Friends in Low (and High) Places

Recently I went to Las Vegas to see my two of my closest friends, Tracy and The Other Rick. He's really just Rick, but I call him The Other Rick just so I don’t get him confused with myself. I had a voucher on Southwest that was about to expire and all runways lead to Vegas when you have a voucher on Southwest that’s about to expire.

I’d never even been to a convention in Las Vegas before Tracy and The Other Rick moved there. Las Vegas, “Who needs it?” I thought.  But I went to visit them once, had a blast, and have been back several times since. I’m sure I’d have a super time visiting Tracy and The Other Rick if they lived in Duluth, Minnesota, but if I had my druthers I’d rather they live in Vegas than Duluth. No doubt Duluth has many wonderful sights and attractions (e.g. Lake Superior and Lutefisk World) but alas and alack, they’re on hold until I retire and start spending my time driving around the country in a motor home.

In my trips to Vegas since Tracy and The Other Rick moved there, I’ve done lots of the usual touristy things like Hoover Dam and the Liberace Museum. (It’s a crime that it’s closed.) But there are still plenty of things to see and do and there's oodles of local culture to absorb.

Unless I’m staying at The Other Rick and Tracy’s house in the suburbs, I stay at the Wynn. As my father used to say, you don’t go on vacation to save money.  The Other Rick is an executive there, and I believe in doing business with people who do business with you. I have a long way to go to pay them back for all the times I've tied on the feedbag at their house.

Lots of casinos seem to have a theme—The Paris, New York,New York,  Caesar’s Palace, etc. but the Wynn’s theme is well, it’s the Wynn.  And believe you me, that's all the theme it needs. Roger Thomas, Steve Wynn's interior designer (just profiled in The New Yorker) pulled out all the stops to create what feels like a 21st century cousin of West Virginia's legendary resort, The Greenbrier.

The spaces are grand, the décor is within a gnat’s eyelash of being completely over the top, and the place is maintained within an in inch of its life. There are plenty of Dorothy Draper elements--she designed The Greenbrier--such as dark walls quilted in diamond motifs and oversized white baroque plaster moldings.

Since the Wynn isn't low end, you don’t have the feeling most of the casino patrons have hawked their government cheese in order to feed a slot machine hoping for the big payoff which will allow them to move out of the trailer park, buy a big boat, and pay for a decent criminal defense lawyer for their good-for-nothing stepson, and ditch the old lady for a new, firmer, and with luck, augmented model. Vegas is way more fun for me when I can ignore all that real life stuff.

Saturday, The Other Rick arranged for Tracy and me to see Garth Brooks in concert at the Wynn.  I’d seen him in concert once before and was bowled over by what a great entertainer he was, so I was delighted to be going back. 

The crowd was well dressed, which in Vegas encompasses every fashion crime known to man and then some. More on that later. The men wore every sort of get up imaginable, from nice western wear—pressed jeans and western shirts—to shirt tails fashionably untucked, riffing on that great fashion icon, Ferdinand Marcos. Lots of women wore impossibly high shoes and dresses so short and so tight that they looked like Technicolor sausage casings.

The theater was intimate (esp. when you are in the front row) and it was plush in a way that reminded me of the theater at the Hearst Castle. The seats are the right size and you don't feel as if you's sitting on top of your neighbor. Everyone was SO excited to be there.

We had seats in the front row, right in the middle. (Thank you again, Rick!) When we sat down the seats around us were empty but that didn't last long. An older man doing one helluva impersonation of a drunken fraternity boy and his shovel-faced non-trophy but still not age appropriate date soon sat next to Tracy. Tracy remarked to me that he was going to turn out to be a jerk and she was right. He knew all the songs better than Garth and the usher had to come over and tell him to put a lid on it. Fortunately for us, he and his shovel-faced non-trophy but still not age appropriate date dashed out during the first standing ovation. They missed the encore but presumably beat the traffic on the way to the bar.  

A well-dressed, cute, young married couple sat next to me. She was a petite thing in a knee length flowing floral silk dress and expensive vintage dress cowboy boots. The Boy Next Door was thin and had a boyish face and a vaguely olive complexion. His short dark hair needed more (or better) product and he wore a suit, fashionably sans tie.  

Maybe the Boy Next Door just liked my hair or glasses or pink oxford, which may be the one clothing item no one ever wears in Vegas. All good possibilities. Or perhaps he wanted to know where I got my fetching brand spanking new green (yes, green) suede bucks. (Brooks Brothers). Then again, maybe he really liked the Toby Keith song, Who's Your Daddy? No matter what the reason, I had the distinct feeling that this marriage was not going to work out, if you know what I mean.

