November = NaNoWriMo!

November is NaNoWriMo!

Write a novel in a month.
Yes, that's right -- 50,000 words by November 30th.  That's 1,667 words per day. 
Because the world needs your novel.
Because you've got to get that book off your chest, out of your head and out into the world.
Because you've got something to say -- and deep down you know that someone else needs to hear it.
Because you've always wanted to write a book.
Because why not.

Join me and register here.

What is mnemonic, anyway?

A mnemonic is a device -- any device, tangible or intangible -- that assists in remembering something.  As an actor that's had to ingest iambic pentameter whole and spit it out at will, I'm well acquainted with this idea. Strangely, I've never given it a name.  Yeesh -- I never knew this had a name. 

And what is bullet journaling, anyway? Sounds like a gigantic, well-organized to-do list.

April's NaBloPoMo = Scandal!

Who knows if I'll be able to keep up? Then again, if I can swing it with morning pages, this can't be that far off.

Here's to moving forward, new beginnings and an action-packed spring.

30 Days of Birthday: Day 15 -- (More) Flash Fiction

I'm exploring some flash fiction that I forgot I wrote. Working on stitching them into something more comprehensive. Until then, enjoy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bedtime

Now that I am the kind of insomniac that daydreams about sleep, I sometimes wonder what was so terrible about bedtime when I was little.  At the appointed hour, my mother would walk into the den with a flourish, clap her hands three times as though she were summoning the palace guards and that was it.  Bedtime.  There was no such thing as arguing or tantrums or any of the time-honored tactics that proved themselves effective in other households.  She simply wasn't that kind of a mother.  I resisted with the empassioned fervor of an unjustly incarcerated inmate awating a twelfth hour pardon, feverishly watching the clock, holding out, hope against hope, only to be sent to my room, to my bed, to sleep.  I resented it, of course.  Each night found me wide awake, staring at the ceiling and stewing in my five year old rage.  Later, I could hear my mother's high pitched squeal of a laugh, promptly followed by my father heh-heh-hehing over the din of applause on the TV set: they were watching The Johnny Carson Show -- and I hated them for it.  Obviously, the good life began after bedtime.

Summers in Charleston with my grandparents were basically more of the same, thanks to my grandmother's uncanny sense of timing.  My brothers and I were usually bathed, pajama-ed, prayed up and tucked in before we realized what hit us.  As everyone sat on the porch and ate boiled peanuts and crablegs, their lively conversation would ebb and flow through my open window. I would watch their words fall and crash against the ceiling.  Sometimes I would sit up and lean against the headboard of my bed to look out the window, in an effort to steady myself amidst this sea of verbal chaos.  Within the confines of this strange and powerful lullaby, I fell asleep with wide open eyes, eyes that saw so many ideas unfold within me that I would often wonder, for days on end, how they would emerge.  In my world, dreams were for the sleepless.  I was quite young, but old enough to realize that no dreamlike state could compare to the world I inhabited when my imagination unleashed itself.  This was the time to be awake, I thought to myself each time I fell asleep at that windowsill, while so much in me was alive.  I knew that I couldn't go on like this.  I had to think of something.  I had a lot of living to do.

Strong reading material seemed to be the only available remedy.until adulthood offered other more suitable options, so an innocuous little scheme was hatched: I sandwiched books inbetween the mattress and the box spring of my bed and read them when everyone assumed that I was asleep.  The wee hours of the morning would find me writing little vignettes by the light of a huge industrial sized flashlight that I had "found" underneath the kitchen sink.  The light was so powerful, I would attempt to conceal it by playing "tent", a precarious undertaking which involved propping up pillows against the sheets to create a secret cubbyhole, lined with comic books, typing paper and hardbacks galore.  I couldn't have been happier.  From the doorway, it looked as though the bed was attempting to digest a sunbeam.  I lay there quietly in the light and the darkness, wallowing in a wordy undertow that spun about the room and into my head, languishing there.

I should have known that nothing that good could last for very long.  It took her awhile, but my grandmother caught me one night, sitting amidst a pile of Jet magazines, reading an encyclopedia.  This incident, like so many others I starred in, became something else to sit on the porch and laugh about, but for me it confirmed what I already knew:  being a child meant having to endure the necessary indignity of constantly being told what I could and could not do, where I could and could not go, what I could and could not have, what I was and was not capable of.

