Silhouettes

contents

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5

7

Annie Martin: Balancing barre and books

Max Gonzales: Artist most wanted

Tony Resch: Sight in sound

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11

13

Gianni Downs: The scenic route

Ian Troot: Unmasking his truth

Vladimir Padunov: Catch him outside the Cathedral

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17

19

Sinjon Bartel: Beyond the bikes

Ana Del Prete: All eyes on Ana

Monica Henderson: A run for your money

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23

25

Anaïs Peterson: Dueling passions

Sheila Vélez Martínez: Making a case for humanity

Richard Garland: A few wrong turns

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31

Mary Bielich: Music and movement

Krithika Pennathur: Giving a voice, lending a ear

Antoine Douaihy: Hopeful healing

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Baldwin: Facing the music

38

Matisse: Purrfect neighbor

Jackie Sharp: For the love of the game

39

Emily West: Politics as (un)usual

Ruthann Omer: Fixing with family

41

Daly Trimble: A selfless social servant

Silhouettes MESSAGES

A

s you walk around campus, do you ever find yourself thinking about the life of a stranger you often cross paths with? For me it starts with little things, like wondering if their scarf is a favorite hand-me-down or if they matched their backpack to their dyed hair on purpose. But the more I see them, the more I get invested, questioning where are they headed or why didn’t I see them today — are they ditching class or sick? Some of those people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, only to realize they had similar thoughts about me. Others I still wonder about.

Those profiled in this magazine might be some of these “strangers” to you. Whether you’ve seen them smoking outside the Cathedral or seen someone admiring their keys in the William Pitt Union, these stories will hopefully bring more clarity about who they are.

We’re privileged that each year new people in our community are willing to let us share their stories with our readers. From everyone on our staff, we sincerely hope you enjoy these stories as much as we enjoyed putting together this edition. hen I reflect on my time at Pitt, one thing that stands out is that our campus is not Ashwini Sivaganesh just a campus — it’s a community. As Panthers, The Pitt News we stand up for one another, celebrate one another’s successes and lend our hands to friends in editor-in-chief need. During my time in Student Government Board, I have heard firsthand stories of countless students. I realize now that those countless stories are a source of the University of Pittsburgh’s strength — people from all walks of life call the University of Pittsburgh their home, each lending a unique strength to our community.

Student Government Board is thrilled to be part of this collaboration for the second year and proud of the great stories that are showcased in this edition of Silhouettes. We hope you enjoy the hard work of the talented writers, photographers and designers that made this project possible and are inspired by the stories that follow.

W

Max Kneis Student Government Board president

BALANCING

BARRE AND BOOKS story by David Leftwich photo by Thomas Yang

W

hen Annie Martin got out of bed at 5:30 one morning this past December, she could barely walk on her right ankle. This wasn’t completely abnormal — she often wakes up sore from the previous day’s eight hours of

ballet training.

But unlike most other aches and pains, this one didn’t go away — and it could not have come at a worse time. She was in the middle of a five-week stretch of performing “The Nutcracker” with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s professional company and held a spot as one of the few students included in the show.

Everyday she would wake up barely able to walk, knowing she needed to fool an audience into thinking nothing was wrong that evening. Martin managed to perform for three straight weeks with a steady dose of Advil, ice and mental bargaining with her body, only later discovering she had a shattered bone in her ankle.

“I’m a slightly strange person so I talk to body parts that are hurting, so pretty much I’d be making a deal with my ankle,” Martin said. “‘Just get me through finale, and it will be okay.’”

The surgery to remove the shattered bone in her ankle after these three weeks of performances added yet more stress to Martin’s already hectic life.

“With any surgery there’s always the possibility that something can go wrong, and especially with a dancer and an ankle surgery,” Martin said. “You never really know.”

As a member of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s graduate academy — an unpaid group of dancers training to become professionals — Martin is on the precipice of joining a professional company.

Beginning with a technique class every morning around 9 a.m., Martin dons a pair of sweatpants as she fluidly stretches her legs and back on barre.

Learning different sets of movements in mere seconds, Martin perfectly mimics them without a hiccup — she is in her own world.

Martin glides through a series of contortions to stretch her entire body, unphased by changes in music or the instructor analyzing her technique from an arms length away. When the barre is moved aside, Martin sheds her sweats in favor of her dancing tights as the class ratchets up its intensity.

Martin starts to kick and jump around the room — constantly teetering on the fine line between seemingly chaotic movement and beauty.

Her demeanor remains unchanged no matter the movement. The angles she makes with her legs and arms remain crisp while her feet constantly remain in alignment — making these movements seem natural even though they are anything but.

With no more than a 30-second break between sequences, Martin continues these breakneck sequences until the instructor, mercifully, permits a break. Allowing herself to finally break her composure, Martin takes a seat, breathlessly panting and in a full sweat.

This is just the warm-up.

Martin’s profession requires peak physical ability, and any setback can put her behind the national competition of dancers looking to land a full-time spot with a professional dance company.

Yet, she describes her situation coming back from injury with a certain levity. Instead of viewing this injury as a potential blow to aspirations she’s held half of her life, she’s just thankful to be back in time for the company’s upcoming show.

But this sort of mentality isn’t surprising after meeting Martin. Her passion for ballet supersedes any fears or anxiety she may have about her future.

It’s what brought her to dance at the age of 8. Martin couldn’t stop danc-

ing after seeing a rendition of “The Nutcracker” at the local ballet of in her hometown of Lubbock, Texas.

Traveling to train in different cities every summer by the time she was 12, Martin came to Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s summer program at the age of 16 with the recommendation of an older dancer from Lubbock. Excelling in the program, she received an offer to take part in their training program during her senior year of high school.

At the end of her senior year, Pitt offered her a full scholarship and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre offered her a position in the graduate academy It was the perfect opportunity to gain an education and stay with a great ballet company.

Martin’s mom, Christina Ashby-Martin, said they specifically looked for ballet companies with nice universities nearby — making Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre an obvious choice.

“The cards fell the right way, and we could not have asked for a better combination,” Ashby-Martin said.

Martin is now a junior English major at Pitt on the fiction writing track and has nearly completed her degree. She’s managed to maintain full-time status by taking only evening and online classes for the past three years.

To most, franticly driving over to Pitt to take classes almost every evening after 8 to 10 hours of grueling physical activity may seem like a burden — definitely not enjoyable. Fellow dancers in the program, like Martin’s friend Allie O’Quinn, don’t understand how she maintains this schedule.

“I’m not nearly as amazing as Annie is and I can’t keep up with her,” O’Quinn said. “Annie is crazy in a good way.”

Martin considers her fiction writing major an escape, another form of self-expression aside from her dancing. She even started writing a science fiction novel exploring what it means to be human after writing the first 50 pages in a writing class last semester.

“I like the possibility to explore things that could happen or that might happen, especially the way that science fiction can comment on issues now,” Martin said about science fiction writing.

With a wry smile, Martin did admit that her schedule does get the best of her on occasion. After waking up between 5 and 6 a.m., she does homework, dances from 9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., then heads straight to class until 8:30 p.m.

She’s excelled with this rigorous schedule for three years because self expression is her guide — Martin is drawn toward activities where she can represent a part of herself.

As Martin nears the end of her college career, she is fully aware of the challenging job prospects in ballet. Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre didn’t hire any new dancers last summer, and even with an opening, Martin will need to prove herself the best among her peers and dancers all over the country to land a job.

Yet Martin has a positive attitude and is open to the idea of exploring modern dancing options around the City next year.

“I am primarily a classically trained dancer, but I enjoy doing modern stuff,” Martin said. “We’re playing it by ear right now.”

This unwavering drive to continue dancing is partially because of her passion for it, but Martin also realizes that she has a short window to seriously pursue dancing. Her mother’s dance career was cut short by injury after she graduated from college.

Martin’s an artist who found her passion when she was just 8 years old, and as long as she can keep dancing, nothing can get in her way.

“In the arts, if you don’t find it inside yourself ... then you’re not really an artist,” Ashby-Martin said. “For her, it is internal.”

4

story & photos by Elise Lavallee

B

efore Gems and Apathy could watch the paint dry on another one of their masterpieces in Homestead, the pair started sprinting up the hill behind them — they realized a cop had become witness to their work.

“We would run 30 yards, take a break and catch our breaths before running more until we got up this giant mountain,” Apathy said.

Pittsburgh’s most-wanted graffiti artist, Gems, otherwise known as Max Emiliano Gonzales, now refers to himself as the city’s “number one reformed bad boy.”

While Gems evaded the cops once again, it was only a matter of time before his actions caught up to him.

Gonzales, who graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon in May 2016, was arrested just a fews months earlier on Feb. 1, charged with 58 counts of criminal mischief for graffiti totalling $114,030 in damage.

His graffiti moniker “Gems” can be seen scrawled on various trash cans, utility boxes and walls throughout Oakland and the greater east end of Pittsburgh. Gonzales was a member of Born To Krush, one of Pittsburgh’s prominent graffiti crews, and would also tag as BTK. Though some of his tags are still up — including one he did above Sushi Fuku in Oakland — many of them have been buffed away.

Gonzales operated in complete darkness, bringing only the essentials, including a telescoping ladder and a few cans of paint. Telescoping ladders are compact, making them easy to travel with, but the aluminum frame would bend under Gonzales’ weight as he painted 15 feet in the air. He describes the feeling as a rush of adrenaline.

“When you’re out in the city between 2 and 4 a.m., and no one’s moving, you feel like time stops. You’re in your own zone. When you’re climbing stuff, you feel a little bit like a superhero,” Gonzales said.

There were no sketches for him to look at and no lights to check for mistakes, each tag emerging imperceptibly different from the last. Even when he was painting burners — larger, more decorative pieces — he moved with flowing precision,

transforming lifeless walls into works of art.

“No one’s outside, it’s just you doing you,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales, who was 13 the first time he tagged a piece of property that didn’t belong to his family, recalls seeing graffiti everywhere in the southwest side of Chicago where he grew up. He was immediately intrigued by the craft, and growing up in an old industrial part of the city full of train yards and abandoned factories provided him with an abundance of blank canvases.

According to Gonzales, Chicago graffiti places a larger emphasis on culture than Pittsburgh’s. Gonzales, who identifies as Mexican-American, recalls Chicago’s Most Known — a Latino graffiti crew from the area — as one of his inspirations as a kid.

Some of CMK’s elements, including letter styling, dollar signs, halos and other embellishments, can still be seen in Gonzales’ work today.

But he didn’t fully commit to the graffiti lifestyle until moving to Pittsburgh to attend CMU in 2012. He was warned by other writers he had met that the City took graffiti seriously — the Pittsburgh Police Department even had its own graffiti task force. But Gonzales wasn’t concerned.

The task force — which was formed in 2006 — was disbanded in 2012, making it possible for Gonzales’ work to multiply across the city. But Mayor Bill Peduto reinstated the task force in November 2015, just a few months before Gonzales was caught.

“I was their first big break,” Gonzales said.

The reinstated force utilizes a graffiti tracking system — a database of pictures and reports from around the City — to catch taggers. Detective Alphonso Sloan, one of the arresting officers in Gonzales’ case, has been on the task force since its creation in 2006.

“I work to match the photos with the reports,” Sloan said. He reports the task force caught more than 100 taggers since 2006, averaging around one-to-two arrests a month.

“When you’re out in the city between 2 and 4 a.m., and no one’s moving, you feel like time stops.”

Sloan and the rest of the task force was attracted to Gonzales because of the sheer volume of Gems’ tags in the city. The cops were able to prove Gonzales was responsible for the tags because of a backpack that had been turned in to them containing spray paint, photos, sketch books and school assignments identifying him by name.

Just before being caught, Gonzales’ old roommate called to tell him the cops visited his old apartment looking for him. He wasn’t sure if they already knew the location of his current residence, so he began tearing up sketchbooks and scribbling out drawings and stickers. He tossed photos of him and his tags into a huge trash bag.

“I probably had around 20 sketchbooks in my apartment. I was just frantic, like ‘oh my god if they come here today or tomorrow, I’m screwed,’” Gonzales said. “I thought that was the only evidence there was on me. So once I got rid of all that stuff I was like I’m in the clear, I’m good.”

Gonzales was apprehended while in art studio at CMU. The task force never ended up searching his apartment since the backpack contained all the evidence they needed.

Having no other option, Gonzales pled guilty to the 58 counts brought against him. His final punishment included a $38,141 restitution fee, 300 hours of community service and one year in Pennsylvania’s IPP program — more commonly known as house arrest — followed by three years of probation.

He recalled feeling depressed while on house arrest. Gonzales, who played for CMU’s hockey team until he was arrested, also felt out of shape during that time. He only left his house for work and to complete his community service.

But being caught didn’t stop him from making art. In addition to the art he shows in galleries, Gonzales continues to do murals and legal graffiti around Pittsburgh.

Gonzales’ most recent legal graffiti mural can be found in a vacant lot on Penn Avenue, owned by Nicholas Hartkopf between Millvale Avenue and Winebiddle

Street.

Hartkopf — who had gotten in trouble for graffiti while in high school — thinks legal walls create a way for artists to express themselves and allow for outsiders of the graffiti scene to see their works as art, and not something that is inherently criminal.

But Sloan is a bit more wary of legal walls. Between 1983 and 1993, the Carrie Furnace hosted such a wall and, according to Sloan, the artists didn’t contain their artwork to the designated areas. Still, he finds some positivity in public art.

“What I can say about public art is that it’s a deterrent for graffiti,” Sloan said. “If you have a nice public mural in the neighborhood, that wall tends to stay untagged.”

Gonzales is currently employed as the digital department manager of Clockwise Tees, a custom clothing shop in Point Breeze. Much of his artwork incorporates elements of graffiti, usually containing textual components broken up by bold colorful images of cartoons and caricatures.

He often collaborates with Jerome Charles, or Chu, who the task force also arrested in 2016. The two first met at a Via Festival party in 2014, two years before they started working together. Many of their pieces offer statements about gender inclusivity, race and other issues affecting LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color.

“I strive for like a C plus in life, but Max has way too much energy for that,” Charles said. “He pushes me to be better with my art.”

The two have a mutually beneficial relationship, according to Gonzales. When he feels like he is too caught up in his pursuit of the professional art world, Charles will remind him to have fun with what he’s doing.

Gonzales, not feeling as though he should have to choose between street art and fine art, has found a way to blend his identity as Gems into his professional career.

He agrees legal walls offer a viable future for graffiti.

“Some changes need to be made first,” Gonzales said. “People in the graffiti scene need to feel comfortable putting themselves, in daylight, next to their graffiti.

But right now the relationship is one of fear.”

6

story by Joanna Li photo by John Hamilton

si g ht in sound

For Tony Resch, a heavy bass line is black, cymbals are yellow and the key of D is green — with an attitude.

Some of Resch’s earliest and fundamental memories of music were colorand shape-oriented — a combination of textures, colors and notes that turn the sounds of music-making into a visual mental experience.

He speculates an experience of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which there is a cross between multiple senses — in Resch’s case, a cross between visual and auditory brain processes. “[Music] will have real-world textures,” Resch said. “It will have the depth of the texture of wood or bark, the repeated patterns of organic textures, and if the pattern breaks, the symmetry breaks like in nature.”

He began to make sense of it all in 2014 when he listened to Dev Hynes — who goes by Blood Orange — give a TED Talk about synesthesia. Later that same day, Resch was assigned to write a poetic response that he titled “Night with the Green Sky.” Struggling to depict a model of New York City through poetry, Resch’s mother suggested he write a song instead.

“I was like, ‘Well, if it’s about a green sky, I’ll do it in D,’ because [the key of D] is green to me and it always has been,” Resch said. “I immediately tuned my guitar to D and I was like, ‘Wait a second, that’s what [Blood Orange] was describing in the video earlier.”

Because synesthesia is a phenomenon Resch, 23, experiences as a brain process, the easiest way to depict his own visual experience is with his music — rather than having to explain the phenomenon for hours.

