projector screen and we’re opening it up to the public. The main thing that this money is going towards is partnerships, specific partnerships. I have been in the process of developing a lot of these classes that I want to run but I know I am no way an expert in some of these subjects, so now I have money to bring in experts that can better lead each class. I previously was going to boot strap this project and do an extremely minimalist version.”
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Robarge hopes these skills will help transfer to his employees and the community members involved with the project. “It can all be applied; if I get really good at personal finances, I can most likely transfer that over to business finance. Getting good at personal relationships, empathy, and knowing how to connect with someone on a more personal level can really help oneself. That lets me be: one, a better salesman, and two, a better business owner. It lets me have better relationships with employees, or a better relationship with customers. Gaining all these skills is going to make you better in all aspects. It can transfer over to your life as well. If we teach you how to have better relationships with your coworkers and conflict management within the workplace you can hopefully apply the skills to your life outside.” The third phase of the program is delving further into the themes of phase two. “Phase three is in development, which is diving deeper into all of these things. You could spend a half a day discussing these topics we mentioned and then dive into 10 other things that are deeper than what we’re talking about,” said Robarge. Classes began in June and are now running every two weeks from 45 minutes to an hour. For more information, visit: www. NancysRevival.com
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MISS LORETTA'S CORNER Transcribed By: John Dubosky
Denny’s Court was near Al Klotz’s store in Lawrenceville. When you walked up the steps— it was seven, I counted them—it put you in a whole new world from Penn Avenue and all that was happening in Lawrenceville up 29th Street. It was a separate little place in Lawrenceville with apartment houses. They were three rooms, and as you went back, there were three houses that had four rooms and outhouses, no indoor bathrooms. It was family members mostly. But this one man, an elderly gentleman, named Mr. Eli, he lived there and would come every Sunday to my mother’s house to eat. My mother sold dinners on Sundays after church to make money while my father was in the service. Mr. Eli was part American Indian, very light skinned, with cool, smooth hair, he was nice looking. Sort of frail, but a very nice gentleman. Every Sunday Mr. Eli would come there and eat dinner because he didn’t cook and didn’t have a wife, and my mother cooked so well. The men who came through for dinners were very respectful of us children. They would sometimes give us a dime or a nickel. He would sing this song, “I’m going to the river, and I’m going to jump overboard and drown.” I remember a lot
of men would come to get my mother’s cooking, but he’s the only one who sang.
people; I never heard him argue or fight or cuss or anything. You’d laugh and joke with him.
One Sunday I came home, and Mr. Eli wasn’t there, and I asked my mother, “Has Mr. Eli gotten his food already and gone?” And she said, “Yeah, he’s gone, he’s gone to heaven.”
----------------------------------------------------
“Gone to heaven, Ma? Why?” I asked. “Mr. Eli went to the river and jumped in and drowned,” she said. It was the first time I had ever heard of someone committing suicide. Mr. Eli sang it every Sunday. It was a well-known song, and people sang it, so you didn’t think anything of it. But he sang it every Sunday and told people what he was going to do; then on a warm sunny day, he went and did it. I realized for the first time in my life, at 13, that people did bad things to themselves. I’ll always remember Denny’s Court for that, because Mr. Eli lived in the first house there, three rooms and an outhouse. He was such a nice guy and I never knew the reason. He never looked mean, he was always smiling and laughing. He always talked nice to
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Crucible Steel was on Smallman Street. All these guys worked at Crucible Steel that lived up in Lawrenceville. I used to see them with their little pail buckets with food in them, their wives sending them off to work for the day. Sander’s Store was over there on the corner where you could get 15 cent hamburgers and five cent Coca-Colas or root beer floats. One day I went there to a girl’s house on that street. That young lady, she’s 93 this year, she lived on Smallman Street. We went to her house and she said, “You have to go in the parlor with me.” I said, “Why? It’s a nice day, I don’t want to go sit in your front room today.” She said, “My brother’s in there, he’s passed away.” I never knew until that day that your body would be laid out in your front room in the parlor. He was dressed in his suit, his coat, his shoes, his hat, I thought the man was getting ready to get up and go somewhere. But they said, “No, Loretta, this is how they do it.” They
r of ponsoorner S d u A Pro retta’s c o miss l
didn’t take you to the funeral home back then, you laid there in your parlor, and people visited you. You laid there all night while the family was upstairs, and that girl was scared. He had been hit by a train near the bottom of Polish Hill near the 28th Street Bridge. He was coming from West Penn swimming pool. But I had now seen that for the first time, a young person laid out in front of me like that. ---------------------------------------------------One day I’m walking past 30th Street, near the end of the Strip District, and I hear all this shouting. I look over and on Spring Way Alley I see all these ladies running. I was 14 years old at the time, so this would have been about 1954 or 1955. I went over to investigate; I was always inquisitive about stuff. I followed the noise to this house; there were three steps go up to this house and a screen door. Behind the door, there’s a lady birthing a child. So, I got to see that. I got to watch that boy grow up and die in Lawrenceville, too. She had him on the kitchen floor, and she had these ladies helping, they were midwives. They shooed me away after I had seen the child being birthed on the floor. The women had seen me at the screen door and said, “Ok, Loretta, you’ve seen too much.” I came back down that street almost an hour later and that lady was up in the kitchen cooking! She had just had that baby! I said to myself, “That’s a strong lady.” I sat on her step and watched her cook and watched her husband come in from Crucible Steel to eat, and she had just had a baby!
It’s All About Living!
I was so amazed at the strength of a woman that all my life I wanted to be strong. Maybe that’s why I am like I am today, for the things I’ve seen and the people I’ve watched stuff happen to. All those things happened in Lawrenceville after I was 13, from 29th to 31st Street.
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---------------------------------------------------These are the different little things that happened: I’d seen someone being born, the life that God gives you, but in the same turn I had seen a dead child and learned about the harm people can do to themselves. And I learned it’s not promised to you. You only get so much time. I had heard about Mr. Eli taking his life. Everything you think is joy and happiness is sometimes only a face that they’re pretending. A person can pretend happiness and not really feel it. So, they’re sad and don’t want to be here anymore.
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people who had come in for other reasons, and they would tell their stories about why they cut their wrists or something like that. I would look at their eyes when they told me stories. A lot of people carry their sadness in their eyes. Sometimes when people smile they’re not looking right in your eye. In your eyes a lot of times there’s a sadness or a hurt you can see. Sometimes when people are smiling they’re putting on a front and they don’t look at you directly. Or if you’re smiling, or your voice sounds happy, or if they see you moving around dancing, they don’t see you’re not completely happy. When I see people that are depressed, the first thing in my mind is I want to talk to you and see if I can help. I met a guy, he’s a lawyer now, I met him 42 years ago on my way to church. He was sitting right there on a railing in a parking lot in Lawrenceville. It was raining, he had shorts on and long blond hair like a hippie. I came past him sort of leery, I was watching myself. I’m on my way to church, and I’m the mistress of ceremony, so I was in a hurry, and I said, “Can I help you, sir?” He said nobody could help him. And something clicked inside of me, something’s wrong. I said, “Don’t you have a mother and father?” He said, “It’s too late for that. I won’t even be here tomorrow.” The first thing that entered my head was Mr. Eli, he’s
going to kill himself. He had sandals and shorts and a short shirt. I said, “Well, why don’t you talk to them and see?” He said, “No.” I forgot about church and everything and I stood there and talked to him, I wrote down my name and number and said, “Just call me tomorrow, and let’s see what God can do for you.” He said, “I don’t believe in God,” and I said that was fine, and I wasn’t going to press that, but I made him promise to call me, and I ran to the church, got dry, went in and did my thing. About a year and a half passed, and I’m sitting in the church, I was up in the choir stand, and in walks this white guy, dressed nicely. He didn’t look the same, but it was him. He went up to my pastor and he said, “I’m looking for Miss Loretta,” and I looked over and I didn’t recognize him. He introduced himself. I said, “Lord, have mercy!” That’s how big the change was. We hugged, he said thank you. He told me he was on his way overseas to work with Mother Theresa. He was married, and he and his wife were going together. He left, and about four years later I get a phone call late at night, and I heard someone saying, ”Help me, Miss Loretta.” He had gone over to work with Mother Theresa, he and his wife, and he was so messed up after four years from seeing all the poverty and sickness, he was deeply
troubled. His wife didn’t snap out of it for a long time, but this young man was eventually able to. I got hold of a mutual friend of ours who was also a judge at one point, he was on the city council back then, the two of them were friends from working together, and he said, “Loretta, we’re going to visit him.” We found him in Western Psych. I got the chance to be with him and talk with him. He’s a lawyer right to this day. He got his mind straightened out; it was a tough situation for him. Two years after that, he and his wife had children. He brought them all into church to introduce me one day. ---------------------------------------------------When you find a person that has a sickness, you don’t stop just because they’re disabled, you help them. You help anybody you can all the way; the blind, people in wheelchairs, people who have become depressed. I didn’t even stop with the living, I worked at Jones’ Funeral Home doing makeup and hair. If you brought a picture of your loved ones in, I would help you make them look like themselves. Whatever way I can help, that’s the way I’m going to help. I’m gonna be your friend. That’s the way I’m going to be for everybody until God takes me home. That’s a legacy I can carry on. I can’t carry on a dance step as a legacy, but I can carry on touching you, communicating with you, and helping you.
