Editor’s note: It’s a long one due to photos, so your email client might be a little jagoff and snip it, forcing you to click a link to read the whole thing. Good luck and godspeed.
Right now you’re thinking, Well, well, well. If it isn’t the artist formerly known as “a person who writes.”
I knew it had been a significant stretch since last we chatted, but it didn’t register for me just how long it had been until I went to write this post and tried to access the That’s Church login page. If you’re newish here, you might not know that’s the old blog I stopped writing like 46 years ago. Basically what it amounts to is I took such a long break from this newsletter that I forgot what its name was. I’m going to blame perimenopause, which is also what I blame when someone asks me how old my kids are and I go, “Wait. Let me math.” Like, what kind of supermom brainiac are you if you maintain immediate recall of your children’s ages (and names) into your 50s? Unfathomable!
Lately, the “thinking of you” and “are you okay?” emails have started, so let me explain what the heck has been going on. The big change for me since last May is that I selfishly* chose to dedicate myself nearly wholly to my daughter for one year. She’s 19 now. As you know, she’s autistic and graduated high school on time with her class last May. That was a massive, hard-won accomplishment. And we quickly realized she needed a year off from all the stress that comes from being a quirky autistic fish swimming in a big high school for four years.**
More importantly, I knew I needed that year to help her grow emotionally and to prepare her to find her purpose and her people. I couldn’t do what I did when she was at school—work/write all morning and afternoon and then spend time with her when she got home. I couldn’t allow her to atrophy in any way during her year off. Not physically, mentally, intellectually or emotionally. Being a single mom, it all fell on me. So, those times when I would usually write, I’d instead grab her and take her somewhere. A museum. A gallery. A store. A day-trip. A train ride. A plane ride. A hike. A festival. A walk around the Point. The zoo. The train into NYC for shows. Disney then Universal (these trips were her graduation gifts). Anything to acclimate her to a fulfilling, dynamic, slightly scary life in the open versus a too-safe life in an inviting comfort zone of social isolation. She got her learner’s permit and is doing wonderfully learning to drive. She’s looking at a few classes at CCAC this fall to start meeting new people and figuring out what she wants to do as a career.
I expect that after this summer, when she has her license and classes and hopefully a few friends, I can more fully turn my attention back to myself and to writing the things I want to write. Including my next book and this silly newsletter of mine.
For now, let’s chat while we’re here!
* I say selfishly because it is better for my life and the things I want to do with it if she has her own life and independence as an adult. It’s a win/win.
** Best early-reader illustrated book series idea EVER!
Wow. It’s BOOM! Politics! right away. Before you go looking for how to unsubscribe, trust that I’m about to make this as non-partisan as possible so as not to offend your most delicate of political sensibilities.
Let’s start with this:
I have been so bored and so over this dumb dress-code schtick of his for so long. Let me put this in terms that everyone, including John hopefully, will understand: The next time you are in the ER, let’s have the nurse walk in wearing sweats and a ratty, oversized t-shirt with some Uggs. The next time you’re about to deliver your baby, let’s have the OB/GYN walk into the delivery room wearing athletic shorts and a tank top. The next time you’re taken to court or arrested, let’s have your lawyer show up to defend you while wearing EXACTLY THIS STUPID GETUP THAT JOHN IS WEARING IN THIS PHOTO. (Yes, I was a Conor Lamb voter. Judge if you must, but look what your guy turned into.)
Are you getting it?
Choosing to take the steps necessary to achieve positions of power in society— especially positions where you are expected to instill a sense of trust in those you serve—means that you should, at the very least, change your cosplaying-a-working-class-everyman attire to fit the new respectable role you sought and won. Do you know what we call this thing where you grow with the role? Maturity. Absent it, you merely look like an overgrown child.
So that’s the first thing I need John to realize—it isn’t about him. More importantly, it’s not supposed to be about him. He was elected to serve others. Represent others. Once elected, it should have stopped being about him and started being about service, respect for the office, and fulfilling campaign promises.
This leads me to my second rant. In interviews lately, John has essentially hinted that he believes he is smarter than his electorate and therefore they should just shut up and let him vote the way he wants, even if it means installing administration members who are the antithesis of the value system he ran on.