Nowadays I can watch my dreams come true but bedtime happens whenever it happens.  I have my days, days when I wake up in my loftbed fully dressed and surrounded by paperwork, my laptop still on and running and resting in my lap, the TV going, the phone ringing me into a semi-conscious state.  I also have days when I go through the ritual of bathing and putting on my bedclothes and calling it a night, even if it is noon and I have to pull the shades to do it.  As I lie there, wide awake and dreaming, somewhere in the netherregions of my subsconscious thoughts I can still lean against that windowsill to see bright stars in a blue-black sky.  I realize, as I begin to fade that  in all the years since childhood, there are moments when I have found myself wishing that someone would walk into the room and clap their hands and say that word.  More often than not,  I am left to clap my own hands as I fall asleep to the lull of the cityscape and it's mourning tide.

30 Days of Birthday: Day 10 - (More) Flash Fiction

This is yet another very short story I yanked out of my laptop and dusted off and put in the summertime rewrite bin, an eternal snapshot of my New York City life.  When I say that I should write a book, MPB says I already have -- I just have to organize all of it and give it a good edit. Now that I'm finding pieces like this, I'm starting to believe he's right.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                                            TRAIN RIDE

Run for the train.

As you stand at the top of the stairs, you feel the blast of warm air, like the subway is gasping.  You start down the stairs and the whole world starts up the stairs, at you.  It is a tidal wave of people, an endless barrage of old people and baby strollers and small children being dragged around by the wrist that leaves you wedged against the wall, close enough to the train to see it leave you breathless.  The teller tries not to laugh at you and fails miserably.

Wait for the train.

Find yourself staring down that long dark empty tunnel as though you and everyone else on the platform staring with you were attempting to will the train to appear. Know that when you see those headlights, you and everyone around you, with your collective pacing and complaining and the tension that is bouncing around inside all of you, had something to do with it finally showing up. You tell yourself that you can keep this up all day.  And you do. 

Get on the train.

Every detail from every train ride melts into each other until one ride is indistinguishable from the next, and then somewhere in between switching to an express or catching the cross town shuttle, all of it becomes one long ride to nowhere.  You may not be wearing the same clothes but it’s the same train ride,day in and day out. The clean seats.  The screaming babies. The vomit.  The obnoxious tourists. The businessmen. The intimate conversations you didn’t want to hear. The foreign languages you don’t understand.  The walking sickness next to you dying and then in front of you begging gradually becomes the same gaunt homeless faces passing you by with the same story, bony arms outstretched for anything you’ve got, like death on holiday. By midday, you look up at someone in a cheap suit sitting across from you inhaling a gigantic hoagie absentmindedly and you realize you haven’t had anything to eat all day.

Your one constant is the book you are reading.  When you read, you are elsewhere.

Get off the local and transfer to the express line.

It’s an unspoken rule that everyone reads over everyone else’s shoulder.

You give your seat to a pregnant woman and glare at the guy next to you. More confirmation that chivalry is dead. You check that subway map next to the door, the one you think you know like the back of your hand, because you’re not sure which stop is yours. The tangled mass of train lines at the lower end of the city spangle the map like the back end of some wierdo’s psychedelic rainbow trip, As you lean down to get a closer look, the plumber in front of you readjusts politely.  You know that you just gave him something to wank off about later because your blouse fell open for a moment longer than it should have and he saw more than he was supposed to.  You sigh and let it go. 

You know that’s all the action you’re going to get for a long, long time.  For a moment, you are grateful to him for not smirking at you.  You look at him for a moment.  Older. Stocky.  Strong.  A touch of gray.  Pale watery blue eyes.  Filthy hard working hands, the kind you were raised to believe that a real man ought to have.  He looks Czech. No, you think to yourself.  Polish.  You are rewarded for your unfailing powers of observation when he pulls out a Polish newspaper from his back pocket. A moment passes.  You stand over him and lean in, pretending to read over his shoulder.  His friends who are sitting nearby stop talking and watch you.  As he attempts to turn a page, you stop him and pretend to finish a last paragraph, then indicate that yes, now he can turn the page. Everyone laughs. You laugh, too.  He offers you his seat. When you refuse, he insists.  Surprised and grateful, you take it. As he leaves, he pretends to give you his Polish newspaper.  You pretend to take it. You both laugh again and wave goodbye. You will never see him again.  You think to yourself, I love New York.  And you mean it.

writing and rewriting and then some

surprise! i'm writing erotica -- under an assumed name, of course. i don't know what that name is yet but i've found a pseudonym generator, so i'm well on my way to something interesting. perferrably a guy's name.

