 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Sunday, March 18, 2001 By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette
March is Women's History Month, and today PG food editor Suzanne Martinson talks with longtime feminist Deanna DellaVedova.
One in an occasional series on local people in the kitchen
Like soup, every woman is different. But whether it's a soup or a woman, the good ones have a lot in common. And the best ones are full of complexity and sustenance.
Take Avocado Mango Soup. The pea-soup-green color might lead you to think that the soup is hot. But it's way cool, a battery of flavors that include the pungent hit from an avocado, the sweetness of an overripe tropical mango, the creamy smooth strength of yogurt, the comforting undercurrent of apple juice. With a quick bite of lime.
The creator of this particular stew of feminist virtues is Deanna DellaVedova -- corporate vice president, sister, mother, mother-in-law, bride, daughter-in-law, friend, feminist. The recipe appears in "Don't Assume I don't Cook!" by the National Organization for Women. DellaVedova herself appears in political uprisings, as well as in potluck lines and at home on the kitchen range.
The talented cook is apt to be seen scrawling flavor notes on a restaurant napkin so she can duplicate an appealing dish at home. She loves countering the no-cooking stereotype, while she remains as much a rock-ribbed feminist today as she was when she signed on for women's equality nearly 30 years ago.
"I still wake up angry at the injustices," she says.
On Inauguration Day in January, for example, she was there when 100 people demonstrated Downtown against the "selection" of George W. Bush and his appointment of Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"I haven't mellowed. I demonstrate, I picket, I march."
She also spells differently. She drops the P and President Bush becomes the Resident, she replaces the H in Ashcroft's name with an S.
She's never gone to jail, though. "They never pick me. Cops like to arrest the aggressive stereotypes, not somebody who looks like me."
Stereotypical, she's not. DellaVedova, who turned 53 on March 5, faces choices that test the complexity of her character. On April 21, she'll likely arise at 4 a.m. to bus to Washington, D.C., for the Emergency March for Women's Lives. Normally, she'd leave Friday night, but "Previn's conducting Mahler's Ninth that night -- I can't miss that."
Adds the symphony supporter, "I'll lose some sleep, but I want to be a part of history."
This one activist's history is a glimpse at the women's movement through her eyes.
DellaVedova calls herself the product of a "mixed marriage" -- half northern Italian, half southern. Her father, a laborer, died when she was 11. Her mother, a first-generation immigrant and a traditional '50s homemaker, supported her two daughters by working for $1.20 an hour in the school cafeteria.
"She didn't even know how to write a check."
So the 11-year-old child took on such "masculine" chores as paying bills, mowing the lawn and maintaining their Hempfield home, a situation continued after the birth of her own son and the break-up of her marriage when he was 3.
DellaVedova went to court to change his last name to hers. "He gave me Mother's and Father's Day cards," she says with a smile.
Today, she jokes she's a "natural redhead," but growing up, she was a dark-eyed, raven-haired Italian whose 5-foot-7-inch height put her in the back row of school pictures. She did some modeling and was athletic, a record-breaker at the broad jump, graduating from Hempfield High School in 1966.
"It was before Title IX -- there were no sports for girls. But you don't miss what you've never had. They don't long for chocolate in Bangladesh."
DellaVedova had longings, though. She was 18, and it was the early days of the Pill. "I wanted to be sexually active, but you couldn't get the Pill if you weren't married. So I went to a woman doctor and said (wink, wink), 'I'm engaged,' and she said (wink, wink), 'OK.'"
With a little college, the smart and good-looking young woman found it easy to get jobs. But she walked a tightrope brushing off boorish behavior without showing rancor, though she was steaming inside.
In 1973, she joined the National Organization for Women, and the movement gave voice to feelings she has always had to tamp down on the job. "I did what I had to do."
One personal change was expressing herself through food and becoming a vegetarian. She believes those years -- "At banquets, I ate the leftover garnishes off people's plates" -- honed her talent in the kitchen. Now married, she cooks every evening and presents her from-scratch meals with candles, crystal, flowers and cloth napkins.
The tall brunette must have cut a fine figure at a time before even minimal awareness of sexual harassment. "Twenty pounds lighter, 20 years younger," she says, deadpan.
DellaVedova recalls trying to close a sale worth "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to her company when the prospective buyer suggested, "I'll buy you breakfast." Translation: Spend the night with me.
She feinted to avoid the passes and sidestepped the propositions. The most horrifying incident occurred early in her career when she was single with a small child to support. An administrative assistant to the president of a Greensburg company, she was the only woman at an evening meeting of an all-male board. She pauses here to say, "I didn't dress provocatively, I always dressed professionally. I was wearing a suit."