This isn’t about the merits of his arguments/belief system. It’s about the fact that he has fully discarded the personality and platform he leveraged to get elected. Do you remember those months leading up to his Senate victory? Every single day trashing every single thing about Trump, his supporters, their beliefs, morals and values on every single social media platform? John, after a few unsuccessful attempts at higher office, had to pick his brand and he chose “meme-posting edgelord.” He rage-baited his way to earning votes. He placed himself fully in the progressive box without even a shirtsleeve fluttering outside of it. He promised he could be counted on to stay in that box. He even posted this:
“Every time.” Ok. Let’s go to the record:
To quote this guy …
Again, this isn’t about the politics that background those votes. It’s about the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand the very basic math that says this …
does not equal this …
John, if I may speak to you directly here … YOU LITERALLY GOT ELECTED BY PROMISING TO SIMPLY BE THE OPPOSITE OF WHATEVER TRUMP SAYS. That was your entire platform — the anti-Trump. You even tweeted this:
What your own indisputable, empirical, computable math proves is this: you aren’t smarter than everyone else; you’re just the actual definition of a liar and a conman. You have revealed the hidden truth that you used false promises of servitude to disguise power-hungry ambition. Even sadder is that you’re so wrapped up in your own mythology that you don’t realize that based on your own words, you, John Fetterman, consider yourself a spineless appeaser.
The only question left to debate is whether that is what you became, or what you have always secretly been.
PittGirl out.
I once wrote, “I don’t choose my obsessions. They choose me.”
I find them, sure. I take notice of them and then casually scratch a shallow hollow into their surface. Then I go deeper, and a bit deeper. And soon, without warning, like a zombified appendage bursting from the earth, they reach out and grab hold of me by the hand, the wrist, the collar, the waist, whatever they can get a sure grip on, and they drag me up against the weight of their history and they hold on tightly.
That’s what Harry Houdini recently did to me from the grave. Master mystifier of the universe, indeed.
To be clear, my obsession is not with the magic, the escapes, his looks (though I wouldn’t have kicked that fine man out of my bed), or the showmanship. It was his last years spent debunking the faux religion of Spiritualism—that once-prevalent mystical practice of seers and mediums fleecing the vulnerable and grief-stricken by claiming to speak to the dead, write message from the dead, conjure the dead, and even return the dead to life. They increasingly did so from within the respectability-lending confines of brick and mortar churches. Houdini, as a lifelong student of illusion, knew their tricks too well to allow them to freely engage in ongoing fraud that stole from so many, especially those awash in grief due to the First World War and the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918.
Thanks to a history book I randomly picked up (Lincoln’s Ghost), I discovered that Houdini’s fight against Spiritualism had some major Pittsburgh intersections (one quite hilarious). This was due to the city being a Spiritualist epicenter with dozens of such churches. My respect for Harry grew a thousand-fold as I learned of the shows he staged here in Pittsburgh during which he dramatically debunked the false methods of Spiritualists right on our historic stages. He spoke to our mainstream churches warning them of the fraudsters. He answered letters from Pittsburghers about the false physics and seers in a series of columns printed in the Pittsburgh Press. The result of my research is my latest column for Pittsburgh Magazine.
Whew. The man was fine. Here’s a snippet (in a rarity, I’m sharing the closing lines):
Harry Houdini was a lot of things to history and to Pittsburgh. He was the Handcuff King. The Master Mysteriarch. The Self-Liberator. It is fitting that he is remembered for all he did on Earth that was seemingly made of magic, but let us not forget he also showed us that empathy can be magical too.
Go read it! Just be warned, you too will fall in love with Harry. As a reminder: I saw him first so hands off [awkward kung fu moves].
As a little treat, please look at this 1906 Pittsburgh Post photo of five packers* from Kaufmann's nailing Harry into a box as part of his act at the long-gone Grand Opera House. This is only one of several times that he allowed local packers to nail him into a box from which he would escape.
* Once upon a time, being a packer for a big department store like Kaufmann’s was a skilled craft akin to carpentry. It wasn’t easy keeping product safe back then.
A little while ago a reader, Chris, reached out for help in locating a poem. He wrote:
Sometime in the early 90’s, a poem was published with what I remember as the title “Pittsburgh Grey”. I could be wrong, but this was certainly a theme of the poem. I remember other fragments but don’t want to say too much because this poem is such a gem; I would hate to spoil it for someone reading it the first time. I have not had any success searching online … I would appreciate any advice you have.