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Steve Salvi was focused on finishing up his lunch service when I walked into his kitchen in late August. We were at his Irwin-based restaurant, Cenacolo, trying to get a recipe for our Fall issue of the magazine, but it was still very much summertime. Steve wasn’t thinking about Brussels sprouts, or root veggies, he was plating bright, seasonal dishes for hungry customers.
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“Don’t rush it,” he tells me. “Live in the moment! Tomatoes are going crazy right now and I already have people asking me about pumpkin ravioli!” But I’m on deadline and I need to get a dish from him for our food section, so I press for an entrée. He obliges, and gets to work with his team to put together something special for us. After about twenty minutes and four or five platefuls of pasta, he and one of his chefs taste, inspect, think, and taste again. And then, “Got it.” He and his crew are satisfied with the new dish and my photographer and I can begin documenting and framing this delectable meal. You guys are gonna like this one.
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AGNOLOTTI DAL PLIN FILLED WITH LOBSTER, LANGOSTINOS, & SHRIMP INGREDIENTS: 1 Lb. Agnolotti Pasta ½ Lb. Shrimp ½ Lb. Langostinos ½ Lb. Lobster Meat 1 Cup Corn 2 Tbs. Mascarpone ¾ Cup Heavy Whipping Cream 2 Clovers Garlic 1/2 Lb. Chanterelle Mushrooms INSTRUCTIONS: As with any pasta dish worth your time, you’re going to want to get a salty boil going. Boil water a few inches deep, and salt that until it’s about as salty as ocean water. While the water’s getting ready, get your other ingredients assembled and cleaned. They’re all going to work together to create a flavorful mushroom and seafoodinfused cream sauce. Heat a pan, get some olive oil in it, and toss in all of the seafood, mushrooms, and corn. Let these flavors build as the pan sears the food.
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After three-five minutes when the seafood is cooked and the mushrooms have softened, it’s time to add the cream and the mascarpone. These flavors will blend and create a creamy, seafood and mushroom sauce for your pasta. When the pasta is finished cooking, place it in the pan and let it soak in the flavor of the dish before serving. Then simply plate, and garnish with some chives and shaved parmesan.
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A truck from Waste Management dumps a load of recyclables – cardboard, plastics, paper, cans and shattered glass — on the tipping floor of Waste Management’s Materials Recovery Facility at Neville Island. The company serves the Pittsburgh suburbs. (Photo by Teake Zuidema/PublicSource)
MANY PITTSBURGH-AREA PLASTICS END UP IN LANDFILLS OR THE ENVIRONMENT. IS RECYCLING A SOLUTION OR ONLY A PATCH? By: Teake Zuidema Pittsburgh has its own floating garbage patch. Behind a mooring cell for coal barges, some 400 feet upstream from the Hot Metal Bridge, a soaked mass of debris hugs the northern bank of the Monongahela River. It’s made up of tree branches, tires and a variety of discarded plastic products: water bottles, soccer and basketballs, sneakers, mangled pieces of polystyrene foam, cups, shopping bags and eating utensils. The patch is one destination for plastics in the Pittsburgh region. Other plastics are bound for recycling plants, where in many cases they’re shipped to landfills because they are either too dirty or are one of many types of plastics not recycled locally. While environmentally minded consumers may view recycling as a green solution, many plastics are actually thrown out as waste. On the Monongahela, Evan Clark steers his pontoon boat straight into the debris patch.
After making a full stop, he hands out nets and trash pickers to the five volunteers on the boat, dubbed the Rachel Carson. “Get as much as you can out of the water and put it in the barrels,” Clark said, pointing at the garbage bins on deck. “Don’t lean over too far, I don’t want you to be the first volunteer to go overboard on one of my trips.” Clark, a boat captain with the nonprofit Allegheny CleanWays, has been to the patch hundreds of times with volunteers. Their goal is to clean up the mess behind the mooring cell. But every day, a fresh load of plastics and other debris gets snagged. “It never stops,” he said. “As long as people buy these products, they’ll end up in our rivers.” If a plastic bottle doesn’t get stuck on the way, Clark said he believes it might travel all the way to the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. fall 2019
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Over a period of many decades, the debris breaks down into microplastics, often coated with harmful chemicals that are small enough to be ingested by animals and reach humans after traveling through the food chain. Most people would probably agree that plastics should not be thrown into the Monongahela. But even recycling is less of an environmentally friendly solution than people might expect. Often items end up in landfills, and the recycling industry is currently grappling with a major shock to its business model. In January 2018, China curbed imports on plastic waste from the United States and other countries to cut down on local pollution. The shift has changed global patterns in recycling, raising questions of what happens to plastics locally and what can be done to better keep them from harming the environment.
As part of our commitment to highlight local voices and promote journalism, Steel This Magazine has partnered with PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom, working to provide meaningful local journalism in Pittsburgh and the region. PublicSource tells stories for a better Pittsburgh at publicsource.org.
Recycling on Neville Island As a large green truck dumped a load of heavily compressed materials — mostly cardboard, plastic objects, cans and shattered glass — on the tipping floor of the Materials Recovery Facility on Neville Island, Waste Management spokesperson Erika DeyarminYoung explained the beginning of a long sorting process. “One of the first steps is that we have to remove all the plastic bags, including the blue recycling bags, from the stream.” Bags that escape this first step can get stuck in the facilities conveyor belts. Deyarmin-Young said it’s costly to stop the sorting process to manually remove the bags. Those that are removed are sent to a landfill owned by Waste Management in Monroeville and Washington County. Plastics classified as Nos. 3 to 7 are also sent to the landfill. There’s no market for these plastics after China stopped importing them in January 2018. Since January 2018, China has only allowed imports of bales of the easiest to recycle plastics, but only if contamination from waste or other plastics isn’t more than half a percent. For American companies that operate with singlestream recycling achieving that purity can be extremely difficult. Deyarmin-Young said Waste Management sells No. 1 and 2 plastics domestically. But all plastics that are not jugs, jars or bottles go to a landfill. If the bottles, jars and jugs are contaminated or not properly cleaned, they most likely also end up in a landfill, Deyarmin-Young said. Philadelphia sends a lot of its waste, including plastics, to a large incinerator in Chester County. There is no incinerator in the Pittsburgh area.
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According to contracts Waste Management signed with 20 communities in the South Hills, starting January 2019, residents were advised to no longer put so-called mixed plastics in their recycling bins, but in their waste bins. The same is true for glass. This year, Waste Management has begun ‘tagging’ during pickup in the South Hills. If an employee sees contamination – the wrong plastics, dirty recyclables, glass, garbage – they will leave a tag behind explaining what shouldn’t be in the recycle bin. “This year, we will still take the material,” Deyarmin-Young said. “But next year we will leave the material behind and have the resident clean up the items and then recycle it the next time around.” In the City of Pittsburgh, plastics are processed at a similar facility owned by Recycle Resource in Hazelwood. Earlier this year, Pittsburgh residents were asked only to put plastic bottles, jars, tubs and jugs in the recycle bin, so long as they are no larger than 3 gallons.
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All other plastics – including caps and lids – should be dropped in the garbage to be sent to a landfill.
A moment of truth Since China is no longer accepting our plastics, recycling experts note that more plastic will end up in landfills, incinerators or as litter in the environment. Not that China ever recycled the bulk of the plastics sent by other countries. “They would sort through them again to get out the leftover 1s and 2s, and then they would use the rest to burn in cement kilns and other factories,” said Justin Stockdale, western regional director of the Pennsylvania Resources Council.
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Evan Clark, a boat captain with the nonprofit Allegheny CleanWays. (Photo by Teake Zuidema/PublicSource)
Stockdale said waste should be dealt with like a utility, just like water and electricity. The government could then, for instance, require polystyrene to be recycled. And if waste is treated like a utility, that means the more waste a customer makes, the more they would pay.
Recycling as a BandAid Wherever Patricia DeMarco goes, she carries a set of bamboo utensils and a reusable bag for her sandwiches. This way the biologist, author and a senior scholar of Chatham University avoids plastic utensils and containers.
Stockdale views China’s about-face on accepting plastics as a ‘moment of truth’ for recycling. He doesn’t think it will be hard to find domestic destinations for plastics No. 1 and 2. But what about all those other plastics bound for landfills and incinerators? Stockdale said consumers should focus on purchasing reusable products and avoid the mixed bag of non-recyclable plastics. The ultimate goal of waste collection and recycling, Stockdale said, should be to provide services that people want and the planet needs instead of the current system that relies on corporations trying to make a profit. In addition to curbside recycling, Stockdale said he believes that drop-off centers should be built to accept materials that are difficult to collect and manage: glass, chemicals, tires, computers and maybe No. 5 plastics, which include medicine bottles, straws and bottle caps. The Pennsylvania Resources Council already organizes programs and events to collect some hard-to-recycle materials such as polystyrene, coded as plastic No. 6.
