I suppose we should’ve seen this whole thing coming…the one where the President is always to blame for everything. I mean President Obama saw it coming. He did keep saying stuff like “the buck stops here” and “this is my job” but some of us really didn’t understand what that meant until the weird complaints started coming in. You know…like the death threats from so-called Christians. The impatience from those who have been fighting decades long battles and had expectations that there would be a magic wand waved and all our problems would disappear. Majority of the country who hadn’t pretended to read the constitution since they were in American History class, now reciting bits and pieces to fit their agenda. The ones who forgot this is a democracy and we have other people in government who are responsible for their jobs and that the President doesn’t do EVERYTHING. I mean we’ve never expected the President to do EVERYTHING before so why now?

It’s a blessing and a curse to have a  historic President. On one hand, we’ve done something we’ve never done before. On the other, we are now doing everything we did before and worse (economically, socially, culturally - we should come up with new deadly sins) and expect one person to wipe up after us.

Today I’m annoyed because people are pissed at Obama for coming to LA and making traffic bad. Really? Traffic in LA is always bad and none of the local politicians seemed to ever care. If we had a city where things on the road ran smoothly, the whole world wouldn’t collapse because Olympic is shut down. Now I know the Secret Service is part of this ring (and they have a helluva job guarding a historic President given there are people who aren’t happy about his skin color in 2010 - real talk). But how come nobody asks Villagrosa to clean up the HORRIBLE traffic on a daily basis? How come we never find out about the protests that close off streets until we are in the middle of them (I mean I’ve learned more about the Armenian Genocide sitting on Wilshire than I ever did in school and don’t even get me started on the Day without Latinos)? How come the Hollywood Bowl area is a always a clusterfuck no matter which way you go since they hold the lights so people can go stack park their cars for $20?

All this has made me read the news less or get soundbite news. I can’t stand how we present actual facts nowadays. There’s always a sly twist, an unsubstantiated tangent, a rash process of judgment, a disregard for humanity. There is no news anymore. There’s just tone - a sarcastic tone, an angry tone, a defensive tone, a judgmental tone…we’re going so fast that we can’t even hear ourselves anymore. I suppose if I was more tuned in, I would find all of this fascinating but I don’t. I find it exhausting. I’m tuning out.

My blood boils a bit when I hear people being so upset with Lebron James as though he literally stole the check out of their mailbox. People from wackalicious Charles Barkley (who NEVER got a ring by the way) to, well, me, have an opinion about how Lebron should have handled his career. Key word HIS career. Barkley, Jordan, etc all say they would have never done what Lebron did (and by “did” let’s separate the HOW from the WHAT). Times were different back then, old timers. Nobody had to live in Cleveland to make their way. I’m not a Cleveland basher but having family from there (so thus, visiting a few more times than I wanted to), I can say that it is NOWHERE near my top choices to live. It’s around where Philly is but Philly has The Roots so I wouldn’t be TOO devastated in Philly.  For Jordan and his years of being off the rader before being the demi-god he turned into, he could do it in fancy Chi-town with all its jazz, good food, metro people, and a budding youngish Oprah who was smashing Phil Donahue in the ratings. Something to do, in other words. Barkley had some nice weather. Bird had Boston where he fit right in, being vanilla and all (If I was vanilla, Boston might be a nicer place for me too). I won’t even get into Magic. I’m from Michigan so I know where Magic came from and I live in LA so I know where he landed. Dude, you had not one complaint. None of y’all tried to make it ago in Cleveland where you literally have to recreate fire.

I imagine it being heavy carrying an entire state’s hopes and dreams. And when people talk about Lebron quitting in the finals, I wonder if they ever bashed Kobe for doing the same (as a message to his teammates) or considered the fact that dud was just tired of being Whole Team Cavaliers.

Haters go hate but there’s nothing wrong with some young men trying to achieve their goals. They outsmarted some rich team owners who sometimes act above the law and they got theirs. Nobody took a check out of your mailbox so fall back and stop taking it personally. I can’t wait to see how many of y’all are camped in front of the tv waching Heat games.

I frequently get a heavy heart when I read the news. More so than I did when I grew up in Detroit and read about Malice Green or the Atlanta Child Murders or even reading about American History. I used to look at pictures of lynchings and water hosing and the Holocaust and Japanese camps and think how hard it must have been back then. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized, we are back then.