someone dared me to do it and i figured, why not.  it's a pretty popular genre -- and when i say popular, i mean pert near everyone is doing it. i've heard from way too many writers who reignited their careers by taking up a pseudonym and writing erotica.  i haven't seen very much that explores any of it from a black female perspective, though. maybe i can change that.

strangely, it's the kind of thing that feels easy to churn out of me, now that there's relative calm in my life.

i'm working on rewrites on this libretto and i'm working on lyrics for a new song cycle and i'm working on submissions for the bmi musical theater workshop and i'm working on a dance performance idea. somewhere in there when my brain starts to glaze over, i'll pull out this erotica and reread it and think, hey this is interesting and then i write a page or two and put it aside. and then i'll go back to what i was doing. if i keep this up, i should have something interesting by the end of the summer. not a short story. probably a novella. a novel seems too cumbersome, too heavy, too much.
 
aside from all this writing, there's that soulful country/rock album i'd like to finish as a birthday present to myself.

apparently, this is a real incubatory moment for me.  this fall should be explosive.

when it's time to get out of the house and spend the day someplace else, the balcony lounge at the metropolitan museum of art is idyllic.  they have wifi, they serve high tea (amongst other things) and they have books and periodicals to get lost in. here's the kicker: not anyone can get into this lounge and it's usually empty on weekends, so i'm left alone.

as if all of that weren't enough, it's adjacent to the asian wing, so when my mind goes completely blank, i can walk to the next room and sit in front of a bodhisattva and be completely and utterly overwhelmed. what more could a nerdy blackgrrl ask for, really.


(i instagrammed this one a few weeks ago. it's ginormous.)

 i can't really think about budhisattva and not have this steely dan song swing through my head. (great album...)

What I Do For A Living, Part 3: "You didn't write that...did you?"

i have always loved to read and write.

i can't remember when expressing myself on paper with words was anything other than effortless.  i'm sure this has something to do with my stay-at-home mother who taught me how to read at such an early age. when i was three, there were letters and then there were small words and then there were dr. seuss books. by the time i hit kindergarten, i could read with the comprehension of a kid twice my age. 

i zipped through one advanced placement english class after another with relative ease, churning out essays and whatnot at will. when i was 12, an english teacher insisted that i turn in a journal as a weekly assignment and i've kept one ever since. when i was in college at ut austin as a freelance writer for a student newspaper, i thought it was kind of kitschy to get paid to write, but that was it. it wasn't until i came to new york city that writing mattered professionally.

what happened?

strange but true: when i came to new york city, i thought talent actually mattered. that's right: i honestly believed that if i did a great audition for a show, i'd get it because i was the best one for the part.  i didn't realize that there were all these other factors at work. like my height. or someone else's height in relation to mine. or if my size 4 body fit into the size 16 costume, or headpiece, or whatever costume i had to wear. or whether or not someone behind a desk thought that i was pretty enough.  or my blackness. yeah -- i know, right? believe it or not, i honestly thought: "this is theater. everyone has the willing suspension of disbelief so it doesn't matter that i'm black. i'll audition for every female role in my age range and my talent will get me the work." it never dawned on me that i could be the best one for the part and not get it because i couldn't fit into the costume or somebody thought that i was ugly or i was the wrong kind of black girl for that part, because the negro doing the casting was colorstruck.  none of that ever entered my mind.

when it finally did, i was profoundly depressed. i didn't believe that i was pretty enough to do film and tv -- and even if i were, i wouldn't really get to act.  theater and musical theater was my home base. with this realization, it was gone.

and then for some reason, i went to see john leguizamo in mambo mouth at the american place theater, and that's when all the lights came on. i had never seen a solo show.  i didn't know that such a thing existed. as i watched him work, all i could think was, i can do that. i went home that night and wrote a monologue, almost as a reflex. it just fell right out of me. the next thing i knew, i was performing it at ps 122. two one person shows and a ton of showcases, workshops and festivals later, i've got a sold out run at joe's pub for my newest idea, queen esther: unemployed superstar.

all of a sudden, a whole world of options opened up to me. i was no longer at the mercy of a casting agent.  i didn't have to wait for the phone to ring.  if it did ring, that was terrific but if it didn't, i could employ myself. i came up with ideas, i developed them, i performed them. boom-POW, just like that. ideas oozed out of me all the time.  keeping that journal since childhood shook a lot of them loose without my fully understanding what was happening. eventually, i shifted gears, started writing lyrics and songs -- and that meant more work.

last april, several performers and i -- francesca harper, charles wallace and keith thomas, respectively -- performed the billie holiday project, a show that i'm still developing, at the apollo theater's music cafe.  how strange was it to chat with people in the audience afterwards, so genuinely surprised that i wrote it.  for those who don't know me at all, getting accepted to nyu's tisch school of the arts mfa program was an astonishing feat. the real coup will be finding a way to pay for it.

what happened? all at once, i realized that i'm an originator, not a replicator.  there have been rough moments, sure -- but i haven't looked back. i can't change who i am.

