Local women take off ‘masks of poverty’
Producer hopes new film will change service to the poor
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Whoops and cheers went up as the credits rolled and lights came up in the Melwood screening room at Pittsburgh Filmmakers one recent evening. Everyone was standing and applauding when Tammy Thompson stepped to the podium, radiant.
“It is so beautiful to see people shed that mask,” she said. “This brought back so many memories of how hard I worked to get out of poverty.”
Having had a private viewing to a select 66 people that night, “We Wear the Mask: The Hidden Face of Women in Poverty” is intended for future community screenings and discussions that she said she hopes will change the methods agencies use to serve the poor.
Ms. Thompson said poverty is often so brutal that it becomes your identity. It steals from you who you really are. To hide from the stigma, the public face is a mask, the show of normalcy.
The mask is also a barrier to healing, said Ms. Thompson, who produced the documentary with filmmaker Michael Savisky on a $45,000 grant from the Heinz Endowments.
The three women whose stories are featured have spent portions or all of their lives poor. Lou Ann Ross grew up in homemade dresses in Larimer. She was homeless for a time. Now married and comfortable in Squirrel Hill, she works at Point Park University but still lives with poverty as her emotional shadow.
She stocks two refrigerators on an old fear of not having enough to eat. “Every time I see someone’s new car, I think, ‘Could I sleep in that?’ ” she said. “Poverty has affected every part of my life, even now.”
Veniecia Robinson grew up in public housing in Northview Heights and rejected the expectation that she would stay there. For a time, she slept in a friend’s basement.
When her kids were young, “there was no time for whining or crying. I didn’t let them know I was robbing Peter to pay Paul. They thought I was supermom, and I was falling apart inside.”
She drove herself like a plowhorse and began getting better