We have a black president who stepped into poo for a job. Some may agree or disagree with how things are being done there but I have yet to find any of the alternative rational solutions to be plausible or even without partisan motive. It’s as if the alternative to the president is to be angry, mean, disrespectful or unrealistic. I will never forget, during the President Bush years, I had a mini-conversation with a co-worker who was Republican. She was older and she stopped our conversation from getting any where near politics. She said, “I was taught to not criticize the President, to not talk religion or politics when cocktails are involved.” While my actions are so far from that, I could respect what she was saying. It seems that respect is gone now. Even Clinton with the girls and the scandals garnered more respect than the man trying to do the best he can in office now. I only know what it’s like to be American, to be a woman and to be black. I can empathize with other scenarios but I don’t know them intimately so I can imagine the fear that rests on others’ chest at night as they watch the world change from something familiar to something that they cannot control. Yet this world was never ours to control in the first place. We are only here to get to know ourselves so that we may grow, try to end our lives some place further than where we begin, appreciate our moments, and institute some kind of order that is fair and balanced to all. Beyond that, we get into scary territory.
Yesterday I was saying to the BF that the conservative white people who are afraid of how this country is turning out must not remember that this country has always been about cheap labor. That’s how black people got here, that’s how Native Americans almost became extinct, that’s how Latinos are still here en mass though this “here” was their “here” first like the Native Americans, that’s how most every immigrant has gotten here and stayed here. What did you think would happen? They would pick cotton, tobacco, fruit, vegetables, clean houses, water lawns, build houses and then leave? You called in specialists and paid them nothing. Of course this country is becoming more colorful. You asked for help and you got contributors. You thought you got free or cheap labor to build your Shanghri-La. Surprise. Nothing belongs to anyone. You fight for existence, not your right to be a bigot, prejudiced or racist.
I got a petition in my inbox to sign something to prevent a mosque being built near Ground Zero. I am baffled. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t have all places of worship near such a tragic site. I can’t believe that there are religious people sending this petition around. There were muslims in the towers, alongside other religious/nonreligious folk, that had nothing to do with the terrorists. There were Muslim nurses and cops who were trying to help people. Just as there were Muslims, there were Christians, Jews, Hindis, Atheists and Spirtualists. I am unable to understand how we are not able to make the separation of religion from terrorists. Just because a murderer says he does something in the name of God does not mean we have to accept that. We can reject it. We can tell them that they are murderers no matter what their reason. This is what happens in the courtrooms. Why can’t it happen in our minds? When Timothy McVey bombed children, did we care why he did it? Did we look at young white men funnier after that? Were they held in a different light? When Columbine happened, did we outlaw bullying or get scared when we saw kids walking down the street? There are so many instances where we have chosen different paths of reaction whether because of emotion or convenience but we must know that every choice has consequences.
It is very difficult to watch people’s prejudices and anger come out all at once. I am sure my irrational mind would love it if I acted a fool over the Detroit shooting of Aiyana Jones but my rational mind definitely paid attention to what Al Sharpton said about it not just being a police issue but a community issue. Maybe it is maturity or getting further along in age but what I strive for most is compassion and the struggle for peace. Suddenly I really feel like if people aren’t doing all they can for that then they must look internally for the problems they place at the feet of others. My old math teacher, Mr. Cole, used to ask us to ask ourselves this question before we did anything: “Is it kind and is it necessary?” At the time we thought it was corny but now I realize he was asking us to create a thought prior to action. To examine our motivations to the fullest prior to presenting our ideas out to the world. To pray for the death of anyone, including a president (like the ever growing Facebook groups) seems to so anti-human that I feel bad for the karma it will create to those who think it necessary.
This is a soapbox rant and I’m not sure how many agree and I’m not even sure if that matters. I just wanted to lament my heavy heart at watching the world grow. Puberty sucks. I can’t wait until we get to be fine adults.

