Scene From A Pancake Restaurant (with apologies to Billy Joel)

 

So yesterday morning, I am among a group of six people about to enjoy a late Sunday morning brunch at a well known pancake restaurant located in the McKnight Road corridor.  (Hint: It wan't Denny's or Eat 'n Park).  The place is packed.  I am sitting on the end seat in a booth.  Traffic among the waitstaff is hectic, and, lo and behold, two of them bump into each other and a pot of very hot coffee spills, with a good portion of it landing on my leg.  It was quite hot at first, but soon cooled down, the waitress was quite apologetic, and no real harm was done other than some brief minor discomfort and the need to visit the laundry room when I got home.

I am now about to appeal to those of you in a service industry, particularly those who might be in the food services/restaurant business.

As I see it, the management of this restaurant had the following options:

1. They could have torn up the check for our breakfast (I had a separate check for two people).
2. They could have comped my portion of the check.
3. They could have given me a gift card for use on a future visit to the restaurant.
4. They could have done nothing.

If you guessed that they chose Option #4, you would be correct.

Now I never owned or even worked in a restaurant, but I did work in an industry where Customer Service was very important (and really, is there a business where customer service ISN'T important?), so I know which option I would have chosen had I been in charge.  Like I said, no real harm was done, but the next time I want to go out for pancakes, I'm going to Denny's.

To Absent Friends - Stephen Sondheim

 Stephen Sondheim

1930 - 2021

Stephen Sondheim, truly a Giant of the American Musical Theater died yesterday at the age of 91.  Had Sondheim only written the lyrics for West Side Story he would be, in my book anyway a first ballot Hall of Famer, but his other works include such classics as Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music.  Wikipedia lists 19 "major" productions for Sondheim.  There were many more.

In his career, he won eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, an Oscar,  a Pulitzer Prize, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and even an Edgar Award for his screenplay of the 1974 movie, The Last of Sheila.

I once saw a production of Company at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.  It was somewhat complex.  The play was "about" the institution of marriage, but I am still not sure if Sondheim was celebrating the institution or excoriating it.  That the play could be seen from both points of view says something about the complexity and brilliance of the  playwright, I believe.

To hear one of Sondheim's most famous and movie pieces, Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, as performed by Judy Collins, click here.

Dim the lights on Broadway.  RIP Stephen Sondheim.

To Absent Friends - Bill Virdon

Bill Virdon

1931-2021

In a city and region rich in sports heritage, there is no more iconic a team in all of Pittsburgh sports history than the 1960 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates, the underdog team that beat the heavily favored Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Berra, Ford, and Stengel on Bill Mazeroski's Game 7, bottom of the ninth walk-off home run.  Yeah, I had to type out that entire sentence for the kids out there who may not be aware of that momentous event.  So iconic is that team that the loss of any member of it is a noteworthy event and fully deserving of The Grandstander's Absent Friends treatment.

Such is the case today with the death of Bill Virdon, that Pirate team's centerfielder and leadoff man.  Virdon was 90 years old.  In 1955, Virdon was the NL Rookie-of-the -Year, and he came to the Pirates in a trade in 1956.  There he stayed until he retired at the age of only 34 after the 1965 season.  He then embarked on a managerial and coaching career that embodied the term "baseball lifer."  He managed the Pirates, Astros, Yankees, and Expos in the majors, and even well into his eighties, Virdon would show up at Pirates Spring Training every year as a guest instructor sporting the same flat stomach and waistline that he carried in his playing days.

By my reckoning, Virdon's death leaves only eight players on the Buccos 25 man World Series roster still among us:  Joe Christopher, Roy Face, Dick Groat, Vernon Law, Bill Mazeroski, Bob Oldis, Dick Schofield, and Bob Skinner.  Bob Oldis, the eldest among them, will turn 94 in January, and the youngest, Maz, will turn 86 in 2022.

RIP Bill Virdon.

The Pittsburgh Football Weekend That Was

It was a rather remarkable football weekend here in Pittsburgh what with Pitt giving us a "This Is Why You Follow Sports" moment, and the Steelers giving us everything from severe stomach cramps to euphoria to major letdown all in one game.  