During a time when he was facing a creative block, Resch struggled to get specialists to believe what he was experiencing with music. Chris Uhren — Resch’s media and marketing adviser — understood the doubt many might

have had. Especially with Resch’s boisterous personality, his explanations may seem too in-depth and strange, but when paired with his music, everything harmonizes.

“When you take what he’s saying and put it toward what he’s doing, you become skeptical just because he’s so passionate about what he does,” Uhren, a Lawrenceville resident, said. “Sometimes I think maybe he’s too excited about it, but then you put two and two together and it lines up.”

Born here in Oakland to a reggae and rock guitar-playing father, Resch was surrounded by a musical environment consisting of countless genres of music. He would hear rock music resonating from the basement one day, then hear the rich rhythms of African drumming another. Naturally, he became inspired in creating his own musical sound.

“I was raised in a really informal environment with music — it was serious, but it wasn’t traditional in the writing forms,” Resch said. “I always butted heads with music teachers all the time because I was like, ‘I want to make blue R&B songs with giant golden horns.’”

With music actively playing a role in of his life, Resch found himself creating melodies since he was young. At age 14, he was writing music for guitar and piano and playing shows when he could — eventually releasing a short acoustic album titled “Tony Resch” with his father two years later.

“In 2011, I put my first release out of stuff I recorded in the basement with my dad,” Resch said. “After that, I started getting into drum programming and trying to flesh out arrangements.”

In high school, he created the band “Mount Royal” — named after a street he cut grass on as a teenager. But, after high school graduation, Resch went off to St. John’s University in New York, while the other members stayed in

Pittsburgh.

Meeting Resch through several mutual friends, Max Kovalchuk, 25, has been able to watch Resch grow not only as a person, but also as a musician — especially as he continued to experiment between the producing and songwriting aspects of music. As a positive and energetic person, Resch creates dark and moody pop melodies that can be surprising to those who know him.

“Tony’s always happy — anytime I see him he always has a big smile on his face,” Kovalchuk said. “His music is the side of him that you don’t see, I think, and it comes through in his music — which is kind of the opposite of how I describe him as a person.”

After a year at St. John’s, Resch transferred to Pitt to pursue a fiction writing degree, giving Mount Royal a second chance to play music together. It wasn’t until his first year at Pitt that he began to work on full musical arrangements, eventually writing his first electronic music composition titled “Full Length Mirror,” released in 2015. After presenting his work to his bandmate, Resch realized the clash in musical ideas among the members, leading to the band’s split into different musical directions and Resch’s solo career as “Royal Haunts.”

Simply liking the richness of the word “royal,” Resch, who graduated last year, combined it with “haunts” — a word he describes as “a place you meet up and hang out with friends, a place you’ve connected with emotionally” — to create an ambience of contrasting adjacency.

“I liked that casual nature [of haunts], that organic, blue-collar word that had a double meaning that I could relate to this feeling of prestige and beauty,” Resch said.

As Resch describes, “the pure essence of Royal Haunts” is the epitome of his song ideas — acting as an imaginative machine that shoots out songs, leaving it up to Resch to catch the ones he can.

When it’s time to sit down at the piano, groove box or computer, he pulls the collected melodies out of his mental bank. Just getting his hands on the piano keys or the strings of a guitar allows Resch to create four- to 16-measure loops or four-minute songs — matching and conflicting the energies of melodies as he experiments with different genres.

Kovalchuk describes Resch as “never stagnant,” as he is constantly looking to develop and grow, pushing as many boundaries as he can. His investment in exploring genres juxtaposes his perseverance to stay honest to himself.

“Even with his older stuff, it was this other side of Tony that you couldn’t really get unless you were listening to his music, so I think he does a good job of making his music a kind of therapeutic thing, allowing his vulnerability to shine through [in a way] that you might not get just at face value,” Kovalchuk said.

Typically, the last component to his songs are the lyrics, because for Resch, lyrics are the most essential element — they carry an impenetrability that can’t be depicted through notes and melodies, making listeners constantly wonder about the meaning. Utilizing all the influences around him — from family to personal experiences, to even Greek philosophers — he is able to creatively translate into his own sounds.

“There’s an element of fiction — of placelessness — but I try to infuse that with the colloquial language that I’ve been surrounded with my whole life,” Resch said. “There’s a ton of weird stuff that my family says that no one’s going to write down if I don’t write it down.”

8

T

HE SCENIC ROUTE

story by Marissa Perino photo by Thomas Yang By the time the show opens, Gianni Downs’ work is already done.

As a scenic designer, Downs’ favorite parts of the creative process all happen before opening night. His field is one of the crucial elements behind any onstage performance. He speaks of his process as an extension of history.

“The techniques are ancient. Even though I’m using acrylic paints now, the techniques are the same,” he said. “There’s a real tactile feel to it, and it feels great.”

When walking into his office, Downs can sometimes be found crouched below his desk, connecting wires and testing software. Other times, he sits in his chair sketching for his latest project, the sleeves of his button-down shirt always rolled up.

Downs described scenic design as anything visual the audience will see onstage aside from the actors and their costumes. This includes any backdrops, the constructed stage and props that make the scene, whether it is a motel room or a city skyline. He talks about this design as creating the world where the story takes place.

“Theater is a collaborative art, and on top of that, it is responsive to a script,” said Downs. “I’m never working in a vacuum.”

Downs’ journey began working backstage in high school, where he was first introduced to theater. He then completed his undergraduate education at the University of New Hampshire, about an hour and a half outside his small hometown of Rumney, New Hampshire. He entered college with the intention of majoring in computer science but quickly transitioned to scenic design after assisting with campus productions.

After graduating, he moved several times for jobs, landing in Pittsburgh for the

first time in 1998 to find work while he waited for another project. He would return to the Steel City after receiving his MFA in scenic design at Brandeis University in 2003.

“I fell in love with the city, fell in love with people here and couldn’t leave,” Downs said. “It is a small city that supports a huge art community, which I have not seen anywhere else.”

That was nearly two decades ago. Downs now boasts an impressive portfolio, which includes sketches, watercolors and digital drawings, along with the research behind each and every performance.

He works with theaters such as the Pittsburgh Playhouse and PICT Classic Theatre, along with consistent work out of town at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, where he just closed the play “The Humans.” Downs is currently working on two new productions — a show called “The Nomad Motel” for the City Theatre in South Side as well as “Recoil,” the final Mainstage production of the 2017-2018 Pitt Theatre Arts season.

After working on and off with Pitt for about 13 years as a scenic designer, he now works as the director of undergraduate studies, the co-head of design tech and lecturer of scenic design and scenic art in Pitt’s department of theatre arts. He won the Tina & David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award in 2017, in which he was honored for his service to his students.

When he is not in his seventeenth floor office, Downs is often below the ground floor of the Cathedral of Learning, in the basement production shop. Here, and in the Stephen Foster Memorial theaters, his team of students open sealed cans of paint while

“

The techniques are ancient. Even though I’m using acryllic paints now, the techniques are the same.

“

Downs picks up his brush to begin their work.

He instructs students in classes such as Introduction to Theatre Design and Introduction to Scene Painting, and works as an adviser and mentor for undergrads.

He works alongside other theater professionals, including costume designer Karen Gilmer and lighting designer and theatre arts department chair Annmarie Duggan.

“I call Gianni my secret weapon,” Duggan said.

Duggan said having a professional on staff who is in the field is a must, as instructors like Downs take their real-life experiences and bring them back to the classroom, where students can analyze what went into the design. This type of work lends itself to one-on-one instruction, as Downs teaches students how to design a production’s set, and often follows his instruction with career guidance.

“If a student needs something, Gianni shows up, every single time,” Duggan said.

Laura Valenti, a current senior in the theatre arts department who will graduate in April and begin her career as a scenic designer, has experienced his support firsthand. Valenti has worked closely with Downs for the past four years and recently finished designing her own show, “Little Shop of Horrors,” in February.

“I tell everyone I want to be the next Gianni,” Valenti said.

Downs passed on his knowledge of working as a scenic designer to Valenti — including how to work with design programs such as Adobe Photoshop, computer-aided design programs and Vectorworks.

Some of Downs’ former students are now successful professionals. Joe Spinogatti, who studied under Downs between 2013 and 2017, will finish up his first year of working as a professional projection designer in April, splitting his time between Pittsburgh, New York City and other locations.

“He has this palpable enthusiasm for everything that he does,” Spinogatti said of his mentor. “He just brings this energy to the room and it just kind of makes you want to learn and want to do well and succeed.”

Working with Duggan’s lighting and Downs’ set focus, Spinogatti’s field of projection design earned the team Pitt’s 2015 Innovation in Education Award.

“They are going to talk about how [Downs] was the fabric of the theater department — he’s that type of guy,” Duggan said. “He landed where he belongs and he knows it, and he loves it.”

His family played a large role in helping him find his place. Downs comes from a family of artists, which encouraged an appreciation of the arts during childhood — something he later combined with a love of building and playing with software.

“I have been around artists all the time,” Downs said. “It’s always been in the back of my head that that is an option in the world, where I feel like some people may not ever even see [art] as an option.”

For his work at Pitt, Downs’ early stages often include both nondigital elements and digital renderings. Even though he teaches hand-drafting using pencils and paper, he now incorporates new aspects of technology such as 3-D printing.

“He can go in there and paint a backdrop with you like they did years ago, or he can take you to the computer and teach you how to render it so we can print that drop,” said Duggan. “He’s kind of a renaissance guy in that way.”

For the upcoming Pitt show “Recoil,” Downs is mentoring scenic designer Cassandra Canavan — a natural sciences and theatre arts student — in her first production. He’s also serving as the show’s projection and sound designer, the latter an element he has yet to work with.

“I am pretty fearless when it comes to technology and just trying stuff out,” Downs said. “And design is the same regardless, it’s just a different medium.”

Duggan remarked that one of her favorite things to do is watch one of Downs’ introductory painting classes, where students of all skill levels learn to paint on a massive scale for the first time. Many of the students are actors and first-time painters and are often nervous to begin, but Downs’ patient instruction leads to the students being confident artists by the end of the term.

“I’ve never really understood the magic that he has to make that happen,” she said. “I keep trying to steal that magic, but I can’t find it. It’s his thing.”

Through this academic work, along with his professional designs, Downs’ art physically gives playwrights, directors and actors the setting to tell a story they couldn’t convey the same way without him.

“Anything you are seeing,” he said, “that is in my world.”

10

Unmasking

his truth

story by Brandon Glass

Y

ou may have seen Ian Troost without even knowing it. It's possible he was a passing thought or a source of lingering ire. It all depends on your opinion of mustaches, mascots and kneeling during the national anthem.

He was the tall skinny guy with the little brown caterpillar named Jerry perched on his upper lip. Jerry has since perished due to a Super Bowl bet.

During the 2016-2017 school year, the senior marketing major was Roc, jumping around in the Oakland Zoo or Panther Pitt. Before that, in Utah, he was Griff the Griffin.

And last fall you may have seen him suited up in a Pitt jersey and kneeling during the national anthem.

Though his recent life is anything but normal, his grew up in standard small-town America.

“Honestly, I don’t think I could have had a better childhood,” Troost said. “I got very lucky growing up.”

Troost is well acquainted with the idyllic beaches and lush green scenery of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Basking in the summer sun and wrapped in hometown comfort, Troost knew Portsmouth had its problems. He just didn’t — or couldn’t — grasp the larger context.

“You kind of get set in your community’s ways and thinking,” Troost said.

“You see the problems your community has, which are all very valid problems and legitimate problems, but you may not see problems on a larger scale.”

In high school, he was the captain of the soccer team, and he was even kicker on the football team for a few games his senior year. When the two sports overlapped, soccer always took precedence — he wasn’t entirely sold on football just yet.

“I really wanted to play soccer in college, and that gave me the best opportunity to do so while still being able to do other things,” he said.

He decided that Westminster College in Utah was the best place for him to continue his passions. He wanted to ski Utah’s slopes and hike its mountains, explore the metropolitan downtown of Salt Lake City and meet a wider variety of people.

He did all of that, but he also opened his perspective to a wider spectrum of social problems — institutionalized ones he’d only heard of and couldn’t comprehend the depth of — including immigration and gender bias.

“I’m sitting there like a naive kid, and I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of these problems before,’ so like — not that I was delegitimizing them — you just don’t understand how serious or how in-depth they go,” Troost said.

As a first-year student, he kept it low-key, playing soccer and meeting new friends like Matt Warne.

“He’s very reliable. He lives in Pittsburgh now, but he still is a best friend to me,” Warne said.

Troost decided in his sophomore year he wanted to get involved in the community around him. This is when Troost had what he calls an “aha” mo-

photos by Elise Lavallee

ment. He was elected student body president of clubs at the Associated Students of Westminster, a group that oversees the operations of over 50 clubs on campus.

While running an organization, playing soccer and growing as a person in Utah, he also met his true love — mascoting.

“I was like, ‘Why not?’ and I ended up falling in love with it and realizing how much of a subculture it is — meeting other mascots, pro mascots and stuff like that,” he said.

Then, he had an idea. He wanted to kick again, and he was also a good mascot.

What if he

could combine the two? He sent out tapes of himself kicking to schools like Carnegie Mellon and Pitt — but most weren’t interested. He then emailed cheerleading coaches about becoming the new mascot. His plan was to build a connection with members of athletic departments and parlay the connections into a spot on the football team.

“And I wanted to be the mascot anyway — if football didn’t work out, that was,” Troost said. “I love mascoting more than anything. Actually, it worked out really, really well.”

Troost moved to Pittsburgh and cemented his place among a rotating crew of Rocs, just waiting for his shot at the football team. Among his top mascot moments was being at Clemson in 2016, when Pitt scored the upset.

“Being Roc was one of the most unbelievable experiences,” he said.

After his time as Roc, he decided to try for a walk-on spot on the Pitt football team. Troost made the team in the spring of 2017, but wasn’t sure if he would remain on the team after that season. But when he came back after the summer to prepare for the 2017 season, he saw his nameplate on a locker.

Though Troost went to every practice, he didn’t play a single minute of the season. But that was okay with him — while he wanted to play, he was happy with helping the team in any way. He enjoyed his time with the team, but missed having the time to spend with friends and realized he wasn’t quite happy with football anymore. After going back and forth, he decided he was leaving the team in November.

His interests aren’t limited to the athletic realm, though. He’s written a couple sketches for University of Pittsburgh Television and plays the ukulele — poorly — but it’s cooking that really excites him.

“They’re not necessarily traditional enchiladas, but my chicken enchiladas are pretty freakin’ good,” Troost said. “Or I make a really, really good pasta dish that has a bacon-chicken-onion cream sauce, which is actually probably my best dish.”

Cooking gives him free reign to try obscure combinations — and to flex his proverbial creative muscles.

But he can also quickly switch conversation topics from his favorite dish to his most influential activist.

His adviser at Utah, Oliver Anderson, opened his eyes to race and identity issues. Anderson challenged him on his biases, sometimes at Troost’s behest.

Troost didn’t always see why a person's preferred identity was such an issue, and Anderson would catch him and explain it.

“He did such a good job explaining things to me, helping me break out of this role of heteronormativity. I really owe a lot to him for that,” he said, his tone almost reverential.

Anderson recalled Troost’s interest openness to learn and his quest to learn “all sides of a topic.”

“Ian has always been a grower,” he said. “As soon as he learned something new or overcame a challenge, he set his goals onto the next big thing.”

Troost admitted that when he was a senior in high school, he likely would have disagreed with Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the anthem, coming from a family with military backgrounds. So when Troost knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality in October, he tried to make his stance explicitly clear.

He didn’t care what strangers on the internet thought but worried friends and family would think his actions on Heinz Field were an attention grab. But it wasn’t — it was an attempt to build a conversation, to add another voice, however small, to the chorus.

“It definitely stressed me out a little bit. I would find myself not thinking about school or not focusing on school, but doing more research or responding to people — not necessarily negative comments, just having conversations with people — which is really important,” Troost said.

