You are using an insecure version of your web browser. Please update your browser!
Using an outdated browser makes your computer unsafe. For a safer, faster, more enjoyable user experience, please update your browser today or try a newer browser.
Recently, an indy filmmaking friend of mine sent out a casting call for extras. I forwarded the email to my capoeira group, my professional writing group and my Austin PR list. Out of nearly 200 people, only one other person answered the call for yesterday’s shoot at the Republic Square farmers’ market. When I introduced my capoeira friend to my filmmaking friend, her eyes lit up and she immediately invited him to play a little capoeira for the opening scene.
He jumped at the opportunity to make his cinematic capoeira debut. Yet, capoeira isn’t an individual sport. Fortunately, one of the lead actors in the film also knew how to play capoeira since yours truly here was not about to get extra funky. After all, sweat was already streaming freely down my back just by me standing on the scene. I planned to go to two tango lessons after the film shoot. For once, I’d be the smelly tanguero in class! (I shared that with another tango student just before our first class and he said that I’d get another free pass at being smelly since I didn’t hit the funky mark.)
I did, however, make my capoeira lead singing debut, both off and on camera. I managed to get the crowd doing the three rhythmic capoeira soul claps as I sang. One other woman in the crowd was brave enough to repeat what I sang as a response to my lead. Unfortunately, she sang the lyrics a little incorrectly, but something’s better than nothing! At any rate, I figured I could always email my filmmaker friend once they start postproduction. She can always record the song over, using two female capoeiristas–I just hope that the whole scene isn’t deleted.
Regardless, I have another opportunity to make it in the final cut since I stood behind the principal actors during the crowd scene. I’d love to see the footage of how we did pretending to see an imaginary helicopter overhead, pretending to listen to a motivational speech and then cheering on one of the main characters.
I now have a newfound respect for actors. It’s very challenging to “get into character” with just a little backstory of what we were doing/reacting to in the scene. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see how much magic is worked in postproduction. Plus, I’m recruiting writers, photographers, and lyricists for the upcoming “Beauty in Other Cultures” roulette in September!
This weekend, I actually challenged my culinary skills by trying out two new recipes and getting a private cooking lesson. For my friend’s upcoming birthday party, I chose to make a cheesecake. Since her capoeira nickname means “pomegranate” in Portugese, I looked up the recipe for a white chocolate and pomegranate cheesecake. For my private cooking lesson, I chose an all-time vegetarian favorite, couscous and vegetable stirfry, since the lesson would focus on the proper way to chop veggies. Lastly, one of the characters in the novel that I’m currently working on, makes up her own recipe for blueberry pancakes; so I chose this morning to see if the recipe actually resulted in a pancake!
I prepared the cheesecake a few hours prior to my cooking lesson. Although I’ve been making cheesecakes for years, I was pretty excited about trying out this new recipe since, for the first time in life, I had to buy a springform pan and I would make use of my blender. All of my cheesecakes either have graham cracker or oreo cookie crusts. For this version, the recipe directed me to put the whole oreo cookies into the blender. After 1o seconds, all those cookies were pulverized. Pleased with the results, I called Mom to let her know this wonderful time-saving step. I then read to her the tip of putting hot water into a casserole pan at the bottom of the oven while the cheesecake was in the middle. Once the cheesecake finished baking, the instructions said to turn off the oven, crack the oven door and let it cool. The water bath was supposed to prevent the cheesecake from cracking. Not only did the cheesecake crack, but the crack formed an interesting shape. Even later on, when my friend helped me to decoratively hide the crack, it took on an interesting design, which reminded me of a jumping woman.
For the coucous and vegetable stirfry, I bought a sweet potato, a red onion, yellow squash, zucchini, roma tomatoes and collard greens. I’ve been on a collard greens kick for two weeks now and I swear that that leafy green is causing me to crave fried chicken! My friend brought over his special set of knives and his own wok. He taught me the proper way to hold the knife and chop round veggies, especially onions. Whenever he quizzed me how I normally chopped up certain things, my answer was the same: I put them in the blender.
As he chopped away, I made the dry spice mix (in the blender, of course) and prepared the pearl couscous, which I prefer over the regular, smaller-grained couscous. Had I known before hand that there would be a battle over adding fresh mint to the stirfry, I would have simply blended it with the other spices instead of setting it beside him to hand chop as he’d done with the garlic and onions that were sauted before the other ingredients were added. I gently handed him a “branch” of mint that consisted of 5 or 6 leaves. He accepted the compromise since the original recipe called for 1/2 cup of mint.