Mark my words, it won’t be long until he’s living in an expensive Design Within Reach-esque apartment in the gayborhood with his new partner Bruce, an underwear and men's accessories buyer at Neiman-Marcus. They’ll share their tasteful 3,000 square feet digs with their golden-doodles Dow (short for Dowager Empress Tz’u-Hsi) and Jones (as in Grace Jones). The B.N.D. will be the personification of his law firm’s commitment to diversity, and as a dedicated barefoot runner who takes off his shirt every time he has to run farther than the Xerox machine, he'll do great things for his law firm’s pulchritude quotient and scores in the bar association's citywide fitness challenge.

Back to the concert. It was great.  Actually, it was fantastic! Way, way, better than great! Garth obviously loves to perform. Everyone knows he’s one of the all-time great singer songwriters, but he’s also a great storyteller, with superb comic timing. He takes the audience through his life story, mostly in music, touching on George Jones and Merle Haggard, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, the Eagles, dive bars in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and his mother driving a P.O.S. Chevy Chevelle, going down Oklahoma highways like  a bat out of hell.

An added bonus was that his wife, Trisha Yearwood, unexpectedly came out on stage and sang a couple of numbers with him. They’re obviously quite in love, and she’s got a voice that just won’t quit.  I’ve always wanted to go to a concert where they announce that someone (say, Bette Midler) is in the audience and she comes up on stage with the scheduled performer and sings a couple of numbers. This was as close as I have gotten to that. It was great music and great theater.

At the end of the show, Garth left the stage and the crowd was on its feet in an instant. He came back and led the audience in Friends in Low Places which, of course, everyone knew by heart. It’s been sung at a billion fraternity parties, every bar at the Jersey shore, and plenty of wedding receptions where they'd run out of food but don't come close to running out of booze. 

  

We had scarcely finished singing when the house lights came up and The Other Rick appeared and led Tracy and me to a door at the side of the stage where he entrusted us to one of the house staff who was to take us backstage to meet Garth and Trisha. She asked Tracy and me how we liked the show as she led us down a long, antiseptically clean hallway deep into the bowels of the hotel. I wouldn't have been surprised had we passed a doorway marked “Undisclosed Location. Dick Cheney. Knock Before Entering.” 

We made a left turn and we found ourselves in an anonymous lounge sort of room. In a half a sec, someone said “they’re ready for you” and our guide took us across the hall, unlocking one of those weird push button combination door locks they have on data centers in hospitals. 

The door opened and there, in a room furnished with leather sofas and a big flat TV with the hockey game playing were Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. We introduced ourselves (they already knew Tracy) and they invited us to sit down and chat. Garth asked me if I wanted a beer and I said sure, and the next thing I knew I was drinking an Amstel Light. We chatted about his playing the Grange Fair eons ago and I mentioned that my sister had seen him near Elk City, Oklahoma even before that.

 

Amazingly we didn’t talk about how Tracy and I met in the 7^th grade math class and all the related topics that arise out of that. Garth and Trisha were warm and gracious and as nice as you could possibly imagine. After a while Garth mentioned that my phone must have a camera and I said I had an actual camera. One of his entourage members snapped some photos. Tracy said "Rick, you didn’t say what you always say, 'Say sex not everyone likes cheese!' and we had a couple of laughs about that.  Garth Brooks shook my hand and Trisha gave me a big hug. And that’s how Tracy and I came to have another story to share with our lunch table at our next high school reunion.

After we left, I looked at my watch. It was 10:10, way too late to call any of my friends back East. So for an evening at least, this was something that happened in Vegas that actually stayed there.

Muscletown USA

I went to York the other day for a meeting. I don't go there with any frequency. I mostly drive by on the Interstate en route to Baltimore. I say to myself, oh, there's the Harley-Davidson factory and then enjoy the sight of the rotating weightlifter sign at the York Barbell factory-slash-Weightlifting Hall of Fame. I always mean to stop at the Hall of Fame, but it's still on my to-do list.

My meeting was at the Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Complex. The complex is made a former 1920s vintage movie palace and an adjoining smaller vintage theater that have been adapted into venues for live entertainment. It's quite grand--there's nothing quite like an old movie palace. It looks as if they bring in some great performers, too. This year they're having performers as varied as Bruce Hornsby and David Sedaris. And, of course, lots of folks I've never heard of.

This sign was near a food cart in York's central square. I never really thought of sausages and lemonade as being natural compliments to each other.

York has a nifty central market which, unfortunately, was closed the day I was there.

The parking garage across the street from the Strand-Capitol overlooked a mural that would be more at home in West Hollywood, California than in York, Pennsylvania. The large work of art, in sort of a post Paint-by-the-Numbers style, celebrates York's place as Muscletown USA. During my few trips to the York metro area, it's never looked like the Dutch Country version of Muscle Beach to me. But what do I know?