I just I just should own it.
I’m a locs girl.
Here’s my story briefly. I first got locs my first year of grad school. I’d been natural about four years. They were great. Palm rolled and no cares in the world. I did have an addiction to hair color that eventually turned them some kind of only-visible-to-me dark green and then jet black thanks to more hair color. I cut them off after my heart got broken and I was in such a state as I would’ve done anything “reckless” aside from harm myself.
And then I went back to braids. This was TERRIBLY convenient as Wudia, my braider, had a shop right below my apartment and I could literally roll out of bed and be there. No travel time!
And then I was with my buddy Schwellie at Jimmy’s Uptown when it first opened, before the stick ‘em ups and the disappearance of Jimmy, when I saw this older women with the most stunning hair. She had the loveliest little locs I’d ever seen. I HAD to know what she had. She told me they were Sisterlocks (I really hate the name and I don’t care if people chastise me for hating the name…I don’t hate anyone attached to it). I got the number to her stylist and I went to my consultation. Well, mine plus about four other women. We were all packed up in her upper Westside apartment to learn about SLs. I was misunderstood because I thought it would just be me and I had put some money away, not knowing how much it would be, in case she wanted to start then. Oh no. This was the opposite of what I thought. With all my hair, she said it would be 800 bills EASY…my breath left em. I was a just started working woman! Plus, even though I group up in Detroit with its 24 hour hair salons, I was not the one to put hair over rent.
I went back traditional. I went to the same woman who started them before. Roberta in Brooklyn who’s house smelled of all of her Aveda stuff. Heaven. She also died them the loveliest shade of bronze. I’m sure all around me were overjoyed given I let my hair rock a blowout afro for 1.5 days before it deflated and shrank.
The second loc exodus just happened November 2008. I took two days off and, with the help of Jamyla who’d done this before, I armed myself with a spritzer bottle of water and a rattail comb. I undid my locs.
I had dreams of I’m not sure what. I think I thought I’d get my hair pressed, I’d do braidouts, I’d do twistouts…I did no such things. I did buns. For a year. I realized something about myself. I’m not really a DIYer because that implies doing things. What I am is a “I don’t want to deal with it” er. The only hair thing I like doing myself is hair color and even sometimes I don’t mind somebody else doing it.
Through a series of life happenings, I was able to finally afford SLs though not at the 1998 price I was quoted (I guess that’s when they were like Howard Hughes…now they’re a bit more known). I have come to terms that I need to put my big girl pants on and get to know who I really am with my hair. I’m somebody who doesn’t like to do a lot and now I’m somebody who starting to put money aside to get my hair done. My mother used to INSIST she and I get our creamy cracked scalps tended to every two weeks and perhaps I was trying to run from what that felt like - being in the salon for HOURS (because we always had the stylist that EVERYONE went to), not scratching my head, fear of it turning out horrible. But now it doesn’t have to be that way. Now I can consider some necessary me grooming time and even make myself believe I’m a little girly for it.

Anyone who really knows me knows that I have ZERO problem with being addicted to certain reality television shows. If Bravo squats it out of their a-hole, I watch (except for that Nine By Design and that’s just because it sounds boring and like somebody higher up made this show happen against better judgment). Also, there’s a slew of crazy wedding reality shows. Having never been married myself, perhaps I roll around these things like a pig in shit too easily. I don’t know what it’s like to feel pressure to chose a big puffy dress or scream on my bridesmaid friends or rob Sallie Mae to pay a caterer. Maybe I should but I don’t feel the urge to destroy my life so much. I hope when the time comes, it will be lovely and peaceful and without bill collectors.

It’s a psychological study for me to watch these things: Say Yes To The Dress, Bridezilla, etc. To be fair, I also enjoy House Hunters but more so House Hunters International (I am FASCINATED how people “work from home” and then decide they need to relo to Fantasy Island at the ripe age of 40). These people, I guess, are the Bridezillas after?

Back to reality…heh…tv that is. It’s now getting to a point where I know people on these shows are just going on to act a fool to get on television. Even my beloved Say Yes To The Dress, which is relatively mild in comparison to the Springer-like shenanigans on Bridezilla. Say Yes To The Dress is just about a bunch of women trying on dresses at the infamous Kleinfeld’s. Whereas before these were princess from Long Island, it’s now turning into African girls from London who are on holiday in NYC and just so happened to stop in with her fiance to spot a one of a kind tissue paper like thing for the price of a village (this actually happened - I suspect she was an actress because she was stunning and so was the fiance and they never came back to purchase the dress despite a long hemming and hawing).  Is reality not even sacred anymore.

This post primarily came about as I was cruising my New York magazine Fashion Trend enewsletter and came about a little Vera Wang tidbit. Here it is:

“I dress a great many rock stars and I’m always surprised when they want the most traditional dresses,” she said. On the wedding gown she designed for Jennifer Lopez: “It took eight months and we made three dresses. It pushed me out of my own box and comfort zone.” Read: Lopez almost pushed her over the edge.”

