Pittsburgh Dreamin': Yoschi, Are You Out There?

Like many people last weekend, I was happy to hear that the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl. Not because I like football, of course, but because I like Pittsburgh.

I used to go to Pittsburgh at least once or twice a year to visit my friend Josh, who lived there for quite a few years. I know Josh from our Rotary International Youth Exchange year in which we both lived in the bustling metropolis of Neustadt am Rübenberge, outside of Hannover, Germany. Those were formidable years, and it’s hard to believe that those good times happened 10 years ago!

In any case, with the attention on Pittsburgh for at least half of an afternoon, I was reminiscing a bit about the various trips I’d taken to Pittsburgh to visit Josh, so I just thought I’d name drop him and say hi. He’s obviously the guy in the space suit in the picture above, and that’s also him in the other picture. Both were taken at a costume shop in Philadelphia in 2005, and that was the last time we got to hang out. In fact, I included this second picture for a good reason.

See, most of my friends who know Josh…well, if you just say “Josh,” they know who you’re talking about. But my wife Angela hasn’t ever met Josh. She also hadn’t met most of my friends until we went to Colorado for Christmas. Still, I had shown her a ton of pictures from the U.S. before we first went there, and in one of the folders we came across the picture of Josh with the prosthetic joke breasts. That made quite an impression on Angela, and to this day, whenever I mention “Josh,” her face still gets a blank stare. But if I add, “You know, my friend with the fake boobs,” then she says, “Oh yeah! Josh!”

So, Yoschi,* if you’re out there and you happen to read this, then drop a line. Or better yet, come on down and visit. You’re bound to be remembered as “The Fake Boob Guy” until you do!


*A note about the “Yoschi”: In the Biology class that Josh and I sort of “attended” while we were in high school in Germany, we had a teacher named Doc Troue. As the students in his class ran around, chatted with one another, and even once got into a fight over a fake fur coat, old Doc Troue would always be at the front of the room plugging away at some equation on the board, with his back turned to the class. Occasionally, though, he’d quickly turn around and ask Josh or me a question, since I think we were the only ones who were even remotely paying attention. We never knew the answer, though, and most of the time we probably couldn’t even have told you which branch of Biology we were studying in class, since we were busy drawing pictures or writing notes about Axl Rose doing a duet with Tina Turner.
In any case, Doc Troue apparently couldn’t say “Josh,” so he always called him “Yoschi,” which made Josh seem about 50% more Japanese. As a matter of fact, Troue called ME “Yoschi” sometimes, too, since Germans had a bit of a tough time with “Ryan” as well…either that, or he may not have even been able to determine that there were two of us.

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