In case you are wondering, it's just 36 miles from Muscletown USA to Chocolatetown USA and then another 497 miles to Hitsville USA.  

The figures in the mural are Bob Hoffman, Tommy Kono, and John Grimek.  They are framed by the York YMCA (no Village People visible) on the left, and on the right, some guys lifting two other men sitting in what looks to be an MG TC parked in front of York Oil Burner, the home of Strength and Health Publications.

Actually, the car looks as if it's levitating, so perhaps it's a reference to the flubber powered Model T in the Fred McMurray movie The Absent-Minded Professor. I know I could bench press a helluva lot more than I can now if I had a little flubber at my disposal. But I digress...

Bob Hoffman was known the "Father of World Weightlifting". In importance this title outranks the "Father of American Weightlifting" yet is outranked by the "Father of Galactic Weightlifting". All kidding aside, he seems to have had quite an interesting life. You can read more about him in the book, Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell. by John D. Fair. Whatever it costs, I think it's worth it just for the title.

Tommy Kono, America's greatest weightlifter was an asthmatic kid who spent part of his childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. He won gold medals in two different Olympics and held lots of other weightlifting records.  Fyodor Bogdanovasky (you just knew he was going to come up sooner or later, didn't you?) of the Soviet Union once said of him, "When Kono looks at me from the wings, he works on me like a python on a rabbit." Fyodor had quite a way with the simile, didn't he?  Interestingly enough, this look (along with a different kind of python reference) was also employed when The Village People were hoping to enjoy the company of others at the YMCA.

John Grimek Mr. America 1940 and 1941, was called the "Monarch of Muscledom" and was the only undefeated bodybuilder ever. It would take an undefeated career to live up to the that title!

During my next trip to York I plan to drive around looking for a mural about 98-pound weaklings having sand kicked in their faces. I'm sure there's one someplace.
                                 

Charlottesville. Part Two

There were plenty of non-fiction authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book, though most of their presentations seemed to have happened before I got there. I did, however, have the good fortune of spending some time in the Charlottesville City Council chambers (easily Virginia's ugliest) attending a talk by Earl Swift, the author of The Big Roads, a history of the interstate highway system. I know what you're thinking, "I need to finish that utterly fascinating history of the Waring Blender before I start on something else..."

I haven't started The Big Roads yet, but I think it might surpass the history of the Waring Blender. Highway building attracted some fascinating characters--like the mover and shaker who required his wife to call him "Chief". Interstate highways have not only had an enormous influence on how we travel, but also on how we live and where we live. Interestingly enough, the Interstate Highway System was pretty much all a done deal when President Eisenhower came along. Calling it the Eisenhower Interstate System is a case of a politician getting credit for something he didn't do. Pretty shocking, eh?

 

Between sessions on murder and highways, I took time to provide economic stimulus to central Virginia by visiting a number of locally owned shoppes. How could I not stop in a store with large and colorful peters in the window?  The store was called Artifacts and it was the Charlottesville version of Aero Studios in New York City. They had lots of cool stuff and I bought some great cocktail glasses. Actually, by my way of thinking, any glass is a cocktail glass.

C-ville is definitely the place to go if you want to buy some pink skinny jeans. For men. Jack Wills University Outfitters can get you all decked out. The pink jeans are a nice change from the standard PSU raiment of a hoodie and sweatpants.

There was plenty real live music to shop by on Charlottesville's downtown mall. It's hard not to like a trio of band geeks having a good time on string bass, guitar and accordion.

There was also a kid in bright blue sneakers and coordinating blue and green striped t-shirt playing Mendelssohn on the solo violin.

There was vocal music, too. This man was exercising his first amendment rights by carrying his picket sign and signing This Land Is Your Land at the top of his lungs. I don't know when I saw an old-fashioned picket sign on a stick last.

Some guy finally listened to his wife (or husband) and took his mounted gazelle to The Consignment House. Presumably he needs to make room for a coffee table made out of a wagon wheel or an étagère filled with Precious Moments figurines. If it the gazelle had a cigarette hanging out of its mouth I might have bought it.

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There was an antique show in the arena that's just across Charlottesville's downtown mall from Omni Hotel, the home to most of the book festival. The show was a benefit for Preservation Virginia, formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Founded in 1889, Preservation Virginia was the first statewide historic preservation organization in U.S. It is responsible for the preservation of lots of cool stuff, including Jamestown, the site of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the New World. So I looked upon it as my civic duty to go.