DELICIOUS…where is THAT show? Jennifer’s career is on the downturn so why not make a show about her being a Lifezilla or something? I mean her back up plan could not be Back Up Plan so she might as well go ahead with it. Why am I not a tv show head? I mean seriously.  This also got me wondering which damn dress Vera was talking about. Jenny’s been around the block a few times if you know what I mean.

I get in moods. Sometimes I have this great desire to cut myself and bleed all over this page and then, having been put in really weird positions because of what I say here, I second guess myself. I’m a hesitator! So that’s why I can go long bouts of “I’m not here” and be fine.

Lena Horne just brought me out from my cave.

My first encounter with her was through Fred Sanford (hey, I was a wee kid then so don’t get all hot and bothered about how uncultured I must have been). He loved her so much that every other word was “Lena Horne.” And then the real introduction happened: The Wiz. Her song at the end literally made me cry and I didn’t even really get the whole movie just yet (I was still a kid — I had just enough comprehension to be in my pre-school’s recital to “Brand New Day” - we basically just danced around in a circle but I took it seriously.

Detroit in the 80s and 90s was the best place to grow up. TV 50 played old movies all day on Sunday and my mom would make us omelets while we went from “Abbott and Costello” to “Roman Holiday.” Double feature afternoons were my joy. Every once in a while, they played a great black movie. I do remember “Cabin In The Sky” and being mesmerized by this woman who looked white but surely did not sound white singing.

Later she would have a guest appearance on my other favorite show, “A Different World” playing herself, still beautiful, still high yellow and still sounding like she was one of my distance cousins from Mississippi. No wonder men of my grands age loved her so. She seemed like she would TELL you a thing or two.

In college I researched everything about the then lost age of black film from Oscar Micheaux to Freddie Washington. I devoured Donald Bogle’s Dorothy Dandridge’s bio and ate August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” daily.

There aren’t many Lena Horne-types around anymore and, at 92, her death leaves a gaping hole in our cultural fabric. We are lucky enough that her granddaughter is penning really interesting screenplays right now (”Rachel Getting Married”, etc.) but they don’t come like Lena anymore.

Not sure what box we get to put these losses in: Eartha, Lena…but thank god for celluloid.

For all of you “true to the game” artists in NYC or NJ, here’s your chance to make some cash and teach the babies:

SUBMISSIONS
Teaching Artist—Princeton, NJ

McCARTER THEATRE CENTER’S Education Department is seeking applicants for a PAID freelance teaching position in its First Stage After-School Theater program. The position runs March–May, 2010. Successful candidates will have extensive experience working with urban youth, specific knowledge of acting theories and styles, and a strong desire to create a stimulating and exciting curriculum. Artists with expertise in storytelling, particularly African folktales, and devised theater are strongly encouraged to apply. Teaching Artist will be responsible for creating a compelling performance with students involved in the Trenton After School Program (TASP), as an employee of McCarter Theater’s Education Department. Candidates should email their headshot and teaching resume to: jmurtha@mccarter.org, or mail to: Jim Murtha, Education Programs Manager, MCCARTER THEATRE CENTER, 91 University Place, Princeton, NJ 08540.

McCarter Theatre is an equal opportunity employer and encourages the application of all qualified individuals.

Dave Chapelle talks Depression

This is why I love him. Sometimes people offer you advice and they have NO idea where you are coming from. While I was taught to nod and smile, Dave just broke the mold.

Yesterday I was so lucky to have breakfast with my college mentor, Dr. Barbara Emerson, who was instrumental in allowing me to have no boundaries in all the things I wanted to do at Eugene Lang at the New School way back in the day. Me and my cohorts were able to put together the first black theater festival there and actually pay our professional friends (like Jessica Care Moore, Jasiri, T’Kalla, Bradley, Shelley Nicole, Nathan Trice to name a few) to come and participate. As a black women in such a progressive academic environment, she was refreshing, strong, unwavering in her support, opinions and wisdom. I remember my father really adoring her at my graduation (especially after the Dean commented that she’d never met a real autoworker before when I introduced him - that got an eyeroll).

So yesterday morning, Dr. Emerson and I caught up and we got on the subject of Sekou Sundiata, the beloved playwright/poet who changed my life through his work and through the simple instruction of connecting headlines to art so I could understand my world in contest and content. Dr. Emerson said she’d missed Sekou’s memorial at The New School because another good friend of hers had passed, Asa Hilliard. She then realized that both of these men were born around her time and that there weren’t that many black men her age because of the Vietnam war. The birth years of black men from 1947 onward had been tricky since not many came back home. It never occurred to me. My dad was one that did come back home but never ever talked about what happened there and I could usually get him to talk about ANYTHING. Vietnam was a closed door.