DeMarco said she thinks dependence on fossil materials has put the world into an existential crisis. The culmination of this crisis is the proliferation of plastic products made from petroleum or gas liquids that are used for a few minutes and discarded to pollute the environment for hundreds of years. DeMarco sees recycling plastic as a Band-Aid. “First, we need to rethink the source of the plastic pollution problem, other than just say, ‘Oh if we only recycled more, we would be able to solve this,” DeMarco said. She said the material used to make a product should fit the product’s use. “Let’s use plastic where very durable material is needed, like in construction,” she said. “Things that last forever shouldn’t be used for a couple of seconds.” DeMarco noted that several communities in the United States already ban single-use plastic products such as shopping bags, plastic straws and stirrers and Styrofoam containers. In 2014, California imposed a statewide ban on singleuse plastic bags at large retail stores. In Pennsylvania, House Democratic lawmakers are currently pushing a “Zero Waste PA”
package of bills with measures that range from increasing fines for littering, introducing a 5-cent beverage bottle and can deposit program and charging a 2-cent fee for non-reusable plastic bag. DeMarco said she thinks a national law banning single-use plastics is needed, though she doesn’t see it as likely in the near future. But recycling could be more effective, she said, if plastic producers would design their products so they would be easier to reuse. DeMarco said the state should have asked for something back from Shell when it provided a tax break to build its ethane cracker, which will produce the feedstock for plastic: “We already have given Shell a lot of money to build it,” she said. “Surely it could be required of them that a portion of what they make should be reusable.” As a member of the Forest Hills Borough Council, DeMarco has written an open letter to the Allegheny County Council arguing that the recent changes in recycling rules present an opportunity for all 139 communities in Allegheny County to work together on common solutions. She called on Allegheny County to establish a task force to investigate the best ways to reduce waste and encourage reuse of materials. DeMarco wrote, among other things, that the Pittsburgh area has nine Green Chemistry Challenge winners who can help develop a material industry that doesn’t rely on fossil feedstocks. But the solution does not rest on only a few; she said every person should take responsibility for the waste they produce. “Don’t expect somebody else to clean up your mess,” she said. “Stop using single-use plastic.”
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david jones farm Fresh turkeys and frozen turkeys available. Call now to reserve your turkeys, they’re going fast! Here at David Jones Farm we offer the best and freshest turkeys, chickens, and sweet corn on the planet. We also sell fresh frozen sweet corn at Thanksgiving. Starting with the feed that we grow ourselves, our birds are all-natural, free-roaming, fresh and ethically raised. No preservatives, antibiotics, or cages on our family farm, just the finest poultry you can find in Pittsburgh or anywhere else. This season when your guests ask where you got your bird, tell them the Jones family raised it from a chick, nurtured it, and brought it to your table to give you the finest dining experience possible.
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CHICAGO TO HOST ONE OF WORLD'S LARGEST PINBALL CONVENTIONS THIS OCTOBER. By: Ernie Pantusso Pittsburghers like pinball a lot. The city boasts one of the world’s largest active leagues and hosts Pinburgh, the biggest pinball tournament in the world. It’s not hard to find a bar or a movie theatre with an old Williams machine, and pinballmap.com will point you to hundreds of games around town. And that’s not including the private collections that fill countless basements, man-caves, and even warehouses throughout the region. This October, many a flipper finger will be curled around a steering wheel heading west to another one of the world’s premier destinations for all things bumper and paddle: Chicago, home of Pinball Expo, for the event’s 35th anniversary. “It’s the everything for everyone show for people involved in any aspect of pinball,” said Rob Berk, founder of Pinball Expo. “There’s so much planned this year for the 35th anniversary that it’s going to be over the top.” On the weekend of October 16th, more than 4,000 people are expected to surge to the event to take in around 500 unique pinball games. And yes, they’re all set to free play. A daily cover charge will get attendees access to the convention which is stacked with discussions, demonstrations, and tournaments. They’re also planning to raffle away a pinball machine. “We are expecting our biggest show ever. From the vendors that come there to show off their latest games, to the number of seminars we have, there’s also a tour of Stern Pinball Factory. Everything from A to Z will be in the seminars from how to fix the games, the history of the machines, to people who are
starting up museums. There’s just so much happening. Some of the designers will be speaking, some of the artists will be speaking. So, it’s always exciting to hear from these people because they have a fan base following that likes their games,” said Berk. Since the eighties, the event has been bringing consumers face to face with the production staff that create pinball games. Berk’s sense of conviction that drove him to host the event was based on his adoration for the teams that make these machines a reality. “The original idea for doing the show was for me to honor my heroes, who were the designers and the artists, because I always felt that they worked at these factories, but they never got any accolades. It was like a 9 to 5 job for them and no one ever recognized them, but at the end of the day, it’s because of their hard work that people buy the machines,” said Berk. For him and his family, it’s a multigenerational love of games and gaming culture that has driven the success and the momentum of Pinball Expo. “Growing up I played pinball with my dad. The lure of the silver ball. You never know where it’s gonna’ go next, unlike the video machines where you can learn the patterns.” Helping pass the torch to families from all over the globe is Brigitt Berk, who has been working with the Expo for decades since she and Rob were first dating. If you ask her what she enjoys most about the show, she’ll tell you anecdotes about the faces she’s seen at the registration desk over the years. fall 2019
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“I feel like it’s almost like a family reunion with many of the people that come; they’re an extremely friendly bunch. And for me, I love when the father and son have come making it a tradition year after year. And so I get all the names coming in for the registration forms and we make the badges, so I remember them for the most part every single year. We have people from all over the world who come. So it’s fun to spend time with our Japanese friends and the people from Germany, and France, and Brazil, and just everywhere. That’s what’s special for me. The Expo is for families, it’s for college kids and all their buddies, it’s for everybody. We love when the little ones come in and they’re bringing their little step stools to stand on to play the games. I think it’s important, pinball. We want to encourage families to get into it so it keeps living on every generation, because it should. It’s good, clean fun,” said Brigitt. The show must go on, and so for the coming weeks the Berk family and their staff will be hard at work laminating badges, testing machines, and coordinating guests. Their efforts will be recompensed if the attendees have enjoyed themselves. “As long as people leave there with a smile on their face, then you know you’ve done a successful job,” said Berk. Pinball Expo 2019 takes place in Chicago, Illinois, USA on 11-15 October 2017. For more details, visit: www. pinballexpo.net. Game Sales: Rob Berk is buying any and all coin-operated games. To sell, buy, or inquire about arcade machines and other gaming systems, call Rob @ 330.716.3139
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`
CUTE CAFE By: miss macross
I’ve recently developed the very intense-yetinnocuous desire to spend my daylight hours in a brightly-lit café. This desire hurts: I itch under the fluorescent lights of my office, and when I’m at home, I can’t think. I look around my former sanctuary and all I see is an assortment of piles: a pile of fabric, a pile of porcelain, a pile of decaying biological matter, a pile of bills. I feel no satisfaction. I feel like all my needs and wants would be met if I spent the entirety of my days in a cute café. It’d need to be filled with green plants and have beige walls, along with a giant window that goes up like a garage door to let in the fresh spring air. I have no idea what I’d do once I’m there. I mean, I’d order something, probably an iced drink that I could make much cheaper at home. That’s what I typically do – I spend about $6 a week on a carton of almond milk and a bag of coffee grounds. For the price of just one café beverage, I can maintain my caffeine addiction for several days.
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Hell, I don’t have the money to go to a café. I don’t even have the money to pay for parking near a café; I live in a city where I must pay to park everywhere. Taking the bus would cost almost as much, add an hour to my trip, and, most importantly, would be impossible, since the city took away the weekend buses in my neighborhood because we’re poor and they don’t care about us. There are no cute cafés in my neighborhood. There was one, once: both a glowing star of progress and an oak-trimmed omen of the first steps of gentrification. But then it was said that the owner exploited the workers, who then pursued legal action and won. The owner’s response was to lock everyone out. The café has not been open since. As much I’d love to have a cute café in walking distance again, I’d rather let the rats and wasps reclaim that building. Let it fester. This itchy intensity has driven me mad. I’ve been looking for new jobs: ones that pay enough so that I can afford parking and coffee, ones that are in walking distance to cute cafés, and ones that are in cute cafés. I feel like this entire jobhunting process would be much more successful if I did it on my laptop in a café that had a tabby cat lounging by a non-functional fireplace. The café would be so chill that no one would talk about how the cat’s presence is probably a code violation. The cat wouldn’t care, and neither would I. I’d just sip my iced mocha and look longingly out the window.