 

The show featured about fifty dealers and they were selling all the furniture and accoutrements that you would need to furnish an English country house. Antique oriental rugs that won't show the occasional episode of dog effluvia? Check. A lovely Chinese export porcelain tater tot dish? Check. Ancestral portraits? Check. Regency dining tables that seat more people than I have readers? Check. Just add a carload of chinless, freeloading relatives with bad teeth and a taste for Benny Hill to all this instant heritage and you'll have an authentic English country house experience.

There weren't that many customers about in the mid afternoon, so the gaggle of fleshy antique dealers channeling their inner Harry Potter really stood out. They all dress pretty much the same--blue blazers, nice trousers (with cuffs), Joseph P. Kennedy's gay cousin's glasses,  and expensive shoes, suede preferred. They all seem to posses x-ray vision that can zero in on your wallet as you walk by. (A good reason to wear clean underwear to an antique show!) If they think you're up to the rigors of an important Baltimore bow front chest, they are all over you. And if they think that you're cute AND up to the rigors of  an important Baltimore bow front chest, they cling to you like a burdock to your dog's fur. Antique shopping is not for the faint of heart.

There was some nice stuff, but most all of the stuff was out of my league, price wise. What's an extra two zeros among friends?  I saw a great duck hunting painting but it wasn't $26,000 worth of great.

Sunday morning, after we were done being Festive,  my friends and I were looked for a special breakfast spot since it was Karen's birthday. My go-to breakfast spot, The Tavern, formerly known as Sarge's--Where Students Tourists and Townspeople Meet (or so it said in a sign painted on the roof), recently closed after a zillion years of serving hotcakes.  So it was time for someplace new. Hence The Pigeon Hole on Elliewood Avenue.

The Pigeon Hole is in a tiny royal blue stucco building that for years was the home of Martha's Cafe. I think I ate enough asparagus quiche in that place to float a battleship. I know, I know, strictly speaking battleships do not float on asparagus quiche. But if they did.... Our waiter was a tall Ryan Gosling doppelganger, with a hipster haircut. He was wearing blue shorts and a plain formerly white v-necked tee shirt--next to the turtlenecked dickey, one of my least favorite clothing items of all time. He was so mussed and casually dressed that I thought,  Holy crap, we just got this guy out of bed!

Whatever our waiter was lacking in sartorial splendor he made up for in the personality department. After several trips to the table, I commented that he'd never told us his name. He replied that it was Andrew. I told him that I heard it as Amber and he chuckled and said, "Well, actually my name is Holly." Chuckles ensued. There were perhaps five people working there, and he was the only one who did not have a prodigious number of quirky tattoos on display.

The front dining room was so small that when the too-tanned parents and their laxer son came in and sat town, they were practically at our table. They wanted the Eggs Benedict but with the hollandaise on the side.
 

Everything in the place is deliberately mismatched. That might not have worked had the food not been delicious and the service epic. Epic is not a word I throw out casually. A card on the table recommended a 20% tip if the service were "epic". It's not every day that delicious food is served by a Ryan Gosling doppelganger, so I went with the "epic" tip. I highly recommend the huevos rancheros with grits.

The birthday girl's French toast didn't look bad either.

Soon enough we had eaten our fill and were ready to point the rental car back towards the Mason-Dixon Line. I won't be back in Charlottesville for a while, but I'm hoping that when I do that gazelle is still there. If it's taken up smoking--it's not hazardous to the health of a stuffed gazelle--he might just be coming home with me.

Charlottesville. Part One

I'm just back from Charlottesville and the Virginia Festival of the Book. I had a super time. Charlottesville is great at any time of year, and the Festival of the Book is pretty darned choice too.

There's a great line in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil where the protagonist is describing Savannah to a friend back in New York City: "It's like Gone With the Wind on mescaline." Charlottesville isn't quite like that, but almost. It's more like The Olde South meets the People's Republic of Berkeley.

I'm pretty darned sure that both Alice Waters and John Waters would feel quite at home there, not to mention any minor Continental royals who are tired of the bad plumbing, lack of cable TV, and the abysmal Thai food delivery options at the family schloss back in the Old Country.

And there are plenty of regular Virginians, too--the kind of folks who, if they didn't have such good manners, would roll their eyes at all the highfalutin' tomfoolery and drawl "there they go again!"

The first program I went to at the Book Festival was a reading by various UVa grads. I didn't really care about any of them except for Chad Harbach. He wrote The Art of Fielding, which I just finished the other day. I loved the the book, so did my best to get there in time to hear him read.