Occasionally, someone will read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article on Troost kneeling and send some hate his way on Twitter, but that doesn’t bother him much. Onl++y his close friends’ opinions matter to him, and only if they’re willing to hear him out — because he’s more than willing to hear them out.

“My biggest thing is, I don’t really care what other people think about me,” Troost said. “If you want to have your opinion, you have your opinion — it’s that simple. Because I clearly have mine.”

12

CATCH HIM OUTSIDE THE CATHEDRAL story by Janine Faust | photo by Christian Snyder

V

Vladimir “Volodia” Padunov’s office looks like a curiosity shop.

A tiara, rattlesnake eggs and other trinkets line the shelves. Cluttered beneath are rolls of film. Hats from the former Soviet Union dangle from the ceiling. A jar of homemade horseradish vodka sits on his desk.

The professor himself looks like a caricature, with a direct gaze, lean frame and thinning white hair. He insists on being referred to as “Volodia,” whether that be by students or the Chancellor.

Students may know him as the man wearing a brightly colored coat who often smokes on the Cathedral of Learning patio — which he 10 minutes to the hour, nearly every hour.

“Why do I do it? I get a fashion show. I get a street ballet, because there’s hundreds of people, but they’re moving around so beautifully without touching each other,” he said. “And I get a street symphony.”

His coats, called chapans, come in a variety of eye-catching colors and are common in Central Asia. Padunov started wearing them after he traveled there to serve on a film festival jury in the late ‘90s.

Padunov said he wears chapans, and owns items such as an early 20th century lighter, because he doesn’t want to be like everyone else.

“I’m a Russian in America and an American in Russia,” he said. “So I don’t try to pass.”

The Russian-American has been working at Pitt for nearly 20 years as an associate professor in the Slavic languages and literature department and the film studies program. He founded Pitt’s internationally renowned Russian film symposium in 1999, which screens new Russian films and features scholars in film and Slavic studies every spring.

Many of the scholars Padunov invites to the symposium come from Russia — the country he could have grown up in. He was born in Germany in 1949 in a displaced persons camp. These camps were created by the Allies after World War II to hold refugees, including slave labor camp survivors like Padunov’s Ukrainian mother and prisoners of war like his Russian father.

Most people in these camps were returned to their countries of origin, but some, like Padunov’s parents, did not go back due to shifting borders or fear of

being perceived as collaborating with Allied forces.

Padunov has no memory of the camp. He and his parents were put on a boat heading to America when he was five.

During the voyage, Padunov’s parents were divorced by the ship’s captain.

He and his mother ended up in New York City on the Lower East Side — he would only see his father every few years after that.

His childhood was difficult. There were no services or aid available to immigrants then, and at first, he did not speak English well. His mother was never able to pick it up.

“There were nights when we went without dinner,” he said. “My bed was the Sunday New York Times. The paper is thick so if you put a bunch of them together you have a mattress you can put a sheet on, and then sleep on it.”

Padunov didn’t get to watch his first movie until he was 13. A babysitter took him to see Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and he was immediately hooked.

“I was amazed that you could do in 2-D what my day-to-day life was like in 3-D,” he said. “It was incredible.”

Padunov began watching four to six movies a week after that. He went not because of his fascination with film but also for the smell of smoke.

“In the movie theater, everyone was smoking, and the whole hall was filled with smoke. And I think that’s when my love of smoking began,” he said.

He managed to resist doing it himself until he was 13, when local bullies pressured him to accept a cigarette. He’s been smoking devotedly ever since.

Padunov, who loved reading as a child and would sneak into clubs in the East Village to listen to jazz, was considered mentally delayed in school because English was not his first language. He was able to get into more challenging classes after his English improved and was accepted into Stuyvesant High School in 1962.

Padunov went on to study at Brooklyn College, where he witnessed student protests against the Vietnam War. He viewed the demonstrations as anti-American.

“I’m a first generation emigre. I was conservative, I wanted to be Americanized,” he said. “I wanted to forget everything to do with my native origins.”

But Padunov’s views changed in 1968 when he received his draft notice the same day he earned his B.A. He was sent to Thailand to serve as a senior administrative specialist, removing soldiers from the field and reassigning or discharging them.

It’s not a time he likes talking about.

After returning to the United States for a few days, Padunov fled to Europe, vowing to never return to America. But during the early 70s, he bounced between Europe and the United States, earning his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Cornell and having his first experiences teaching Eastern European studies and film.

“For me there’s no difference between teaching a novel and teaching a film,” he said. “It’s just that one is written with words, [and] one is enacted in images.”

Padunov eventually landed at Hunter College in 1977, where he taught Russian. Inspired by some of his students — Soviet Union immigrants who spoke

better Russian than he did — he applied for a grant to study the language more intensely in Moscow in the summer of 1984.

While there, Padunov — at this point having been married and divorced three times — met professor Nancy Condee, who would join him for smoke breaks.

Condee, Pitt’s current director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, has been married to Padunov for more than 30 years.

“He’s a contrarian. He likes to decide spur-ofthe-moment what he’s going to do. If it’s at odds with someone else, even better,” Condee said.

When the two returned to the United States, they were both at different colleges. After they married in the early ‘80s, they received grants to teach in Moscow , where they had their first child.

Padunov said being in the Soviet Union influenced him to teach more contemporary works because he was able to meet the creators of films and plays he attended.

“It’s nice to get drunk with people you’re studying, rather than reading crap sitting in dusty archives,” he said.

When their time in Moscow was up, Padunov and Condee returned to the United States in the mid ‘80s.

Pitt’s Slavic Department approached the couple with

job offers in 1988.

Stanford also offered them positions at the time. But Padunov said one of the reasons they settled on Pitt was because Stanford had certain policies that didn’t allow smoking near the university-owned houses.

Padunov likes being at Pitt, although he misses teaching comparative literature. But he still enjoys being able to teach about the world through film.

“The greater number of angles that you learn to look at the world from, the more interesting the world becomes and the more interesting you become,” he said.

He gets creative to keep people’s attention in his classes, employing techniques such as raising his voice unexpectedly, using obscenities and “getting in people’s faces.”

In an Intro to Film class one evening in March, Padunov keeps a discussion about queer cinema going — pacing around the front of the room with his hands stuffed in his pockets — as he rebutts or elaborates on answers his students offer up to his questions.

Students raise five fingers if they have an answer, two fingers to respond to a comment.

“Why are musicals as a category considered queer cinema?” Padunov asks.

A student raises five fingers. “I have an idea, but it might be wrong,” he says.

“Who cares?” Padunov replies.

Sophomore computer science major Michael Neuman said Intro to Film is one of his favorite classes because Padunov is interested in hearing students’ opinions.

“He’s very blunt and unmitigated, which I like,” Neuman said. “He has personality as a teacher.”

Padunov still watches films frequently in his spare time, often for the festivals for which he serves on juries in Eastern Europe. Sometimes, on his way home from work, he will stop in a theater and buy a ticket for whatever is playing next. He refuses to name a favorite film, though.

“Why don’t you ask me which one of my children I love more?” he said. “I’m a slut, I’ll watch anything.”

14

beyond the story by Brian Salvato photos by Elise Lavallee

bikes

“We need to be cognizant and we need to engage in some way.”

T

he last total solar eclipse in the United States was in 1979, 17 years before Sinjon Bartel was born. So when a total eclipse was set to occur last year Aug. 21, he knew he wanted to experience history.

Actually, he knew about a year and a half earlier that he wanted to be a part of the Pitt Shadow Bandits, one of 50 NASA ballooning teams across the country studying the eclipse. He sacrificed most of his weekends for a year and half to help design a balloon equipped with cameras and research equipment that would float about 100,000 feet into the atmosphere to study a phenomenon called shadow bands.

Bartel, his close friend Maura Kay and the team of researchers found themselves in the middle of a field in Tennessee right in the path of totality.

“They start inflating the first balloon and all the kids have their fancy gloves on to touch it and it’s very funny-looking,” Kay said.

Just as she noticed that peculiar shape of the balloon, it popped.

“Everybody was horrified. And in the instant that it pops, Sinj starts laughing,” Kay said.

Kay watched mania ensue while Bartel chuckled. A balloon never popped in any of the test runs they conducted. But Bartel grabbed another balloon and soon helped the team launch a successful probe.

“I think it captures his humility meshed with quick action and genuine smarts,” Kay said.

The 22-year-old mechanical engineering and computer science major certainly doesn’t boast about his wide range of talents, interests and pursuits. Instead, it stems from a drive to be diverse in all that life has to offer.

“I’ve never been into drawing my identity too much from one specific avenue.

I’m into bikes, and that’s probably the one thing that shows the most,” Bartel said.

“But I don’t want that to be the sole dimension of my personality.”

Bikes are a large part of Bartel’s life as the co-president of the Pitt Bicycle Collective. When he isn’t riding around campus or to various destinations in Pittsburgh, he can often be found in the Bike Cave — a small outdoor bike shop where he provides free bike repair training and welcomes anybody to hang out.

The shop sits under the connecting bridge between Posvar Hall and David Lawrence Hall — a lone metal office, desk and two workbenches reside behind a black iron fence with thick concrete on all other sides. To the far left, a collection of donated bikes wait to be ridden by those taking part in the group rides or instructional classes the collective offers. To the far right, any wrench, screwdriver or tool a mechanic could need hangs on a blue and white pegboard. Shuffling between all of them to dispense free bike knowledge is Bartel and the bike collective team.

“Our goal and our statement is always ‘We won’t fix your bike for you, but we’ll help you do it,’” Bartel said. “The point is we’ll be there every step of the way, and apart from actually holding the wrench, we’ll give you as much help as you need or back off if you got it.”

There have been trying moments for Bartel in his time at the shop that extend beyond repairs, though. One was working with the rest of Pitt Bicycle Collective to establish a night for women and people in the LGBTQ+ community. Bartel said cycling has historically been a male-dominated culture — he’s even seen men grab wrenches out of women’s hands at bike shops. This wasn’t the direction he wanted to follow.

“We are trying to encourage people to ride their bikes and be psyched about it rather than continuing to build a culture that, if not intentionally, inadvertently depresses one’s willingness to engage,” Bartel said.

The shop dedicated Thursday nights in the fall of 2017 as a time for women and the LGBTQ+ community to utilize the shop without feeling unwanted. As word spread, Bartel began receiving emails criticizing this decision.

“For a lot of people, it’s a new thing to hear ‘you can’t be here,’” he said.

Bartel’s desire to share the power of two wheels and pedals took hold when he started riding more the summer before his sophomore year at Pitt.

“Having a bike was one of the most personally empowering and expanding things to happen to me while living in the City,” Bartel said. “I was like, ‘This is awesome, this is incredible. More people should have access to this.’”

Being a founding member of the Pitt Bicycle Collective offered him a forum for sharing bike culture. In doing so, his eyes have been opened to the power of determined young minds.

“Students have a lot of ability to be bigger than themselves. We don’t have the responsibilities of a family, we don’t have the responsibilities of this or that,” Bartel said.”Transportation equity has become a big personal issue.”

Transportation equity is just one example of Bartel’s broader view of where Pitt’s campus conversation could shift. He isn’t a huge “rah, rah, go Pitt” guy in the sense that he sees the world as more than just Pitt’s campus.

“We exist in a context that is larger than just ‘Hail to Pitt,’” he said. “We need to be cognizant and we need to engage in some way. To me, that’s been finding ways to advocate.”

One way he engaged with the community was his journey to the Pittsburgh Contra Dance Network in Lawrenceville the fall of his sophomore year. He was familiar with contra dance from back home in Allentown, where his sister had been participating in the folk dance. Bartel described it as a simplified square dance where people assemble in lines with partners, a definition he hopes won’t offend any contra dancers.

Contra dances are accompanied by a live band, and he was impressed with the traditional Appalachian sound of the Lackawanna Longnecks, an Old Time stringband based in Pittsburgh. Through talking with one of the bandmates, he was directed to an older woman in the area who taught fiddle. Every Tuesday for the majority of his sophomore year, he would bike to the woman’s house to learn how to play the old-time instrument.

“We’d spend an hour together. She’d teach me a new song by call-and-repeat style, so she’d play a bar and I’d try to figure out the notes,” Bartel said.

He learned more than the fiddle at his instructor’s house. She showed him new perspectives through her own way of living.

“She gave lessons for money or for trade, so she’ll set up these arrangements where she’ll barter music lessons for washing someone’s barn,” Bartel said. “Me and my friends were like, ‘Subverting capitalism, man. Great.’”

In between lessons and his teacher showing off her asparagus growing in her backyard, Bartel noticed a banjo in one of her roommate’s bedrooms.

“I was like, ‘Hey, can we try this out?’ And she was like, yeah. So at first she lent me one of hers, and then I found a cheap one. Since then, that’s where I’ve focused most of my playing,” Bartel said.

The inclusiveness of playing music is special to him.

“There are few things I can think of that are more fun than getting together with my friends and just like playing music together for an evening,” Bartel said. “There’s a sort of presence that’s really hard to get through other activities.”

As Bartel’s ever-expanding collection of hobbies grows, the question of who he is becomes harder to answer. On the street, he can be identified by his long, dirtyblonde hair and bushy beard. Some days he might wear a multicolored striped sweater. He isn’t as familiar with trends, Netflix shows or the latest memes as many college students are, but he has plenty of interests to occupy his time.

“I’m always, at the very least, questioning of somebody who’s all about one thing,” Bartel said. “Some people will tell you differently like it’s the only way to make it, but then you lose sight and perspective.”

16

All eyes on Ana story & photos by jordan mondell

A

na Del Prete originally bought the desk that occupies her small apartment bedroom to work on homework.

But now she finds herself at the provisional vanity on any given weeknight preparing to do another kind of work. She has everything ready in front of her — a tube of ColourPop concealer, a NYX Ultimate Brights eye shadow palette, a pot of shimmery, kaleidoscopic craft store glitter, a dazzling ring light and stand-alone mirror.

Her camera is there, too — ready to go as she prepares her tools. She pins her white-blond hair back as she pats a shade of lime green shadow across her lid and crease, followed by a deeper hue in the center. She highlights the inner corners of her eyes and brow bones, finishing with a latex shine gloss, mascara and fluffy false lashes.

And the glitter, of course.

“I really need to find some cruelty free cosmetic-grade glitter!” she later writes on Instagram.

When she’s finished, she takes a few last photos of the look — snapshots of one of her made-up gray-blue eyes, usually the right one, in sparkling green and opal makeup — and sends them to her computer to edit.

But the Allison Park native wasn’t always good at the art of beauty. It started in middle school — or maybe a bit before — when she would wear makeup in

secret, hiding the burgeoning craft from her well-meaning mother.

“I would actually sneak eyeliner and makeup wipes to school, and get there early and put my makeup on at school and then take it off before I went home so I wouldn’t get yelled at,” Del Prete said.

The makeup wasn’t all that great, either, she recalls.

“I did my eyebrows so thin, I plucked, like, all of them all off,” she said, cringing. “I was so horrible with that.”

She opens her laptop to skim through her photos, her eyes flitting across the screen for the perfect shot. Though her looks may have been a little lousy at first, she improved. She joined the makeup crew for Hampton High School’s drama club, and quickly rose as head of the team in her sophomore year.

“I got some experience and lessons in special effects makeup there,” Del Prete said. “But I don’t have any formal training.”

As high school — and her makeup skills — moved along, she remembers her looks doing the same.

“I used to wear bright lipstick to school every day. I would do a full face of makeup and fake eyelashes, too, every day,” she said. “I would wake up at like 5 a.m.”

Though she no longer does full faces every day, Del Prete still takes her craft seriously — treating it as a form of therapeutic self-expression and creativity.

“I kind of fell out of doing art and music and stuff in college, just because you’re busy and with friends all the time,” she said. “I feel like everybody kind of falls out of their artistic endeavors in college.”

Among these friends is Pitt senior political science and communication major Jeanna Sybert. Sybert met Del Prete in their first year while they were living on the same floor in Tower B, and she says Del Prete — now one of her best friends — is one of the most creative people she knows.

