It was 1993 and I had just gotten to New York. I’m sure I had a sign on me that said, “Hi I’m from Detroit and I ain’t never seen a place like this before in my life. Where is Spike Lee”?

I was doing some reporting for the Michigan Citizen newspaper my first year there and was always on the look out for something fantastical to report that nobody seemingly cared about back in Detroit. (I in fact got one letter in the mail asking the paper to write about some entertainment news that people were familiar with…like Patti LaBelle and not movie reviews for movies only at the Detroit Institute of Arts–man whatever). I cared though. Part of the fun of entertainment journalism is finding the entertainment that nobody knew already.

Enter the Village Voice. After my first visit to New York, I was hooked - baggy jeans, Carhart jacket envy, you name it. Somebody came to my dad’s house in Southfield selling magazines and instantly I saw the ticket to my future. The Village Voice. I perused it four seven months before I even moved there.

Enter The Circle Unbroken in a Hard Bop. I had seen the ad for the play and then recognized Sekou Sundiata’s name as one of the practicing professors at Eugene Lang (they are ALL practicing there - no weekend artists best believe).

I made my first foray down the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (someplace that would one day be like my third home) by myself. Alphabet City in the hot Fall at 8pm is something to be experienced. Back then there were drunks on every corner singing spanish love songs at the top of their lungs and as many dark corners as you would imagine your worst mood to have. I didn’t even flinch.

When I walked in, I’d never seen a cafe like this. There was a small cognac stage that was well worn with old whore red curtains that had been manipulated a few too many times. Ghetto bistro tables smelling like lots of beer spillings and discarded gum were surrounded by uneven bistro chairs light enough to create your own space. The long wooden bar looked to grand for this place and I don’t remember it ever living up to the potential of a palatial liquor garden but it did have beer. Always. It sat at the entrance on the right side like a forgotten brown whale waiting to take off and find Paris in the 1920s. One day.

The lights were set urgently. Bright hot spots on the stage. We all waited. The first thing I saw were slides of beautiful countries. Slides too bright for the cafe, betraying the melancholy left there by Pinero and all those before and after him. These were photos of a bright love. African people in colorful outfits. Sunsets you could sink your teeth in to taste the citrus of their core. Billie Holiday blue water running along nooks. And then the voice. You heard the voice before you saw the body, the tall lanky body with woman hips and taught chocolate skin. If it were not manly, it would be like your southern grandma. But it is a manly body and voice. And it is projected straight out to us. Later in the play, that manly voice will make me forget his posture and tone and he will contort himself into a homeless Vietnam vet who can’t even tweak out more than three words at a time. But no matter because those three words always evolve into lines of poetry. It must. The voice is Sekou Sundiata.

The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop is a play about three people on the road dealing with their lives post Vietnam and knee deep in a world. They are letters to one another trying to explain things to themselves and to us. They are friends who seem more intimate than the most married of newlyweds. I got so swept up in their language, their slides, their voices that sway like skirts of the most beautiful of dancers.

I wanted to be that play, to be in it, to eat it and have it drip down my arms, to sleep with it like a lover who’d been away, to laugh with it like my friend who I mean to call but time always slips through my fingers.

It made me write a play. And another. And another.

I need to say this now because Sekou is seriously ill and needs all prayers. Any man who can make you swoon with a world that is literally painted by colors that can sing, burst in your mouth and dance around you like sprites should be riddled with prayers and love and tears of joy and song and poems. Sekou is a treasure unlike any other and though he wasn’t the best advisor in college (he was such an artist that he had absolutely no time for “required courses” and idle chit chat, especially not helpful since at Lang, we created our own majors. It was as if somebody showed you Santa’s workshop and said, “Make your favorite toy!” Where does one begin??)

This prayer is for you Sekou that your ability to spin a brutal reality into a painting that goes beyond flat surfaces but then becomes its own star of life is something that gives you safe travels with moonbeams and rainbows attached to your exterior, keeping you colorful and full of joy. No matter what.

The song: Imani Uzuri (my sister Capricorn!)
Song: Sun Moon Child
Crafter: Exittheapple.com

This absolutely takes my breath away. Not only am I an Ailey/Wiz/Mikhail/Judith dancer when I close my eyes but my body knows it too because my heart beats faster to keep in time. And then I get my breath back.