I arrived in the middle of a poetry reading by either some woman named Jazzy or  some other woman named Brittany. Hey if you are going to call yourself a poet, you might as well go by the first name Jazzy. Her poems sounded like a string of random words and occasionally one of the words would refer to a personal body part that is commonly covered by underwear. Unless you're going commando, I mean. Apparently poets named Jazzy do not do iambic pentameter or rhyming couplets. They go in for a trickle of consciousness that focuses on out of body experiences that take place on hospital gurneys. At least that's what I think she was talking about. I wasn't exactly certain. And didn't have the nerve to raise my hand and say, "Excuse me Jazzy. I don't understand. Is this going to be on the test?"

The room was packed and when they were changing poets on stage woman next to me commented that my silver bracelet looked like vintage Georg Jensen. This sort of thing never happens in State College. In State College someone would ask if my grill were vintage George Foreman. My neighbor was a local, an attractive-ish woman of a certain age (plus a few) who wore artsy sportswear and bright blue oxfords (two thumbs up on the shoes!). She was carrying The New Yorker (of course). She said that she reads the movie reviews first and admitted to sending in a caption to the cartoon caption contest once. She was sure that she'd nailed it, and of course, she never heard from the mag. Ever. Her voice was two thirds Virginia and the remainder equal parts Bombay Sapphire and black coffee. She'd read The Art of Fielding, too, but got tired of Henry, the main character. I replied that I wouldn't say I got tired of him but I certainly was ready for him to have a Disney-like redemption since my literary tastes ran to P. G. Wodehouse and romance novels with Fabio on the cover.

After Brittney (or was it Jazzy?), Chad Harbach read a couple of chapters from his book, and then all three writers took questions from the audience. A couple of the questioners seemed to be channeling their inner William F. Buckley since I had no clue that they were talking about. The poets seemed to, though. Or at least they did a passable job of faking it. I was the second person in line for the book signing. Chad signed my book which actually belongs to my friend Susan. He was quite charming and gracious, and if his fame is a drag to him it he didn't act like it. I should have asked him if he could have validated my parking.

After The Jazzy and Chad Show it was time for a personal tour of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.  It was so cool. They showed us everything from a letter signed by John Rolfe (Mr. Pocahontas) to the original manuscript for William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner wrote in longhand, on yellow legal paper, in about 4 point type. He did not cross any of his t's. No joke. Rose Mary Woods would have taken years (plus 18 minutes) to decipher and type the book. 

A little later it was time for a panel on Leo Tolstoy, E.B. White, and Kurt Vonnegut. The presenters weren't dry academics so the discussion was more fun than any panel on Leo Tolstoy, E.B. White, and Kurt Vonnegut had a right to be. The guy who wrote about E.B. White did seem to be channeling his inner drag queen and started to get the vapors when he talked about visiting White's barn in Maine, but thankfully that episode passed before he needed smelling salts. The counterpoint to his vapors was hearing how Kurt Vonnegut tripped over his yappy dog's leash and fell down the stairs of his brownstone, conking his head. He went into a coma and never recovered. What a way to go! I'm sure it was a bad day for the Vonnegut family but it made for an interesting story.

Dinner was an al fresco feast of fish tacos at a restaurant that used to be a gas station. According to its web site, "Mono Loco is Charlottesville’s original nouveau-Latin restaurant." I didn't even know that nouveau-Latin was a genre of restaurant, let alone that there were non-original knockoffs of the real deal in that dining category.

The post-dinner event was a moderated chat between bestselling novelist Steve Berry and another bestselling novelist I'd never heard of, Lisa Gardner. He's a former attorney and likes golf. She writes murder mysteries and enjoys taking kickboxing lessons with  her husband and daughter. I don't know where they come in on Frank Sinatra, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and long walks on the beach. Work wise, she writes murder mysteries and you can enter a contest on her web site to get her to kill or maim one of your friends. He writes books called stuff like The Jefferson Key and The Romanov Prophecy. He's prolific to say the least, and has a zillion books in print, all of which were probably purchased in airports.

After hearing him talk (and overhearing him in the parking lot saying "I was sitting in Chanel in Paris when....") I decided that the titles for his books worked like menu at an old fashioned Chinese restaurant--one from column A and one from column B.

       Column A                                                        Column B
Historical Figure or City                               Another Noun at Random

   Cher                                                                 Toaster Oven
   Buenos Aires                                                     Circumcision
   The Virgin Mary                                                 Indigestion
   Pancho Villa                                                       Divertissment
   Lord Cornwallis                                                  Bidet
   Gibraltar                                                           Jackhammer

There are no incorrect answers, so his  next book may very well be The Cher Jackhammer or The Lord Cornwallis Jackhammer. (Cher and Lord Cornwallis are about the same age, after all!)

Some stuff on the rest of the trip will follow in a later post. My copy of The Gibraltar Circumcision just came from Amazon.com and I can't wait to start reading. I hear that in some quarters it's a religious experience.