“She could do any artistic thing and she would be successful,” Sybert said. “She’s great at makeup, drawing, she’s probably great at photography, too.”

With her final JPEGs ready, Del Prete sends them to her phone for light edits, posts them to her avant-garde-inspired Instagram account — @nightmaring — and waits for the feedback to trickle in.

Del Prete started her account in mid-December, and in around four short months it has garnered more than 2,500 followers. That number grows by the day, but Del Prete wasn’t always sure about even starting the account in the first place.

“I had a lot of self-doubt and a lot of impostor syndrome about it because I wasn’t formally trained,” she said. “But I was following a lot of accounts that had that kind of avant-garde, editorial look, and I started to really like that and I thought I could do the same thing. Honestly, I saw these accounts and was like, ‘I can do better than a lot of these guys.’”

The makeup artist community on Instagram — though vast and seemingly endless, with thousands

of accounts and counting — has responded well to Del Prete’s looks.

Tarin, who goes by the moniker @taralysa on Instagram, is a makeup artist who follows Del Prete. In an Instagram message, she said she follows Del Prete because of her unusual and captivating style.

“I found Ana a few months ago, back when she was a smaller makeup page. I instantly loved her work because it’s so unique compared to what I usually see on Instagram,” she wrote. “There’s a lot of people who stick to basic cookie-cutter makeup techniques and she just does whatever she wants, and always makes it look good.”

Others responded with the same enthusiasm for @nightmaring’s looks and online presence.

“I follow her cause she is really talented and her work is really unique,” @kassandrarummel wrote.

“She is so sweet and kind I absolutely am in love with her work.”

“I’ve been following her since I started my account and I just loveeee how unique and creative all her work is! There’s no one else like her on Instagram!” @gracies.makeup wrote.

“I really admire her creative looks! [A]nd I also like supporting other [makeup artists] who I think deserve more love and appreciation,” @shharleen wrote.

Though this particular Instagram community of makeup artists — also known as “MUAs” by those in the industry — seems overall positive, there are darker parts of the internet craft.

In addition to paid deals with makeup com-

panies that can alter one’s intentions on the site and general drama within the community, Del Prete cites the very nature of Instagram as somewhat deceptive — designed to keep users coming back.

“Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Why didn’t this post get this many likes?’ and ‘Why didn’t this many people follow me this week?’” she said. “But then you kind of have to snap yourself out of it and remember that it’s just Instagram.”

And, though her hobby has become a great success, Del Prete still plans to pursue another passion of hers professionally — hoping to leave Pitt and attend graduate school this year to work on a career in counseling and therapy.

With majors in psychology and communication and a minor in gender, sexuality and women’s studies, Del Prete hopes to use these skills to help women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“It’s a really underserved demographic,” she said.

Sybert thinks she’s more than capable of accomplishing any goals she has.

“She really cares about people, gives thoughtful advice to anyone who asks for it,” she said. “She’s wildly intelligent.”

But even if Del Prete doesn’t pursue a professional career in makeup, she doesn’t see herself stopping her sessions in front of the mirror — armed with the latest palette and an army of feathery brushes — anytime soon.

“I don’t think there will ever be a time where I don’t have an extra 30 to 45 minutes in my day,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever lose that joy that it brings me.”

18

A RUN FOR YOUR

MONEY A

t 5 p.m. in her Tower A dorm, Monica Henderson begins her familiar routine — right sock, left sock, right shoe, left shoe — and ties her turquoise and grey running sneakers. Bending down to touch her toes, she begins her lengthy, 10-minute stretching sequence, needed for muscles she says are always tight. After sitting down to stretch her back and hips, she reties her shoes one more time, just to make sure they’re secure.

Shadyside and Squirrel Hill are her most frequented running sites — she enjoys the challenge of hills — but her new favorite spot to run is Downtown at the Point. Instead of listening to music like many runners, she leaves her phone behind and sings to herself.

It takes Henderson about a mile to warm up. She has a bad habit of starting off too fast, but she paces herself over time. After that, she says she could keep running forever — and in any conditions.

“Runners run in any weather,” she said.

Though Henderson, a first-year studying biology and sociology, has never run more than 10 miles at a time, but she’s training for a 49-day relay from from San Francisco to New York City this summer.

Henderson’s rigorous training process is preparing her to run coast-to-coast with the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults through their 4K for Cancer program. She and her team of 25 other college runners from across the country will run a total of 4,000 miles over the course of the summer. The group will start by running across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on June 17, and finish by running over New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge on Aug. 4.

Henderson said some of the runners don’t have a connection to cancer — they just think it’s a great opportunity to run for a great cause. But Henderson is a cancer survivor — the race is personal.

“Once you’re a part of the cancer community, you kind of never leave,” Henderson said.

At 2 years old, doctors found a tumor growing on Henderson’s left cheekbone. They diagnosed her with rhabdomyosarcoma, an aggressive soft-tissue sarcoma.

Accounting for only 5 percent of all pediatric cancers, Rhabdomyosarcoma is a rare form of cancer.

After two years of treatment, she was cancer-free and has been in remission ever since.

Beside frequent doctor visits and trips to the hospital during the remainder of her childhood, Henderson’s parents rarely mentioned cancer. She thought it was a normal thing for every child to get frequent IVs and monthly MRIs. The word “cancer” felt like something hidden under the rug to her.

Since she was diagnosed at such a young age, most of her experience with cancer was outside her control.

Because of this, she was almost afraid of the word growing up — it made her feel helpless.

“Every time I used to hear the word ‘cancer,’ I couldn’t explain it, but it made me very uncomfortable,” Henderson said. “I kind of just got very afraid

story by Hannah Schneider photo by Theo Schwarz

of it in a way.”

Then in October 2011, the word came out of hiding when Henderson’s aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. Six months later, her family was affected more directly. It was a typical school night, and her family had just finished eating dinner. Henderson, 12 at the time, was called to the living room with her twin sister, Natalie. The atmosphere was tense, and she could tell something was wrong.

Her world had been targeted by cancer again — but this time it was her mom — diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I didn’t like to think that anything had changed,” Henderson said. “I wanted to do so much more than I could.”

Henderson’s mom and aunt have fully recovered, but it took Henderson a long time to feel comfortable talking about her experiences with cancer. In her first and sophomore years of high school, she was frustrated.

“I was just very mad. I was like, ‘Why’d this have to happen to me?’” Henderson said. “You know, I didn’t choose this.”

Her mom, Carolyn Henderson, said her daughter

“

Once you’re a part of the cancer community, you kind of never leave. has felt strongly about making a difference — especially in something that’s affected her and her family directly. She doesn’t want to be seen as special, or as a victim. She wants to be seen as a survivor and a fighter.

“Having gone through cancer at such a young age, a lot of what she was feeling at that time was never expressed because she was so young,” Carolyn said.

“Now that she’s a young adult, she feels like she can do something about it.”

In the spring of 2017, another of Henderson’s aunts was diagnosed with breast cancer. Soon after, she saw an advertisement for the 4K for Cancer program. With a renewed connection to the disease, she decided to apply on a whim in September, and received her acceptance a month later.

When she was accepted, she said she was “really freaking out,” having only run 10 miles at a time before. Since then, Henderson and her team have since developed a training schedule that includes running for at least 30 minutes a day.

During the 4K, Henderson’s team will wake up before 5 a.m. and run from the morning until the after-

noon. They’ll run six to 16 miles a day in a relay-style format — that is, two members at a time will run in two-mile increments, while the rest of the team rides in a van. After two miles, the runners will switch off with two other team members. After their mileage is completed for the day, the team will participate in service and education events along their route in the afternoon.

Along with physical training, the team also has financial requirements to meet in order to prepare.

They each have to raise $4,500 — of which Henderson has raised $4,160 — and host a bone marrow drive.

Henderson said her drive was very successful, and she registered 117 donors to the bone marrow drive registry, 92 more than the requirement. She said it’s more than just a summer run — it’s a whole year of preparation.

“I’m raising money, I’m educating myself … it’s a really good thing,” Henderson said. “When I do something, I want to give my all to it.”

Preparing for the 4K isn’t the only rigorous thing in Henderson’s day-to-day life — she also balances school and multiple extracurriculars as well. She’s a part of the Emerging Leaders LLC — a living and learning community that provides a 10-week leadership certificate program and opportunities to connect with other students passionate about leadership.

“I do like to be a leader. I don’t mind public speaking, I like to speak my voice,” Henderson said. “I like to make sure that everyone is heard and everyone has a contribution. I like to include others.”

She is also involved with Strong Women, Strong Girls — a nonprofit organization that aims to empower young girls by providing a curriculum grounded in female role models. Once a week, Henderson mentors girls in the third through fifth grades. As a part of the program, they have a cheer they all say together.

“It goes, ‘I am strong, I am proud, I’m not afraid to shout it out loud!’” Henderson said.

On top of her positions in leadership, Henderson is involved in a research team. Mentored by Mary Margaret Kerr, a professor in Pitt’s School of Education, Henderson’s team’s current project looks at the role that interpreters play in children’s experiences at memorials of painful history, such as the Johnstown Flood National Memorial in Johnstown. Kerr said despite the heavy material, Henderson is high-energy, upbeat and positive.

“She likes doing research that she thinks is going to make a difference,” Kerr said. “I think that’s what initially brought her to this research.”

Henderson said she hopes to pursue a career in health care and continue the fight against cancer as a pediatric oncologist — a doctor that specializes in treating childhood cancer.

“My story’s not finished. I fought and I won, and now I’m still winning,” Henderson said. “I’m not done with this fight yet.”

20

DUELING PASSIONS story by Remy Samuels photo by Sarah Cutshall

Anaïs Peterson has a minute and a half to scurry onto a gym floor and set up a stage for her and her fellow dancers and drummers. Lugging heavy drums and TV towers over their shoulders, the members of Matrix Performing Arts Indoor Percussion Ensemble quickly create a makeshift stage before the curtains rise.

In her white and silver sequined bodysuit, Peterson gracefully dances to the beat of snare drums and the marimba, all with a wide grin across her face. Once their seven minutes are up, the group has another minute and a half to gather all the equipment and load it into two semi-trucks. Moments later, Peterson crams into a car with three other Pittsburgh locals and immediately passes out.

It’s a long drive from Akron, Ohio, back to campus. All for a 11-minute show.

“It’s pretty exhausting,” Peterson said. “This week we got like eight and a half hours of sleep in total.”

But there’s no time to rest. As soon as she steps out of the car, Peterson, a sophomore, heads to the Student Office of Sustainability for her weekly meeting with Fossil Free Pitt Coalition — a group formed in 2014 demanding Pitt to divest its endowment from any holdings in fossil fuel industries.

“Being with [the coalition] is rejuvenating,” she said, despite the lack of sleep she had accumulated over the weekend’s rehearsals in Ohio. It’s as if the chaos of Matrix reflects the rest of her life, one nearly overflowing with passions and interests.

Sitting around a small conference table in the Student Office of Sustainability, a group of about 12 students lounge in office chairs while dipping animal crackers in Nutella and talking about plans to attend future Board of Trustees meetings. Even though the group is discussing important matters like climate change, the atmosphere is warm and welcoming. Much of the meeting includes members gossiping and chatting about their weekends. Here, just like on the Matrix stage, Peterson transforms from the shy child who would give her classmates answers to avoid public speaking, into the engaged, creatively outgoing community organizer.

She admits that balancing her love for color guard and her passion for divestment, which she values as important, is a struggle for her, but she is desperately trying to cling onto both.

“I’m torn a lot of the time between doing things which I love, like band, and doing things which are important,” she said. “I’m not quite ready to give up on the things that make me happy that aren’t ‘saving the world’ things, but I also feel it’s so important to do activism work.”

But so far she’s been successful.

When the coalition of 49 organizations first formed in 2014 under the name Fossil Free Pitt Coalition, it initially brought four demands to Pitt administration — freeze all new endowment investments in leading coal, oil and natural gas companies; divest current direct holdings in these companies; divest current commingled funds from the entire fossil fuel industry and institutionalize discussions between students and administration regarding divestment.

Since then, Pitt has started a process among University staff, students, faculty and administration to discuss divestment, marking the fourth demand

complete.

But needless to say, going up against large corporations and powerful nonprofits can be a daunting task. And although flipping through stacks of documents and attending boring meetings may be a drag, Peterson believes this is a crucial part of being an activist in order to understand how decision-making works.

“I find environmental organizing to be a really weird experience because the oil and gas industries have so much power,” she said. “It’s just this very scary, murky world where you don’t know the legality of things.”

It doesn’t stop her though. The difficulty drives her, and it always has. Just ask her mother, Dianne Peterson, an active community organizer and environmental activist in their hometown of O’Hara Township.

“People always say … ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’” Dianne said.

“Actually, it’s the tree that moved to be right next to that apple that was doing interesting things. It was her that really inspired me into doing the kinds of things that I do.”

Her family attends environmental marches together when they can, organizes community events and speaks at city council together whenever there’s an opportunity. And Peterson’s passions not only transformed her family into a group of activists, but also her friends, like Eli Berman, now a sophomore music major at Princeton University.

The two met while students at Fox Chapel Area High School at a mental health advocacy conference, and soon became close friends, founding their own activist group called the Fox Chapel Student Union. Their friendship has always been rooted in activism, from going to pride proms at the Andy Warhol Museum to participating in transgender clothing swaps at the public library in Oakland.

“She definitely pushes me to be less complacent with issues, and just stick up not only for myself more … but also stick up for the people around me,” Berman said. “Especially with environmentalism, she pushes me to be less complacent.”

Peterson knows that if she wants to address issues like fracking, she needs to “get out into the world and do it.”

And she certainly does. Not only does she speak out against social issues, but she also writes poems about them.

She writes about her Japanese-American identity, what it was like having her first girlfriend and her frustrations about climate change. Whether it’s in the form of words or attending marches or speaking up at Board of Trustees meetings, Peterson is constantly striving to have her voice be heard.

And come May, she’ll be helping ensure other people can have a voice in local elections. She wrote her name on the ballot for election inspector in her O’Hara Township district and asked her parents to do the same. They thought it was crazy — but nearly a month later she received a letter saying she received three votes for the position.

“Then,” she said, “they sent back the certificate that said, ‘Katherine Peterson has been elected as election inspector.’”

22

MAKING A CASE FOR HUMANITY story by Salina Pressimone photos by Thomas Yang

W

hen Hurricane Maria swept through Puerto Rico in September 2017, Professor Sheila Vélez Martínez was already taking steps to ensure that law students like Sofia Mendoza continue their legal education.

Mendoza, who was enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico, found a temporary home at Pitt in mid-October — with the help of PVM, as her students in Pitt’s School of Law affectionately call her. “[Me and the dean of UPR] were in communication as the hurricane was happening,” Vélez Martínez said. “As we learned of the devastation after the hurricane, the initial conversations of concern turned into ‘What can we do?’”

Through coordination with the Puerto Rican Bar Association of Florida’s Student Temporary Assistance and Relocation program, Vélez Martínez — who is originally from Puerto Rico — arranged for Pitt to temporarily enroll 11 UPR students. Three of those students have since decided to transfer permanently to Pitt and enroll in the immigration law clinic run by Vélez Martínez.

Mendoza, a second-year law student who transferred this year, said she would never have considered Pitt if it hadn’t been for Vélez Martínez. After six months and a semester at the clinic later, she decided to stay to finish her legal education and explore career options in Pittsburgh because she says there are far more job opportunities in the field of immigration law here than in Puerto Rico.

“That was the only way I knew that Pittsburgh had a school of law that was really beyond in its academic offerings,” Mendoza said. “I would have never known if she didn’t make an approach to receive students from the University of Puerto Rico School of Law.” Vélez Martínez established the Immigration Law Clinic at Pitt in 2010 after years of experience and exposure to women immigrant populations in Puerto Rico in particular. The clinic typically accepts eight to 10 law students on a first-come-first-serve basis and trains them to represent immigrant populations in Pittsburgh.