He’d been searching for it on and off for years. So I read the email, accepted the challenge, and super-sexily went …
Hell yes I found it in less than 30 minutes of searching. (I am amazing; throw miscellaneous wedding cookies in my general direction.) It really is a fantastic poem. So fantastic in fact that I based my forthcoming column on poems about Pittsburgh from the 1800s to early 1900s. As a preview of that column, from the Post-Gazette, Saturday, January 28, 1995, I give you …
Actually brilliant. I found so many wonderful poems about Pittsburgh that I couldn’t include them all in my column. I’ll share the ones that I had to cut with you in future editions of this here newsletter that I publish with such regularity, it should be called Metamucil.
Bah-dum-tiss! Try the veal!
It’s Pride Month, yinz, and that means more happy rainbows than can be produced by a diarrhea-riddled unicorn. Let’s have a round up of some of the best local rainbow/Pride merch I’ve found so far:
Fjord & Fable PRIDE PRIDE PRIDE Limited Edition candle, $28
Pirates “Pittsburgh is Love” shirt (women’s here; Penguins versions here), $34.99
Pirates Pride P baseball hat, $31.99
Sleepy Hollow Handmade Pride & Joy soap, $12
Dustin McGrew’s Three Sister Bridges in Rainbow Colors photo print, starting at $24.99
University of Pittsburgh Pride lanyard or keystrap, $7.99 and $5.99
Nothing is an ad! I just thought all of these were, as the kids say, SUPER CYOOT.
My friends at Zachary’s Mission (wonderful local org that provides support to families with children who are cardiac patients at Children’s Hospital) asked me to guest bartend at the 10th Annual POURch Tour With YaJagoff! at Mike’s Bar and Grill this Sunday, June 7. I have been invited to be a “celebrity”* bartender numerous times in the past and have always declined on account of my deafness, social awkwardness, etc.
But I’ve long been supportive of the work of Zachary’s Mission and could never tell them no. So I’m going to bartend and act like I have half-a-clue what I’m doing. Even more fun, I’ll be bartending with my good friend Nancy Angus, the president of the Mario Lemieux Foundation, who is also a supporter of Zachary’s Mission. We will be slinging drinks terribly and deaf-ly and perimenopausely** between 2 to 3:15 p.m. at Mike’s Beer Bar on the North Side this Sunday. So swing by, say hello, praise me with a good deal of specificity, hand me a box of wedding cookies, have me pour you a drink, and then when I hand you something you didn’t ask for, just take it and drink it and pretend you love it and that it’s exactly what you asked for.
* big fat fingerquotes around that word please
** shockingly, not a word
This edition’s wrap-up of big things that I had those Kaufmann’s packers fit into cute, tiny boxes:
Make Room for Kids at Mario Lemieux Foundation continues to operate, albeit more quietly as we work to bring an all new still-in-development video gaming system to the kids at Children’s. In April we hosted a fun video-gaming event with Microsoft in the atrium at the hospital. I brought along my nephews (children of Tina Fey, for you old-school readers) as volunteers. It was such a success that we have a second event planned for next month to celebrate national Video Game Day. Here are a few photos from the April event:
I recorded a fun episode of the City Cast Pittsburgh podcast with Jeremy Boren about who we consider to be Pittsburgh’s worst villains from the last 25 years or so. Listen here. Some of my answers will likely surprise you especially when we chat about Luke Ravenstahl. Not an ad!
Now that PastFinders is officially launched there is some media coverage to share, particularly around the Pittsburgh Film Office’s content in the app. Here’s Pittsburgh Magazine, Beaver County Times, Pittsburgh Business Times, and a feature from PantherLabWorks at Pitt, who have been helping us for a while now with consulting services. We’re onboarding some exciting new orgs over the next few months, so download the app and stay tuned!
Astrobotic has been acquired (and I’m feeling conflicted about it).
My goodness. That was so long. Let’s get out of here and enjoy the sunshine. Have a wonderful week or two! Download PastFinders! Throw cookies! Buy my book! Come see me bartend and be real real bad at it! And be sure to come out and see my band The Diarrhea-Riddled Unicorns.
We’re … EXPLOSIVE.
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