utterly opinionated

Last night’s cityLIVE event, 10 people. 3 minutes, was a rollicking success.  10 brilliant people with 10 brilliant ideas.

Our moderator, Chris Potter of the City Paper, conducted a survey to determine the “winner” by providing 5 pennies to each audience member and a styrofoam cup for each panelist, bedecked with their photo.    Late last night, Chris and his wife counted pennies.  He remarked that as an alternative-weekly journalist, a lot of his workdays end this way.

Top honors, or should I say, the most pennies go to Jon Rubin of the renowned East Liberty Waffle Shop.  Chris will make a donation in his name to Pittsburgh Promise.  The amount is TBD but he promises it will be less than the $10 million donated by UPMC, but more than the 41 cents dropped into Jon’s cup.

Jon amazingly crammed three big ideas into three little minutes.

First, he proposed to kick all of  Pittsburgh’s universities (classrooms, teachers, students and all) out of their buildings and relocate them throughout the entire city into storefronts, apartments, boats, and tree houses.  No longer would students be tempted to stay on their cloistered campuses. Writing classes would be conducted on coal barges,  a physics program in row houses, a business school at city hall and university lectures in backyards and street corners.  Imagine!

Second, he proposed super-gigantic sky fans to be installed around the perimeter of downtown Pittsburgh, blowing clouds away and creating a perpetual sunny zone over downtown to attract businesses, tourists and even more new residents.  Sunbathers would abound.  Suburban flight would be reversed and most importantly, the weather in the surrounding suburbs would actually become worse.

And last, but not least, John proposed exporting our greatest resource – the Steelers.  Our football team would become an international traveling soccer team in the off season.  Think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of soccer.   The last World Cup had viewership of 30 billion people and John thinks we are missing out.  ”If we really want to call ourselves the city of champions, I suggest we take the big leap and go with the sort shorts” said John.

Last night was a celebration of the talent we have here in Pittsburgh.   It was a chance to hang loose and let ideas roll.  In every idea presented there was passion, conviction and truth.   Take any of them and push them forward and we could rebrand Pittsburgh in a completely unexpected way.

I’m voting for the city wide campus.  Short shorts on Steelers don’t seem quite right to me.

Tags: cityLIVE!, leadership, pittsburgh, pop culture, reinvention

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 11:44 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.