“Growing up and looking at the immigrant community in Puerto Rico and how hard — especially Dominican women — were working in the service industry and

domestic industry, and not being valued, respected or not having a place to turn,” Vélez Martínez said. “I think that is what got to me.”

Prior to teaching at Pitt, she earned her law degree from the University of Puerto Rico in 2000 and attended the immigration law clinic at the University of Arizona in the late 90s, as very few existed at the time. She worked for more than a decade with immigrant women survivors of sexual and domestic abuse and asylum seekers, and headed her own firm in Puerto Rico before taking the position to launch the immigration clinic at Pitt Law. Unlike many immigration clinics at other law schools that only consider cases where defendants are seeking asylum, Vélez Martínez made it a point to equip the Pitt clinic to take on a “mixed batch of cases.” This gave students the chance to evaluate cases of domestic abuse, assault against children and victims of religious persecution, for instance, in addition to asylum cases.

“This helps us have a bigger footprint and really help more communities,” she said.

During a meeting one early March afternoon, Vélez Martínez takes a seat after giving a lecture about asylum cases, joining everyone at the table. She flips her long black curls over her shoulders and adjusts her glasses to address her students face-toface and offer them the fine-print advice that isn’t included in their readings and files.

She tells her students that before they go to a hearing, they need to prepare their case and form an evidence-based argument, but also be able to present their client as a well-rounded and good human being before the judge. She says not every case can be easily defended, but that “we have to stand our ground.”

Her PowerPoint dims as she reels out questions and ideas for two students spotlighted for the day’s case round — a portion of the class reserved for students to discuss the particular case they’re working on at the moment.

“Ten brains work better than two,” she says. “It’s really helpful for the students, it’s really helpful for me because I invariably learn from my students all the time.”

The formal class technically ends at 4 p.m., but the work carries on after that.

Students often stay and work in the office, preparing their cases and analyzing ap-

“

“

plication options — even if it means coming in on a Saturday or Sunday. Vélez Martínez regards her students as practicing attorneys. She’s made it clear to them that the cases they take on are not like the projects that are conventional of college curricula — they involve real people’s futures and lives.

Pitt Law alumni who took the clinic have ended up working at the Assistant General Counsel court in Washington D.C., and immigration firms in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Toronto.

Vélez Martínez helped Pitt Law alum Ashley Lively arrange the interview for a job at JBM Legal, where Lively still works today. She intended to go into criminal law prior to taking the clinic, but said the topic and hands-on experience she had working with Vélez Martínez changed her course of legal direction.

“With PVM, you’re invested in people’s lives, you’re working together, you’re collaborating. You’re bringing something to the table,” Lively said. “Really, my success as an attorney, I can attribute to the Immigration Law Clinic.”

Vélez Martínez juggles the clinic with her new position as the NCAA faculty athletic representative at Pitt and going to the Jewish Family and Children’s Services every Saturday to screen cases for the clinic. She accredits her management of the new workload to proper planning but also her husband, who is equally committed to social justice and supports her many career endeavors.

She also connects students through the clinic with opportunities to work with local organizations such as the JFCS, African Union Pittsburgh and the Latino Family Center. She said these new partnerships are crucial because of the limited resources local organizations have and the volatility of immigration policy in the U.S. “There is an incredible anti-immigrant sentiment in the current administration that really affects people’s access to relief and to justice,” Vélez Martínez said.

In 2017 alone, ICE made 3,831 removals in the Philadelphia Area of Responsibility — which includes Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

“Every day it’s more difficult to do our jobs,” she said. “The legal protection for immigrants — and they are scared — are increasingly being curtailed.”

Prior to the clinic, local organizations relied solely on volunteer attorneys from other firms, according to Monica Ruiz, the civic engagement and community organizer at Casa San Jose, an organization that provides resources for immigrants. Now, with the help of the clinic, these organizations have been able to take on more cases and get people to feel comfortable seeking legal aid.

“Just the mere fact that people have been able to have access to an attorney, or access to somebody who works in the capacity of an attorney has been really, really helpful,” Ruiz said.

Vélez Martínez said the communities who go overlooked are the ones she and her attorneys-in-training can best serve. While they mostly serve the Pittsburgh community, their work is part of the global effort to transform the way societies across the world support immigrant communities.

“We need to have an environment that allows women who are victims of abuse, domestic violence, to come forward and be witnesses and seek protection,” she said.

She says the clinic takes up “110 percent” of her time — but that time is of the essence.

“For me, the way that I operate is the personal connection, is the social connection,” she said.

I invariably learn from my students all the time.

24

A FEW story & photos by John Hamilton

Driving around Allegheny County on a brisk midMarch afternoon, Richard Garland refuses to use the GPS in the dashboard of his black Chevy Tahoe.

Instead, the car’s screen displayed a zoomed out map and XM Radio’s Soul Town station as Garland made right turns, left turns, wrong turns and U-turns on his way back to Pitt from McKeesport Area High School.

“I guess we’re taking the scenic route,” he said as he rested one of his gloved hands on the steering wheel and apologized for the 45-minute journey.

But it was on that long drive that Garland was most comfortable opening up about his wrong turn-filled past — and the way it influences him in his current role as a Pitt assistant professor of public health and director of the Violence Prevention Initiative in the Center for Health Equity.

Garland is now one of the most well-known and respected anti-violence experts in the area, said Lee Davis, a life coach who works with him at Pitt. But Garland was once just like the at-risk young people he seeks to help.

“I had ‘short man syndrome,’” Garland said of his childhood. “Everything was about how good I could fight.”

Garland was raised by his grandmother until he was 13, when she was unable to take care of him. His lack of support led him to become involved in gangs while living in Philadelphia’s Frankford neighborhood.

“I was trained to be a gang member,” he said.

Garland, who is 65 but looks a good 10 years younger, spent more than a third of his life in prison. He was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and hindering arrest apprehensive and prosecution, landing him in prison from 1979 to 1991.

He said he was “wild” as a “young buck,” and prison kept him out of trouble and off drugs. “I’ve been blessed,” he said. “All those years in the penitentiary preserved me a lot.”

By the time he left Western Penitentiary — the recently closed Pittsburgh-area prison, later called SCI-Pittsburgh — Garland was a different person. He credits much of his transformation to the anti-establishment MOVE movement. Garland was a supporter, not a member, of the Philadelphia-based radical group, but his most vivid memories from Western Pen revolve around MOVE. Garland remembers exactly when he learned nine members of MOVE were accused of shooting a Philadelphia cop — August 8, 1978. Though MOVE claims the cop was killed from friendly fire during a shootout, nine members — including women who held babies during the shootout — were sentenced to life in prison.

When Garland entered SCI-Huntingdon in ’79, he met some of the men sentenced for the killing. He was attracted to the group’s belief in natural law, a principle that says there are universal laws inherent in nature.

WRONG TURNS

Though his early life took a circuitous route, Richard Garland set himself on the right path and now works to help others do the same.

“We all need the same air to breathe, we need water to live, we need food to exist,” Garland said.

“MOVE kind of chilled me out.”

While at Huntingdon, Garland refused to cut his dreadlocks — which all members of the group wore — a rule violation that put him in solitary confinement. But a few years ago he had no choice but to cut his hair.

“It started falling out so now I’m back to wearing hats,” he said. It’s rare to see him without a fedora.

But if you want to see a photo of him with his dreadlocks, simply head to the Carnegie Library and check out his 2004 biography, “That’s All In It: The Richard Garland Story.” On the cover of his 306-page history — as told to the writer John A. Taylor — beams Garland wearing an era-stylish sweater and chain.

As he recounts in detail in the book, Garland remembers another date very clearly — May 13, 1985. The Philadelphia Police Department, which classified MOVE a terrorist organization, dropped a bomb on the group’s West Philly row house during a shootout. Police said MOVE started the gunfight, but the bomb and resulting fire killed 11 people, including five children.

The bombing has been largely forgotten by the city and the country — “literally stuffed down the memory hole,” as Temple professor and journalist Linn Washington puts it.

But it had a profound impact on Garland, then at Western Pen, who says officials at the prison came into his cell and said he’d never get released because of his support of the “terrorist organization.” Despite the threat, Garland got out of Western Pen in ’91 and finished the bachelor’s degree he started in jail, graduating from Pitt one year later.

Kicked out of high school at age 16, Garland was now back — this time as a drug and alcohol teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools. Then he returned to school as a student, earning his master’s in social work from Pitt in 1996. He bounced around anti-violence nonprofits for the next few decades, eventually founding One Vision One Life, an organization that tried to prevent retaliatory violence. After a lack of funding killed the organization in 2012, Garland found his way to his current job at Pitt.

Working in academia has been an adjustment for Garland, according to Steven Albert, who co-directs the VPI. Garland’s experience is in more direct intervention, so he has to “walk the fine line” between getting people services and dealing with the goals and bureaucracy of a research institution. “[Pitt] is a big operation and we move slowly,” Albert said. “The paperwork must be excruciating for someone who’s used to getting out in the field and talking to people.”

Garland’s nontraditional background is to the benefit of the VPI, Albert said.

His experience in working directly in underserved communities leads him to critique some common practices at a place like Pitt.

He said the academics’ research in poor communities often lacks insight from people on the ground.

“You can’t just research one part of a community and make a blanketed decision,” he said. “One block to the other — kids and parents think totally different.”

His solution — walk the streets and talk to kids.

“Ear hustling,” he calls it.

That’s just what he was doing at McKeesport Area High School in March as superintendent Mark Holtzman gave a tour.

“You play football?” he asked one 10th grader during lunch.

“No, I golf,” the student, built like a star linebacker, replied. Golf, Garland said, is his favorite hobby — he can rattle off the names of the PGA Tour’s leaders until you get sick of it.

“The only reason I’m an expert is because I listen to the kids,” he said. “It’s the kids telling me what’s going on.”

He takes what he learns in the streets and forms a monthly list with all the fights and beefs around the county. He sends the list — dubbed “Shot Watch” — to hospitals, schools and other community groups so they know what to watch out for.

Garland and his team in the VPI treat violence from a public health perspective. Along with people like Davis, Garland works to interrupt “the transmission of the disease of violence.”

Davis, whose position is funded with a grant from the Allegheny County Health Department, has known Garland for 20 years. Garland mentored Davis, keeping him out of trouble by constantly checking in — until Davis eventually gave in and took his advice.

“He’s always put himself on the line to help guys like me,” he said. For Davis’ generation — the “hip-hop generation” — Garland is a legend.

So when Garland reached out with a job offer when he received the county grant last year, Davis immediately accepted due to his passion for preventing violence. Garland has the same passion — he could easily sit back at his desk on the sixth floor of Pitt’s public health building, but instead he is joining Davis on homicide scenes in Braddock and talking to 10th graders about golf.

However, when he is in the office, Albert said his co-director “sounds much more like a public health academic” than he did when he was hired in 2012.

But he has years to go before he blends in at Pitt — not that that’s his goal.

Garland is the only professor who has ever called me “homie,” and he usually avoids vague buzzwords — though Albert has caught him talking about “protocol” and “infectious processes.”

26

O

n the seventh floor of a nondescript South Side storage locker facility, the industrial walls and bare floor shake with the reverberations of a heavy metal bass line.

The sound is surging from a cramped rehearsal space at the end of the hall. Inside, the Mud City Manglers practice for an upcoming benefit called Jailbreak — which will both honor the late Malcolm Young of AC/DC and fundraise for Scrap the Trap, a local activist group encouraging policy change for animal trapping.

Musical equipment clutters the room, concert posters cover the walls and “Metal” Mary Bielich strums a steady bass line from AC/DC’s “Ain’t No Fun” in the back corner.

In her steel-toed shoes and Cro-Mags band T-shirt with colored tattoos trailing up her arms, Bielich is the physical embodiment of a punk rocker. But when she talks, “Metal” Mary exudes an effusive warmth, speaking with equal passion about metal and punk as she does about animal activism — particularly when it comes to factory farming and mistreatment of wildlife.

“We all kind of walk around with blinders on,” she said. “It’s not really our fault, but unfortunately it has to be our responsibility to look beyond them.”

Bielich has played benefits and tabled for various animal rights causes in the past, but most recently she has become devoted to reforming the Pittsburgh’s wildlife trapping policy alongside Scrap the Trap.

The City’s current policy allows citizens to obtain a trap from wildlife control, trap a nuisance animal in and call the City to come pick up the animal once it has been trapped.

This only exacerbates the City’s problem, said Rebecca Reed, Northside resident and co-founder of Scrap the Trap. It creates a gap for more wildlife to fill instead of targeting the circumstances that are bringing the animals to residential areas in the first place, she said.

“Sometimes, people do drastic things with wildlife because they’re just afraid, and they don’t know and they think that’s the only thing they can do,” Reed said. “So bringing a little bit of magic into it can be a little helpful sometimes in engaging a conversation.”

Bielich recognizes an intersection between activism and the rebellious nature of the underground music scene — a discovery that began during her time as a Pitt student in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

She said it was almost second nature that she attended Pitt — following in the footsteps of her older sister and both her parents, who were Pittsburgh natives. Though her father’s job took the family to Gary, Indiana, for most of Bielich’s adolescence, they returned when he accepted a job in Pitt’s athletic department.

Growing up, Bielich discovered new music by plodding through her older brothers’ record collection, perusing the local record store and taking note of the band T-shirts older kids in the neighborhood were wearing.

“It was before the discerning taste of music,” she said. “You just bought everything. It was great exposure to just music in general.”

Bielich began attending makeshift punk shows with her older sister when she moved to Indiana. These were often held at skate rinks or community centers — where the underground punk scene then existed in small towns.

When she got to Pittsburgh, Bielich found a flourishing punk and metal scene at places like Eide’s Entertainment, which employed people from local bands such as Half Life, Eviction and Bird of Prey. Bielich said the employees would recommend underground bands to each customer based on what records they bought.

“Everybody loved metal and punk, they wore it on their sleeve — you either looked like a punk thrasher or you looked like a punk rocker,” she said. “But everybody loved all kinds of music, so everybody’s still playing music.”

Her education existed as much in communities and spaces outside the classroom as it did in the classical jazz curriculum she studied. When her classmates were studying in Hillman Library, she was playing underground punk shows at local venues like the Electric Banana — now a family restaurant run by the same owners.

“I wasn’t looking for the next party, I was looking for the next show or the next gig and then trying to balance it with school,” she said. “I had too many balls in the air, and they were falling all over the place.”

On one occasion, Bielich dragged herself to class in a state of near-exhaustion after playing a metal show in Buffalo the night before. Rather than receiving backlash from her jazz instructor, Bielich was met with an acceptance and understanding she hadn’t expected.

“He’s like, ‘Oh, so you missed class cause you were gigging,’ in his jazz lingo, and I said, ‘Yeah,’” Bielich said. “He said, ‘Oh, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.’”

At the turn of the decade, punk culture had begun to permeate Pitt’s academic atmosphere. Bands would even host frequent punk shows and benefits for various causes in on-campus buildings such as the William Pitt Union and David Lawrence Hall.

The first punk benefit concert Bielich ever played was an anti-vivisection show held in David Lawrence. A lineup of mostly unknown punk bands from Western Pennsylvania took the “stage” directly in front of the blackboard in a first-floor lecture hall, pulling a crowd of about 500 people and taking a stand against animal testing.

Bielich suspects the raucous nature of these shows is what brought the on-campus punk benefits to an end.

“Everyone is there for the cause,” she said. “Then occasionally someone rips a urinal off the wall and there’s no more shows.”

Bielich attended Pitt during the years when the underground music scene

was beginning to thrive. In the college community, these interests culminated at WPTS — Pitt’s student radio station — where Bielich found herself surrounded by individuals who were constantly on the fringe on independent music.

“It was always college radio that gave bands like that their first chance to be played on the radio,” she said. “And it wasn’t about commercial success ... a lot of us obviously snubbed our nose at commercial success, because we were the underground.”

During her time spent at WPTS, Bielich hosted a metal show, communicated with label representatives and interviewed bands touring through Pittsburgh.