So incidentally, at the same time this conversation happened, one of my dad’s best friends since the womb, Richard “Scooter” Williams, was making his transition in Detroit, daughter and pastor present. His daughter, Kirsten, was one of my very best friends when I was in 1st - 3rd grade. Her father took us to the mall many times, our first Michael Jackson concert and chaperoned many crazy sleepovers. He taught me that it was okay to ask for what I wanted since, at that time, I had some crazy notion that asking the opposite usually got you what you really wanted. I wasn’t that imaginative obviously.

What a great life my dad, Scooter and my Uncle Mitchell have had. They’ve had adventures that many would envy, they have children who adore them in so many different ways, they’ve left a legacy of loving outside of the usual boundaries since blood is really just blood but love is really family. They gave me tools to be who I am now and I’m eternally grateful (I’m not sure if I can do a funeral yet since my dad’s really left me in a fragile place and has still) but not a day goes by that I don’t remember driving around Highland Park as if that was my world where I could expand and contract with ease and security. Memories are almost like my bible of sorts. I have such loving pure ones that I am thankful everyday when I wake up and am able to love as I do for the people like Scott, Marcella, Jen, my brother, my mom, Ari, Jessica, Kamilah, Inge, Eve, Vasanti, Yvie, Maritri, Amanda, my cousin Renee…the list is pretty long because of that time. How lucky I feel right now because of the untraditional.

Have a great time with dad, Uncle Scooter.

There are so many wonderful writers I know and we are all so vastly different but there are a few things we share aside from the need/love of writing. Specifically, we all share the presence of people in our lives that assume writing is very easy. I mean you just make stuff up, right? Or there are those that say, so what it’s hard? Push through. Or there are those who have the romantic relationship with writing which only sets you up for failure (if romanticizing the fully unknown doesn’t work for love, why would it work for anything else?). Here’s how it goes for me:

- Great idea pops itself into my head at usually not a convenient time causing me to either zone out, grab a napkin, try to remember, forget, remember again at another time, magic dust sifted off and idea is a little less than the initial great formation.

-open blank document. stare. be scared. first word struggles. first word deleted. decide to be zen and just write it out. usually like that. come back and realize you must do this sweaty palm typing all over again.

-panic when story structure does not go smoothly despite outline or no outline or clear steps in head.

-write it out.

-decide you are really not killing any of your children if yo cut that monologue that doesn’t work. i for one never use the cut stuff again. it sounds great but it sounded great THERE and it doesn’t fit there so it doesn’t matter.

-share. with people. preferably other writers. if you share with actors, they either smile blankly or digest the thing whole and want it to be part of their fabric and ask you tons of questions you haven’t really thought of. sometimes this is great. sometimes you get an actor or actors who have decided they know this thing better than you and there is no way to talk them away from this concept. nobody got anywhere being a stage mother.

-hear comments. related to above. the magic of getting notes is pretty easy. if you let it, it will make you a patient in the bin but if you become liquid, it will become another exercise in getting to know others (sort of like eavesdropping). first, realize that people’s comments are coming from them - not from some magical unbiased think tank. this is not bad. sometimes people’s experiences are wonderful tools to use. other times, not so much. but they don’t know this so don’t be defensive towards them. they know what they know. how you get through this process is simple. write down what’s useful, pretend to write down everything else.

-remember your own thoughts after hearing play out loud. a few times. the first time you might want to peel your skin off, pee, run and crave oxygen at the same time. that happens to me. i’m no good the first time around. my heart wants to say the lines and that’s not possible so my mouth is forced shut. the second time, you can hear the gaps, run into the bumps, realize when a line is said not how you intended (decide if that’s your fault or if the actor just missed the lead in), figure out how to fix it.

The thread here is that you have to stay fluid in the process. If you have decided already how things should go, you might miss out on the best way they can go. What if? is never a bad thing to keep asking. Tune out the people who think you just sit down and start typing fast. Confidence works in life and more so in art. If you have a day job, realize that art is not the same structure. There is no boss when writing. No one can boss creative process. Well, that’s wrong. Madonna can boss creative process. But you’re not Madonna. So there’s that.

Just remember to cheerlead yourself until you get a posse who does it. You shouldn’t stop when you get a posse but you also don’t have to be sad you don’t have one when you don’t because you are more than enough.