Overkill in the Old Dominion

I went to Charlottesville last weekend and happened upon two interesting maintenance projects--one on the UVa grounds and the other at a convenience store I stopped at in Strasburg, Virginia.

The good men (and probably some women) of Buildings and Grounds at The University were doing something to two steps. This this project involves four portable fence posts, three orange traffic cones, two warning signs --in red and black no less, a generous dollop of green plastic fencing and I don't know how many twist ties. The University must have had a papal dispensation to skip the blinking lights, a foghorn, guard towers and a two flag men. I do not have superhuman powers of observation, but I didn't see any actual construction in progress. I know that the sign says there is construction in progress, but it wasn't apparent to me.

On the way home to Pennsylvania, I stopped at a convenience store/Exxon station/McDonald's. I'd never seen all of them combined into one building. It must be the latest thing. One thing about a three-fer interstate exit amenity, it was quite the buffet of smells--the convenience store smell, eau de high test from the gas pumps, and of course that distinctive McDonald's aroma for good measure.

The men's room there contained this urinal, or perhaps a previously undiscovered work by Marcel Duchamp. Not only is there a Wet Floor pylon (non bilingual, McDonalds logo edition) warning you away. but there is also a plastic shroud over the urinal's handle. The Out of Order/Do Not Use sign is cheerfully secured to the plastic shroud with smiley face stickers. When did a broken urinal become something to smile about?  The nearby plunger is at the ready in case you ignore all those warnings and the Bold Look of Kohler turns into Strasburg's version of the Trevi Fountain.

Even with all those warnings, I am sure someone guy's going to use it before it's fixed. Even I thought about it....

Da Burgh

I went to Pittsburgh last weekend. I hadn't been there in some time. I'm old enough and go infrequently enough to be surprised all over again that there aren't steel mills in the spots where I remember them. The UMPC sign atop the US Steel Building still comes as a surprise too. We used to be a country of large corporations that manufactured stuff. Now we're a country of large corporations that manage our health care. I'm not entirely sure that counts as progress.

State College is fairly bombarded with news of the Stillers and Pens (not so much the Buccos; they stink) and we tend to think of Pittsburgh in terms of sports and still mills and the super geeks at Carnegie-Mellon, the only school in America where you can major in bagpipes. One of the funniest things I ever heard about Pittsburgh was that someone called it the straight San Francisco. That made me smile, since I'm fairly certain that no one has ever called San Francisco the gay Pittsburgh.

I stayed at the Renaissance Hotel, which was designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, more famous as the designer of Forest Hills Gardens in New York City. The lobby space is great, but most of the decor is Kimpton-lite; apparently the Marriott family of hotels does not approve of the generous use of animal prints or the hiring of cute and flirtatious yet sexually ambiguous front desk staff. The hotel bar is called Braddock's. General Braddock blundered his way into a memorable defeat (not to mention his own death) in the French & Indian War. He's definitely a guy who needs to have his name on a bar! Whatever happened to naming stuff after the old Pittsburgh standbys....H.J. Heinz, Andrew Carnegie, and Barbara Feldon?

My friend Chuck and I stopped at the 7-11 near our hotel. Does 7-11 management really think that people in ski masks care about the rules against wearing one in the store?  But hey, customer satisfaction (except if you're wearing a ski mask) is the store's #1 Priority. 

The faux mid-century modern Fort Duquesne and Sixth Street Garage was across the street from the hotel. According to the Pittsburgh Parking Authority, the garage has an "award winning central lobby." Apparently this award from from the Parking Garage Central Lobby Design Association of Pittsburgh, because I couldn't imagine who else would give the lobby there a second look. It was strictly "meh", especially if they're trying to make you think that Don Draper parks there. 

I was having a hangover ameliorating coffee at Starbucks when Chuck walked in and asked me if I'd seen the robot repair shop that was right next door. My first thought was "Robot repair? How much did he have to drink last night?" But there it was, Fraley's Robot Repair. However, it wasn't really a repair shop, it was an art installation disguised as a robot repair shop....a robot repair shop from the Robby the Robot era. It's a project designed by Pittsburgh artist Toby Atticus Fraley. Audience members can look through the shop windows and see robots in various stages of dishevelment on the workbench, along with boxes of radioactive parts. Vintage lab instruments are plugged in and ready to be put to use overhauling the Jetsons' robot, Rosie and her friends who suffer from bunions, robotopause, or even iron-poor tired hydraulic fluid.

Once our hangovers went away, we went out to DeLuca's in the Strip District for breakfast. Fantastic place--make it a point to go! I'd never been to the Strip District, but it seemed like Manhattan's Meat Packing District without the fashionistas and hipsters who work at J. Crew naming colors. The folks who are responsible for calling boxer shorts anthracite, midnight, soot, and sable instead of black haven't even heard of Pittsburgh, let alone the Strip District.