She also utilized the skills she picked up at WPTS in her postgrad years, working as a sales representative for record distributors and labels while continuing to play music.

Bielich now receives her main source of income as a vehicle operator for Aptiv, an autonomous software company in Pittsburgh, allowing her to play in four different bands — Derketa, the Mud City Manglers, Behind Enemy Lines and Penance — in her spare time. These bands each identify as being within a different subgenre — death-doom metal, high octane punk rock and roll, anarcho-crust punk and doom metal, respectively.

Sharon Bascovsky, lead vocalist and guitarist of Derketa, said Bielich’s packed schedule — playing in multiple bands combined with her day job and volunteer work — makes scheduling time with her difficult.

Derketa still finds time to rehearse weekly and play shows at local venues like Howler’s and the Smiling Moose. Between these performances, Bascovsky writes original songs for Derketa, often joined by Bielich, who provides the harmonies.

“I don’t think people give her credit for her talent because she comes across so humble and laid-back, but I’ve learned so much from playing with her,” she said. “She doesn’t really talk about it either, but I don’t think people realize how smart she really is.”

Downtime doesn’t seem to exist for Bielich, but she said it’s become second nature to spend her free time rehearsing instead of catching a movie or spending the night in. She doesn’t chase the elusive “work-life balance” — she prefers to follow her instincts.

“Have yourself covered, protect yourself as much as you can, but don’t lose that energy and that drive to keep doing what you feel you need to be doing,” she said. “And always find time to put back into the world.”

28

Giving a voice, lending an ear

story by Sarah Shearer photos by Sarah Cutshall

K

rithika Pennathur has a story to tell, but it’s not about her.

Pennathur, a Pitt junior, may spend her days speaking at events or leading advocacy workshops in clubs on campus — but over coffee you’ll have her undivided attention and the feeling that she has all the time in the world.

“You can just write at the top of my profile, ‘Krithika just likes to listen,”’ she said. “‘That’s all she likes to do.’”

From a young age, Pennathur could tell she wasn’t like the kids she grew up with. Whether taking ballet, jazz and tap classes at South Side Dance or sitting with her nose in a book at Winchester Thurston School, Pennathur had a vague but sure feeling of unbelonging — and a feeling that she wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

She developed a love for books, though hardly any of them were written by or about women who looked like her — a petite Indian girl with a wild mane of dark hair flowing down to her waist.

“I was very much attuned to other cultures not being represented and other sexualities not represented in literature,” Pennathur said. “Or they’re misrepresented.”

But in college at Pitt — where she’s majoring in gender, sexuality and women’s studies, along with English writing and history — Pennathur decided to make her voice heard. With the birth of her club, Pitt Unmuted, she’s created a space for her voice — and a lot of other ones, too.

Pennathur set Unmuted in motion with a Facebook post last summer to gauge Pitt students’ interest in the club. The focus would be wide — sexual assault, relationship abuse, issues in the judicial system and other current events — and the club would allow for discussion and education on these topics as well as offer an online platform for both male and female assault survivors to share their stories.

Pennathur, who has a “personal connection to the cause,” said the support she received for the idea overwhelmed her.

“That huge response [on Facebook] showed that people needed this,” she said.

The club has held regular meetings since the beginning of the 2017-18 school year with the support of Unmuted’s faculty adviser, Laura Stamm, but only became officially Pitt affiliated in January.

Jacqueline Souza, Pennathur’s good friend and Unmuted’s vice president, said members are thankful for the club because they don’t see the University providing the kind of support for assault victims that they need.

Pennathur agrees, citing the death of Pitt junior Alina Sheykhet in October as one case in which Pitt neglected to directly address the incident and issues like intimate partner violence.

“It was a really big blow to students,” she said. “Upsetting is an understatement.”

This is the kind of silence Pennathur and the members of Unmuted combat every time they meet, validating those who haven’t felt they could voice their experiences and uplifting those who feel isolated.

“It’s so hard,” she said, “because survivors don’t owe you their stories, but they deserve a place where, if they want to share their story, they should be able to.”

The club isn’t only for survivors, though. Pitt senior English and economics major Matthew Walker, who has three friends who have experienced assault and partner violence, attends the club as a way to support them.

“It’s definitely a place of healing,” Walker said.

Pennathur aims to make each meeting as interactive as possible, engaging members to brainstorm ways they can uplift women and other marginalized groups. She calls on club members by name with a warm familiarity as she writes their input on a whiteboard.

Though Pennathur founded the club and is its president, she prefers to stay in the background.

“It’s really led by the people who are in the club, the people that continue to share their stories,” she said. “I don’t impose a certain vision for the club except for it to serve as an intersectional platform.”

Pennathur hesitates to bring any kind of focus herself. For the first time in an hour-long conversation, she is short for words when asked to talk about a time she’d uplifted someone else.

“This is difficult for me,” she said, “because as you probably notice, I’m not the kind to want to talk about myself.”

Though Pennathur would rather listen to others than share about her own experiences, her friends can confirm what anyone would guess from meeting her — she speaks to inspire.

“We became friends on Facebook before real life, and she’d always like every single comment and post I made on Facebook,” Khusbu Patel, a Pitt sophomore and neuroscience and psychology major, said. Patel describes Pennathur as one of her best friends. “She’s very supportive ... definitely my number one hype woman.”

“I could write an essay on her,” Souza said. “I’m constantly amazed at how tireless she is. She spreads herself so thin, but you don’t see the negatives that come along with that.”

Souza isn’t the only one to notice how involved Pennathur is. In addition to serving as Unmuted’s president, she is the volunteer coordinator for Pitt Girl Up, an international women’s rights advocacy group, serves on the board for Pitt Color TV, a startup organization at Pitt which serves as a platform for people of color, and is involved with Pitt’s South Asian Student Association. Pennathur is also a part of the sexual assault prevention month task force.

It’s a heavy workload, one Pennathur said her parents were initially worried about her taking on.

“My dad thinks [my work with Unmuted] is I’m like doing the job of three people,” she said. Her mother, Revathi Pennathur, said that though she was concerned about her daughter’s workload, she always encourages her to take a few hours to rest.

“That’s my big thing with her,” Revathi said.

So, what does a woman with three majors, two minors, a certificate and countless extracurricular involvements do to relax?

“I try new dessert places and coffee places,” Pennathur said. “I’ll just go into different places and try their desserts.”

But don’t ask Pennathur for a favorite sweets shop recommendation — she’ll direct you to her own kitchen, saying her mother’s recipes are some of her favorites.

Pennathur’s relationship with her family, which resides in Pittsburgh but hails from South India, has had a strong influence in shaping her into who she is today — whether she’s standing in the kitchen making Indian desserts like gulab jamun or saying her morning prayers.

Pennathur is Hindu — a faith that, between passed-down necklaces and long Sundays spent at the temple, weaves itself deeply with her identity.

“My grandma gave me this when I graduated high school,” Pennathur said as she pulled back her sleeve to reveal a golden, intricately designed bangle.

Both of Pennathur’s grandmothers — “pathi” in her native language Tamil — live in India. She sees them only about once a year because of the travel distance.

“I always felt sad … because I could never go to ‘Grandma’s house.’ But this kept me grounded,” she said of the jewelry, “like, they’re with me.”

Pennathur’s passion for activism didn’t take root until high school, but the adversity she faced since starting school for her race and religion contributed to her devotion to intersectionality in her advocacy.

Pennathur’s advocacy and leadership of Pitt Unmuted may have been college creations, but intersectionality and diversity run deep wherever she’s involved.

And as for her role models? There are no shortage of those, either.

“The women in my family are my earliest heroes. Their strength — I’m a first-generation American,” she said. “A lot of people on this campus inspire me, and some of them don’t necessarily know it.”

But as much as Pennathur does to uplift and give voice to students, some still feel isolated and shamed by their stories.

“My heroes,” she said, “I haven’t met them all yet, because their stories aren’t being told.”

30

HOPEFUL H E A L I NG Dr. Antoine Douaihy is hooked on helping others recover from addiction, but that wasn’t always his plan.

story by Grant Burgman | photos by Thomas Yang

D

r. Antoine Douaihy didn’t think he would end up working as an addiction psychiatrist when he was growing up in Lebanon and France.

He wanted to be a classical ballet dancer.

Douaihy discovered his passion for dancing when he was 9 years old — and he thought he would pursue it as a career throughout much of his childhood.

His passions have motivated him since he was a young ballet dancer in France — during his time at a local dance studio in Syracuse, New York, when he came to America and still to this day. He’s maintained his slight, athletic build from his dancing days. He sees a connection between his time as a dancer and his current professional life.

“To me, dancing was a way to express myself … to be more in touch with who I am,” Douaihy said. “This is where the similarity is probably the common denominator.”

In both dancing and medicine, Douaihy values the connections that he can make with people, whether they’re colleagues, patients or audience members.

“It’s very much similar when it comes to being in this place when I’m connecting with patients,” he said. “So in a sense, when you’re really dancing, you’re on the stage, you’re connecting with people. You’re affecting people on some level.”

Douaihy is now, among other things, the senior academic director for addiction medicine services at UPMC. He found his interest in addiction medicine during his psychiatry residency at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in the ‘90s.

Douaihy’s original plan was to work with patients with mood disorders.

It wasn’t until one of his mentors, Dr. Eugene Tinelli, suggested he take a job at a veteran’s hospital that he became interested in the field of addiction.

Tinelli suggested Douaihy do a rotation on the addiction floor of the VA hospital in his first year to explore his options. Wary of working with addiction patients, Douaihy cautiously took the chance.

“I went with preconceived notions. Is it going to be rewarding working with that population? Do these people change?” Douaihy said. “From there it was kind of an instant chemistry. Working with that population helped me a lot to debunk my own preconceived notions.”

It was there that Douaihy discovered motivational interviewing after Tinelli gave him a book on the topic.

Motivational interviewing is a therapeutic technique that helps patients find internal motivation to change their behaviors. Douaihy uses this in place of confrontational approaches like interventions.

“Motivational interviewing has been the foundation of my career,” Douaihy said. “It has become like a way of living, because I believe in what

I’m doing and how I’m doing it.”

Douaihy’s interest in motivational interviewing led him to eventually co-edit a similar book on the technique, designed for medical trainees, in 2014.

“You accept the person for who they are,” Douaihy said. “You don’t necessarily accept their behaviors, but you accept the person and you believe in their ability to change.”

Douaihy found this more empathetic approach useful in working with patients struggling with addiction. He values the trust that his patients have in him, so he was reluctant to share specific stories.

“These are people who struggled, who tried very hard to change their lives and are stuck in a vicious cycle,” Douaihy said.

He said it was those patients who really solidified his interest in the field of addiction psychology.

“I got hooked on that kind of work,” Douaihy said with a laugh, acknowledging the irony.

After finishing his term at Syracuse in 1996, Douaihy did addiction work out of a private practice that he set up in Ogdensburg, New York, for a few years. But it wasn’t long before he wanted something more.

Inspired by his mentors at Syracuse, he wanted to find work in academia, initially planning on heading to the West Coast. But when things didn’t work out after an interview for a job in San Francisco, Douaihy found himself in Pittsburgh.

“I ended up interviewing here, in a way, by default,” Douaihy said. “I never thought I was going to end up in Pittsburgh for 18 years.”

Since arriving on campus in 2000, his passions are divided between clinical research and training and mentoring medical students. One of his former mentees, Alexandra Sansosti, a third-year medical student, worked with Douaihy last July and August.

Even though Sansosti plans to make a career in general surgery — not addiction psychiatry like Douaihy — she found Douaihy to be a valuable teacher and guide.

“He is the most loyal, dedicated mentor that I have ever encountered. I am talking in my entire educational career,” Sansosti said.

She remembered one patient in particular from her rotation last summer who had been admitted to rehab several times in the last few years. Douaihy stuck with her when others were ready to give up. Another physician told Sansosti that they didn’t know if the patient could be helped since she was so self-destructive.

“[Douaihy] had said to me, ‘Alexandra, this is the population that we work with. This is not out of the ordinary. And if you give up on these people, they’ll never trust the medical system. And they’ll never come back. And that’s when you lose people. That’s when drug addiction becomes deadly,’” Sansosti said.

Douaihy was able to keep the patient on the floor until she was ready to enter inpatient rehab, an experience Sansosti described as “eye-opening.”

Cecilia Fichter-DeSando, the prevention manager for addiction medicine services at UPMC, says Douaihy is similarly compassionate and encouraging with his colleagues.

Fichter-DeSando and Douaihy were part of a team looking to help pass the Pennsylvania Clean Indoor Air Act — a law that prohibits smoking in a public place or workplace — in 2008. She said Douaihy was vital to getting the law passed and helped keep her encouraged throughout.

“I just said, ‘When is this going to happen?’ and he said, ‘Cele, this is a culture change, and culture change happens slowly — and we’re going to do this if we keep working at it together,’” Fichter-DeSando said.

According to Fichter-DeSando, he researched and sent articles to other professionals in the field for months explaining the benefit of smoke-free public places.

The research he found showed that people recovered from illness and addiction quicker if there were smoke-free spaces available to them.

“He’s not autocratic,” Fichter-DeSando said. “Even though he firmly believes what would be best, he wants you to come to your own decision.”

Douaihy’s line of work has come to the forefront of both local and national conversations as western Pennsylvania and the United States as a whole have found themselves enwrapped in an opioid addiction crisis.

In Pennsylvania, 38 out of every 100,000 deaths during 2016 was due to overdose — the fourth highest total in the nation, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Douaihy has seen the effects of the opioid epidemic firsthand in his clinical work.

“This has to be a collective responsibility. That’s not just really the physicians that are prescribing … that’s not gonna work. Everybody has a responsibility — communities have a responsibility,” Douaihy said.

He wants the public to look at the victims of the crisis in the same way that he looks at his patients and students.

“It’s about human beings that are suffering,” he said. “All this work revolves around empathy.”

32

story by Rachel Glasser photos by Thomas Yang

F A C I NG

I

T HE MUSIC

t was a chronic condition.

Dead keys, they said, and the prognosis was bleak. More than 50 years of occasional aggressive banging coupled with normal wear and tear had made Baldwin mute. His hammers were dull and worn. When they hit the strings, he uttered no sound.

The recommended treatment — a complete hammer replacement — could run his caregivers around $4,000 at the very least. They didn’t have that kind of money.

And so Baldwin sat in the corner of the William Pitt Union lower lounge trying to remember how or when he got there. The days blurred together as he watched the sun rise and fall from the long windows encasing the room.

An anonymous donor came forward and snapped Baldwin from his stupor.

There was a glimmer of hope. The woman couldn’t bear to see Baldwin sitting there, neglected, day in and day out. After all, she thought, what good is a piano that can’t be played?

She gave a hearty chunk of change to Pitt Arts, a division of Student Affairs that offers students affordable access to the arts. It was her vision that one day, not only would Baldwin regain function and mobility, but students could play him.

The donor entrusted Annabelle Clippinger, the director of Pitt Arts, with his repair. The first repairman sized up Baldwin and brushed him aside. Unfixable, he said. Too old.

But Clippinger wasn’t satisfied and sought a second opinion. She found a registered piano technician — a Mr. Michael Mezhinsky trained in Moscow — to do the job.

Even with the anonymous donation, there was nowhere near enough money for the needed hammer replacement. But Mezhinsky was a reasonable guy, and he offered a temporary fix — shaving Baldwin’s hammers.

It would only run them about $1,000 instead of $4,000 or more. The shaving

would extend Baldwin’s life, but at some point, the keys would fail again.

Clippinger was determined to make it work. But she still needed more money, even for the shaving. She contacted the donor again to ask if she would consider donating more money. The donor doubled her contribution, and the donation covered the cost of the shaving as well as a lock and cover to keep the piano safe from unauthorized passersby.

Mezhinsky worked meticulously to file the faulty hammers. He grasped their wooden ends, reshaping the felt casing on each hammer until it regained some semblance of the necessary egg shape.