I don’t know how going to a cute café would benefit me. Why does it feel like such a lifechanging decision? I feel like I’d experience fulfillment, some validation that my life meant something if I could enjoy my accomplishments in an aesthetically-pleasing environment. But there is no evidence that I wouldn’t just end up $10 poorer and nothing else. This torture has gone on for weeks, and now I’m considering becoming a cute café. I stole some plants from my workplace: ivy-like greens that, if I stay still for long enough, may wrap up my legs like I’m an iron gate. I put on my beige cotton dress, which is starchy and smells of mothballs because I haven’t worn it since high school. It’s too tight, but that’s okay because I will soon lose weight from not doing anything other than existing as a cute café. I walk to one of the many abandoned storefronts in my neighborhood and try opening the door. It’s locked, but it’s made of glass, so I hit it with a rock, and it opens. I stand in the front window with the coiling plants at my feet. This window does not swing open, but I’m willing to settle. Maybe by next spring, I’ll earn enough money from the café to invest in a new window. I stand still and I close my eyes. The space is infused with what I imagine must be the scent of lavender cold brew and buttery croissants. I let myself indulge in that fragrance until I can’t feel feelings anymore.
miss macross is a multi-genre writer, workshop organizer for Girls Write Pittsburgh, and host of the Hell’s Lid Reading Series. She was selected by The Incline as part of their 2018 class for, “Who’s Next in Pittsburgh Art.” Her work has been published in more than 30 literary magazines and anthologies. She has published two chapbooks: miss mcross Vs. Batman, (CWP Collective Press, 2018) and, The Midnight Princess, (2019). You can find her on Facebook @MissMacrossPoetry
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No, I did not have an awkward conversation with my father-in-law about my past dating issues. That would be mortifying. But he did bring up an eyeopening point that really resonated with me. He had, after all, raised a gentleman, so he knows what he’s talking about. I routinely run out of things to do around town with my family, so when my in-laws visit us in Pittsburgh on a weekend, we watch movies. Since the influx of Bollywood to the streaming world, it’s been fun to watch some oldies but goodies. If you haven’t seen Bollywood movies, I suggest you do so IMMEDIATELY. They are so multidimensional that I can’t explain the great culture in one post. Unfortunately, though, if you’ve seen a Bollywood movie, you’ve probably seen some sort of sexual harassment or rude behavior to either a woman in general, or towards a spouse in a marriage. This applies to serious movies and comedies, but I never caught on to most of this.
it, and I didn’t really remember the story, but I love the music. I think it’s some of A.R. Rahman’s best work. During the movie, my father-in-law said, “Oh, my! He is harassing the poor girl!” At first I didn’t think much of it, and brushed it off. Maybe my father-in-law is not a romantic. But then he said it a few more times, and I woke up. He was right! The girl was not being romantically pursued by someone she loved, she was being harassed by some guy who was infatuated with her. This is when it dawned on me… DATING MISTAKE: Confusing Rudeness and Harassment with Playful Flirting.
I love these movies and grew up watching them, but allow me to break down what I hate about some of them. I’m not blaming my parents, ancestors, or the cultural norms of India, but I do want to live in a world devoid of rudeness and harassment, so I have to be aware of these things.
Anytime a date felt like I was in some sort of interview, someone asking me way too many questions, it was actually just plain rudeness. Calling me out on my body, health, or fitness, was ill-mannered. Making me prove a point, like whether I can cook, was disrespectful. The worst thing I ever let slide was the guy who claimed his life depended on whether we were together. I see this now as manipulation, but at the time it seemed like he loved me so much, he was willing to risk everything. So much drama and nonsense!
I’ll give you just one example that exemplifies the core issue. A few months ago I suggested we watch, Taal. My in-laws had never seen
Was I dismissing bad behavior because I subconsciously saw it as acceptable in Bollywood films? Taal is a typical story: boy falls for girl and
their families don’t like it. However, in this movie, at no point does the girl suggest she is in love with the boy. In fact, she usually looks confused, sad, angry, or depressed. She even states that she doesn’t want to hurt her family or disrespect her father. So when the boy continuously chases after her, it doesn’t look like harassment, because Bollywood presents it as though he is just trying his best to be with the girl of his dreams. Honestly, go back and watch it. What you will see is haunting. This is just one of the scenarios in Bollywood movies that exemplifies the subtle ways Indian society instills submissive behavior, sexual harassment, rudeness and disrespect. The submissive girl is shown as respectful and shy, the man is shown to be romantic. Well, let me tell you, it was actually harassment, rude behavior, and the fear of the consequences for hurting a volatile man. Personally, I think the woman’s character in, Taal, gives up a really good relationship for the wrong person. CORRECTION: Reminding Myself that I’m not in Kindergarten.
Were you ever told as a child that a boy was teasing you because he “likes” you? Well, that was bullshit. Yet we accept it. No one who cares about you will intentionally and manipulatively make you sad. That’s it, plain and simple. Dating in any culture can present these issues. At first you think they are flirting, then it’s a little annoying but you let it slide because it could be nervousness, eventually, though, you have to just walk away. Whether it is a defense mechanism or an attempt to be funny, if it makes you uncomfortable, it just isn’t right. And, if a person is never getting past the annoying behavior to actually tell you who they are and what they are about, well, that’s a, “surface only” person, and they will get boring really fast. I will forever be watching Bollywood movies, and I know many of them have shifted to a more equal presence for both men and women characters. And, to be fair to my father-in-law, he actually is a romantic (just see how caring he is towards his wife), but just doesn’t tolerate harassment towards women. And let’s not forget that a culture as a whole is not represented by a few movies. Bollywood is a fantasy world, and the creators know this. I hope to leave the bad messages right where they are, and remember my own morals and values instead.
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DRYER IS BETTER. THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH'S GEORGE A. ROMERO ARCHIVE By: John Dubosky
Pittsburgh horror fans are in for a treat. The archive of legendary independent filmmaker and horror pioneer, and once-Pittsburgher, George A. Romero, has been given to the University of Pittsburgh Library System and will be on display soon. Fans of Romero have long followed his cult classics, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead. This collection will provide a greatly anticipated look behind the scenes at Romero’s work behind the camera. “It’s a pretty expansive archive. It include[s] a lot of scripts, both produced and unproduced, and in various states. So, different types of drafts; some of them are treatments which seem to be more like a picture of an idea before it makes it in script form. There’s correspondence, there are contracts, there’s production material like call lists and cast lists and scouting reports for where he’s going to be filming,” said Benjamin Rubin, Horror Studies Collection Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to written pieces, there are also promotional materials for films, media responses, magazine clippings, and newspaper articles. “They give a contemporary account of the response to the different films as they came out,” Rubin said. The collection was donated to the university by Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, Tina Romero, and Peter Grunwald, (Romero’s widow, daughter, and business partner, respectively). In May, Pitt announced the acquisition of the collection and began processing it. The collection offers a glimpse at imaginings of Romero and associates that are sure to spark local, and national attention. This includes a potential collaboration with Pittsburgh Steeler’s legend, Franco Harris, on a movie about Big Foot. But this is just scratching the surface of the ideas and unfinished projects within the archive.
