July 29, 2004 - Bob
Minneapolis, MN
Minneapolis, MN
We arrived at the YOPC after the long drive. I was initially distracted as our plans for tomorrow’s Chicago Cubs game were very much in limbo after seemingly being squared away just yesterday.
We were warmly welcomed, receiving hugs from some folks we knew like Mike O’Leary, Mary Ann Sprinkle and Jack Hungelman. We were given the opportunity to tell our story to everyone. Afterward, I led everyone in singing a round of “Take me out to the ballgame”.
Just like everywhere else, the magic started happening as we started listening.
Graphic Artist Alan Rabinowitz was diagnosed with PD in June of 1999.
BC:
Alan, you grew up as a--
AR:
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And I was taught as a little kid that the Dodgers were the best team and the Yankees were the enemy.
BC:
And when were you born?
AR:
1951 in Brooklyn. The same year that Mr. Thompson hit the home run over Branca, “The shot heard ‘round the world.”
BC:
And how did that call go?
AR:
"The Giants win the Pennant! The Giants win the Pennant! The Giants win the Pennant!" At any rate my first baseball game that I was supposed to go to I was about five years old. It got rained out. And the next year the Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn. Then I became a Mets fan. I could never root for the Yankees. I could never, ever -- they were the other guys. They were from the Bronx, we were from Brooklyn. Pterodactyls still fly through the skies of the Bronx. So I became a Mets fan. As bad as they were, they were still our team. We’d go to the Polo Grounds or out to Shea and they were bad but it was fun.
Then it was the summer of ‘69 which was...unbelievable. Or as we used to say back in the neighborhood, (with heavy Brooklyn accent) “Unbelievable!” And it was one of my three favorite baseball memories. The other one was the ‘91 Braves.
I moved to Atlanta in ‘79 and saw even more bad baseball for a number of years. ‘Til the ‘91 season when the Braves coalesced and became “The Braves”. It was great. Everyone was doing the Tomahawk Chop. My son was two years old, he was doing the Tomahawk Chop. I remember doing it when we lost in the ‘91 playoffs. Lonnie Smith got deked out by Chuck Knoblauch in game seven of the World Series. Zero to Zero, Terry Pendelton hits one deep to the corner I said, “Lonnie Smith’s gonna score!” He gets deked, winds up on third and we can’t bring the run in.
But, the next year, 1992, game seven of the NLCS, the Pirates are up two-zip going to the bottom of the ninth. The Braves come up. They get one run back. Then there’s two outs. The bases are loaded and up comes Francisco Cabrera, who was the third string catcher. And I’m standing in the living room saying, “Come on, Frankie! Come on, Frankie!” On a two and one count, he slaps one past the short stop and out to Barry Bonds in left. The tying run comes in. Then Sid Bream, the slowest man in baseball, who was on second base, comes tearing down the basepath like a runaway locomotive and sliiiiiides. And if his foot was a half-inch shorter he would have been out. The ball comes. Their catcher, LeValier, tries to tag him. Sid’s foot touches the corner of the base. Braves win. Or as Skip Carey said, “Braves Win! Braves Win! Braves Win!”
I’m sitting in my living room and I think everybody in my neighborhood heard me go, “ALL RIGHT!” I woke my kid up. “What’s wrong, Daddy? What’s wrong?” I said, “The Braves won!” He said, “Oh.” He’s a big baseball fan, but he was also about three years old at the time and too tired to deal with it.
BC:
Were there in repercussions from your wife?
AR:
She said, “Do you have to yell so loud? The neighbors are going to hear you.” And I said, “But the Braves won! Sid Bream -- my man!” Francisco Cabrera could have run for Congress in Georgia and won. He could have. It was incredible.
BC:
Tell me about your artwork and why you do it.
AR:
Well I call this digitography. What I do is I take existing imagery and I manipulate them in the computer using Photoshop Elements. And what got me started doing it was, my son’s Bar Mitzvah a couple of years ago, my wife is into genealogy and she wanted to do a family tree. And we had all these old family photographs and I said, let me mess around with these in Photoshop. It turned out great.
About the same time, the PD was getting worse and I fell into depression, I had insomnia. I couldn’t focus for work. I was a writer and I was missing deadlines. I was up and I swore I would not stay up all night watching television. I was up and I was trying to write. And I was on the computer anyway, so I said let me see what will happen if I start to mess around with some of these photos. And that’s what happened. I started playing with photos and I do this and that, add them together and get “that”.