The procedure was risky. Mezhinsky discovered other technicians had filed the hammers over the years, and the hammers’ felt had nearly worn away. But he gave it his best. After filing, he repositioned the hammers and pressed a key.

The notched felt made contact with string. Sound broke his silence, and Baldwin was reborn.

Baldwin had full musical range, a touched-up cabinet, a fabric cover to keep him warm and dust- and scratch-free and a lock to protect his keys from abuse.

The Union front desk would unlock Baldwin’s cover for any Pitt student wishing to play him. But Baldwin found himself sitting for long stints at a time with no visitors.

It was the damn Yamaha in the Union Jazz Hall, every time. Students frequently picked the cheaper Japanese upright over Baldwin, an American-made grand. Some claimed the sound of the Yamaha was brighter. Others desired an audience, and the Jazz Hall — catty-corner to the lower lounge but closer to the Union’s main entrance — offered a more public location for playing.

The sound of the Yamaha’s music tormented Baldwin, and his self-esteem diminished by the day. Seemingly, Baldwin was worth more than the Yamaha — while new Baldwin grand pianos cost between $21,000 and $42,000, new Yamaha upright pianos cost between $4,400 and $18,900. Yet Baldwin did not find

these numbers comforting. In self-worth, Baldwin was not valuable enough.

Baldwin found his only solace in the students that did visit him, and he tried his best to please them with his full sound. But even these students complained. He’s old, one said, and the keys “stick” — failing to bounce back instantaneously. Baldwin wondered how the students could expect him to immediately bounce back after being ignored for so long.

Despite the grief they gave him, Baldwin enjoyed the music they made, and the passion with which they passed along to him through their fingers. Sometimes it was neo-soul piano, a mix of R&B and jazz, snappy rhythms with creative chords. Other times it was ACG — anime, comic and games music — the score originating from video games such as the Legend of Zelda.

Baldwin took the most pride in the human interactions that piano playing produced. When Yanbo Wang, a GIS master’s student, played ACG music, Baldwin would watch as other students who recognized the songs approached Wang and conversed with him.

Baldwin, like Wang, was struck by how the piano gave students of different nationalities and backgrounds a reason to get to know each other.

Baldwin relished in the emotion that reverberated through his strings, his wooden construction and throughout the room. He tried to learn as much about the outside world from the students as he could. One sophomore, Eric Reynolds, combined spoken word and piano when he played. His hands floated about the keys as he slammed about current events and social issues, addressing topics such as police brutality in his poems. Metaphors representing the Boston bombing as Bigfoot and the fear of growing up as the Muffin Man were difficult for Baldwin to digest, but he savored the words and the music and the feeling.

But most of the time, Baldwin still sat alone. Perhaps if others knew his story, he thought, they would play him more. He just wanted people to understand who he was.

One day, two girls sauntered into the Union lobby and sat down on the cushioned chairs near the building elevators. Both editors of The Pitt News, they were looking for some sort of inspiration.

Music migrated to their ears from the Jazz Hall Yamaha, and an idea dawned on them. They needed a story, and they needed a subject. Though inanimate objects had never been chosen before, they decided they would tell the story of the Jazz Hall Yamaha piano.

Of course, Baldwin thought, as if the Yamaha didn’t already get enough attention. The girls called their friend, another editor of The Pitt News, explained the idea to her and asked her to write the piece.

Slightly distracted at the time and unenthused, the friend agreed.

The bouncy, curly-haired girl’s first stop was the Pitt Arts office.

She heard the Yamaha piano had an interesting history and was determined to get to the bottom of it. She was led to Clippinger’s office, where she explained what kind of information she was looking for.

To her dismay, Clippinger knew very little about the Yamaha piano. The real story, Clippinger said, was Baldwin’s. He had battled all sorts of adversity — dead keys, a major repair — and in the end, he emerged victorious.

The girl, conflicted, said she would talk to the editor-in-chief about changing the story’s focus. On one hand, Baldwin had a more complex history. On the other hand, more students played the Yamaha.

She took the Union elevator from the Pitt Arts office down to the main floor. She turned the corner, walked through the Jazz Hall, past the Yamaha, and into the lower lounge. Baldwin sat in the corner, quiet as ever, wrapped comfortably in his quilted sleeve.

His isolation did not detract from the story, she thought, but rather enhanced it. She empathized with the piano, and to her, he felt human. She realized that his story was the one worth telling.

And Baldwin wanted her to tell his story. He asked that she tell it honestly, completely. Intimately. She heard him and promised that she would.

34

For the love of the game Jackie Sharp was encouraged to put her hockey career on hold after a startling medical discovery, but that didn’t keep her from the game she loves. story by Trent Leonard If you had told Jackie Sharp two years ago that she would eventually become the first Pitt women’s ice hockey player to have her number retired, she would have thought you were crazy. At that point, there was no women’s hockey team at Pitt, and Sharp hadn’t played organized ice hockey in nearly eight years.

“I loved hockey as a little kid. But I wasn’t allowed to play — my parents wouldn’t let me,” Sharp said. “It wasn’t until I was 11, when I begged and begged them, that they finally said I could play in-line [roller] hockey, no checking.”

Sharp, a Pittsburgh native, played competitive roller hockey for three years — often on boys travel teams. During her first year in high school, though, she talked her mom into letting her play ice hockey for the nearby Taylor Allderdice Dragons.

She played for just half a season before suffering a devastating setback — but the injury didn’t occur on the ice.

Sharp was walking home from school one day on her usual route, which took her through Oakland. While crossing the intersection at Fifth Avenue and Atwood Street, she was struck by an oncoming car that ran a red light.

“I was actually fine, for the most part. I had this really thick laptop in my backpack, and it snapped in half, which saved my back,” Sharp said.

Paramedics rushed her to the hospital, where doctors performed a series of X-rays and scans to detect any underlying damage. They didn’t find any significant injuries resulting from the collision, aside from a few bumps and bruises. They did, however, discover that Sharp was missing half of her C4 vertebra in her neck — a defect that had been present since birth but previously went undetected.

Then she heard three life-changing words from the doctor — no contact sports. Her mom made sure she obeyed. With that prognosis, Sharp’s ice hockey career was over just a few months after it began. But it didn’t take long for her energy to be channeled into another activity — robotics.

Two weeks after the accident, Sharp joined the robotics team at her high school, the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy, after one of her friends suggested she check it out. She felt an instant connection.

photo by Theo Schwarz

“I fell in love again,” Sharp said. “I went from being ‘all hockey’ to now being ‘all academic stuff.’”

As part of the team, she competed in robotics and battlebots tournaments throughout her high school career. Sharp left high school in 2013 as a member of her school’s inaugural graduating class. She decided to pursue robotics as a career, so she enrolled in the mechanical engineering program at Pitt and at the same time became the first member of her family to go to college.

Sharp often worked a full-time, 40-hour week on top of an already-busy class schedule during her first two years to help pay tuition, including jobs as a skate guard, flower deliverer, tutor and babysitter. Sharp also worked as a Resident Assistant — two years at Panther Hall and one at McCormick Hall — and it was during this time that the Pitt women’s ice hockey team started to take shape.

“I was sitting there, helping out with some Green Team event,” Sharp recalls. “And this freshman comes up to me at Sutherland [Hall], and we get to talking about hockey, how she plays and how I used to play. And she says, ‘Well, we’re gonna start a women’s hockey team!’ And at first I was like, ‘Yeah, okay. Freshmen.’”

But Sharp kept in touch with that first-year student — Dana Julian, now a junior— and the two started going through the steps of creating a club hockey team. After making calls, attending meetings, recruiting and fundraising, they had everything they needed for a team — a coach, Pitt alum Jim Napoli, a league — the Division II American Collegiate Hockey Association — and nine players.

But playing hockey still posed a danger to Sharp. The condition that ended her participation in middle school never went away. But now that she was an adult, she decided to take the risk.

“I shouldn’t play,” Sharp said. “I only have tissue around the area of the missing vertebrae, and it could potentially puncture the vessel to my brain.

I play for the love of the game.”

Sharp also had to make another sacrifice — sleep. Due to class schedules and ice availability, team practices started at 6 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays

at the Shady Side Academy rink. This meant she had to wake up at about 4:30 a.m.

“At practice, Jackie was always the first player on the ice, usually at least 10 minutes prior to the start of our practice, working on skills either on her own or with one of the coaches,” Napoli said.

“Jackie's youth hockey career was cut short, and it seemed that she wanted to make up for lost time.”

Every young team has to start somewhere, and the Panthers club didn’t exactly look like the Pittsburgh Penguins in their first season. The team lacked an experienced goalkeeper, so Sharp volunteered to get in the net despite having no competitive experience at the position of her own. “[Jackie] wanted this team to be successful more than anything,” senior teammate Bre Doherty said. “She is incredibly dedicated and passionate about the things she truly loves.”

The Pitt women’s ice hockey team went 1-15 — dead last in the league — in its first season, with Rochester Institute of Technology being the lone opponent to fall prey to the upstart Panthers.

“We were god-awful,” Sharp said. “But the amount of recruiting we did last year, and the amount of students we met with … it was crazy.”

The heavy recruiting efforts paid off — the

team nearly doubled its roster size from nine to 17 players in the second season. One of those recruits was graduate goalkeeper Katie Pucci — a transfer from Penn State — whose presence in goal allowed Sharp to shift back to her natural position on defense.

With the more experienced and newly reloaded roster, the Panthers went 11-6 during

“

I just want to say that my hockey team has been a great advocate for getting people to come to Pitt. the 2017-2018 season and finished eighth out of 25 teams in the ACHA standings. Before its last home game of the season, the team also announced that it would honor Sharp by retiring her number — 88.

That 10-game improvement earned Pitt its first playoff berth, where the Panthers lost to the eventual champion Buffalo Bulls in the opening

round.

In addition to the drastic one-year advancement in the win column, Sharp also emphasized the empowering nature of the team.

“Girls hockey is different, where a lot of these girls never had the opportunity to play,” Sharp said. “And you want them to have the opportunity to play. You don’t want to just end after high school.”

Doherty picked up on Sharp’s impromptu recruiting style, noting how she tries to inspire any girl she meets.

“It's a running joke on the team that in 2028, we're going to have 100 girls coming to Pitt saying, ‘Jackie Sharp told me I could play hockey for Pitt,’” Doherty said. “Because anytime she sees a young girl wearing something hockey-related or at a hockey game, she goes up to them and talks to them about our team.”

While this will be Sharp’s last semester at Pitt, one thing is for sure — she’s impacted the school, and the women’s hockey team specifically, in a way that will be seen for years to come.

“I just want to say that my hockey team has been a great advocate for getting people to come to Pitt,” Sharp said. “It’s been really awesome, to see women’s sports grow.”

36

When Ruthann Omer installed a door backward in a handicap restroom project she worked on as a civil engineer, it felt like the end of the world to her.

But her father, Frederick, an engineer himself, remained calm and repeated one of his favorite sayings.

“Don’t worry, it will all come out in the wash,” he said, to which his daughter would always reply, “Dad, the washing machine is broken.”

Engineering is all the younger Omer, now 57, has ever known. Other 5-year-olds may have thought going on civil engineering site visits was boring, but Omer loved working with her father, whose idea of a playground was a construction site. She remembers playing in the Kennywood Park parking lot while it was still a field of weeds, and recalls her father convincing a coal barge capitan to let a survey crew on his boat to survey the land for what is now Point State Park. The captain adamantly refused until Omer’s father offered him a bottle of whiskey.

“That’s why I always say, ‘the Point was built on a bottle of whiskey,’” she said.

By following her dad for his work with his firm Gateway Engineers, she picked up innumerable stories like this about the construction of Pittsburgh.

And by the time she graduated high school and enrolled in Pitt’s civil engineering program, she already had more experience than most civil engineers working in the field, including her classmates.

“We did topography for the Cathedral of Learning and Gateway had already done that. You could imagine how popular I was with my team because I already had the whole project done back at the office,” she said. “I eventually asked the instructor, ‘Can you give me more than this work?’ Because I already did it at Gateway.”

When Omer was ready to join her father at the company full-time, he crammed a desk for her to sit into his already compact office, despite her

Fixing with family story by Sid Lingala | photo by Christian Snyder wish to be in the drafting room with the whole team. She described how he wanted her in his office because he was either telling her something, wanted her opinion or because she was asking for his.

“Has somebody ever given you something where you got the gift and you were like, ‘This is not exactly for me,’ but you could see in their eyes how hard they worked for it, and you just say, ‘Thank you very much,’” she said. “That was that moment.”

Omer and her father worked closely together while the senior Omer served as Whitehall’s borough engineer and she served as his assistant. She described how they would always split up work and couldn’t have an ego about who would be the boss.

“When you’re on a job, you don’t have to be the boss,” Omer said. “Do what skill set you’re best at.”

She also developed a strong work ethic, taking after her father. She remembers how she took a one-week vacation upon graduating from Pitt, only to have her father question her commitment to her craft. As a result, she developed the inability to put off work and now feels like she must complete pending work immediately.

“If you say you’re going to do a job, do it,” she said. “I don’t join anything or tell you anything, unless I’m going to follow it through.”

Eventually Omer and her father switched roles when she became the president of Gateway Engineers in 1992, which has gained more than 100 employees during her term.

That same year, Omer also assumed her role as the first female municipal engineer in Allegheny County, overseeing more than 30 municipalities. She joked how her nickname was the ‘Sewer Queen’ due to her expertise in working with sanitary sewers and maintaining its systems.

“You work on the basic needs of things for people, to enjoy their life that most of them don’t ever pay attention to but really need,” she said.

She wasn’t too affected by barriers in the male-dominated industry, she

said, as she was focused on completing her work.

“People didn’t always know I was an engineer. They thought I was my dad’s secretary and I was coming along to help him,” she said. “It didn’t actually faze me. If you can show that you’re good at your job, it doesn’t matter where you came from or who you are — male or female.”

Omer continued her father’s legacy after he died in 1999, making sure that the company he founded continued to succeed.

“Some of the municipalities only had an Omer as an engineer because first my dad was there, then I took over,” she said. “The responsibility of making sure the company went on was huge. I really wanted to make sure that my dad’s hard work went on.”

Omer retired as president of Gateway Engineers in January, though she has started Omer Advisors to consult for the company and others. Aside from wanting to give opportunities to other people and wanting the company to go on, Omer said she also retired to have more time to work on boards of countless organizations, such as Hilltop Economic Development Corp. and Local Government Academy.

“I’m busier than I was before. It allows me the opportunity to get more involved with a group or less involved,” she said. “Since I’ve retired, I feel like life hasn’t changed a whole lot, except now I don’t have to do evening municipal meetings.”

She took the money she would have used for a massive retirement party to start two new scholarships at Pitt — the Omer Family Scholarship and the Omer Legacy Fund. It was a better use of the money than those “‘cheese cubes on a plate’ parties,” she said.

Both funds will work to grow opportunities for engineering students, and the legacy fund will specifically support female engineering students attending the National Society for Women Engineers’ annual convention.

“I like helping people, helping students,” she said. “When you get where you are, you should turn around and help the next person coming.”

37

PURRFECT NEIGHBOR story by Henry Glitz | photos by John Hamilton

Bearing a name like Matisse might seem like an awful lot of responsibility for a lot of people — living up to such a well-cultured namesake can be a challenge.

But on a stretch of Parkview Avenue in Oakland, from Oakland Square to the Boulevard of the Allies, you’d think the famous French painter was named after the local resident, not the other way around.

“She regards all the architecture up and down the street as hers,” Andrea Boykowycz, who lives with Matisse, said.

Among the longer-term residents and Pitt students in newer rental properties along Parkview, Matisse has a reputation for being both friendly and self-assertive. Her taste for wanderlust is the stuff of local gossip, admiration and concern. Her highly anticipated visits turn a mere social occasion into a party. People notice when she isn’t around.

Matisse has been the family cat for Boykowycz, her husband and kids for eight years, and she ventures off the family’s property virtually every day.