“The wealth of unproduced scripts that he made has been really exciting to look through so far. He only made about 13 movies that were actually released; there’s probably about 60 unproduced scripts. Most of them are full scripts. There are definitely ones that are partial, or just kind of an outline of, ‘Hey, this is an idea for a movie, or an idea for a TV show that never went anywhere.’ Some of them are scripts written by other people. He was friends with and worked with Stephen King a lot. There are a lot of variations and drafts of Stephen King films that either never got made, or were made by somebody else,” Rubin said. Pitt will host a party celebrating the collection on October 23rd from 7-10 pm on the first floor of Hillman Library. The event is a celebration of both this archive and Romero. Materials will be on display, and, in collaboration with the George A. Romero Foundation, the inaugural Pioneer Award will be presented to recognize trailblazers within independent film and the horror genre. Rubin hopes that this installment will be the beginning of a journey to build Pitt’s reputation as a destination for scholarship in the horror gernre. “This is meant to be a first step in striving to create a Horror Studies Center and be the first academic institution to really devote any resources to the academic study of horror. It’s a genre that’s been neglected, and it has a huge fan base. There are people that want to look at this, and so we’re hoping this could be the first step. We’d like to get other horror collections, and eventually be able to build curriculum and do other things here at the University so that you could come to Pitt with the intention of studying horror,” Rubin said. For more information on the George A. Romero collection at Pitt, visit: Romero.Library.Pitt.edu
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As part of our continuing partnership with media organizations throughout the region, storyburgh has shared with us, Our Neighbors Outside. We strive to elevate the voices of pittsburghers we find intriguing, and this story is right in line with our mission statement. To find out more visit storyburgh.com
OUR NEIGHBORS OUTSIDE By: Gabrielle Keane | Photos By: Maranie Staab If you choose to start your hike through Ohiopyle State Park at the top of the mountain, near Kentuck Knob, you can wind your way down to Cucumber Falls in about two hours. Follow the babble of the stream down from the top of the mountain. In July it is humid, but the trails are shaded by some of the tallest trees in Pennsylvania—mostly oak. The trails wind along and across tributaries, feeding to Cucumber Run, and then to the Youghiogheny River. The tributaries carve shelves into the stone on their way down. If you go in the days after a rainstorm, the water at the top of the mountain is clear and cold, cutting the humidity as easily as it cuts into the mountainside. Here, it is easy to see the ways the weather and the earth affects us. On the side of the mountain you are small, and it takes you much longer to wind down its face than it takes this little stream. Your toes are chilled by the fresh rainwater when you take your boots off and dip them in. Down the mountain, where Youghiogheny Falls stumbles heavily over the steps and shelves it has pounded out of the rocks, it’s even more apparent. From
the shore, the rumble overpowers the sound from the road, the birds, everything. When Dave Lettrich started seminary school six years ago, he did so with the intention of committing himself to being where God wanted him to be. In the summer of 2015, that place was Ohiopyle State Park, located about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Lettrich had an internship with an organization located in the South Side that allowed him to meet people who lived on the streets, and after forming a relationship with these individuals, he began taking them on trips to Ohiopyle to hike and swim in the Meadow Run rock slides. Through a crowdfunding campaign, Lettrich raised enough money to take 20 people white water rafting, a popular activity for Ohiopyle visitors. While most activities in the park are free, rafting is dangerous without experienced guides, and day tours cost upwards of $50 per person. “We split it equally between people from the streets and people who were not from the streets,” Lettrich reflects. “We had a wonderful time.” fall 2019
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After this inaugural trip, Bridge to the Mountains was born. In May 2017, Lettrich incorporated the original crowdfunding campaign and became a 501c3 non-profit in order to serve the people he met on the streets. The relationships he cultivates with people translates to what he calls a “continuous care model of service coordination,” which meets people where they are and helps them strategize a more peaceful way of life if they so choose it. I first meet Lettrich outside his office. He’s talking on the phone while he has a cigarette break, so I walk in ahead of him and meet Kaylee Shockley from The Open Door, an organization founded in 2006 to provide housing for those with HIV, a history of substance use, history of arrest, or some combination of those things. The two organizations share office space, which seems to have at one point been a small medical office as there is a large counter that dominates the center of the room. Inside Lettrich’s office are stacks of sleeping bags, tents, tarps, backpacks, sharps containers, and
Narcan (an overdose reversal drug for opioids; also called Naloxone in generic form). “Basic need items our people living outside might need,” he said. “Our people” and “we” are how Lettrich naturally refers to the people he meets every day. His face looks windburned, and his Bridge to the Mountains hat is worn through around the brim. His eyes and smile add to the rugged approachability, which is an important attribute for him. Lettrich’s role in today’s version of Bridge to the Mountains is “pastoral care in the streets.” His days are sometimes 12 to 15 hours long, and “every single day brings crisis,” he said. In 2018, Allegheny county emergency shelters, homelessness prevention, street outreach, and other programs saw 9,901 unique active clients, according to Allegheny County Department of Human Services. Of those people, nearly 5,000 were homeless before coming into contact with an outreach program. Another quarter were living in rented or owned housing, meaning they entered into programs that helped them pay their rent or utilities. In a county with a population of 1.2 million, this seems like quite a small number, but when one considers that the total population of the city of Pittsburgh is only about 302,000, and that a majority of those engaging these services do so within city limits, the scope of the problem widens. Of those 9,901 people who engaged with all the services the Allegheny County Department of Human Services tracks, about 4,100 were in contact with an emergency shelter, street outreach, or day shelter, which offer things like food, clothing, medical services and other immediate necessities to people experiencing homelessness. But of the people who see these services, most immediately go missing or are documented as living on the street soon after. The question comes to mind: Why would anyone given the opportunity to enter a rehousing program not do so? Lettrich explains it like this: If someone has had a lot of trauma in their life, they most likely aren’t going to feel comfortable being in a shelter. Maybe something bad happened to them in a shelter before. Maybe they can’t stay with the people they care about if they go into a shelter. Or maybe they need to use substances to stave off withdrawal symptoms. The reasons are unique to the individual, therefore any care model that approaches a person with an idea of how they should behave will necessarily fail to help people who experience chronic homelessness. On top of social and historical reasons to refuse treatment, 61 percent of those who visited an
emergency shelter or received care through street outreach answered “Yes” when asked if they had a substance use disorder. This could mean that they’d go into withdrawal during their time in a shelter or risk using alone. Since men and women are separated in most shelters, people in relationships are often split, and trans and gender non-conforming individuals may be subjected to shelter groups not in line with their identities. These are dangerous situations, so to some staying in the street, under a bridge, or in an abandoned building is a safer choice. The weather in Pittsburgh in the middle of January can steal your breath and make you marvel at the wonders of nature better than the Youghiogheny can. Some mornings, the sky is clear enough to see the sun rise low behind the city, but most days are grey enough to turn even the most chipper person sour. Laura Drogowski seems an exception to this, as I meet her just as the weak sun sets on a January afternoon. As the critical care initiatives manager for Mayor Peduto’s office, Drogowski helps coordinate human services for vulnerable city residents. Because the city is just one of 140 municipalities in Allegheny County, the county’s robust Department of Human Services is tasked with serving roughly a quarter of the total county population just within city limits. Drogowski said she works “on a general human services platform. In the city, that’s substance use, homelessness, advocacy for people with disabilities, food security, wellness,” and veterans who need assistance. That means everything from resolving 311 calls from concerned community members about someone who has been sleeping outside to making sure curbs are accessible for those using mobility aids, to devising programs like PORT, or the Post Overdose Response Team. The Post Overdose Response Team works to reduce fatal overdoses by connecting those who have overdosed before with a community medic, who “works with a trauma-informed care model… from a harm-reduction perspective,” Drogowski said. That medic works to identify and resolve issues that person may be facing, like unstable housing, traumatic situations, and their overall health. Drogowski relates the concept back to work done by The Open Door, asking, “How are you going to take care of your underlying chronic condition? How are you going to address your potentially unsafe substance use when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep tonight?” According to Drogowski, PORT is one program of many that’s making a difference. There were 266 overdose deaths in 2018, down from 737 overdoses in 2017 at the peak of the opioid epidemic. fall 2019
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Since May 2018, the Narcan that Lettrich has distributed in the streets reversed 84 overdoses. Of those, only one person interacted with authorities through 911, so information about how they overdosed, where, and when were not recorded. In the first half of 2018, police departments in Allegheny County only reported 29 overdose reversals, meaning Lettrich’s direct connections and relationships with people in the streets are changing both the experience for those who might overdose and the data governments and nonprofits have to prevent overdoses going forward. The work by Prevention Point Pittsburgh has also resulted in prompt overdose reversals and safer needle use through its needle exchange, and ultimately, a dramatic reduction in deaths. Prevention Point also offers trainings, free Naloxone kits, and information about what pharmacies have a standing order for Naloxone. Bridge to the Mountains, PORT, and Prevention Point Pittsburgh follow a harm reduction model, which Drogowski and others describe as “meeting people where they are but not leaving them where they are.” “It’s helping people to do whatever it is they’re doing in the way that’s safest. And it’s recognizing that a person’s choices are their own choices,” Drogowski said. In 2006, social worker Dana Davis and her colleagues were noticing that their clients living with HIV had trouble adhering to their treatment. One focus group, a case of wine, and a lot of courage later, they bought an apartment building and started The Open Door. The findings from the focus group were undeniable: people needed stable housing before they could consistently access treatment. In the 12 years since it began, the 14 apartment units
have been supplemented by a Representative Payee care model, which helps people by taking their rent directly out of their income, dealing with landlords, and helping people access to food and medical care. Representative Payee ensures clients have full financial control, without some of the risks associated with that freedom. This type of harm reduction allows clients to use their money how they wish, but it prevents them from losing housing. These two approaches are housing first, but they include a strong social element that give clients a sense of community. Kaylee Shockley, a social worker who began working with The Open Door while she was still a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, said “it’s not just about the apartment itself, it’s about a greater culture and a family.” “Even when individuals move on, we engage everybody over the history of the 12 years, so they can still very much be a part of our family.” They do this by hiring direct care staff for their apartment building who are peers with the residents; these people may have HIV, a history of substance use, history of arrest, or some combination of those things. The Open Door succeeds by not stopping at housing first, which Lettrich calls “a socioeconomic response to what is inherently, most often, not a socioeconomic challenge.” According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness: “Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life”. For Allegheny county, it’s the only model supported by the Department of Human Services and the Allegheny Link, the first place those seeking housing assistance of any kind can go. After an initial self-resolution attempt, which can divert people experiencing housing instability to rent, mortgage, and utility assistance, a vulnerability assessment helps Allegheny Link determine the best program for the individual or family. After being placed on a waiting list, people who are staying in shelters, living in the streets, or in temporary housing programs can enter rapid rehousing.