As she carried some papers into that roomful of men, the president looked her up and down and said, "That skirt is so tight I can see your pubic hairs."
"You can't talk to me that way," she said. "I quit."
"You can't quit. You're fired."
She worried how she'd feed her son -- people who quit don't get unemployment. But the employment office never questioned it. "They had heard stories about that guy before. I know how Anita Hill felt."
She soon found another job, and not long after that was recruited by the president of Rel-Tek Corp. in Monroeville, where she has worked for 20 years.
Becoming part of the women's movement was an awakening. She once felt alone, but discovered many women shared the same frustrations and anger at second-class citizenship. The swirl of change -- economic and reproductive rights, world peace -- took her all over the world, from Pittsburgh's Point Park to Chicago, Moscow to London.
"I march, I picket, I write hate letters to Arlen Specter" for blindly following the party line, she says.
Her son often went along on the marches. When he was 15, he showed his skill with a yo-yo in Moscow's Red Square. As a U.S. Senate page for Sen. John Heinz, he met Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. DellaVedova hates Thurmond's politics, but she asked her son, "Was he nice to you?" He was.
Thurmond encouraged this son of a feminist to attend The Citadel, the all-male military school in Charleston, where Shannon Faulkner was attempting to become the first female cadet. "As a feminist, I should have been supporting her, but she didn't prepare herself," DellaVedova says.
The summer before her son set out, he was readying for the miles-long runs and the 25 push-ups at the drop of an officer's voice. "Shannon showed up 25 pounds overweight and not ready for PT," DellaVedova says. "She sets other women back."
DellaVedova knows what it is to make it in a male-dominated business. She is vice president of Rel-Tek Corp. The Monroeville company makes gas sensors for commercial accounts, such as the airport.
In the '80s and '90s, she made more than a dozen business trips to the Soviet Union to sell Rel-Tek equipment -- kind of an electronic canary of the coal mines. She created quite a stir in places like Siberia. "They had never seen an American, let alone an American woman."
She landed on the front page of their newspapers, but her appearance may have been deceiving. She drives a hard bargain. "At work, I'm known as the Dragon Lady," the vice president says.
Away from work, her donations run the gamut, from the National Abortion Rights League to the Pittsburgh and Westmoreland symphonies, from Planned Parenthood to the ballet. She buys Ms magazine subscriptions in three-year bites, and, in lieu of flowers, a donation in the deceased's name may go to a women's shelter.
At election time, she distributes "Deanna's Voter's Guide." Motto: "Even a bad woman is better than a good man -- except for Melissa Hart."
Her son, who recently married, is now Capt. Joseph DellaVedova and is serving in the Pentagon.
Wearing his Air Force uniform, Joseph smiles from a picture at his mother's wedding to John Masters. "The dress is from Victoria's Secret," the redhead says, smiling.
She and her husband, a pilot, recently bought a house in North Huntingdon (just outside the Allegheny County line -- for tax reasons). They've been married just two years. "I put myself in the same category as Gloria and Barbra," who also married later in life. (That's Steinem and Streisand.)
On Sundays, DellaVedova cooks dinner for her mother-in-law, Dr. Ruth Masters, a recently retired general practitioner whom she admires greatly.
Deanna DellaVedova loves to create in the kitchen, which contradicts the nagging misconception that feminists can't cook. "We have great food when we get together," she says. The eats were great at a reunion of the Greensburg NOW group, though it made her sad that she was the only one still active.
The woman who carried condoms and tampons into Russia for women whose "government spent money on arms, not people," continues to challenge herself and others.
"I picket for the women who can't, or won't. They ask me, 'Why are you doing this?'"
Her answer: "Why aren't you doing it with me?"
She shakes her head. "Women don't support other women. They don't want someone to be more successful than they are -- or thinner. And the women that have made it don't appreciate what we did. They want to wear pink and be fluffy and chase the boys. I'd like to hit them with a brick.."
Still, she lives life full throttle in the feminist lane. At a seafood lunch at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto in Monroeville not far from her office, she brings out photos of her sisters (spiritual and biological -- her mother's second marriage gave her two more), her son and other marchers carrying signs and banners.
She'll never forget one 12-mile march on Women's Equality Day -- it's Aug. 26 -- when her son was about 5. "It was so hot, I had to carry him on my shoulders for the last mile so he would finish and collect his contributions."
Now she spreads out a sampling of campaign buttons that chronicle her political past: Perot. Anderson. Ferraro. ERA. And most recent, We Won't Go Back.
Here's the best button, she says mysteriously.
"She who dies with the most shoes wins."
Then Deanna DellaVedova hops into her black Cadillac and is off.
Related Recipes:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