After an incident when she was mistakenly taken to the pound at just six months old by a stranger who saw her wandering outside, she’s worn a tag telling any humans she meets her name and that she knows her way home.

“People would be calling us at 2, 3 in the morning to tell us they had found our cat,” Boykowycz said. “We just gradually increased the amount of literature around her neck — ‘I’m not a stray, don’t shut me in.’”

The black- and white-patched feline takes full advantage of the freedom her tag gives her to roam up and down the relatively quiet sidewalks of her street like she owns it. If the weather’s good, you’re almost guaranteed to spot her trotting toward you, belly swinging, loudly meowing and looking for a scratch behind the ears, no matter what side of the street you’re on.

Dina Lardas, Boykowycz’s next-door neighbor, has lived in her current house on Parkview Avenue since 1999. She says she’s never seen a local resident become as popular as Matisse.

“She’s a cat that really binds the street together,” she said.

When Lardas first moved into her Central Oakland residence 19 years ago, the street was mostly families and older residents. But while the street’s

population may have begun to skew younger and more toward the college student demographic in recent years, Matisse hasn’t lost any of her ability to bring people on the street together.

One student who lived on the street few years ago insisted on bringing her mother around to Matisse’s house after the student’s graduation ceremony so she could meet the cat. Another group of students who got to talking with Lardas about the cat revealed to her that they had a framed photo of them with Matisse in their house.

“She forms relationships with all the kids,” Lardas laughed. “She ends up in a lot of people’s houses.”

It’s not hard to see how a small, friendly, fluffy animal could hit it off with stressed-out college students. But many Parkview residents, including former resident and recent Pitt graduate Mairead Casey, can attest that Matisse has an almost uncanny emotional intelligence — showing up at just the right time to avert an emotional breakdown by forcing her way onto your lap and purring loudly but calmingly.

“There were so many nights that my roommates and I would spend sitting out on our porch with Matisse after a stressful day of classes just unwinding,” Casey said. “When we were getting ready to graduate in the spring, it was even better when she would come around because it was comforting to have her around as we were trying figure out was going to happen next in life.”

Boykowycz said she and her family are used to the long absences that Matisse’s socializing requires. She recalled just a few times when they were worried about where she had gone, and each time her family’s concerns were echoed by the people around them who had come to rely on Matisse’s sharp meow.

“I’ve only fliered for her twice,” she said. “Somebody texted me one time from Ward Street, asking me, ‘Is Matisse okay?’”

Thankfully, Matisse returns mostly unscathed after each adventure.

Sometimes, Boykowycz can detect the scent of cigars or soap on the cat as she comes back home — the only clue to her mysterious voyages to houses blocks away from her house. The cat never lets on that she’s afraid except in the rare case a dog walks down the sidewalk or she finds herself near the high-speed traffic on the Boulevard of the Allies.

But no matter where Matisse finds herself, she keeps an eye out for potential invaders. There’s no question in her mind who owns the block, and her tours lounging around the neighborhood’s front porches are just as much for politics as they are for pleasure. During the summer, when Lardas, a teacher, has all day to watch Matisse’s circuit, she can figure out just which other cats she wants to stay out of her space.

The only cats Matisse can stand live with her — her family also plays host to Phoebe, a gray cat about the same age who is as shy as Matisse is gregarious. An older tomcat also lived with the two until he passed recently. Since his death, Matisse has been noticeably less venturesome and only patrols out to the Boulevard infrequently.

But she’s still going strong. Whether it’s jealously guarding the people in her little corner of Oakland or aggressively rubbing up against the legs of college students who come to visit their friends, Matisse does everything with an emotional intensity that it’s difficult to imagine in any other cat.

One of her favorite things to do is follow the kids in her family as they leave the house for school and wait for their return outside when the weather’s warm enough. Boykowycz thinks it’s because Matisse feels a special connection to her son, who named her when he was just 3 years old.

“This is where she lives,” Boykowycz said. “She comes home, and there’s a lap.”

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POLITICS AS

(UN)USUAL When CBS political analyst and Pitt professor Emily West predicted Donald Trump would win the 2016 Presidential election, no one believed her — then it happened. story by Prachi Patel photo by Christian Snyder

Two years ago, Maureen West often found herself settled in her home office, hooked on watching CBS news on her computer. Every now and then, she’d spot someone on her screen and take a snapshot.

When she saw her friends, West would whip out her phone and flaunt her pictures.

“Look at this photograph, and tell me what you see in it,” she would say.

She wanted her friends to notice something specific, something strange and unsettling about the images. Each showed people in suits bustling around a room, squinting into laptops and television screens, with cups of coffee abandoned on a desk.

Most of West’s friends couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

The images were from CBS’s live coverage of the 2016 presidential election and featured the channel’s Decision Desk — a team of data analysts responsible for developing statistical models and crunching numbers from polls and voter files to predict and track the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Hidden in the corners of each photo was West’s daughter — Emily. Sporting a pair of square-frame glasses and dark blond hair, either fastened into a bun or tucked behind her ears, the young Ph.D. candidate at New York University had accepted an analyst position at CBS in January 2016.

“I was looking for [my friends] to notice that she’s the

“

I believed that people were overconfident in believing that [Trump’s] controversial candidacy was a detriment to him.

Her office in Posvar Hall is sparsely decorated. A coat hangs off a hook in the entrance, and four rows of books on a wall-length bookshelf feature titles like “Understanding Ethnic Violence, “When Does Gender Matter?” and Statistical Models.”

Wearing a striped blue shirt, West leaned back slightly in her chair as she spoke, one leg crossed over the other. She had a bright voice and tenacious smile.

Beaming, she explained how her journey to the bustle and glamour of New York City began at a Quaker high school tucked away in Bucks County.

West attended the George School, where her mother teaches theatre, from grades nine through 12.

With its community-orientated values and multicultural student body, The George School encouraged her to do service work in Cuba and consider identities and inequalities around her.

“I was exposed to a lot of different types of people, given I lived in a pretty homogenous town — a white, upper middle-class town,” West said. “I was just always taught from an early age that it was important to value diversity and inclusion.”

Despite zig-zagging through career options, including journalism and culinary school, The George School’s values encouraged her to study political science, specifically African politics, during her undergraduate education at NYU. But her mother said lively political debates in their household sparked her daughter’s interest in politics.

“I’m a very staunch Democrat, her father on the other hand is a very staunch Republican,” her mother said with a laugh. “Without arguing, we have some fairly strenuous debates in our household.”

Though she lived in New York for 12 years, West is registered to vote in Pennsylvania with her parents, both because she enjoys the ritual of voting with her parents, and because she’s determined to make her vote count in the swing state.

“My dad and I joked that we would go into the booths next to each other and cancel out each other’s votes,” West said in an email. “You can probably guess then who my dad voted for.”

At CBS headquarters, as data continued to stream

“

only woman in the photograph,” the senior West said.

The younger West, now a Pitt professor in the political science department, stuck out at CBS. About to defend her dissertation at New York University, she was fresh, young and often the only woman in the room among a crowd of older-male colleagues. But she didn’t just look different.

Among her team of about 10 analysts, West was the only one to predict something her peers thought impossible — Donald Trump winning the presidential election.

“I believed that people were overconfident in believing that [Trump’s] controversial candidacy was a detriment to him,” West said. “But I actually didn’t take it that way, I saw some things that made me think, ‘He has a shot.’”

Leading up to the general election, when she wasn’t tracking election results, West was developing a statistical model using multilevel regression and poststratification, or MRP, and data from YouGov — an online survey company — to predict which way states would swing in November.

Unlike everyone else, her model showed Trump winning Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania by narrow margins — key swing states he went on to win during the election.

This was controversial, and West wasn’t sure whether to believe the numbers herself. But she felt she was using her inexperience to her advantage. As a new analyst, she didn’t have strong prior beliefs about how elections unfold, which gave her a unique perspective on the election.

Specifically, West believed white, middle-class voters — which generally voted Democrat to support labor unions — were losing faith in their party.

She also felt comfortable enough with her boss and mentor — Anthony Salvanto, director of CBS News elections and surveys — to be adamant about the accuracy of her statistical model.

“It would often be sort of intense — it would be a back and forth,” she said. “He would say, ‘You worked on this for another 36 hours, why do you have the same answer?’ And I would say, ‘I did, I worked on it for another 36 hours, and I have the same answer.’”

Election nights — for both the primaries and the general election — were a whirlwind. West and her fellow analysts sat behind big-name news anchors like Scott Pelley and scrambled to use exit polls and demographic voter files to assign states either blue or red.

“They’re like emergency room statistics,” West said. “There’s high stakes and high pressure to get an answer, 30 seconds sooner is a big deal, because you’re trying to beat NBC for their calls.”

That entire year was high pressure for West. In addition to late nights at CBS, she was an adjunct professor in the political science department at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Policy. And she was applying for jobs — which would lead her to move to the South Side and accept a position as an assistant professor in the political science department at Pitt in fall 2017.

into the Decision Desk Nov. 8, 2016, analysts realized Trump was taking the lead in the presidential election. By 8 p.m., they were certain of the outcome.

While she felt good about her spot-on election prediction, the feeling was overshadowed by how surprising the night was for everyone at CBS once results came pouring in.

“Everyone was pretty shocked and sort of numb when we started to see what was happening that night,” West said. “Even Republican-leaning academics were sort of shocked in a way that made it very somber on the desk.”

Now, she brings her experience as a data analyst at CBS to the classroom, by teaching a political psychology course at Pitt. “[Students] should be at least very skeptical and aware of the amount of uncertainty that lies in any kind of polling analysis,” she said. “There are things that I try to make my undergrads very aware of so that they are very savvy consumers of polling estimates.”

As students scribble down notes from her slides or sneak a couple minutes of a March Madness basketball game on their laptops, West stands in front of the classroom and asks undergraduates to consider gender bias in politics.

“She’s got a lot of information in her head,” Ian Callahan, a senior electrical engineering major in West’s class, said. “[She makes sure] you have the best picture possible to form your own interpretation.”

During the beginning of the semester, she spoke with her students about being the only data analyst at CBS to predict Donald Trump’s victory.

“It was nice of her to tell that story,” Callahan said.

“It just shows how in-touch she really is with the political environment and what people actually think.”

As for West, while her accurate predictions were never published, she impressed Salvanto enough to always have a job as a data analyst at CBS. “He met with me when everything calmed down and he said, ‘You have a position on the desk, the Decision Desk, for life,’” she said. “He puts together a team for the midterms, so I hope to go back.”

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A SELFLESS SOCIAL SERVANT story by Kim Rooney photo by Issi Glatts

L

eaning forward in a wheeled desk chair on the 35th floor of the Cathedral of Learning, Daly Trimble looked up from her organic chemistry notes, with a surprisingly warm smile on her face that never faded as she talks about feminism, faith and community engagement.

North Oakland, Squirrel Hill and Shadyside stretch out in the window behind her — and in the distance, Millvale.

Trimble helps address the concerning lead levels in Millvale’s water, researching the uses of lead filters and trying to determine the best way to move forward.

A Pitt sophomore on the premedicine track, she first found the borough through the Browne Leadership Fellows Program in the summer of 2017.

The fellowship, offered through Pitt’s School of Social Work, is designed for students not majoring in social work but who have a passion for helping others.

Its mission resonated with Trimble, and it placed her in the Millvale Community Library last summer.

“The premed track zooms in and zooms in and zooms in, and community engagement lets you zoom out in a macro sense,” Trimble said. “It’s kind of hard going into medicine, because you want to be a healer and builder.”

Trimble worked with Brian Wolovich, a co-founder of the library, during her fellowship to do a community needs assessment and distribute water filters to residents. Millvale, along with Pittsburgh, has lead service lines that have led to unsafe lead levels in some residents’ water.

Trimble spent the summer talking to people in the area, traveling everywhere from bars like the Double L — where she met Harley-Davidson bikers smoking at the long counter — to a convent. She also helped with distributing water filters, Wolovich said, something beyond the requirement of her fellowship.

“Daly is a truly remarkable person,” Wolovich said.

“Her intelligence is only matched by her kindness and sincerity in wanting to help and learn from others.”

Millvale stood out to Trimble as a place that cares about its residents — an attitude the borough exemplifies through its Ecodistrict Plan, which promotes proj-

ects to improve mobility, equity and air quality. The community aligns with Trimble’s values, particularly in its mission to create an equitable community.

“Gentrification is something horrible for community health and especially for the vulnerable, whether that’s the elderly or people with compromised health conditions,” Trimble said. “Millvale is very special in that it’s trying to prevent gentrification by building up [the] town and the people who have been here the entire time.”

She also works with people affected by gentrification through Operation Safety Net, an outreach program that offers an emergency weather network for homeless men. Trimble volunteers there every one to three weeks, handing out food and talking to people, and she connected it to her role as service officer for the Ryan Catholic Newman Center — the Catholic student organization for Pitt and CMU — where she organizes service for the elderly and homeless.

Working with the Newman Center is like “a third major” for Trimble, although many of her friends are also involved. Trimble converted to Catholicism in the spring of 2017, saying the church’s message of service above self and dedication to loving and caring for others resonated with her. But she also recognizes the unwelcoming and hurtful experiences others have had with the church.

“You always have to weigh your words carefully, because you don’t want to hurt anybody,” Trimble said.

“I’m trying to bridge chasm between what the church has caused for others and what I can do to help. It’s stuff to keep you up at night.”

Some people are surprised by her faith, and she realizes that Catholicism has a reputation for being conservative and hurtful, especially toward LGBTQ+ people. When talking about her past work with the Gender and Sexuality Alliance in her high school, she slowed down, reflecting on the seemingly incongruous.

“When you join an institution, you take on the pain the institution has inflicted on others,” Trimble said.

Yet she couples that awareness with the knowledge

of the church’s core value of caring for others, and she found “the idea that God is love itself felt like the answer I’d been waiting my entire life for.”

She also met her boyfriend, Chris Garcia, through the Newman Center. A trained accountant, he works as a campus missionary at CMU, and the two help each other at events they organize.

“I think she teaches me a lot with her optimism for this kind of work,” Garcia said. “Seeing her natural joy and exuberance — she’s helped me see how everything I do can be a way of elevating the people around me.”

Trimble sees their relationship as a way to “serve our faith and others around us,” and her passion for helping others permeates every aspect of her life.

“I’m passionate about preserving people whose dignity would otherwise be forgotten,” Trimble said.

“It’s a really dangerous idea to see people’s dignity ignored because they can’t produce enough. I think in this day and age we forget about the dignity of the human person — that’s my motor.”

Trimble’s faith also acts as a lens through which she sees the world, and she also wears the lens of intersectional feminism. As editor in chief of The Fourth Wave, an intersectional feminist magazine at Pitt, she often writes about maternal issues, faith and feminism.

“I emailed them [my first year at Pitt] and they said, ‘come to our meeting,’ and I went and I never really left,” Trimble said. “There’s no one way to do feminism, and I think that comes out in our publication.”

Through all of her work runs a vein of passion that is visible as she motions with her hands, bringing them up and down, fingers splayed, in the rhythm of her thoughts. The Honors College noticed it when she was applying to Pitt and offered her a Chancellor’s Scholarship for her community engagement.

“She hit the ground running, and she hasn’t stopped yet,” Holly Hickling, who interviewed her for the scholarship and now works with her through the ACT Fellowship, said. “I can’t wait to see what we’ll be saying about her in a year. So many things she’s doing are just getting started.”

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Cover design: Raka Sarkar Layout design: Danah Bialoruski Photo editors: Thomas Yang & Issi Glatts Copy chiefs: Kyleen Pickering & Kim Rooney Editorial staff: Ashwini Sivaganesh John Hamilton Mackenzie Rodrigues Rachel Glasser Janine Faust Salina Pressimone Caroline Bourque Grant Burgman Jordan Mondell Henry Glitz Sarah Shearer Christian Snyder Elise Lavallee Amanda Reed These profiles can also be found at pittnews.com/silhouettes Web design: Matt Choi

And thank you to our subjects, entire staff, Student Government Board and Trib Total Media.

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