A little over a year ago, I went to Boris Weinstein, the retired Shadyside ad executive with business cards that say "The Litter Czar," with a half-baked notion.

I called my idea "Trashapalooza," a vision of people across the city going out one day to pick up all the litter they could find. I went to Mr. Weinstein in a Squirrel Hill coffee shop, like a supplicant approaching Marlon Brando in "The Godfather."

Mr. Weinstein, 75, suggested tackling just one neighborhood before presuming to sweep the entire city. He'd already established zone defenses against dropped trash in East End neighborhoods, and he knew it would take time to organize a game plan for Pittsburgh.

I took that advice and, on a fine October Saturday last year, Mr. Weinstein, several dozen other folks and I clambered up and down the city steps of the North Side's Fineview neighborhood. We collected 185 bags of litter, wiped our hands, ate pizza, drank beer, handed out goofy awards and called it a day.

But Mr. Weinstein never stopped. His dream is being realized. In three weeks, on the weekend of Oct. 12-14, this city will have its first October Redd Up, an event in which an estimated 5,000 people will hit the streets, bags in hand, in more than 80 city neighborhoods and 13 more communities in Allegheny and Beaver counties, to clean up our mess.

Mr. Weinstein, founder of Citizens Against Litter, has coordinators in each of those places. Contact him at 412-688-9120, boris.weinstein@verizon.net or info@citizensagainstlitter.org if you're interested in lending a gloved hand. You have some time to organize your community if nobody else has. The October weekend is a Steelers bye week, so there should be plenty of lost souls with no idea how else to spend an autumn Sunday.

I drove out to Mr. Weinstein's townhouse in Shadyside this week, to the command center for this enterprise, which is in an ironically messy corner of his basement. Papers are spread on the floor around the desk in his basement office, but each has its purpose.

He says he started making calls about this three or four months ago and hasn't stopped. He isn't funded and isn't seeking money because he says all his work hasn't cost him a dime. Besides, he keeps the coins he finds on his cleanups.

If this goes half as well as what he and his partners in grime have done in the East End, Pittsburgh might finally be ready for its close-up, rather than those long shots used for every postcard. The Homewood/Squirrel Hill/Point Breeze Redd Up Coalition won last year's national Program Excellence Award from the Jewish Council of Public Affairs for its "collecting and connecting" concept.

Their cleanup events the past couple of years have brought out hundreds of volunteers, and connecting the people of those neighborhoods, from some of the city's most prosperous and its most troubled streets, has been as important as the cleanups themselves. The coalition didn't want to dilute those ties by taking on more neighborhoods, Jeff Cohan, director of community affairs for the United Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, said, but added, "Godspeed to Boris as he goes on and tries to organize everyone else."

He's already preparing for the city's 250th anniversary coming up in November 2008. (Seems like yesterday that the Brits captured Fort Duquesne, but no, it's been 2¹/₂ centuries). Mr. Weinstein sees no reason we can't clean up at least 250 neighborhoods and communities in Allegheny and Beaver counties and beyond.

He's not the first person to make picking up litter a pastime. Hundreds do that anonymously in their neighborhoods each day. But Mr. Weinstein has given the cause organization and passion.

I left him and drove back to the newsroom, noticing again how our city mimics the planet. Almost three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water. More than three-quarters of our streets are littered with water bottles.

I parked the company car in the lot and began walking toward our building, only to notice an empty Marlboro pack smashed in my path. Some macho slob must have been too weak from sucking on cancer sticks to carry an ounce of cardboard to a trash can.

I didn't want to be what Mr. Weinstein calls a passive anti-litterer, all jabber and no bending. I picked up the empty pack and walked it inside. It wasn't hard.

Now, as they say on the back of the shampoo bottles, repeat.