For the sake of convenience, I usually tell people my parents were from Pittsburgh. But really, they were from a tiny hamlet called Denbo, about 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. To put a finer point on it, my mom grew up in a company town, and the patch of row houses took its name from the local coalmine—Vesta 6. Her dad worked in that mine. The company owned their home, and they shopped in a company store and paid with company-issued scrip.

I remember our family visits when I was a kid as exotic—driving in from Illinois, the serpentine roads through the hills and valleys were like a roller coaster. We stayed in the house my dad grew up in, very near the Monongahela River. My uncle George lived there, and sometimes there would be an open fire roast of multiple chickens on a spit, as well as a lamb. It’s the first time I ever ate lamb, wouldn’t have touched it before then. But that lamb was different.

George always kept an ancient family tractor operable, and he had a trailer that he’d transformed from a defunct truck. He’d hitch that makeshift trailer up and take me, my sister and our cousins on a twilight ride along the river and then to the entrance of an abandoned strip mine. It was spooky in a Ray Bradbury way. There’d be talk of the old days, when my dad and his brothers swam in the river, sometimes hitching onto barges for a ride. It was impossible to comprehend, but kind of electrifying.

We only went every few years, but the whole place seemed never to change. It was like going back in time.

Of course, everything does change.

I was reminded of that this past weekend when I made a sojourn to western Pennsylvania.

Not your typical cemetery setting.

I hadn’t been to the cemetery at St. George’s Serbian church in nearly 25 years, when we buried my father there. Saturday I drove in around 11:00 a.m., somehow managing not to get lost. As I approached, the memory of my dad’s funeral day began materializing. It’s a beautiful drive, really, and then all of the sudden these enormous cooling towers from a power plant come into view. The church and cemetery are very nearly in the towers’ shadows.

That’s the kind of imagery that sticks with you.

It’s a very small church, and the cemetery is unassuming. No tombstones, just markers. Nearly a third of them also had a medallion indicating the deceased was a veteran.

I was utterly alone on a sun-soaked day. As I walked the grounds, the number of markers with names ending in ovich kept fooling me. But it being a Serbian cemetery, well… .

Then I saw a cluster, and there he was—with his veteran’s marker. And I remembered his funeral, the flag-draped coffin graveside, and the paunchy troop from the American Legion playing taps and firing their rifles in salute. And just bawling. Twenty-five years later, it was as clear as day.

I spent my time with memories of my dad—and uncle George and Aunt Bert and her husband Uncle Hunch, one of the all-time characters of all-time characters, who are buried steps away. And then I headed to Bert and Hunch’s daughter’s house.

Cousin Linda lives in a beautiful spot at the top of a hill surrounded by woods in Brownsville, Pa. I was treated to scrumptious homemade stuffed cabbage and fried chicken and pogacha, traditional Serbian bread. And to conversation with Linda, her husband Rich, and my cousin Johnny—Linda’s brother. We caught up on children, grandchildren, cousins, family dramas, and the cacophony of cicadas that had only recently subsided at their house. And it was wonderful.

A gem of a stadium in a gem of a city.

From there, it was back to my hotel in Pittsburgh for a nap and then a trip to PNC Park, home of the Pirates, who hosted the Dodgers that night. Decades ago I’d gone to Three Rivers Stadium with another uncle and cousins and seen the great Roberto Clemente play. Clemente played the game with a kind of artistic grace, and with flair. He has remained an all-time favorite.

The new stadium is splendid, the best baseball park I’ve been to—and the Pirates won in convincing fashion, with Andrew McCutchen hitting two homers. I had a kielbasa.

I spent Sunday walking downtown Pittsburgh, where a whole lot of construction is going on in some blocks, with other blocks and grand old buildings still suffering by comparison.

I felt a little empty all day, which I sort of expected. It’s a lot to reconcile. All those people and times gone. Poof.

But still somehow more vividly alive than ever.

It’s a mystery for which I’m grateful.