The next day the double chocolate cheesecake was a big hit at the birthday party . Not a soul knew that the milk chocolate on top had been added merely to disguise the split. As a matter of fact, I think the next time I make that cheesecake, I’m going to assume that it’ll split and have a white chocolate sauce for to cover it and then cover that with the pomegranate sauce with white chocolate shavings. In addition to eating the food I prepare, I find it’s entertaining to test out new recipes and modify them to suit my creativity.
So, Sunday’s blueberry pancake experiment truly took the cake, so to speak. In the current novel that I’m working on, The Adventures of Infinity and Negativa, Infinity describes to her twin sister how she prepares the batter:
“Well, my favorite way for making blueberry pancakes is to use twice as much flour as milk. And then I mix in a fourth of the amount of milk in oil.”
“Milk and oil. Fascinating,” Negativa said, shoving in a mouthful of pancakes.
Gaining momentum, Infinity continued. “I follow a one to one ratio for cups of flour and eggs. Then, for every egg, I’ll use an equal number of tablespoons of sugar. And for every tablespoon of sugar, half the number of teaspoons of salt, but double the number of teaspoons of baking powder. And get this,” she paused, waiting for Negativa to raise her head from her feeding frenzy to make eye contact, “with a total disregard of mathematical measurement, I’ll toss in as many fresh blueberries as I care to and gently fold them into my mathematically precise blueberry batter!”
Since I was preparing this only for myself, here are the measurements I used, following the above formula:
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup almond milk
1/8 cup (= 2 tablespoons) oil
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
handful of blueberries
I definitely had “experimental error” in the form of overshooting the prescribed amounts of flour, milk, and salt. I’m usually not too precise with my cooking measurements to begin with, but my end result was a tad saltier than I generally like. That little problem was remedied if the pancake was dripping with syrup. Needless to say, I’ll have to try it again, showing more attention to my measurements. In the end, the result was an edible pancake that rose beautifully, despite the slanted burner it cooked on. Next time I have a private cooking lesson, I want to learn how to flip a pancake although I think making several smaller pancakes will probably be my best bet.
Last night was a confirmation of just why I love life in Austin. One pivotal member of the tango community, especially the part of the community that takes classes at EsquinaTango, has been suffering health problems along with the accompanying exorbitant costs. As a creative fundraising idea, one of our regular milongas was turned into an entertaining cultural event where all the proceeds went to Tom.
A committee was formed to plan out the evening, which consisted of Indian themed cloth to decorate the space, a group of Bollywood dancers who practiced especially to perform for the evening, Indian food and of course, our tango teachers performed.
I arrived just in time for the tango and Bollywood performances, which meant that I totally missed the tango dancing for the evening. Nonetheless, I had danced about 6 luxurious hours of tango in the past week; so I didn’t feel that I missed out on too much. Besides, when I entered, the tango line of dance looked far too crowded to be much fun.
I went to the back room to change shoes and returned to the dance hall to pour myself a glass of wine and enjoy the performances. I was so delighted to see Tom again and he seemed in such good spirits that so many people would come together in his honor. Here’s a man who tirelessly gave a lot of his time and carpentry skills to renovate the space that we all have come to love.
We were forewarned not to expect a speech from him, but Tom was so moved by the turn out and mix of people that the room hushed to hear his wise words, advising us that if we enjoyed multicultural events such as the one we were currently attending, then we should do all that we could to support our little tango school. I couldn’t agree more.
Not only did the tango and Bollywood communities had come together, but many of us reached deep into our closets to retrieve our Indian attire for the event. So often at milongas, people stick to dark colors, especially black, and usually contrast black with either white and/or red. What a visual relief to see bright greens, blues, yellows and oranges. The festiveness of the swirling colors added to the positive fun energy.
After the performances, the crowd thinned since most of the pure tangueros left. Those of us who stayed did our best to dance to Indian music, which had quite a range from traditional to hip-hop and reggaeton. A few salsas and cumbias were mixed in, but every single song inspired sweat-drenched movement.
Before I left, I cooled down with a glass of water in front of a fan and I also suggested to one of the tango teachers that Esquina should have an ethnic-themed milonga at least once a season. Monthly would be a little too often, but we should not wait until one of our members needed help. We should be proactively embracing the talent and cultural population that we have.
I’ve been reading quite a lot lately about the various forms of oppression that we women face as research for my latest novel, The Adventures of Infinity and Negativa. Although I’m only going to focus on how a lack of education, a lack of birth control and a lack of income oppress women, I’m beginning to see that the first oppressive situation is the biggest of them all.