(to paraphrase paul harvey: "...and now you know the rest of the story.")

Flash Fiction: "Chicken Lips"

  

This month's NaBloPoMo theme is RISK. I've been revisiting some flash fiction that I'd written some time ago and I found this one that seems to have a bit of risk in it somewhere, so here you go.
 

Chicken Lips

 

It was their first date and it was a blind one, rabid with good intentions and interesting talk.  A mutual friend had set them up and Dana figured, why not, it'll be fun.  They both put on a mock game face when they met--for Marion's sake, they laughed--but there was a mutual attraction that neither of them could deny.   After awhile, they were chatting as though they'd known each other for years.

Unfortunately, something was killing her buzz. 

Every time Jason smiled at her, what little was there in the way of a mouth disappeared into the rest of his face, revealing two rows of gleaming whiteness. Dana smiled at him warmly and tried not to think about it but as the night wore on, it was all that she could think about.  The words glowed as they hovered around his head, in neon: chicken lips. After she watched him talk through the main course, she was ready to politely excuse herself and go home.  But to tell the truth, she was having a good time.  And besides--she never skipped dessert.

A question loomed over her thoughts like a cloud: Would he kiss her?  No sooner did this query appear than another floated along behind it, listlessly: If he did kiss her, what in God's name would it feel like?

That she was unlike anything that he had even remotely expected was enough to knock the wind out of Jason's Nantucket sails.  The details she gave him about herself and her life made him sputter with a mixture of bewilderment, confusion and pleasure.  He had driven his car past quite a few, locking the doors carefully as his vehicle came to a complete stop at the red light.  Perhaps there were one or two in his classes at his alma mater that he hadn't really paid any attention to.  This was certainly true at work.  And he'd certainly seen plenty in the movies, on television and those videos--music, sports, porn and otherwise.  But to have an intelligent insightful conversation with one--and a beautiful one, at that--this had never happened.

Jason, on the other hand, was exactly what Dana had expected. 

Jason was wonderful in a New England white guy kind of way.  The kind that can trace his family tree all the way back to Old England.  The kind that likes to go rock climbing on the weekends. The kind that walked through this life with the patented swagger of privelege and entitlement.  Jason had no need to stand up and demand whatever he wanted out of life. He understood from a very early age that clearly, it was already his.  An all-American birthright, if you will.  Somewhere down the line, whether they had any money or not, didn't they all come off like that to some degree?  Doing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, with society condoning them all the way?

If my brother behaved like that, Dana thought, the cops would shoot him in the back 41 times.

As he excused himself and disappeared to the men's room, she sighed and wondered what she'd say to Marion the next day. Dana could visualize the look of disappointment on her face so easily.  How could she get out of explaining this one?  She'd have to think of something.  She always did.  Only someone who'd been in a situation with someone like this would truly empathize. As Dana nibbled on her dessert, she began to count the days leading up to the next night in with the girls and thought about how she'd describe this encounter.

Suddenly, she felt a slight pressure on the embankment next to her.  It was Jason, sliding towards her in the booth.  Here it comes, Dana thought and for a moment she closed her eyes to clear her thoughts.  When she opened them, he was very close to her.  Too close.

"Have you ever seen that movie Annie Hall?"

"Yes."

"You know that part about how they kiss each other at the beginning of the date to get the kiss overwith?  Because if they don't, Woody Allen will be thinking about it for the whole date and then the evening will be ruined?"

"I remember that scene."

"That's how I feel."

Dana looked into his face.  She could see the freckles that speckled his eyelids so delicately, so faintly, she had to resist the urge to touch them.  She wanted to tell him that they were beautiful but nothing would come out of her mouth.  She waited for the words to say and as she did, she held his gaze.

"I feel like if I don't kiss you now, I never will."