After Prince died, I asked the writers in my memoir classes to write a 500-word essay about a celebrity’s death that made them especially sad. We published writer Bob Eisenberg’s essay about Vidal Sassoon here, and it inspired my young friend Tara to publish an essay about Vidal Sassoon on her taraisarockstar blog as well. “His passing was very sad for me, too,” Tara wrote. “I’m not a hairstylist, but his technique became a major part of my life.” She gave me permission to excerpt from her post here on our Safe & Sound blog, and here’s that excerpt:

How Vidal Sassoon changed my life

by taraisarockstar

When I entered the London Sassoon Academy as a shy 18 year old girl, the creative director asked, “Are you looking for a change?” I had no idea that phrase would be the caption of my life for the next fourteen years.

That’s Tara modeling backstage, purple hair, Midwest Hair Show (photo of haircut by Tim Hartley)

Every few months, I was given the opportunity to hair model for the Vidal Sassoon salon in London and back home in Chicago. The hair modeling adventure pulled me in, and, like any other addiction, I couldn’t stop. The company made such an impact that I became a receptionist for the Chicago salon for five years.

I am a platform for the seasonal hair collections. With the color and cut changing every few months, my hair attracts attention wherever I go. Total strangers stop me walking down Michigan Avenue to ask, “Where did you get your haircut?”

The day I met Vidal started as a typical day of prepping for a hair show at the salon. Stylists pacing, cutting, and shaping hair. The local stylists made room for the international creative team as they poured in from various cities to Chicago, finding their creative space.

The international creative director was cutting my hair as Vidal strolled into the salon. Some stylists cheered. Some cried. I sat on the edge of my seat.

Sassoon stood, arms crossed, and watched Tim Hartley cut my hair. After a few moments, he whispered to Tim that he needed to add this haircut to the next collection. He took pictures with the staff, gave hugs and left.

His technique, taught in salons throughout the world, demonstrates to stylists how to treat hair like a canvas and hairstyling an art. They see geometric shapes, vibrant colors, dimensions. They find inspiration in architecture.

I admire these stylists and colorists who devote their lives to this evolving hair education. Truly, I see how the stylists admire the man who changed the world with his pioneering hair techniques. In the midst of devoting their lives to his method, the experience of meeting Vidal was meeting their idol. An icon. I am glad that I got to be a small part of it all. Thank you, Vidal, for changing my life.

I’m trying something new this summer, taking this weekly playwriting class at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.

Over the course of 10 weekly 3-hour sessions that start on June 4, 2016, students will explore the process of creating a 2-minute play in the Too Much Light style, writing and crafting pieces based on true life experiences. The class will introduce tenets of honesty, brevity, audience connection and random chance, and will examine specific play formulas and styles that recur on stage– including monologues, object theatre, and even the difficult shortie play. The workshop culminates in a student-written performance of Too Much Light at Victory Gardens on August 13th, presented and performed for the public. In partnership with Victory Gardens’ Artist Development Workshop, Intro to TML at VG offers an opportunity to study the fundamentals of Neo-Futurism in a physically accessible setting, with accommodations provided for any student with a disability. Artists with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply, and will be given preference in acceptance into the workshop. (The class is open to everyone; however we will strive to maintain a majority of artists with disabilities in the class.)

Whitney makes the most of travel time.

Without being able to see the other participants, I’m not sure how many of us have disabilities. The first day of class, though, a voice rang out at about my height and requested I pull Whitney completely under the chair I was sitting in. “I don’t want to run over her!” Aha! That classmate uses a wheelchair.

We all got to work right away on our first day. Introductions, exercises to help us relax, exercises to loosen up, a game to inspire creative word choice, then freewriting — we wrote continuously for five minutes, without worrying about spelling or grammar. Topic: Something I Feel Strongly About.

After five minutes of freewriting we took a 15-minute break. Then we got right back at it. Teachers read a few Too Much Light monologues out loud for us. We discussed ways those writers utilized good word choice, unexpected props, and unique staging to make their one-person play more interesting. Our homework? Transform our freewriting “Something I Feel Strongly About” exercise into a two-minute monolog based on a true-life experience. We’d each use a prop and unique staging to perform our monolog in class the next week.