My friend Bruce would love Bent and Dent Grocery Liquidators. I love a good deal as much as the next guy, but you can't mark a bulging can of vichyssoise down enough for me. 

Pennsylvania is known for its macaroni. It's in all the guidebooks.

There are lots of architectural gems in the Strip District.

This building reminded me of Altoona's Roaring River Mills Roaring River Mills Roaring River Mills (at least that's what it was called in their radio commercials. Officially it was just Roaring River Mills.) R.R.M. was a fabric store formerly located in what was quite possibly the world's largest orange building. 

A particular highlight of the trip was a tour of  the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. Louis Sullivan said that a skyscraper should be "every inch a proud and soaring thing", and the Cathedral of Learning surely fulfilled that mandate--it's the tallest academic building in the U.S. My uncle, who went to Duke, usually called the Cathedral of Learning the "Tower of Ignorance", much to his sister's dismay. She, of course, was the token Pitt alum in our family. Interestingly enough, our tour guide did not touch on the Tower of Ignorance nickname during our tour. 

The building is more handsome than I remembered it to be. It was designed by Charles Klauder, a Philadelphia architect who also worked at Princeton, Penn State, Cornell and at a couple of well-known prep schools. The interior is quite remarkable, with a Gothic central space surrounded by the Pitt's famous Nationality Rooms. They're cool but crazy all at the same time. It's great to see the pride Pitt takes in them and how well they're maintained. I wouldn't be much of an architectural historian if I didn't mention that the building contains tons (probably literally) of incredible Samuel Yellin ironwork.

It's Spring Break at Pitt, so the T.o.I. was dead except for some Asian students staring intently into their laptops while they pecked away at their keyboards. Perhaps they were doing Facebook or maybe astrophysics, or were on an industrial espionage mission, stealing the recipe for the Clark Bar. Whatever it was, they weren't in Ft. Lauderdale in an crowdsourced community theater production of Where the Boys Are. 

A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. My RULE class was fortunate to have the charming, erudite, and elfin Dr. Christopher Beard as our guide for a spin through the dinosaur exhibit. In addition to being a great tour guide, he's also a MacArthur Fellow, and won his award in 2000 in the same year as architect Samuel Mockbee, the currently dead founder of Auburn University's Rural Studio.

Dr. Beard explained to us that in the last few years the dinosaur displays and dinosaurs themselves had been refurbished. The museum had more dinosaurs than you could shake a stick at so they were sort of crammed into the dinosaur halls willy-nilly. Things from the Middle Crustacean were rubbing up against stuff from the Semi-Cambrian with a Two and a Half Twist and so on. Not good. So the museum added some space, red-did the exhibits, and even added a glass walled paleo lab, so you can watch museum staff members chipping away at fossils with hammers just as if they're an Ant Farm. It is SO cool. The assembled dinosaurs themselves have had some work, done, too. Hey, before you go all natural beauty righteous and T. Rex on me, after hundreds of million years, you'd want to have a little work done too.

When I was a little kid my parents took my brother and me to the museum to see the dinosaurs and whatnot. They had a good friend whose sister was a curator there, so we got to go behind the scenes with her for a look at the stuff that wasn't on display.  I didn't even know that museums had backstage areas. It was amazing.

One of the things we saw was a stuffed Belgian hare. I knew that hare was another word for rabbit and knew all about rabbits from Beatrix Potter's story Peter Rabbit. Rabbits were all named Peter, after Miss Potter's hero. You know, the guy who wore that fetching blue coat, had siblings named Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail and lived near Mr. MacGregor's garden in a hutch that had been decorated by Sister Parish. (OK, I made that part up. But trust me, as rabbit hutches go, his could have been in Architectural Digest.) 

So back to the Belgian hare. This thing was BIG. It had to be three or four times the size of any  Peter Rabbit I had ever imagined. My parents' friend told us that someone had imported it from Europe it to someplace near Erie as a pet, and it had escaped and someone else shot it (Welcome to Pennsylvania...blam!) and then called the museum because it was several times the size of Peter Rabbit's American cousins living in the better Erie suburbs. That stuffed hare made quite the impression on me. 

Soon thereafter, our tour was over, and my brother and my parents and I left our friend's office and walked through the great marble hall on our way to our car.  My mother and I were right next to a museum guard when I turned to her and said, sounding like the obviously astonished six year old that I was, "Mommy, did you ever see such a big peter?!" I can only imagine the look on my mother's face as my words echoed through the hall.