As he spoke, he came closer gradually, lowering his eyes to look at her mouth, stained with berries from her half-eaten dessert.  She held his gaze and readjusted, smiling faintly. All at once, she knew. That's why he noticed her.  That's why he harassed Marion into a blind date set-up. That's why he persued her all this time, polite and unassuming and direct.  He wanted a kiss, a real one, from big soft lips like hers that would taste like everything he'd ever wanted.  He got everything he ever wanted, didn't he?   Isn't that why this should be the one thing he doesn't get?

In that moment, Dana felt like the most powerful woman in the whole wide world.  And for a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she was. 

nablopomo - again?

falling into the dead of winter with nablopomo, to jump start some ideas and keep my creative juices flowing.   although blogging everyday for a month sounds daunting, i'm determined to not fall off this time. wish me luck -- or better yet, join me!

how green is my kudzu: greatest hits and near misses

here's the entries that are getting the most hits on this blog lately. enjoy!

1. your inner svengali - a few pithy observations on making the transition to on-camera work from theater/musicals. for some reason, this is a pretty popular post. not for the faint of heart.
   
2. why do i love dolly parton? - in my head, she's my mentor. here's why.
3. oh, lebron - remember that vogue magazine cover that featured lebron james and gisele? yeah, me too.
4. a two-fer! oh, terrence and terrence howard sings? - remember that jazz album terrence "baby wipes" howard released in 2008? yeah, me too.
   
5. grillin' in the ghetto - you do what you gotta do...
   
6. the war of attrition - the anatomy of an audition, this time for an industrial for state farm
   
7. a picture is worth a thousand words - my first national commercial shoot for ocean spray
8. black man fridays: geoffrey holder - 'nuff said.
   
9. the dr. king interview you probably haven't seen - this is from the mike douglas show, circa 1967: a fascinating chat with mr. douglas, dr. king and singer tony martin (do you even know who he is?) in the guest seat.
   
10. the black national anthem controversy - a jazz singer in denver, colorado sings the lyrics of lift every voice and sing over america the beautiful. bedlam ensues.
    

you and your awards

i fell backwards into this blog entry by esquire writer chris jones and i couldn't climb out. simply put, his sense of entitlement blew me away. even though he'd already won two national magazine awards -- TWO! -- he couldn't stop whining about the one he felt he deserved. at one point, i thought, well at least he's being honest. but this guy is someone who, by his own admission, hasn't had much adversity in his life or his work. basically, he's won with each of his nominations. Lord God. adversity, that's a bigger part of what some of us have ever had. the word "no" is just about all that some of us ever hear. and he's only 36.

if this guy had to be a negro for a month, he'd never make it. hardly a week would go by and he'd probably throw himself out of a window.

awards matter, i suppose. but art is a funny thing. it's rare that an artist can know the impact of their work in their own lifetime. what you do can matter a great deal while you are here. you are rich, you are famous, maybe you get loaded whenever you want. and then you're gone -- and your precious work is a mere mention in an obscure footnote in some book somewhere. just think about all those movie stars from the 1920s, for example. there were gobs of them. i'll bet you can't name ten.

do you know who pola negri is? this chick was a really big deal, back in the day. totally one of my favorites. she was valentino's last girlfriend, a massively popular actress internationally, hollywood's first foreign import (from poland!), a former ballerina, even. and she could sing. she was rich, she was gorgeous. she's definitely got a star on the hollywood walk of fame. and now? well, who knows. the 1920s is making such a big comeback these days. it's only a matter of time until some starlet makes her their template and perhaps she'll burst forth all over again. her work is waiting to be rediscovered -- the thing is that thankfully, she left something worth watching.

i love that line from the end of the movie basquiat, when the artist tells him that the audience for his work probably hasn't even been born yet. or that chuck palahniuk quote: we all die. the goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. none of that has anything to do with awards.

a talk given by dr. richard hamming at bell labs gave a talk called you and your research and although it was primarily about science and scientists, he dropped a massive amount of wisdom about process and what it means to challenge yourself and do great work.

writing and writing and writing

i was working with ken on some rewrites at the workspace in chelsea tonight and he starts improvising around this one idea, just verbalizing intent and ideas and bits of things that we'd been discussing about entitlement and white people. i don't know why but something took off in me, running. hard and fast. i almost literally exploded in another direction. i stood there in the middle of the rehearsal space scribbling, while he went off. i couldn't write fast enough. it was astonishing, how effortless all of it was, how the words swung out of the pit of me, how what ken said had me bouncing in a thousand different directions, all of it oozing out of the tip of my pen.