My freewriting exercise betrayed my disgust with people who fake or lie about a disability to pass their pet off as a service dog. My Seeing Eye dog Whitney served as my prop and I took suggestions from the teachers about staging. Writing the monologue was fairly easy. Memorizing it? Miserable. Performing it in front of my classmates? Painful! More on memorizing without being able to read print and performing without being able to see the audience in a future blog post. For today, I’ll leave you here with my monologue script:

Scene opens with a person sitting in a straight back chair, an empty chair right behind that person, me standing and holding the back of the empty chair, my Seeing Eye dog at my side.

Me: My Seeing Eye dog leads me down the jetway and onto the plane whenever I fly somewhere. When we get to our seat, I sit down first.

I sit down in the empty seat.

Me: Then I tell her to lie down.

I point to the ground and give Whitney the “down” command.

Me: I picture her like a pile of logs.

I lean down and start shoving Whitney underneath the seat in front of me. Thanks to that person’s weight in the chair, it stays still while I squeeze Whitney under. I say the next lines while continuing to get her situated.

Me: I shove shove shove her back under the seat in front of me. She sighs a sad surrender And lays her head between my shoes.

Whitney does that.

Me: One time while I was leaning down to get Wonder Dog all situated the teenager sitting next to me tapped my back and said she had, like, this really, like, funny story to tell me. I brushed my hand over Wonder Dog’s distressed leather harness one last time to make sure her flat back was completely under the seat

I Brush my hand over Whitney’s harness.

Me: My fingers spidered over to curl her tail under, too…

I spider my fingers down to Whitney’s tail and remain down there checking her out during the next couple lines.

Me: …so it wouldn’t get run over by the shaky drink cart. Finally confident that Wonder Dog was safe and sound, I scratched her nose and sat up for the funny story.

I scratch Whitney’s nose, and once I’m confident she’s under, I sit up again to deliver the next lines.

Me: The teenager told me she was traveling alone. She told me she was an only child. She told me she had a dog. She told me her German Shepherd was like a brother to her. She told me they hated to leave her brother at home when they traveled.

She told me her dad came up with an answer. “My dad wears sunglasses,” she said. “He, like, acts like he’s, like blind.” The teenager was laughing so hard she could hardly tell the rest. You know, about how her dad, like, had somebody at the leather shop, like, make one of those, like, harness things for Rusty. “He pretends Rusty’s a Seeing Eye dog and, like, brings him on the plane,” she said. “Can you, like, believe that?”

I lean down again to make sure Whitney is still secure under the seat in front of me. I stay down there with her to deliver the last two-word line.

Me: I could.

With all the passion and angst and fear and — in some quarters joy — attending the presidential election this year, it’s easy to forget Tip O’Neill’s favorite maxim: All politics is local.

Of course presidential elections matter (see Supreme Court), but in my view, real change bubbles up, it doesn’t trickle down. Attention must be paid to state and local politics.

Here in Illinois political dysfunction has produced a nearly dystopian situation. We haven’t had a budget, not to mention a serious plan for addressing long-term pension problems, for going on two years now. Like many other states, Illinois has financial problems. Unlike most other states, Illinois has not been paying its bills, which has put a real hurt on a lot of people. As usual, the pain started with human services. But it’s spreading And today this: Mt. Sterling, a small downstate town that supplies water to a medium-security prison—is threatening to shut off the supply because the state owes it $370,000.

Meanwhile, a showdown between Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan continues the budget paralysis. What’s worse is that between them, sorry, I can’t find one to root for, and I blame them both.

It can make you throw up your hands and give up.

But don’t do it.

Here’s something else those of us in Illinois can do. I was reminded (thanks Regan!) of a long-running campaign aimed at cleaning up the redistricting process. Redistricting happens every ten years, based on census numbers. Unfortunately, it’s also based on the needs and wants of political operators who want to protect their turf or gain more. Here’s a nifty slide show explanation in case you’ve forgotten civics class:

Click on image to go to a handy explanation of redistricting, and how it can go awry.