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Like The Open Door, these programs aim to keep people in contact with their social communities as best they can, and case management staff work with those in need of housing to create solutions that work for them. This can mean housing non-spousal partners and friends together as roommates so they don’t lose social support, or moving someone into close proximity to where they used to stay outside, to helping someone reconnect with family members who might be able to help. “There is not one county or city resource that I work with that I can think of that in any way poses a challenge for me. They’ve all been so helpful in serving our population,” says Lettrich. It was nine degrees on January 31 when I met Carol outside a Starbucks in Oakland. She had on a pair of sweatpants that rode up a bit when she sat on the ground, and her calves were pink and chapped from the cold. She sat directly under an outdoor light; a little pool to protect her from the cold night around her. The purple fuzzy gloves and sweatshirt she wore seemed insufficient to me, but she gripped my hand firmly when I shook hers, not shivering. Her cheeks were pink like her legs. She cheerily accepted my offer of help, but when my friend and I found an open shelter, she told me she didn’t need to go. “My friend is coming to get me,” she said. I asked if I could buy her a coffee, or anything, so she could sit inside and wait. She held up a large paper cup, “No, I’ve got hot chocolate,” she said. “Can we pay for your Uber to a friend’s house?” We volunteered our phones, hoping there was something we might be able to do. After sitting in some of Pittsburgh’s coldest weather, Carol accepted a little bit of cash, but nothing else. We walked away and I wondered if we’d done enough. Our winter boots crunched over the salted pavement; breath condensed on our scarves. On the way home, I thought about all the posts and tweets I saw that day: if you see someone outside, call 311. But calling authorities before you engage the person, who shares your community space, who might be choosing the weather over a traumatic shelter experience, did not seem like a solution. Our instinct is to give only what we perceive as helpful, when really we need to take time to introduce ourselves to our neighbors and ask them what they need. Harm reduction and continuous care don’t start when a person first engages with Allegheny Link ( 1-866-730-2368, alleghenylink@alleghenycounty.us), but rather when their community engages them.
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As the playoffs commence, the leaves change, and the mottled weather of Pittsburgh brings us our usual mixed bag of meteorological scattershot, one thing is certain: winter is coming. The nights are coming a bit earlier, the clouds are rolling in day after day, and the temperatures at times will be unpleasant. If you’re getting depressed reading this, you’re not alone, and you may be one of the hundreds of Allegheny County residents who will experience Seasonal Affective Disorder. Welcome to Pittsburgh. Some estimate as many as 10 million people in the United States experience SAD, or Seasonal Depression. It occurs during late fall and winter in the United States when there are fewer hours of sunlight. Mental health experts aren’t exactly sure of what specifically causes SAD, but many think lack of sunlight is a big trigger. The theory is that shorter days could mess up our circadian rhythms or cause problems with serotonin, which is a chemical that affects your mood. Symptoms that are associated with SAD include: • Feeling grumpy, sad, nervous, or having mood swings • Anhedonia or lack of pleasure in things you normally love • Eating much more or less than usual • Gaining weight • Sleeping a lot more than you normally do, but still feeling sluggish and unrested • Difficulty concentrating fall 2019
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The effects from SAD can be compounded in Pittsburgh because of the general lack of sunlight from our consistently overcast skies. The Steel City has generally lousy weather throughout the year when compared to almost any other part of the country. Take those cloudy days, mix in short daylight hours and freezing temperatures, and you’ve got a recipe for a lack of vitamin D, a compound associated with mood, and one that our bodies make by absorbing sunlight. About 10% of adults living in the United States have a Vitamin D deficiency. Pittsburghers and others who live in dreary cities are at higher risks of depression and lethargy caused by lack of sunlight. There’s even an arbitrary formula climate scientist Brian Brettschneider developed to rank just how much of a bummer the weather is throughout the US. It’s called, the Dreariness Index. Spoiler alert: Pittsburgh is at the top of the list. “Pittsburgh is cloudier than a lot of other major cities in the country, and one of the cloudiest places for cloud cover excess, particularly during the cold season (October through March). This is driven by a combination of the terrain and Lake Erie. As you can see [from the chart], Pittsburgh suffers from both extensive annual cloud cover (especially in the winter season) and precipitation,” said Evan Bookbinder, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh.
Anybody could potentially experience seasonal depression, but it tends to be much more common in: • People who have families who have SAD • Women • Individuals between 15 and 55 years old • Individuals who live in areas where winter daylight time is very short It’s important to look at SAD in a holistic manner before getting diagnosed. In addition to therapy, it’s crucial to see your doctor so she or he can run blood tests to rule out any other conditions that may be making you feel blue. One of the common ones is hypothyroidism or low thyroid. Treatment There are multiple ways to help treat seasonal depression. Light therapy can be used, increasing the amount of light a person receives by introducing them to periods of artificial light. Counseling is another option and one of the most effective ways of treating SAD. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help you learn more about seasonal depression, how to manage your symptoms and ways to prevent future episodes. Medication can also be prescribed and taken to help alleviate some or your symptoms. Antidepressants such as Zoloft, Effexor and Wellbutrin are most commonly prescribed for SAD. Vitamin D supplements or foods rich in Vitamin D like yogurt, salmon, Shitake mushrooms and freshly squeezed orange juice can help combat any potential Vitamin D deficiencies you could have. Be sure to talk with your doctor and therapist about any side effects from your medication and check with your MD about Vitamin D supplementation.
Sara Makin is a mental health counselor and owner of Makin Wellness, specializing in holistic and clinical mental health and addiction counseling.
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Our fifth edition of our partnership with Word Association Publishers brings us an excerpt of, POCKETS—The Problem With Society is in Women’s Clothing, written and illustrated by Audrey N. Glickman. In her book, Glickman makes the case for the power of the pocket, and laments gendered differences in clothing, and access to comfort, utility, and freedom for women. The book is available on Amazon.com, or Word Association Publisher’s homepage: WordAssociation.com. We hope you enjoy this selection as much as we did.
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Let’s get back to the basic practicality of pockets, regardless whether we have enough money to put into them.
any bell-bottom pants in my size. The patterns back then often did not include pockets, and I had to learn how to make them.
with no pockets. How can I resist? So I take it home and cut open the darts or the princess seams and insert pockets.
Take a survey of your clothing, please. If you are female and you count each pocket large enough for a cell phone per article of clothing, and average such a pocket in more than 50% of your clothing, you are doing quite well. The average of our averages, though, is less than optimal.
Over the years, though I have decreased production of bell-bottoms, I have increased making pocketage, and have devised many types of pocket for various styles of clothing. For instance, many times I’ve bought simple skirts or pants and opened the side seams and inserted pieces of lining material or muslin cut into this shape:
My latest creation is a supported side pocket for pants. I build a welted pocket into the outsides of the thighs of pants, and support it with seambinding tape or extra-wide seam allowances so that it is suspended on the sides from the waistband. Thus it can hold either my phone or my wallet, down away from my body core. This is even possible in flimsy fabric, as long as it is properly suspended, or attached to the lining.
One must make certain that the top part – the vertical straight side – is large enough for you to comfortably insert your hand, and also has room for seams around the outside.
I thought about patenting that last pocket, but I’d rather see the whole world have them, than to make money on the design and have to produce them myself.
Sometimes when making pockets of this type or any other type for bottom clothing, where the pocket will ride along the thigh, I add a second pocket inside the first, thus:
Of course, it is relatively easy to make a rectangle of fabric, finish the edges, and attach it to the lining of a jacket. One need only dream the pocket, and then make it.
Even making a jacket, sometimes I’ll insert a secondary pocket along the body side of the larger pocket. These secondary pockets are good for parking change, for an aspirin, cough drop, or necessary pills or a pill box. (As I mentioned in Chapter 7, I use them for Milk Digestant Tablets, so that I can always be ready to eat a slice of pizza or an ice cream sundae should someone hand it to me.)
HOWEVER, one also needs the time to do this. And as we keep saying, we no longer have so much expendable time.
I do believe that if women’s clothing had sufficient pocketage – to coin a new term – we would have more control of our lives and the world. As we discussed before, I understand that some women want to wear formfitting clothing. Men used to do that, too, when I was younger, not to mention what they wore back in the 1400s with jerkins and codpieces and such. But I find the motivation sometimes to be troubling. Wearing skin-tight clothing on a date, or in a rhumba contest, or to karaoke night might be okay. Why wear it to work, unless the date is immediately thereafter? And if it is the case that many women want to wear skin-tight clothing, let’s find a way to insert pockets somewhere. I’ve been building my own pockets since I was a teenager. I began making my own clothing when I was 11 years old because I couldn’t find
Also as I mentioned earlier, sometimes I fall in love with a blazer, washable and on sale, but fall 2019
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If the clothing companies would offer as many pocket styles as they do jeans styles, we would have a booming market. And by “styles” I don’t mean whether the pocket has colored stitching holding it, or rhinestones on it, or a little zipper beside it. I mean real pockets of varied sizes and locations and uses. Surprise us! The most inventive pockets get our money.
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The pockets of the 99% generally are emptier and the pockets of the wealthy are fuller because we are accepting the way they do business. They can afford to have their pockets built in. GENERAL LIVING EXPENSES Remember we mentioned the days when Lil Beldengreen earned $8,000/year? Back then, she paid $26 per month for a landline phone, $210 per month for apartment rent, and upkeep and insurance on her $250 ten-yearold used car (her good friends the Pomrenkes helped immensely with the initial repair and maintenance, and taught Lil to do work herself to some extent, she should have been louder with her gratitude). At that time, a bus pass to work cost about $35 a month for unlimited rides. And any money Lil put into the bank earned between 9% and 13% interest back in those days. Eventually Lil saved enough to buy a house. Back then, though, few banks would give a mortgage to a single woman, so she could not actually buy one. But once she was engaged to be married they permitted her to spend her money.