When females lack education, they are more likely to be viewed by society as mules, who should toil from sun up to sun down on menial tasks that neither require nor stimulate intellectual thought. When society has the expectations that certain women are only good for such menial tasks, then it does not value educating such young women. As a matter of fact, the tendency is to think that the act of educating such young women a waste of resources–with time also being included as a resource.
Outside the States, in some of the most conservative developing countries, such young women are kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Many times, the local police are aware of the brothels that kidnap, beat, and drug young women, but the attitude is that they are the poor, uneducated girls; so it’s OK. Moreover, some condone the practice because the forced sexual enslavement of this perceived undesirable population of young women means that the desirable population of young women (at least middle class and educated) will remain virgins upon marriage. Males can satisfy their sexual desires with prostitutes instead of enticing the desirable population of young women into sex, which would shame her family.
As the universe tends to do when I’m researching a topic, a related workshop presented itself. Walking into this workshop, I wanted to contrast how young women are trafficked in the States.
One of the first things that I learned was that pimps did not have to cross international or state lines to be considered “trafficking.” I also learned that “teenage prostitution” did not exist by definition since the age of consent federally is 18 and statewide, there is a range of 16-18, depending on the state. The most devastating fact I learned was that the average age for young women to be sexually trafficked in the States is 13.
In the States, young women are recruited to and from school, at women’s battered shelters and virtually any place where the pimps can have access to girls who are at risk. Again, the younger and less educated a girl is, she is at risk of being categorized as an undesirable. If the girl comes from a chaotic home where her parents physically and verbally fight, one or both parents are addicts, then being taken care of by a pimp initially seems better.
Pimps, who are much older, shower the at risk girl with attention, gifts, compliments and eventually have sex with her. Then, once the girls are emotionally attached, that’s precisely when the pimp will flip the script and put her on the street. The biggest lie is that by soliciting herself for money, that she’ll help him save up enough money to eventually marry her and they’ll live happily ever after.
For my book, I’m only focusing on prostitution as it occurs in Honduras, but the common thread of this form of oppression is, by one method or another, young uneducated girls who are poor are at the greatest risk of being trafficked. The universality of this theme sickens me. As a teacher, I’ve discovered newfound motivation to make sure the females in my classes stay plugged into school. Not only are they less likely to be trafficked, but statistically they are more likely to have fewer children and those children will be better cared for by their educated mother.
As a writer, I see it as my duty to bring about the global double standard that is continuing to plague women. I now know that it was an absolute blessing to be born to middle class parents from a developed country that values female education and insures my rights to control how many children I bring into this world and secure income and property.
I’m not sure if just one book will do, but at this point, there are so many issues that are beyond the scope of my current work in progress. Not only do I need to address the three oppressive situations that I’ve previously mentioned, but also the whole double standard concerning female sexuality. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.
In an effort to meet more people, I started checking out the weekly Meet Up listings that I receive every Monday. Confirming what I already knew about this lovely city known as The Live Music Capital of the World, there are so many interesting people and things to do…now reading Meet Up, I know about even more things that all happen at the same time!
Just for shit and giggles, I decided to hook up with the “dinner and a movie” group this Saturday to watch the latest Batman movie. A few days later, every media source were competing with one another to break the latest exclusive angle on the mass murders that occurred at a midnight showing of Batman in Aurora, CO.
Years ago, I used to teach at a middle school close to that mall, but of course, the media didn’t care about the schools that were closest to the mall. Instead, some chose to show a map with the mall and Columbine High School highlighted, which was the last location of such horrific mass murder.
One of the differences between the two incidents was how much technology has advanced. In addition to several cell phone calls to 911, there were digital images, tweets, texts and good ol’ fashioned eyewitness interviews on camera. Law enforcement did its best to respond to the incident, including urging the media not to hype the situation and encourage copycats, but honestly, the amount of planning and preparation that Holmes underwent cannot be readily copied.
In addition to feeling sympathetic to the family of the murdered movie goers, I became angry that once again, some nutjob legally purchased weapons of mass destruction and killed and injured many people within minutes. Granted, I’m not a gun owner and I have next to no hunting skills with any implements, but I fail to understand why the average private citizen needs the type of fire power that allows hundreds of bullets to be sprayed in minutes. No hunter, novice or experienced, would carry such a weapon, but it seems to be the legal weapon of choice for the mentally unstable.
