Karen and the Wedding Cookie Table
Two incidents away from having to show ID to buy sliced cheese
So the birds whose babies I saved tried to kill me.
I gave my deck up for a month. Gave them space to nest and feed their babies. Tethered the deck ceiling fan so their unhatched children wouldn’t become some squirrel’s morning protein, assuming squirrels eat robin eggs. I’m not honestly brushed up on what rodentia are dining on these days.
I watched as the nestlings hopped out one per day. I saved the vulnerable fledglings from my dogs who absolutely love shaking birds until their little bird necks snap. The day after the last fat fledgling finally left the nest after MULTIPLE days of the parents feeding it and being like, “YOU ARE NEARLY AS BIG AS WE ARE. GET OUT OF HERE AND GET A JOB,” I went to cut my grass because I thought it was gone. I thought it was safe. I didn’t realize the final fledgling was in my yard still, having not quite figured out it could just hop through the spaces of my fence to join his family. Instead it was acting like a prisoner while his mom continued to feed him through the fence and then would scream at him after every morsel like, “YOU IDIOT. JUST HOP THROUGH.”
My dogs found the fledgling first, sniffing it curiously, and I sprung into action to save it, by screaming my head off at them to get away. It had been so quiet before I started screaming at them. Then hell truly burst open. The mom and dad robins appeared out of nowhere and began SCREAMING AT ME. Like, did you know birds can scream? One began circling and swooping and screaming and dive-bombing the dogs. Milo immediately squatted to shit in fright. Juno took off running in confused circles while the fledgling stupidly and fatly just sat there in the grass watching the chaos unfold. The other robin parent came screaming for my face. My human face. I saw the point of its screeching beak as it came within feet of my nose. My human nose. My person. I screamed a scenario-appropriate scream and shielded my eyes and my head with my arms and ran up the deck stairs commanding, “JUNO, COME! MILO, STOP SHITTING! AUUGGGGHHHHHH! ALFRED HITCHCOCK WAS BEING SERIOUS.” My neighbors were probably watching from their sunrooms like, “She finally snapped. We should probably record this.”
I managed to get the dogs and myself safely into the house without any of us spilling our eyeballs’ internal juices into the grass. The fledgling finally hopped through the fence and into the woods with its mother about an hour later, but now I get scared every time a shadow of a bird passes on the ground beneath me while I’m outside.
Not one word of this is an exaggeration. I swear.
So to sum up, birds are murderous screaming ungrateful bitches and just like that we have our band name for this edition.
Let’s talk.
1. But is cheese vandalism?
Tribune-Review journalist Brian Rittmeyer is a great follow on Twitter for news from the eastern-ish suburbs and that’s how I saw this police incident report:
I have some questions:
Who calls the cops over cheese slices and does it really warrant an “investigation?” It’s … cheese.
What would the phone call sound like from a tipster for this case? “Yeah, I seen the guy who did the Kraft singles fiasco dahn the Walmarts.”
Were they individually wrapped cheese slices that he was taking the time to unwrap before placing them on the car?
Was he only cheese-slicing one car or multiple cars?
Are you mad I’m assuming “the actor” was a man? I’m sorry. Women are not doing this shit; we are stabbing your tires and digging our keys into the side of your pretty little souped up four-wheel drive like Miss Carrie Underwood told us to do.
Of all the things you can put on a car, sliced cheese seems pretty harmless. One time I saw the result of a parking chair war in which a driver who dared move a residential parking chair to the sidewalk so that he could park in the space during a busy neighborhood event, returned to his car to find not only that same parking chair sitting on his hood, but also a pile of random cheap garage shit balanced precariously on the roof of his car—-a rusty shovel, a single ski, a plank of wood, a grill brush, a small folding table, a sled, etc. Now that’s violence. And a handy way to get rid of junk you don’t want.
Anyway, shout-out to the Velveeta Volkswagen Vandal. If I wasn’t already fronting Murderous Screaming Ungrateful Bitches this week, I’d totally play keyboards really poorly in your band.
2. Monster-in-law says what??
If you’ve never experienced what it’s like for people who aren’t unfamiliar with the tradition to be smacked in the face with the concept of a wedding cookie table, let me rectify that. Here’s a portion of an email that appeared on the Reddit Am I The Asshole (AITA) subReddit and it’s really something:
My son is marrying Wendy and the wedding is this summer. She is not close to her own mother for multiple reason and is pushing hard to have me fill in the gap. I am not comfortable with it at all especially with how hard she is pushing. She has multiple times overstepped boundaries such as inviting herself along, discussing very personal issues, very touchy etc…
Due to these issues we are not close and my own daughters are not a huge fan of her. She asked me this week if I would make the cookie table for the wedding. It is something the bride's own mother would do with other female relatives.
This is the first time hearing about this tradition and I did some research. I would have to make over a thousand cookies from scratch to feed the wedding guests. I asked my daughters if they wanted to do it, and it was a strong no.
On behalf of every Pittsburgher who ever lived, allow me to say …
Where to begin? Invites herself along to what? Family stuff? Wants to be close to you because she’s reaching for a mother figure to help her plan a wedding without her own mother? The nerve. Discussing personal issues? Like a member of the family would?
I’m not going to advise Wendy to run screaming from this family of villains, because she probably really loves her future spouse, so instead I’ll say to the groom’s mother and sisters … “Ew. Be better. Get a bunch of your friends to bake cookies and give Wendy the wedding she deserves, you hateful crones.”