Redistricting is an utterly boring subject in a way and also supremely important. This gerrymandering has been show to be at least part of the polarization across the United States, as well as the paralysis of the kind we’re experiencing now in Illinois. A nonpartisan and committed group called Independent Maps has been collecting signatures for a petition to put a constitutional amendment on this fall’s ballot. The amendment would clean up the redistricting process.

The Board of Elections just validated the signatures—a major hurdle. It’s now headed to court where, ahem, Michael Madigan’s favorite lawyer is fighting against it.

A similar effort was ruled unconstitutional a few years back, but this effort was crafted to avoid that fate. You can learn more at the Independent Maps site, where you can also donate or help with you time by writing letters and advocating.

It’s concrete. It would make real difference now and moving forward. I hope you’ll support the effort.

And vote this fall!

Today’s guest blogger, Nancy Lerman.

My assignment to write a 500-word essay about One Thing I Own that I Should Throw Away but Probably Never Will exposed a few of the writers in my memoir classes as…gasp….hoarders! Nancy Lerman, one of the youngest writers in my classes, is one of the packrats, and she managed to avoid writing about something she should throw away by skipping the next class.

The following week I assigned “Nine” in honor of Anna Perlberg’s memoir, The House in Prague. Anna is a writer in one of my classes, and her memoir starts in present tense from her nine-year-old point of view. Writers could do an essay about themselves as nine-year-olds or use the number nine in any other way they chose. Here is Nancy’s “Nine” essay in its entirety (the “Michael” she refers to in the essay is her husband, and “Evan” is their 27-year-old son).

by Nancy Lerman

Last week’s assignment was to write about one object we should give away but never will. That topic hit too close to home.

I am a packrat. My closets overflow with shoes, sweaters, books, linens and toiletries. A hoarder to the core, the thought of tossing puts me in a tizzy. Rather than write that essay, I played hooky. Yet deep in my unconscious the desire to let go simmered and stewed.

This week’s assignment is to write anything about the number nine. After a week of brooding I am ready. Grabbing a step-stool I begin the purge.

I’ll have nine in no time!

1. Frye boots, circa 2001. I’ve always loved these shortie boots even though I haven’t worn them in over a decade. They were comfy for the first few years but then my knees started throbbing after 15 minutes of wear. Evan’s girlfriend politely declined when I tried to give them to her six months ago. Back in the dusty shoebox they went. Until now. Gone.
2. Lemony-mustard-yellow Italian sling-back flats, circa 1988. These shoes’ surprisingly neutral color goes with virtually everything. Even so, I haven’t worn them in 20 years. (Five years ago I caved and parted with an identical pair in rosy-magenta.) I slip on the lemony flats. They’re still cozy. I’m giving them a test-wear while continuing to hunt for other give-aways.
3. My deceased mother-in-law’s beige Dockers khaki pants. Never in a million-years would I buy a pair of preppy Dockers. But Dee did. She died, but her pants still hang in my closet. Someday they’ll be perfect for an African safari or Amazon boat ride. I’m not planning on either trip. Even if I were, the 5’2” Dee hemmed all her pants. These Dockers are way too short for me. Gone.
4. Xeroxed flip-book of 12 recipes from our day at a cooking school in Saigon, Viet Nam. All 12 contain soy sauce, miso paste or hoisin. I’m allergic to soy. Gone.
5. The Guinness Book of World Records for 2001. This was a Chanukah gift for toddler Evan. Gone.
6. The Guinness Book of World Records for 2002. The 2002 book has a pre-holographic snazzy cover, very avant-guard for the time. Neither book has been touched since 2003. Gone.

I’m exhausted. Time for a snack. Prowling through my cupboard I unearth an unopened box of chocolate-mint-girl-scout cookies. Expiration, 2010. A tin of chocolate covered pretzels. Expiration, 2009. A Christmas mixed nut assortment, Expiration 1999. Gone. Gone. Gone.

These lemony-mustard-yellow sling-backs are keepers. I slip them off and the soles of my feet are covered with a white gooey substance. Shoving my footsies under the faucet doesn’t help.

“The lining is sticking to you,” Michael cackles and hands me a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I scrub for 10 minutes. Finally, the white is gone. So are the shoes.

Another stellar assignment from Beth!