Despite my efforts to meet new people, I forgot that I needed to arrive at least 30 minutes prior to showtime and ended up watching Batman by myself. Nonetheless, I’m thankful that all the drama and violence occurred on the screen. Plus, I was proud to be among a full house of people who did not allow fear of copy cats keep them away from enjoying life.
I’ve had such a productive week, I’m amazed that only a week has passed! I took the positive energy from last Sunday’s writers roulette and channeled into the new search for some “raunchy writers” for the upcoming “Expressing Your Wild Side” roulette.
I attended an open mic, a romance writers’ social, an art opening, a milonga and several tango classes. All the while, I’ve been handing out flyers to people and leaving them places in visible places.
I even got the bright idea to contact two businesses that I thought would do well, given the theme. All-in-all, I’ve been thinking out of the box to build up the event. One thing I’m surely going to miss when school starts up in the fall is the flexible schedule that I have to do everything that I need to get done in a humanly pace rather than feeling stressed with a million things to do.
This upcoming week, I plan to pay one of the potential vendors a visit since I know the manager’s going to be present. I’ll have to call the other vendor, just to make sure that she received my email with the vendor information. Plus, there’s at least two open mics that I plan to visit. I like the idea of seeing people perform and recruiting the artists who I want.
I’m also going to meet a friend for a light dinner then try out a modern dance class. Of course, I’m going to drop off flyers along the way. These days, I’m always thinking of the roulette and ways to improve it. I think I’ve got the basics covered and I even have my first submission. I’ll be doing very well if I can have all of my writers lined up during the next two weeks. Although the first show went very well, I want to nuture it into something spectacular.
Last year, I dreamed of reading my original work at least once a month; so I prepared about 30 professional-looking press kits, made a list of venues and spent a lot of time driving around and passing them out. Out of all my efforts, I got 2 gigs before I abandoned the mission. This time around, I finally realized that in order to participate in the type of event that I want to be a part of, I have to organize it myself. So, I’ve spent the past month and a half organizing the Austin Writers Roulette, a monthly cultural event of spoken word, poetry and performance.
It’s been an interesting, constructive way to spend my summer vacation. One thing I loathe about teaching is the beaucratic paperwork involved and yet, I’m now the creator of my own forms in order to organize this event. And like my students, some artists have not taken the time to read, a “short” one-page attachment about participating in the roulette as a performer and/or vendor. However, I take it all in stride since I know, just like teaching at a new school, I’ve got to work out the kinks and adjust my “lesson plans” according to the culture.
I took an 8 am yoga class just to help calm mind nerves, which worked for the first two-thirds of the class, but I became increasingly nauseous toward the end. I managed to stay in the room by doing one set of the last four postures. Once I left the intense heat of the bikram yoga room, the nausea subsided.
In a few hours, I’ll get to see my plan unfold and see where the gaps are. Better than that, I’ll get to emcee my very own event, introducing a line up who I personally recruited and whose material I’ve reviewed for an audience to whom I advertised with the help of social and traditional media.
At this point, all that needs to be done is to set up the chairs, my vending table, and the audio equipment. Come what may, I’m going to take comfort that I’ve done all that I humanly can do to make this first event of many a success. The rest will depend on other people–what a scary thought for a control-freak Virgo like myself!
Once again, I had a brush with my latent psychic skills nearly two weeks ago when I first arrived at one of my sister’s house. I normally keep certain items prepacked in my suitcase–wine opener, goggles, camper’s headlamp. For some inexplicable reason, I handed my 11-year-old nephew my headlamp. I proudly boasted that I liked being prepared for all occasions.
Fastforward exactly a week and a line of thunderstorms later, the lights browned, flashed back to normal and repeated. I’d lived in enough developing countries to know an impending electricity blackout warning when I saw one. I raced to my suitcase and got the headlamp as the lights blinked off. While everyone else ran around the house, I adjusted my headlamp and proudly walked around, lighting the dark rooms until they found their own light source. My nephew grabbed the little flashlight in the TV room, beating his mom to the punch. My father wore the “emergency” hat he had been given, which came equipped with two little lights built into a cap.
With the background hum of electrical appliances and TVs eerily quiet, we could hear the threatening sounds of mother nature. We all met in the basement, where it was safe and cool. Without any of the distractions of electrical conveniences, we actually began to talk with one another–well, except for me and one of my nieces. I wanted to finish the section of the chapter that I was on. My niece eventually received all the updated texts from her friends who were also in the emergency storm situation. The phone battery eventually wore down until she had to reconnect with the rest of the family conversation.