Let's start with the Pitt Panthers.

As you no doubt know by now, Pitt clinched the ACC Coastal Division title and  a spot in two weeks in the ACC Championship game with their thrilling, and I do mean thrilling, 48-38 win over Virginia.  It was Senior Day at Pitt, the final home game for Pitt's senior players, most notably quarterback Kenny Pickett.

As he has over the course of a career that has seen him seize every significant passing record in Pitt history, Pickett delivered big time.  He passed for over 400 yards and threw four TD passes, two of them on fourth down plays.  All four of those TD passes went to sophomore wide out Jordan Addison.

It was a remarkable and electric performance by both Pickett and Addison.  Pickett will no doubt be a Heisman Trophy finalist and Addison has become the favorite to win the NCAA Biletnikoff Award as well.  Pitt now sits at 9-2, is nationally ranked, and will be favored to win their final game at Syracuse this coming Saturday.  Their opponent in the ACC title game is still TBD, and should they win that, a New Year's Day Bowl game is all but assured.  By any measure, it as been a successful season for HC Pat Narduzzi and his squad, and a very entertaining one for those of us who have been in attendance at Heinz Field throughout.  I was there on Saturday evening for that game, and it was truly a thrilling experience.

It has also been a joy to follow the career of Kenny Pickett and see his development.  His first start as a freshman was a win over a then undefeated and Top Five Miami team.  It was a portent of things to come.  His decision to forego the NFL Draft last year was a wise one.  From the probable late round pick he would have been last spring, it now appears that he will be among the first 2 or 3 QB's selected in the 2022 Draft, a surefire first round pick.  Panthers fans will surely miss him next year, but many Steelers fans are savoring the possibility of seeing Pickett just switching from Blue & Gold to Black & Gold come 2022 and replacing future Hall of Famer Ben Roethlisberger.

And that brings us to last night's Steelers-Chargers game.  Let's call that game a Tale of Two Quarterbacks.

Facing a Steelers defense without all-pro DB's Minkah Fitzpatrick and Joe Haden, and, oh yeah, their best player and perhaps best defensive player in the NFL, TJ Watt, Chargers QB Justin Herbert shredded the Swiss cheese of a defense that Steelers had out there last night for over 380 passing yards, 90 rushing yards, and three TDs.  He is scarey good, and so young that it doesn't even look like his teenaged skin has cleared yet. He's going to be a force in the NFL well into the 2030's.

After three quarters, LA had a 27-10 lead.  No doubt TV sets were being switched off all over Western Pennsylvania.  However, a blocked punt, a bizarre interception of a Herbert pass, and some remarkable quarterback play from a "He's-still-got-some-gas-in-the-tank" Big Ben, and presto-change-o, the Steelers found themselves with a 37-34 lead with 3:24 remaining in the game.  Alas, the fairly tale ending was not to be as Herbert, on the third play of the ensuing Chargers possession, hit Mike Williams for a fifty-plus yard touchdown, a play that probably wouldn't have happened had Fitzpatrick been in the game.

In its own way, the Steelers losing effort was every bit as entertaining and compelling as Pitt's big win was the day before.  The Steelers now sit at 5-4-1, but in an AFC North Division that no team seems to want to win, who the hell knows what might happen the rest of the way?

Next week....On to Cincinnati!

 

Leni Riefenstahl

The genesis of this piece occurred back in late summer when I heard film critics Arch Campbell and Jason Fraley discuss German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl on Campbell's "At The Movies" podcast.  It prompted me to check out a couple of movies from the library to learn a little more about her.  

Riefenstahl was a dancer and actress in Germany during the time between the two World Wars.  In the early 1930's, she went behind the camera and in so doing, she became one of the first acclaimed female movie directors in the world.  Her work caught the eye of Adolf Hitler, who commissioned her to make a documentary film about the Nazi Party congress that was held in Nuremberg in 1934.  That movie, "Triumph of the Will", is widely considered to be the greatest documentary film ever made.   Scenes from it have been copied in many movies down through the years, including some of the "Star Wars" films.

