‘If you want go, go out and get it. Find a light and follow.’

Spoken in a monotone without the enthusiasm that the words implied.

He had only got to New York at this stage, drawing shoes for the manufacturer Israel Miller, but he had escaped. He was free. And he had brought with him some of his work that had been in an exhibition in New York. He had made it, broken away. His name was Andrew Warhola. He had attended her school, Schenley High School, and was now returning to speak as part of the ‘Everything Is Possible – Just try’ programme.

Then just a few years later he burst into prominence and covered his birthplace in glory. Although Heinz and its 57 varieties and the Steelers had been doing that for nearly half a century.

She did meet Andrew Warhola after the talk, along with a whole crowd of girls keen to be in the presence of someone who had escaped. He would soon morph into the silk-screen printing, flaxen-bewigged Andy Warhol and truly do Pittsburgh proud.

‘Drawing shoes.’

Lomita voiced to the room, still amazed at how people start and blossom, and wondering what kind of shoes Warhol would have produced had he continued.

This reflection made her sad, not about the missed career of a shoe designer, but about the idea of being allowed to blossom.

She took another sip, and then followed it with an inhalation of the malt aroma.

Two people, same place, with dreams of changing their lives.

But it hadn’t ended that well for him, for Andy, he was dead. Fifty-eight. Luck, that’s what you need.

Luck, her foulest four-letter word.

Her best friend at the time, Betsy, was moved away, along with hundreds of other impoverished families, to make way for redevelopment. The new city.

Lomita felt a guilt when she became aware that she was going to benefit from the removal of less fortunate people like Betsy. But this development enabled her to leave school and find employment at the newly built Carlton Hotel on Bigelow Boulevard.

It was either that or the Henry, both completed in the mid-fifties, but the Carlton won her over because she had read about the hotel of the same name in the South of France, in the magazines she scanned as quickly as she could at the news stand before the paper vendor complained about her lack of purchase.

She had seen pictures of the elegance of the film festival in Cannes, and she would close her eyes standing on the sidewalk. She, for that brief moment, became one of those women in a silk taffeta gown with curled hair, bobbing in the gentleness of the breeze while the cameras popped and people shouted for her to turn this way and that, and thank her for being her. Just for being her.