Once the storm passed over, we waited another thirty minutes in the basement, but the electricity did not return. My father, who has elevated napping to an art form, was the first to make the trek upstairs to get ready for bed. We were fortunate to still have running water even though we only had a limited amount of hot water. Since the basement was the only cool part of the house, my sister and her family slept on the sofa and made sleeping pallets on the floor. I just slept on my usual roll out bed in the loveseat sofa. Well, “slept” is an optimistic retelling. I was subjected to two versions of competitive snoring and a tiny flashlight, doubling as a night light…I’m a dark room sleeper.
I was pretty bitter when I finally emerged the next morning. The sight of my nephew playing a board game with one of his sisters turned my attitude around. Instead of being spoiled little brats, complaining about the electricity outage, my niece and nephew automatically switched to a nonelectronic form of entertainment. I joined them in the “TV room” to read a book after my breakfast of freshcut fruit.
While the rest of the family took showers, using as little hot water as they could stand, I boasted about being the only clean one, thanks to my habit of showering at night. Yet, the house had begun to heat up and become stuffy; so I figured I wouldn’t have too long to wait before I lost my bragging rights.
I took my father up on his offer to go to the grocery store. The first one we tried was closed due to the power outage. The second one smelled of food about to go bad and had partially stocked shelves. The third one was just right: brightly lit, fully stocked and no funny smells.
We made another outing later in the afternoon, mainly to be in the air-conditioning, wait for the return of the electricity and vie for charging our electronic devices, using the car charger. We figured out that we could charge two phones at once, but the challenge was there were 6 of us. I inwardly laughed at how we were reduced to animals, fighting over a limited resource.
By dinnertime, the electricity still had not returned; so we went out to eat. Again, we competed to charge our phones. This time, I opted out of the competition since my plan was to charge my phone at the restaurant. With my luck, there wasn’t a close outlet to our table, but I encouraged my sister and father to charge their phones near the servers’ station. I figured throughout our entertaining and delicious dinner, two phones would be out of the competition back in the car.
A few hours and too much food later, we waddled out of there. Mom and my sister just had to go shopping afterwards, but I succumbed to a food coma. Just before nodding off, I noticed that the car video monitor had a USB port. I jumped up and tested it out. One of my nieces, who was low on the phone charging list, became excited as well. As soon as her mother returned from shopping, my niece borrowed her mother’s phone cord and plugged in her phone. We all celebrated as if we’d just discovered a vital survival strategy.
We became excited when we noticed that the traffic light closest to home had resumed working. The townhouses closest to the intersection had electricity. Our hopes dimmed as we drove past the dark townhouses leading up to our house. I anxiously looked through the house windows as we rolled into the driveway. “The kitchen lights are on!” I reported.
We raced throughout the house, turning off unnecessary lights while plugging in our nearly depleted electronic devices. Just like that, we catapulted back into being electronic slaves, abandoning the civilization we’d briefly rediscovered.
This year’s family reunion had a wonderful surprise: pictures of the original twelve Strange siblings, especially my guardian angel since I’ve been traveling around the world and living in Austin, my Papa, Floyd B. Strange.
And I was especially moved to see my grandmother, who married into the Strange family, was the first Avon lady in Cascade, VA, could spin entertaining stories while cooking up delicious food, Mama Bea, Beatrice (Adams) Strange.
As I studied the sepia-toned pictures of my ancestors two generations before me, I was filled with a sadness that I only had a thin volume summary, given the wealth of life experience these twelve siblings and their spouses represented. One result of the closeness of the dozen siblings is that we’ve just celebrated our 71st Strange family reunion.
Last year at the family reunion, I made my novel reading debut, which had been a bit nerve-wracking since I could scarcely find an excerpt that contained kid-friendly language. I chose to read a BBQ scene since it dealt with food, a highlight of our family reunion. I sold several books based on the double-entendre with (meat)balls. As a matter of fact, one of my cousins informed me that she loved reading Tribe of One so much that she completed it in two weeks. She kept laughing about all of Salome’s antics.
This year, instead of doing another reading, I gave all members of my immediately family a Tribe of One t-shirt in order to “represent.”
Yet the main two reasons I attend our yearly family reunions are to catch up with relatives who I hardly ever talk with throughout the rest of the year and to eat too much delicious food that will take me about a month to exercise off!
