Thursday, same slow business day

Around noon we gave a short presentation of our work to the to kids of the summer youth employment program at the Kingsley Center. Afterwards we went to Mama Rose’s again and ate shrimp curry and shared a fruit punch. At 2pm we arrived at Meadow street and while one of us was setting up the table, chairs and sun umbrella, the other one talked to Tony, the neighbor across the street who sat on his porch. Tony has been living in Larimer since 27 years. He is 57 years old and used to be a steel worker. On the first day of working with the Union a piece of iron fell on his shoulder and disabled him. Since then he is at home. He talks to a lot of people from the neighborhood and he hopes that talking to the young people,  could make a difference in their lives. In some cases it did, or at least he hopes it did. Tony would like to fix up his house, but he can not. So his mission is to sit on the porch and talk to people.

The afternoon almost felt like “open porch day”. There were at least ten different people who stopped by at Tony’s and sat down next to him on the chairs or on the steps, and out of the three hours we operated the lemonade stand, there was probably just one minute when Tony wasn’t involved in a conversation. The quiet street became busy and for us it was interesting to be able to listen to bits and pieces, it was like a neighborhood radio talk show.

Even though business at the lemonade stand was extremely slow, we had two returning costumers. One was Mike, who showed up at 3:20pm to get iced coffee again. At 3:46pm Sherwood returned on his bike and asked for another cup of lemonade. Sherwood had liked the lemonade he had tasted the day before for the first time, when he had gotten a small cup to try it out. So, this time he wanted a big one. Since he had paid only 30 Cents the day before, we didn’t want to shock him with the price for a big one and asked for 50 Cents. He paid the 50 Cents and inquired: “How is business going for you?” “Kind of slow. Actually very slow!”, we answered. Sherwood pulled out a dollar bill, put it on the table and said: “I like your lemonade stand. Let me help you out a little bit. ” He then told us that he works at Carnegie Mellon University as a receiver, a person who unloads incoming trucks. He goes to work everyday by bike, which takes him about 20 minutes.

At around 5pm, we packed up, said good bye to Tony and his crowd. At 7pm one of us attended another Green Team meeting. Since the members of the Green Team Group were almost identical to the ones of the Consensus group, and, since Mr. Bankston felt that we had done a very confusing presentation about our project at the Consensus Group meeting (we basically had said, that we didn’t know what we want to do, that we first wanted to get to know the neighborhood and some people before making any plans) he had asked us to come back and do another presentation. The atmosphere at the meeting was lively, people seemed to like each other. There were 6 agenda points for the evening, we were agenda point 4. To go through with agenda point 1 took one hour and 10 minutes, so before the group could move into the next topic, we asked to become number 2. To our relief, our request was granted. Mr.Bankston then introduced our project to the group, who was involved and how it was funded and then we briefly talked about the lemonade stand. Everyone laughed. Everyone knew already that we also sold “iced coffee”. Our idea, to go and sit on an empty lot for a week seemed to get approval. That Emma opened her own little shop in response to ours seemed to be a good outcome of the project. That we would come back in the fall and dig deeper seemed to be logical. People wished us well, and before we left, Mr. Jones asked, if the business was for sale, once we would leave Pittsburgh.