In 1936, she was ostensibly selected by the International Olympic Committee to make a film documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I say "ostensibly" because it is widely believed that Hitler himself wanted Riefenstahl to make this movie, and prevailed upon IOC president Avery Brundage (another real piece of work, but that is a subject for another day) to have her make the movie.  That movie, "Olympia", is also considered a landmark documentary and set the standard for sports documentary films.  Techniques invented by Lenu Riefenstahl for "Olympia" are still being used today.

So, it was those two movies that I wanted to see, along with a 1993 German documentary, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl", and I was able to obtain all three of them from my local library.  I also wondered if requesting these movies has put me on some sort of Homeland Security watchlist.

Riefenstahl's work with and for the Third Reich followed her for the rest of her life.  After the war, she was arrested and tried, but never convicted of war crimes, but was branded as a "fellow traveller" of the Reich.  Her skills as a filmmaker have never been questioned, but involvement with Hitler no doubt hampered her career although she worked for pretty much the rest of her life.  She died in 2003 at the age of 101.

Throughout the "Wonderful, Horrible Life..." doc, Riefenstahl held firm to the sort of statements that have become familiar throughout post WW II history:  "I was never a member of the Nazi Party"...."Hitler did many good things for Germany at first"...and, of course "I had NO IDEA of what was taking place in the concentration camps."  I tend to take all statements such as these with a hearty degree of skepticism. Maybe, she told the truth for all of those years.  Maybe.

As for the two films themselves, "Triumph of the Will" is indeed a work of film art.  Very compelling to watch, but, given the subject matter, it is a hard watch.  If viewed through the eyes of people in Germany in the mid-1930's, it can no doubt be seen as an ultimate recruiting tool for National Socialism and the hate that Hitler was selling.  Sort of like some of the rallies seen in the United States in 2016 and 2020.  I wonder if Riefenstahl was able to live with that on her conscience throughout her life if she indeed repudiated what Hitler stood for as she claimed.  (By the way, rumors that she and Hitler were lovers have never been substantiated.)

As for "Olympia", I confess to not getting through that one, only watching about the first thirty minutes or so.  Events in my own life in September pretty much put movie viewing on a back burner, and the DVD's were due at the library, so "Olympia" will have to wait for another day.

Despite all of that, Riefenstahl remains an interesting person to read about.  She continued to work for the rest of her life.  She photographed the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and was a "guest of honor" at the 1976 Montreal Games.   Noted American film critic Pauline Kael has said that Triumph of the Will and Olympia are "the two greatest films ever directed by a woman."

I've brushed over much of Riefenstahl's life, but it cannot be denied that it wasn't an interesting one, as this 2003 British obituary details.

To Absent Friends - Sam Huff

 

Somewhere in the 1959-1960 time frame, I was being indoctrinated into becoming a "sports fan" by my Dad, two older brothers, and my grandfather (something for which I will always be grateful to them), so it was time to start watching football, baseball, and basketball on television.  When it came to football, of course, it was the Steelers, Pitt Panthers, and probably Notre Dame, but even at such a young age, I quickly became familiar with one name, the name of a player from the New York Giants - middle linebacker Sam Huff.

Middle linebacker is arguably one for the more glamorous defensive positions in all of football.  You know the names....Butkus, Nitschke, Lambert, Lewis, Erlacher....but the first of the great and glamorous middle linebackers was Sam Huff.  There were reasons for that. First and foremost, Huff was good, really good.  He played in New York at a time when the Giants "owned" Manhattan and the NYC television market,   a  time when the marriage between the NFL and the television networks were in the first blushes of a powerful and lucrative marriage that is still going strong almost seventy years later.  Huff was a dominant player in the 1958 NFL title game between the Giants and the Colts that went into overtime.  It has been dubbed the "greatest game ever played", and if it wasn't actually that, it certainly can claim to being the most important game ever played as it announced the dominance that Pro Football was to have on both the American sporting public and network television.

In 1960, it was Huff whom CBS chose to have mic'd for a game that became a television documentary, "The Violent World of Sam Huff", narrated by Walter Cronkite, no less.  It was seminal moment in how the public came to see just what a brutal and remarkable game that pro football was.

