Post-Gazette Michelle Madoff as a Pittsburgh City Council member in 1985.

In what might be a case of culture shock for both sides, former Pittsburgh Councilwoman Michelle Madoff has relocated to sunny Arizona and coughed up a second career as an environmentalist.

"I have asthma again. I haven't had it since '78. I'm using an inhaler again," Ms Madoff said in a telephone interview. "I said 'somebody's got to do something.' "

Ask anybody who ever met her and they'll tell you: Michelle Madoff is definitely somebody. Now 78, although she admits only to being "64 and holding," the former council rebel is taking Pittsburgh-style grass-roots politics to a place where grass doesn't necessarily grow, and roots can be as recent as the arrival of last week's moving van. Arizona is growing, and Michelle Madoff says it's growing dirty.

She burst on Pittsburgh's political scene in 1969, after moving here with her then-husband, a physician. Raised in Ontario, Canada, she wasn't accustomed to smog and pollution and, in a meeting with new neighbors inside a house where the furniture had yet to arrive, she helped found the Group Against Smog and Pollution. She insists she was in the kitchen getting drinks for her guests when they elected her president.

The group created "The Dirty Dozen" -- naming legislators who refused to push for stringent enforcement of air pollution laws which, in a town still dominated by heavy industry, weren't stringently enforced.

What followed was a political career at a high point of Pittsburgh City Council antics, with a cast of characters out of Damon Runyon.

There was Sophie Masloff, an old hand from the days of the late David L. Lawrence. There was Ben Woods, the suave North Sider who later went to prison on a federal corruption indictment. At midpoint arrived Jim Ferlo, the firebrand community activist who once seized the gavel from the council president. Above all, there was Eugene "Jeep" DePasquale, who became Ms. Madoff's bete noire. The two disagreed on almost everything, often loudly.

But she insists she never made the famous remark attributed to her during a council session -- something The Arizona Republic joined the ranks of other papers in recounting when it profiled Ms. Madoff's work in Arizona. The legend says that Ms. Madoff, at the height of an argument with Mr. DePasquale, told him to kiss something that rhymes with "class" and was located on the aft portion of the argumentative lass.

"I never told anyone to kiss my [deleted]," Ms Madoff said. "I admit, I did call Sophie a" -- and here we switch to a word that we can only say rhymes with "stitch."

Ms. Madoff left politics -- and Pittsburgh -- after she was defeated for re-election in 1993. For a time, she rambled the United States, in search of a comfortable home.

"South Carolina was too buggy, too humid," she said. "Then I moved to the gambling town -- Lost Vegas." That is not a typo. She has not lost her love of puns. "I hated the gambling. Hated the ambience. There was no culture. So I moved here."

"Here" is a Phoenix suburb aptly named Surprise, Arizona.

The culture, such as Ms. Madoff found it, seems to consist of gravel mining.

"How about houses 200 feet from the gravel pit?" she said. "It's unbelievable. Guess how many. Take a guess. Twen-tee-six. And they're all along the Agua Frio River."

Ms. Madoff says she wants the dust kept down -- dust she insists is responsible for huge outbreaks of asthma and other pulmonary dilemmas. Her approach, she says, will be to reinstitute the "Dirty Dozen" and pressure Arizona legislators to force companies to control the dust from quarrying.

"She might have scared some of the politicians who haven't been doing anything," said Shirley McDonald, who heads the Environmental Task Force in the Phoenix area. "It could be helpful. This state is run by lobbyists. It's kind of good to upset the apple cart."

Ms. Madoff plans to upend the apple cart this way: "What I learned in Pittsburgh I want to apply the shorthand version here. We'll have a petition to have voters sign. We're going to say 'if you care about this issue, will you sign this petition saying we the undersigned promise not to vote for anyone who refuses to do anything about the environment.' "

Whether the tactic will work remains to be seen, Ms. Madoff allows. But she plans to make it a jolly fight. Just a year after she founded GASP, the Clean Air Act was put into place and the group's pressure forced a number of enforcement changes. Pittsburgh today offers the air for which people once moved to Arizona.

"It's so sunny and beautiful here. You don't see that red cloud unless you go up on a mountain and look down," she said. She thinks back, sometimes, on Pittsburgh.

"Now that the air's really clear, I should come back. Right?"