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Now the times are different. First of all, women can get mortgages on their own, thank goodness and persistence.
new stove can cost between $500 and $2,000 or more. A new toilet is a couple hundred dollars and won’t match the rest of your bathroom.
But the expenses we incur have skyrocketed. We are paying for our television, our internet, our individual phone lines, and our devices to manage those commodities. Our car insurance costs an exorbitant amount, many of us pay for our own health insurance (often about half our take-home pay or more), apartments cost more than mortgages used to cost and we pay for each utility as well, and taxes have gone up. Lowto mid-level cars now cost at least four times what fancy cars cost back then. We don’t buy record albums and own them forever, we pay monthly fees for listening to music that can be taken away if we don’t pay.
These items used to be good investments, because they would last 40 or 50 years. But no longer, because someone has “improved” them all.
Meanwhile, any money we put into the bank earns 0.025% interest. But they charge us 20% to borrow money. CAPITAL INVESTMENTS We all make capital investments. We buy $30,000 cars, we buy $1,000 phones, we spend $2,000 on a new washer and dryer. A dishwasher can cost $400 to $1,000 or more. A
This “improvement” is really just a bamboozling of the public. Lil Beldengreen has a washing machine that recently failed because the electronic door lock sensor, which has its own control board, failed to communicate with the main computer board, causing them both to stop working. The door was shut, but it gave the code for a failed door lock and simply would not wash the clothes. $450 later, after waiting six weeks, if Lil unplugs it between loads, the ten-year-old washer is working again. Lil prefers this, because her washer does more than the new $1,200 models do, and the new ones have more parts to break. Essentially, though, the machine accomplishes the same thing as the 1970s models did without computers. It washes either rough or gently, with cold, warm,
or hot water, and can soak things and rinse extra times. Does Lil really need the machine to sense a drop of water in her red sock and therefore keep spinning for an extra ten minutes? Does she need it to sense when she has closed the door, or would she rather accept a floor filled with water when she hadn’t, so she wouldn’t have to endure the failed door lock? The machines cost ten times as much as in the 1970s, but Lil certainly is not earning ten times as much. And they also now last 1/8 as long, and keep getting more expensive with more complex devices that can malfunction, and we have to pay to have them repaired or replaced. Lil’s dad used to know how to fix these things, but now that they have computer boards in them, he has given up. Even toilets have been “improved.” Lil’s neighbor, J’Kay Ramblattner, has a toilet. Her toilet got the treatment by a plumber over a decade ago (under J’Kay’s husband’s watch; J’Kay says he didn’t object enough). The plumber replaced the float ball with some sort of standing plastic thing that breaks and leaks
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And then beyond that we give up our security with these new-fangled devices! The Internet of Things? Do we really need garage door openers – which used to last about 60 years but now last only ten – that connect by wi-fi? It takes the machine three seconds longer to start opening the door, wants me to use my cell phone to control it, and risks telling remote spies when I am home or away. Thermostats and alarm systems and refrigerators and any other device that connects to the Internet are security hazards, and I am against them because we cannot keep them safe. And they often talk with our cell phone, which may hold our financial and medical data, and which connects with our Social Security Number which we permit the phone company to require before they will open an account for us to have the phone. (Don’t get J’Kay started about giving our Social Security Numbers to the phone companies! Her Congressman’s aide told her he feels it is perfectly okay, and at the end of a 45-minute conversation she had not yet convinced him that having the phone company employee able to look at a list of everyone’s “Last Four Social” is not okay.) Lil Beldengreen’s first house had a thermostat that ran on electricity generated by the gas furnace. Old model thermostats used a doublestrip of metal which would bend based on the current temperature affecting one metal different from the other. Now Lil’s thermostat needs a battery, thus risking freezing the house when they are away and the battery dies. Everyone has these stories. Again, these “improvements” only mean that the companies can charge more for their products, which more often are made somewhere outside the country, and the devices will be broken within a decade and thus the capital investment will be amortized over a much shorter time. In fact, I would call the purchase of any of these devices an “expense” rather than a “capital investment.” Meanwhile, the folks who run those device manufacturing companies are stuffing their pockets, and the planned obsolescence reflects well on their projections. and sprays and miscalculates and needs to be replaced about every five years for no reason. Toilets are now dumbed-down, and it’s harder to get parts for the older high-end models. The expectation is that we will put a new white toilet into our blue bathroom with the blue tub and blue sink and will replace the toilet every ten years when all the moving parts break, or spend $60 or more every few years having it repaired. Who is making all that money? And is this really a good economic model? The porcelain part of
the fixture has withstood the test of time, so to make more money the companies have fitted the main body with flimsy innards. J’Kay likens it to her car. “Do I really need my car to have more electronic items to break, when those devices still don’t tell me anything further than ‘maintenance required’?” she asks. Everything costs so much more for no good reason.
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The only capital investment we have left is house and real estate. And if we can’t keep up with the taxes, we can lose that as well, as anyone whose neighborhood has been subject to gentrification will tell you.
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TIPS FOR FIRST TIME HOME SELLERS Steel This Magazine asked realtors how to help a house sell more quickly. It can be tough figuring out a price, knowing when to sell, and understanding the local market. To shed some light on how to get that property off the market and into the hands of potential home buyers, here’s what they had to say.
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Sellers ask me all the time, “Should I do this,” or, “Should I do that?” Generally speaking, no, you shouldn’t do anything major. A clean and tidy house free of smells has the best chance of selling. People have been misled into believing that there are small things they can do that will hugely increase the value of their property. That may have been true once upon a time, but this generation of homebuyers that have grown up on HGTV, are much savvier to that kind of thing.”
Before presenting to the market, focus on an organized, clean, and de-cluttered home. Buyers will inevitably place a higher value on what feels orderly and tidy.
ELIZABETH KOFMEHL - REALTOR COLDWELL BANKER My top tip for sellers is to always make the beds. You never know when your house is going to be shown. Clean out the basement; empty basements always look great. Put out a fresh roll of toilet paper and keep the toilet seats closed. Whatever you do, do not bake cookies!
JULIE BLOCK - REALTOR RE/MAX SELECT Over 90% of home searches begin online, so make sure your pictures stand out! The first ones are the most important, so focus on curb appeal. A great front door color with a wreath and some potted annuals are like putting a bow on top. We also ALWAYS use professional photography, and a first time seller should work with an agent that does, or should plan to pay a photographer themselves.
ROB STROHM - REALTOR COLDWELL BANKER You only get one chance to make a first impression. The best thing that somebody can do is paint their front door. And make sure the doorbell works. What does that cost you? $17? Amazon had them on sale for 7.99. This small investment could change your one opportunity to entice a home buyer. Landscaping, siding, soffit and fascia, new gutters... installing these things are minimal investments and can make a huge difference. Any yard work that needs to be done on the outside of the house should be finished. De-clutter. If you’ve been in there a long time, get rid of stuff that you don’t use anymore. Clean out your garage, your basement, make the space look as big as possible.
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While it always makes sense to have your house neat/clean and in the best shape possible, think twice before doing any major renovations to get it ready. Home buyers have their own taste and style, and the updates you do might not appeal to the next owners. So paint, trim the lawn, and complete any needed repairs, but don’t invest too much in renovations. Keep the price right and let the new owners renovate to their own tastes/budget!
Hire an agent who knows the neighborhood and check their stats (ask them to show them to you) to make sure they are active. Ask for recent references and call them. Have a budget to do a little prepping and painting. Get professional staging. Get professional photography.
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Artwork By: Alisha Wormsley
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THE LAST BILLBOARD: HOW AN EAST SIDE ART PROJECT IGNITED A CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE IN PITTSBURGH. By: Edward Banchs
O
ne simple, innocuous, factual sentence displayed on a billboard over the corner of Highland and Baum Avenues in East Liberty in the Spring of 2018 transformed Pittsburghbased artist Alisha Wormsley’s work into a city-wide conversation: “There Are Black People in the Future.” Jon Rubin, a colleague of Wormsley’s, had rented space for a public art display known as, The Last Billboard. Other billboard installations of his included bits of provocative thought and irreverent humor found in texts from various artists based in and around Pittsburgh such as, “We Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” “Question for My New Blog: Who Invented Tape, How Were Feelings Discovered, When Did ‘Skinny’ Become Fashionable,” and “Rachel Carson Is My Hero.” But, “There Are Black People in the Future,” was different. Like any piece of art worthy of a conversation, there were those who took umbrage to its existence. Wormsley’s sentence, which according to her website was inspired by a quote from the Seattle-based musician, Gabriel Teodros (“If we don’t write ourselves into the future, we get written out of tomorrow as well.”), was the last one that would appear on the sign as the building’s owners, We Do Property, contacted Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) —Rubin and Wormsley’s employer—to invoke a seldom used clause stating that billboards could not be used for items deemed offensive, distasteful, erotic, or political. The sentence was removed from the billboard. As Rubin told the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art Podcast, the email he received from the landlord stating their discontent with Wormsley’s sentence was brief and to the point: “There are community complaints about the current billboard. Take it down immediately.” Though Rubin tells me via email that there are no plans to continue The Last Billboard, he sees it as fitting that the property’s owners’ actions had an inverse effect: the magnitude of the message was amplified. Ironically, the sentence was originally scheduled to be displayed for only one more week. But, for Wormsley, this was beyond
irony. “I don’t understand how that sentence is at all threatening to anybody…It’s just a fact. It’s a sentence. Even that, they couldn’t deal with it,” Wormsley said. The response from the public in East Liberty surprised Wormsley and the humbling wave of emotion motivated her to push forward. She describes being consumed by a sadness upon leaving a community meeting, held immediately after the billboard was removed, where some stated they saw those words as combative to ‘their’ city, ‘their’ America.
