Pittsburgh: February 2011
Thursday Feb 24
My dear friend the paper collage portrait painter Sandy Oppenheimer was coming into Pittsburgh, our joint hometown, from California and I decided to meet her here. [Here’s her lovely portrait of Frida Kahlo; she also generously created for the cover of my book a portrait of Sarah Palin.]
For many years I’ve only come to Pittsburgh for hospital visits or funerals. Really, this is the first time since I left in 1965 when I’m just stopping in for fun.
And fun it is. We’re staying with Sandy’s sister and brother-in-law and kids and dogs and fish. We’ve got the third floor to ourselves and a fridge full of scrumptious left-overs from last weekend’s bar mitzvah (Sandy’s nephew). They’ve lent Sandy a car and we’re out and about.
Despite foul betrayal by Mapquest, Sandy relies on her instincts and gets us to the increasingly recognized Mattress Factory Museum, to see the exhibit “Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art.” These are the works of a generation who grew up when the society was actively anti-racist. Because of the economic turmoil following the collapse of the USSR, discrimination increased as people were forced to fight over reduced resources.
The photographers were particularly strong, not the least the mighty Rene Pena who can take the most common of settings – say, a man in a bathtub – and produce the most moving still, containing a narrative that tells us a lot about Cuba. An installation titled “Ave Maria” by Meira Marrero and Jose Toirac features a cornucopia of Ave Maria statues - big, small, sparkly, plain – called in the accompanying material “a shrine to diversity, to Cuban racial and social equality.”
The museum has an almost-affordable gift shop and a welcoming café, both managed by wonderful, personable women, and an annex down the block with further exhibit rooms. It is in a run-down area of Pittsburgh, but is clearly having an impact on the neighborhood, with whole blocks fixed up and occupied. Other blocks are riddled with boarded up decrepit houses.
Pittsburgh is touted as one of those back-from-the-dead smaller cities. It is “smaller” because it has half the population it had back in my day when it was still had a viable industrial sector. It wins all sorts of “most pleasant city” awards and receives justifiable praise for it’s cultural scene.
But when you get lost, as we did on returning from the museum, and find yourself in the out-of-way neighborhoods, the poverty is a slap in the face with a bag of coal. Since the population is so reduced, housing property is cheap and plentiful. So are the boarded-up houses, the empty lots and the isolated little shops in titling buildings trying to stay alive. Behind the much-touted success in re-inventing itself after the elimination of the steel and coal industry is an underclass that shouldn’t be so invisible – or so poor. We were lost but not entirely so. As we drove along the river, Sandy said with justified confidence but a certain lack of precision, "I know we're next to one of the rivers and I promise you -- it is either the Monongahela, the Allegheny or the Ohio."
We got caught in a traffic jam due to road works on Rt 28 and sat bumper-to-bumper next to a run of slag heaps. When my dear Pittsburgh friend Linda, with perfect timing, rang me on my cell, she was able to assure us we were headed for the Highland Park Bridge – one of the 446 bridges (beating out the former high scorer Venice, Italy) inside Pittsburgh – and the one we want. Linda is the Executive Director of WISDOM, a new innovative disability advocacy non-profit, and I sit on her Board as her Communications Officer. We’re having dinner tomorrow.
Back home for tea and victuals as Sandy and I catch a half hour of an American Idol results show. It is mainly annoying with its repetitious contrived tension and tears and little singing. We soon set off for the Regent Theater, one I used to go to in the early 60s, to see the Oscar-nominated live-action shorts. This year’s crop are excellent, if varied and I reviewed them here.
Friday Feb 25
I have brunch with my Uncle Jake and Aunt Estelle, the last of the previous generation. Jake is my late dad’s youngest brother and Estelle is the Brooklyn bride he brought back home to us at the end of WWII after meeting her at a dance for G.I.s. I remember how exquisite she was with her protruding teeth and high cheekbones. Estelle was probably the first woman I ever fell in love with. Jake used the GI Bill to go to college – the first Katz to do so. He studied engineering and ended up inventing some sort of factory filter when he worked for US Steel.
When that industry went down, he didn’t go down with it. He became a consultant to industry for cleaning up their smoke, I believe, and he learned to invest his money wisely, eventually writing a book about it.
Sandy and I rest at home before going to our respective dinners. I’m with Linda and Jim, her husband, both of them beloved friends of mine. Linda has many new facilitating devices since last I saw her, including some new air-pressure sleeves her Dutch physical therapist gave her to help relieve the hand-curling spasticity that can come with paralysis. Jim never fails to obtain the best steaks money can buy and, despite the snow and freezing temperatures, grill them outside for me. Together with the perfectly baked potatoes, the gently sautéed green beans and two of my favorite friends, life is sweet.
