PITTSBURGH - Citing a need to keep Pittsburgh beautiful and to continue Mayor Bob O'Connor's "redd up" campaign, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl stood on a trash-strewn corner of Hazelwood this morning with iconic environmental symbol Iron Eyes Cody in an attempt to shame citizens into picking up litter. Both men spent the morning touring city neighborhoods on horseback and canoe, pausing only long enough to cast a baleful glance at landfills and polluted streams during the course of their journey. Both Cody and Ravenstahl shed a solitary tear after confronting a group of teenagers who threw plastic bags and cans from a moving vehicle, spilling the contents on the moccasins of both men.
The entire sobering trek through garbage-saturated city neighborhoods was filmed for a series of anti-littering public service announcements scheduled to begin airing sometime next year.
The only snag came when Cody, standing curbside in a Squirrel Hill residential area, began silently weeping when city refuse workers attempted to complete their weekly pick-up. "What’s the matter with you?" shouted one man, before the Mayor’s security team intervened. After receiving an explanation, the man apologized. "Sorry about that, Chief Crybaby," he said, before climbing aboard the side of his truck and moving to the next house on his route.
Mayoral spokesman Dick Skrinjar said Ravenstahl would have no comment on the incident. Instead, he was asking the public to "look deeply into [Iron Eyes'] wizened face and mournful eyes, and allow the searing memory of his sorrowful visage to haunt you the next time you are tempted to defile this once beautiful land." Failing that, Skrinjar added, "the Mayor would just like you to clean up after yourself, for God's sake. He’s your Mayor, not your mother."