In the forty some years since that family visit to the Carnegie Museum, I've been around the block a few times. I've even made several excursions to Pittsburgh's gay cousin, San Francisco. Sure San Francisco has sourdough bread, cable cars, Tony Bennett's heart, and men in assless chaps on every street corner. Pittsburgh, however, remains the home of the really big peter. 

San Francisco, eat your heart out.

Going Out With Style

Altoona’s Jones Funeral Home isn’t the only cool funeral home I’ve run into. The Fred F. Groff Funeral Service is another one of my favorites.

It’s located in Lancaster, in a not all that interesting block of West Orange Street. Its neighbors are typical Lancaster row houses. The nicer ones are red brick with green shutters and white trim. They lead you to think of our Found Fathers hanging out within, thinking deep thoughts. The less nice are Permastone. They cause you to wonder if the scowling fat woman in a house dress sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette is a permanent fixture.

While the Groff building is red brick with white trim, just like lots of buildings in Lancaster, it’s made from longer, slimmer Roman brick, not the standard American brick, and the white trim isn’t painted wood, it’s white marble.  As Emeril Lagasse would say, the architect definitely kicked it up a notch. And it’s not a Georgian or Federal style knockoff, it’s modern, or rather, Moderne, an asymmetrical composition of mostly windowless rectangular forms with projecting white marble entrance pavilions.

The building is quite handsome, but the aluminum sign, Fred F. Groff Funeral Service, Inc. (no, it’s not a funeral home and it’s definitely not a mortuary) really puts the place in the big leagues. 

I can just see Fred F. Groff himself saying to his architect (Henry Y. Shaub, in case you were wondering), “I like those logo signature signs that they have at Altman’s, and Wannamaker’s. And at Lord & Taylor, too. Do something like that, but more modern. Oh and make it big enough so that my mother can read it. Without her glasses.” Hence the great aluminum letters, with large f’s that look like bows on kids’ shoelaces.

I never thought the building looked like a funeral home.  I always thought it looked like a high end tchotchke shop, like Gump’s in San Francisco. My uber-cool friend Richard thought it looked like the headquarters of an upscale furrier. Once again, he’s right on the money. I can just see Milburn Drysdale in the Groff building wringing his hands complaining about the prices as he paces back and forth while Mrs. Drysdale takes her time trying on a full length blonde mink coat.  Miss Jane Hathaway stands at the ready outside, eager to take The Chief to the Clampett mansion in her shiny red Chrysler convertible.

The stylish front of the building faces the street and the parking area, while the utility wing of the Groff building stretches out toward the back of the lot like the servants' wing of an English country house.

That’s where the business end of the funeral service takes place. Embalming. Casket storage. Washing and waxing the hearses. Rehearsal rooms where funeral director trainees work on their lugubrious expressions. And a laundry where they iron those “Funeral” flags for the cars in a funeral procession.

I had a chance to go to a service at the Groff funeral home once, years ago.  I was rather looking forward to it, too. Not because I had tons of feelings to share about the dearly departed—I hadn’t actually met him. Likewise, it wasn’t because I look swell in a dark suit and love using the term “laid out” in conversation.

It wasn’t even because I would get to Make the Red Rabbit a Habit and eat dinner at the Red Rabbit Drive-in on the way home. It was because I would finally get to see inside the Fred F. Groff Funeral Service, Inc. 

Unfortunately, on the way to the funeral I had car trouble. The gonkulator on my Volkswagen crapped out. My car went from motoring along to sputtering when I was in single lane bumper-to-bumper traffic in a construction zone. In a flash, my car was as dead as the main attraction that day at Fred F. Groff. A construction zone is never an ideal spot for a car to conk out. Naturally, it took more than some swearing and the laying on of hands to make the car functional again. Consequently I missed the day’s funeral and my chance to see if the innards of the building were as nifty as the exterior. 

When it comes to the interior, fantasy is probably better than reality. The most likely case is that the distinctive funeral parlor smell that’s a cross between a florist’s shop and a taxidermist’s studio would smack you in the face as soon as you open the building's thick glass doors. The public rooms of the Fred F. Groff Funeral Service no doubt look like every other funeral home, with some hideously furnished, dimly lit, thickly carpeted rooms, and a large Olan Mills-esque color photo portrait of the founder in an altar-like arrangement in the hallway. There the standard elements would be in place—tasteful enough silk flower arrangements, some pamphlets on ‘pre-need planning’, and a guest book on a stand. If you cock your head and listen closely, you might be able to hear Tennessee Ernie Ford singing hymns in the background.

I hope that no one I know is playing in the big room there any time soon. As much as I want to see the interior of the Groff building, I’m content to wait until someone turns it into the fur salon that it always should have been.