Too soon Sandy is honking outside their door – like in high school – and I must hug Linda and Jim and run.
Saturday February 26, 2011
Pittsburgh had its demonstration for choice on Wednesday and its solidarity-with-Wisconsin march on Thursday, and I’m feeling frustrated that while everyone across the country is protesting on those two issues today, I’m in a place where I can’t raise my voice. Thanks to all my friends on other streets – Boston, LA, etc – who are shaking their fists.
Sandy and I go searching for a solution for my parents’ punch-bowl. I was unable to sell it when I was getting rid of all their stuff after they both had died, and I didn’t want to include it with all their other worldly goods which the charity trucked to their shop. It’s beautiful. Maybe crystal. Maybe a wedding gift from the 40s, maybe much older. The good people who bought my folks’ condo, total strangers, have been storing it for me for three or four years – for it has taken me that long to get back to town. It’s sizable and we try to find a canvas bag big enough to pack it in for the plane at the Family Dollar, only to discover one for $3 next door at the charity store which, ironically enough, turned out to be the one where I had donated their house full of stuff.
We go on to Frick Park and the Frick Museum, housed in a variety of estate buildings, to see an exhibit called Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art . It’s a particularly cool destination, the legacy of Henry Clay Frick’s daughter Helen Clay Frick. We start in one building at the café where I have a scrumptious sweet plantain quesadilla, take a quick run through the former carriage house to see the amazing collection of antique cars and carriages – all of them actually in use in the Frick homes at one time or another, and then to
the main structure for the exhibit and permanent collection. The museum is free and friendly and in the general part of Pittsburgh where I grew up, but opened in 1970, five years after I escaped.
I stop for one last goodbye kiss to Linda and Jim and Linda insists I try on the many pairs of expensive Arche shoes she bought in past visits to Paris but can no longer wear. They’re all my size, gorgeous, some new, but much too girlie for my tastes so I turn them down.
Tonight I finally get to meet Sandy’s Pittsburgh posse. Wherever she goes, she’s got a gaggle of folks who, like me, adore her and can’t wait to see her. Alexis and Joe live right outside Pittsburgh in a large old home enlivened with a variety of Alexis’ collections: a mix of artistic and vintage toys, ceramics and lunch boxes. With her handsome fall of red hair, her elegant long fingers and her gushing warmth she is irresistible. The other guests are artists and geeks and activists, each more interesting than the next.
I have promised to give them a dance lesson in meringue and Sandy warns them – referencing my teaching style – that it’ll be “dancing with the Gestapo.” I explain that deciding whether to lead or follow has to do with one’s character and personality, not one’s gender or height. Three of the boys decide to follow and three of the girls decide to lead.
The food is scrumptious (Indian) and the desserts even better: crumbles made from Alexis’ home-grown cherries and blueberries. Her garden is a place of legend, but tonight it is covered in snow. Sometime in the evening I’m in a discussion about Pittsburghese, for I hadn’t realized that “jagoff” (ie: a-hole, jackass) was distinctly and exclusively Pittsburgh slang. Anyone else grow up calling drips jagoffs?
I have to drag Sandy away by 11:00 because we have to get up early to make my flight. It’s hard to leave this high-spirited celebration, but I also want to check in with Sandy’s sister Julie who has by now returned from the business trip that has kept her away from us. I’ve been hosted by her witty and generous husband Jesse and her two gorgeous kids.
Sandy and I drop onto opposite ends of our luxurious king-sized bed with an agreement that it will be a fart, burp and snore-free area; meaning that we can freely fart, burp and snore without restraint or comment. We fall asleep too quickly to take advantage of our contract.
Sunday, Feb 27
I set my phone alarm as well as the alarm in the bedroom for 6:00 and then struggle with turning everything off as the cacophony of bells and whistles rouses me. Sandy is also awakened and there’s nothing to be done about it. She drops me at the closest stop of the incomparable Pittsburgh shuttle bus to the airport: $3.25 and about 40 minutes ride. My only worry is that, while I checked my suitcase (or rather my suitcase inside the new suitcase I got for $12 at the charity store), I am carrying my shoulder bag, my laptop and the awkward large canvas bag holding the punch bowl., but luckily I don’t have a carry-on issue. I return to Boston, feeling like I’ve been a tourist is a rather familiar-feeling place.
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