There are some fabulously creative people here in Austin and occasionally, several of them get together and do wonderful, enlightening things. One such occasion was the special lunch that I attended this past Thursday at 11th Street Station. For the second weekend in a row, the Black Arts Movement festival had lined up a selection of Black artists, starting with political poet, Amiri Baraka.
As usual, the morning had gotten away from me. When my cell alerted me that I had 15 minutes to get to the restaurant, I raced around the apartment to get ready. I put my game face on as I walked to the back room of the restaurant, but to my relief, Baraka had not arrived. Fortunately, I had a chance to reconnect with another writer and meet a large round table of others.
When our guest of honor finally arrived, most of us local writers, who were mostly poets, had arrived. After taking a brief opinion poll that chicken and waffles were the way to go, Baraka first asked how many of us were published. Then he asked how many of us were self-published. I’ve heard so many mixed messages, concerning self publication, but I was initially surprised by Baraka’s reasoning: institutions never published writers whose work deals with bringing down those very institutions; therefore, it was up to us to make sure that our work is published. He told us about how he had self published his own two-page newspaper back when he was in middle school, writing every copy by hand.
Baraka then wanted to go around the table and hear which poets had influenced us. Fortunately for me, the outspoken writer to my left, suggested that discussion begin with the poets on the other side of the table, which meant that I would blessedly go last. I estimated that I would have at least 30 minutes to think of an intelligent answer. I felt like one of my students who had not done the reading all along and now the teacher had given us a pop quiz.
Name the poet who has had an influence on my writing?! Now, I occasionally read poetry, but the greatest influence on my writing has been traveling and living in other countries. I write to document significant moments in my life. I write fiction so that the main characters talk and think through the everyday drama of their experiences.
As the enlightening conversation unfolded, my anxiety of being an unprepared student subsided. I sat there, drinking in the other artist’s experiences, which were all the more interesting since we all had the additional connection of being “community caregivers”: teachers, teen counselors, financial counselors for low-income adults, event organizers, anthropology graduate students.
Baraka led us down another conversational path when he stated that presently, there was a whitewashing of the political history of the 60s. We all agreed that in general, the quality of education had lowered. One guy, who was orginially from Chicago, testified about the dumbing down of education. As soon as he came to Texas in 1988, he hit a huge barrier of not fitting in. Not unusual for the new kid, but he vividly recalled being teased for using big words, reading a lot and so on.
After he shared his story, I was nearly bursing out of my skin to share my background. I explained that I began writing so I could remember every detail of my Peace Corps service in Tanzania as a Biology and math teacher. I then summarized my international teaching experience and concluded with the fact that I’d taught my students outside the States at a much higher level than what is expected here in Texas despite the zealous emphasis on standardized testing.
Before the lunch had ended, I exchanged information with most of the local artists in order to send them information about the Austin Writers Roulette. The few artists whose information I had not received, I caught up with later that night at Baraka’s performance. Two of the local artists opened for Baraka and I was blown away at how I had never heard of such great talents until that day. I hope they will make time in their busy professional and performance schedules to participate in the roulette.
Once Baraka came to the stage, three local jazz musicians accompanied him–a pianist, an upright bassist and a drummer. Their music provided an aural backdrop that rose, dipped and punctuated the selections Baraka read. He started off with about 20 “low-kus,” which was his variation of haikus. The short pithy poems did not follow any numerical format. My favorite one dealt with the fact that rich people ate more than poor people; so rich people are full of more sh*t. He ended his hourlong performance with an epic poem about 9/11, which occurred when he was poet laureate.
As beautifully packaged as Baraka’s political, poetic messages were, I also experienced nearly the extreme opposite when I attended Paul Mooney’s performance on Saturday. My friend had wanted to sit closer to the stage, but I did not want to tempt a comedic berating from a man infamous for his raw humor. Although Mooney dabbled with some polticial jokes, such as the ridiculousness of Trump questioning Obama’s citizenship (“Trump forgets that he and Obama both came from a white vagina!”), my personal favorite was, “My grandmother told her granddaughters ‘Don’t you come back home broke ’cause a dry purse and a wet p*ssy don’t go together.'”
Although Mooney never once mentioned Tupac, the bandana around his bald head caused me to recall the political messages of the slain rapper. I don’t believe that association was coincidence.
This weekend was a fantastic reminder that despite the grimness of politics, be it work, local, state, national or global, I can always write about it and share my observations through artistic expressions.
Yet the main two reasons I attend our yearly family reunions are to catch up with relatives who I hardly ever talk with throughout the rest of the year and to eat too much delicious food that will take me about a month to exercise off!