Weirdly, I did manage to find a picture of the groom’s mom and sisters.
Here you go:
P.S. Murderous Screaming Ungrateful Bitches is available for wedding receptions. We accept payment in cookies only, so add another 300 to the count and get busy baking, “Lady” Tremaine.
P.P.S. I can’t believe no one has yet run with my idea for a food truck called The Wedding Cookie Table that only sells pre-filled boxes of random wedding cookies. The tagline is, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” Epi-Pens cost extra in case your peanut allergy explodes in your face.*
*I am kidding. Do not email me about the seriousness of peanut allergies. Just do the passive aggressive thing and go put cheese on my car.
3. Pittsburgh History with Ginny: Giving unionized child laborers their voices back
My next history column for Pittsburgh Magazine will be published in the June edition and I’m so excited it. It will probably dispel everything you’ve been led to believe about the lore surrounding Pittsburgh “losing” its H. In addition, I just turned in my column for the NEXT next edition, and I love that one too. That will appear in the July issue, I believe. So back-to-back columns forthcoming from me!
My major work since January for grad school has focused on labor history, specifically Pittsburgh’s child labor. You remember last year I completed work on a look at the extent of child labor in Pittsburgh’s steel mills, metal factories and coal mines. Doing that allowed me to discover that from 1870 until 1915—when the state’s child labor/compulsory education laws became stricter and better enforced—it was quite common for Pittsburgh’s working children to strike from their jobs and even to form unions. We always knew Pittsburgh was built by labor and unions, but what I’ve learned is that it was also built by children and child labor unions.
I’ll make some time next month to edit the paper for a general audience and will share it with you, but for now, I wanted to share a few newspaper photos I found of Pittsburgh’s child laborers on strike. Here are Pittsburgh’s telegraph messenger boys on strike for improved wages and better hours in 1907:
They struck along with the mostly-female telegraph workers and here is one striking messenger boy shown with the female strikers. It totally looks like he’s mocking the photographer so I love him:
These are the elected leaders of the telegraph messengers union in 1907 along with a photo of their fellow employee whom they fought to have reinstated after he was fired for pulling telegraph wires in an act of labor protest. They even met with the mayor to plead their case:
The union leadership’s ages range from 14 to 17. After young Jacob Miller was kicked out of his aunt’s home, the boys’ union took donations to feed and house him so that he wouldn’t cross the picket line to earn money for survival. To quote 15-year-old union secretary Lewis Harris during a speech to the boys’ union at the river wharf one night, “Our fight is not one in which people starve.”
I think I’ve shared this image with you previously, of the children striking from Oliver Steel in 1913:
Yes, 12-hour days at 60 cents for the day was a common shift and wage for child laborers here in Pittsburgh, again across multiple sectors. Here are the messenger boy’s parading through downtown Pittsburgh during their strike from Western Union in 1912:
One particularly sore spot with the messengers was the high cost of their uniform rental, their low wages (one to two cents per message delivered) and that they wouldn’t be paid for trips on which messages could not be delivered due to the intended recipient being absent or not found. I found well over 150 news reports of children striking in Pittsburgh during this time period from every sector of industry and commerce. They struck from Carnegie mills and works, from a H.J. Heinz glass factory (though the company denied it), from Westinghouse, from cigar and textile mills and more. The occurrence was so common that most child strikes warranted only small blurbs in the daily papers with occasionally larger in-depth reporting and photos when the strikes lasted longer or threw an exceptional number of men out of work due to their reliance on the boys’ labor to keep things running.
I truly enjoyed hunting down the stories of these children and returning their voices to them, especially when I could find quotes that illustrated they were not engaged in child’s play (as they were regularly accused by their managers and the press), but rather they understood their importance to Pittsburgh’s economy/ They were well aware the adults had failed them but that they had a collective power they could wield to improve their lives as full-time laborers.
More later on this!
4. New Pittsburgh-themed stickers!
A local Etsy shop I’ve featured previously has a few new Burghy sticker (and shirt!) designs that are perfect for tucking into the card you give to your local high school or college grad this month. Look at these:
The cat. I cannot. Snag them all here! Not an ad!
(Reminder: I’m always open to suggestions of locally made products to feature here!)
5. Random n’at
Uber is rolling out lots of new features locally, including a shuttle service to the airport and concerts. Listen, if they make Star Lake a little less of a logistical hellscape, I’m sold. Parking there is so bad that it’s honestly surprising there aren’t more reported incidents of Burghers cheese-slicing cars in fits of rage.
Pittsburgh has its first public statue depicting a woman of color. About time.
You have just a few more days to grab the new Lemieux Choco Chunk Cookie shake at your nearest Burgatory location in support of the Mario Lemieux Foundation. I’ve had one. It is stupidly delicious. Not an ad!
The Blocks are in disarray, lawsuits, accusations and probably greasy hamburger bags are being flung about, brothers are being ousted, bowties are being loosened should fisticuffs begin, cheese slices are being unwrapped. What remains to be seen is how this all impacts the future of the P-G. I truly just want this batshit family out of our newspaper business. Don’t email me.
6. Let’s get out of here!
I’ll be off next week for travel and should be good to return here the following week even though I decided at the last moment to not take the summer off from grad school and instead am taking two classes lollllllllll. I’m the worst.
Have a great week! Be kind! Watch for cyclists! Don’t litter! Use your cheese weaponry responsibly!
And for the love of clothespins, just. bake. the. cookies because you are 100 percent indeed the asshole.