Midway through his career, the Giants traded Huff to the Washington Redskins, where he played with distinction and finished his career as a player-coach under Vince Lombardi.  Huff went on to a career in radio and television as an announcer for the Redskins Radio Network, where he become a respected, revered, and beloved football guy in the Washington area.  Listening to stories told on Monday by Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon on both the Kornheiser Podcast and PTI about Huff gave you a real feel for just what Huff meant to that Washington Football Team fan base.  The Washington Post also printed an "Appreciation" for Huff by sportswriter Leonard Shapiro on Monday.  You can read it here.  It is worth your time.

As was said in "Hamilton"...Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? How many people under the age of fifty even knew who Sam Huff was when they heard the news of his death last week?   It's too bad, but that is why we need history lessons, kids.

It's Quiet Uptown

Readers know of my penchant for writing about Absent Friends.  For the last four plus years, I feared the coming of the day when I would be writing of the absence of the Greatest Friend of all, my wife, Marilyn.  Marilyn lost her nearly five year battle with cancer one month ago yesterday on October 12.  I have waited a month before even attempting to write anything about this awful event in my life, and as I type these words, I wonder if I will be able to finish.  So here goes...

It is a testimony to her that there were any number of people who have said to me words to the effect that "I never even realized that she was even sick."  Marilyn never wanted her illness to define her.  She wanted to forge ahead with her life - and our lives - as if nothing changed.  Annual dinner parties took place, holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries continued to be celebrated, neighborhood social events, and vacations continued to occur.  As always, she was always more concerned about everyone else (like me!) more than she was herself.  Once in awhile she would rail at the Unfairness Of It All, but she never once complained with a "why me?" attitude, and those moments passed quickly and she soldiered on.  She seemed to accept her fate and put herself in God's hands much more readily than I did.  In fact, I doubt that I will EVER get over the Unfainess Of It All, but I guess that is what made her such a good person, certainly a better one than I.

When the end came, it came quickly, and after fighting so long and so valiantly, she knew what it was right to say "it's over."  She was sad to be leaving all the many people who loved her, but she knew that God wanted, and maybe even needed, her back.  "Take care of yourself, and be okay" was the constant theme of all of our conversations in those final days.  She put others ahead of herself right up to the very end.

So here I am, one month later.  Volunteering for twelve years at the Caring Place has taught me a thing or two about grief and the nature of grief.  I have learned that grief is a journey that never ends.  That there will be good days and bad days.  Now I am experiencing that first hand, and learning that it is the little things, the mundane things, that really trip you up.  I could take delivery of her cremains from the funeral director and not bat an eye, but removing her toothbrush from the bathroom and throwing it away or replacing paper napkins  in the kitchen were acts that had me crying for 20 minutes.  (Yes, I said paper napkins. Those of you who knew her surely get the reference!) There have been and will be other such moments, "paper napkin moments" as I have come to call them.

One more.  On Thursday, I was at the Pitt football game at Heinz Field.  When it started to rain late in the game, others began pulling out their rain ponchos and putting them on while I just then remembered mine hanging in the closet at home.  "Well" I said "another example of how my life has changed.  No way in Hell that Marilyn would have let me out of the house without packing the poncho."  At least I was laughing about it.  Sort of.

I have been overwhelmed, truly, by the support of family and friends.  You expect it from Family, but the friends? Wow, what a treasure it is to have good friends.  Not only the people in our closest circle of friends, but people from church, both of our workplaces (I saw people from Highmark whom I hadn't seen since I retired), the neighborhood, from acquaintances on Social Media, and the staff and fellow volunteers from the Caring Place.  They absolutely embody the words of the Caring Place pledge: "I am here for you.  You are here for me. We are here for each other."  

I move forward.  I think of her constantly and talk to her every day.  This is the one "Absent Friends" post that I never wanted to write.  There is a void in my life that will never be replaced, but I know that I have to "take care of myself" and "be okay."  It's what she wanted.  I know that while it  may forever be quiet uptown, I also know that I will never stop telling her story.

One final word to the readers, if you are in a loving, committed relationship, married or otherwise, never let a day pass without telling your partner that you love him/her.

Wonder Women