I see more than just a car.
Instead of dwelling in anguish, Wormsley channeled her bravura into a wave of positivity that transformed that one sentence into a movement, one in which the public was encouraged to use her words for the betterment of the world around them. She approached the Heinz Foundation, which allocated funding for Wormsley to channel grant money to artists, activists, and community workers who create art throughout the East End around their interpretation of, “There Are Black People in the Future.” A display of the artwork is scheduled for October at the Homewood Library. The residents of East Liberty, who have watched their neighborhood transform in record speed, found their lives captured well by that sentence as they went from members of a community, to feeling like outsiders in a matter of a few short years. As Wormsley put it, “The one thing people were saying was that East Liberty was their neighborhood, that they had been there—some people [for] generations. It is a place where some people see these closed businesses, but it was this booming African-American space…and now people who have lived there their whole lives are being looked at like, ‘Why are you here?’ So, people felt they were that sign.”
W
ormsley views her art as a rebellion. Informed by Afrofuturism, her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the black lens. She describes herself as a cultural producer. Her work is not defined by the traditions of “oil-on-canvas” paintings; it steps far beyond the traditional. She challenges contemporary views of modern life in America through whichever medium she feels is the fall 2019
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channeling African dialects when speaking in tongues. “So it puts this sci-fi into reality, where our bodies have this technology that we can’t even tap into… Our bodies are more advanced than any machines just by the nature of DNA.”
B
orn in Sewickley, Wormsley bounced between neighborhoods growing up, joking that she lived in, “Every gentrified neighborhood”, in Pittsburgh. The daughter of a journalist, Wormsley attended Winchester Thurston School in Shadyside at the encouragement of her mother, who pushed her to take scholarship tests to every private school in the city.
best form of expression, whether it is creating an object, a sculpture, a billboard, or a collage. “[Wormsley’s] work wonderfully defies conventional definitions. She ingeniously bridges social engagement, political activism, science fiction, public art and the aesthetics of film and media to reveal lesser-known histories and fantasize about alternative futures,” Rubin said. Her vision and her drive should be looked at by other artists as a template for what is possible. As Rubin states, “If artists think their place in society is only in the discrete and marginalized spaces that art is supposed to occupy, then they will have discrete and marginalized impacts on the world.” Her work is in constant forward motion, always evolving into something sure to garner a dialogue in its wake. This includes a topic that has become important for her in recent years: the lives of black women in America. Among the works she discussed is a film project entitled, Children of Nan, which was screened this past summer at various spaces owned by black women across North America. The film, shot in a number of cities including—Accra, Ghana, Houston, Texas, and New York, tells of an apocalyptic future where there only exist black women and white men. The men perform experiments on the women, causing them to disappear, leaving one woman to go on a quest to find her sisters on a planet engaged in war. “The planet of the United States of America,” she laughs.
The film project is a result of an intersection between her passion to tell stories of the lives of black women in America and a science fiction genre that seldom features protagonists of color. “This particular film was focused on motherhood, or kind of not actually being a mother,” Wormsley says, “All of the anxiety… what’s happening in the world, what it all means and how we got here. ‘I don’t know studies,” she continues referring to political and economic studies. “I know my life and [the] lives of the black women around me. And the lives of black women are really powerful and magical. And so, I just made this film based on that. And my own personal trauma of becoming a mother and what that means and the anxiety of raising a black child in America.” Motivated by her love of science fiction, Children of Nan is just part of the deeper consideration Wormsley has for the genre, in relation to how it could be used as a positive realization of how black life can channel its history in the Americas. “I love science fiction and I love future stories and kind of this idea, kind of like this ancient-futurism which is when we create these futures that look like ancient Egypt. I love that circular kind of idea.” Citing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1981 book, The Sanctified Church, Wormsley joyfully recounts the stories relayed in this seminal work of anthropology that documented, among other things, the behavior of churchgoers in black Southern churches, whom Hurston noted were
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Wormsley describes her upbringing as one surrounded by readers, writers and artists, noting that her brother, too, is a gifted artist. After graduating high school in 1996, Wormsley headed west to study at UC Berkeley, where she got her degree in anthropology. After California, she made the decision to move back east and settle in New York City, where she lived and worked for over 10 years, even completing a recent BFA from Bard College in arts and film. Apart from her work as an artist, she also teaches courses at CMU and is pursuing a research fellowship which will keep her teaching at CMU over the next few years. The return to her hometown came by way of a residency at the Andy Warhol Museum several years ago. “Here I can have low cost of living, I can be in my studio, I don’t have to hustle all of the time. I actually live and make work… the best move I ever did,” she says. “Pittsburgh has a really supportive arts community. There’s some really great artists here. And the foundations here are super helpful. It’s just been awesome.” While she is proud to call this city home, she is quite aware of the changes around the Ace Hotel gymnasium where we sat. This was no longer the East Liberty that she remembered from days when she was chasing down mix tapes, or a new pair of shoes. The gym in the Ace Hotel was once a room where she would attend raves, she says, pointing her forefinger in the air to indicate that the spaces upstairs were used by the homeless.
Photo of a sign in Detroit sporting The Last Billboard Series quote originally featured in East Liberty, Pittsburgh.
Wormsley instead saw that everything around her was no longer a space where black businesses were thriving, or that black spaces were even occupied. She says: “America is white washed. Everything comes from this white lens. Even our history, which is inaccurate. This [white washing] is something that’s just existed, and as we start to change, that will change also. I hope, though, not in the same structure of white supremacy. That it kind of starts to break things down. It’s like a system. I sometimes think about that a lot. We’re trying to change the structure of white supremacy. But is that change just us getting higher into that structure, or is it just breaking that structure down to create something else? I hope it’s the latter.” It is this structure, one in which black and brown bodies and voices are marginalized, that led to, “The sentence” being removed from the East Liberty building—a result of fear. A system that has left blacks and poor whites in powerless and uncomfortable positions. Says Wormsley, “No one wins in white supremacy.” This fear is what pushed Wormsley to the front of a dialogue this city has been having in recent years over gentrification, and what it means to be a Pittsburgher. Noting that
the black demographic represents the largest percentage of people moving away from, “The Most Livable City,” Wormsley says that perhaps Pittsburgh is not taking the right steps to see to it that those whose roots have been sown here for generations do not feel the squeeze to relocate. “If all the brown people leave, this city is going to be so boring. If this city is not careful… they’re going to see it, they’re going to feel it. I already see it. If they’re not careful, it’s going to change the city,” she says, adding that she has been encouraging black artists from around the country to relocate to Pittsburgh.
W
ormsley is proud of the experiences she is having as an artist, challenging much of the way we perceive the world around us— whether it is a sentence on a billboard that encapsulates black life in America, or a film told from the perspective of a black woman, or more traditional paintings that highlight the racism that permeates society is what she does best. Wormsley wants her art to invoke a conversation, one that puts the viewer into a position—even an uncomfortable one—where they can challenge their own thoughts and channel their feelings into creating a better world around them.
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When asked if there was a truth that was unsettling for some in our city, Wormsley pointed out just how precarious black life is in the USA at the moment, and it was easy to understand why the response to the sign was unlike any other in, The Last Billboard series. The same response also followed this sentence when it was placed on a billboard above a gentrified neighborhood in Detroit this summer. “The immediate argument is that it separates people to say things like, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ instead of ‘All Lives Matter.’ But, if there was this unity that they were talking about, then we wouldn’t have to put up a sentence. That’s the whole point; this unified world is not working because we’re not unified. So, we have to make statements that ensure our future, ensure our existence, ensure that we matter.” A full listing of Wormsley’s exhibits, film and art work is available at alishawormsley.com
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STEP IT UP! Across 1 Rivers of Hollywood 5 Clock radio button 9 Star 14 Patron saint of sailors 15 ¿Qué ___? 16 Boxer Ali 17 Prudent item to carry in Glacier National Park 19 Van Gogh haunt in France 20 Meet imminent demise at sea 22 Swear words? 25 Bro’s sib 26 Outer: Prefix 27 ___ in cat 28 Help to recollect 32 Like TV’s Betty 33 “Game of Thrones” title 34 Pepto Bismol target 38 Purify, in a way 40 Relative of “uh-uh” 42 One of 150 in the Bible 43 Certain self-defense tools 45 Frequent NYY opponent 47 Miners of Conference USA 48 Vie for a seat 51 Egyptian icon 54 Until the end of time, to Keats 55 Music professor’s degree
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