it was almost as though i were in some sort of trance. not thinking, not feeling. instinctively shifting something inside me again and again and letting more and more out.

there was a time when i couldn't remember when i had moments like those as a playwright. now they're coming hard and fast, all the time. for this, i am truly grateful.

now back to my rewrites.

long day, long night

i've got an audition today late in the afternoon for a regional musical, and i'm just not ready, on so many levels - so i'm spending the better part of my day absorbing this material and prepping my voice, which is kind of crunchy. i found the song in question on iTunes and downloaded it onto my iSwitch, which is what i'll be listening to while i do my usual everyday runaround.

after the audition, i'll go for a nice hard run to burn off whatever nervous energy will still be chewing away at me and then i'll pick up my dan electro guitar from gotham guitar works and then i'll go home and get lost in my junk room, plug that guitar into my pignose amp and practice, practice, practice.

tonight, i'm submitting material to naked angels theater company's tuesday @9, their weekly workshop that lets you put your ideas up - plays, screenplays, even fiction - in this really impromptu way, once its accepted. i can't mail it in, i have to go there to give them what i have, and i have to stay to see their process and get a feel for how everything works.

because basically, i realized i have all these unfinished undeveloped ideas and the only way they're going to jump off the page is if i get with a theater company and grow them. what's cool is that everyone seems to have a literary component for fiction and experimental work, so i can throw everything i've got against the wall and see what sticks.

oh, yeah. and i have to find a horn player for my gig next week.

i've got something cool jumping every day and every night of this week. it feels good and right and true, to rip through a crossword puzzle straightaway, and then read and write and think every morning. if i can find it in me to work out before i do anything else, i'll be batting a thousand.

reading and writing

between preparing for the jazzmobile vocal competition on 5/30, making that IMWS deadline for the millionth time on 5/21, rewriting work for submission today to a writer's residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts and organizing the home office, i've been more than just a little busy. as if all of that weren't enough, i'm working out every day so i can get my body back by my birthday in june. so far, i really love the boxing lessons and the conditioning, and yesterday i ran a 10 minute mile. i haven't done that in quite some time.

instead of the usual blogging hi-jinx, i thought i'd let you read the first two pages of what may grow into my first book. i'm just writing what i know and remember and elaborating on it. i'm not sure what you'd call it -- memoirs? creative non-fiction? you tell me.

i didn't fall into writing last week, by the way. my mother taught me how to read when i was 3 years old and i started writing and storytelling very soon afterwards. i never thought about pursuing a career as a writer but somehow, writing was always with me. when i crashlanded in the city, i wrote a one act play and two one person shows. i majored in screenwriting as an undergrad at the new school. sure, i was a freelance writer here and there. and i'm seriously thinking about applying for the master's degree program in dramatic writing at NYU. but that's a whole other enchilada...

actually, this book idea came out of my earliest entries as a blogger for cafe los negroes. people kept telling me, this should be a book -- and one day, the idea stuck.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During any given Sunday morning service when I was very small, I would cry as if on cue when our bishop would begin his sermon. One would think that the music and the prayers and the praise that went up all around me for some time beforehand would lull me into a state of grace that would leave me gazing at the gigantic kaleidoscope of a stained glass ceiling that seemed to dangle just out of reach as I reclined in my mother’s lap, but no. As our bishop opened his Bible and began to read scripture, I would speak in tears. It happened with an intensity and a regularity that was disturbing. My mother’s disapproval was an ever-present threat and yet it was not enough to quiet me. A loud hasty exit that had her dragging medown a long wide aisle and the fit of violence that ensued in the ladies room was inevitable. I could not be satisfied.

As time went on, interesting theories as to the motive for my tearful behavior were bandied about with increasing regularity amongst the congregation:

“How could she possibly know when the sermon is going to begin?”

“Where did she get those lungs? They sound like they’re bigger than she is!”

“What in the world could she possibly have to say? She just got here!”

“Is she trying to sing -- or what?”

There were many who saw these weekly eruptions as a sign from God. After an especially noisy outburst, someone began to call me “The Wailing Prophetess.” Eventually, so did everyone else.

I can still see that church in my mind’s eye: the modest yet stately entrance; the vestibule that felt more like a reception area than a foyer; the stained glass windows and ceiling that caught the light so completely, it made me feel as though I were perched inside of a prism; the large piece of cloth that ushers would give every woman as she entered the sanctuary if she wasn’t wearing an ankle-length skirt; the paper fans that fluttered amongst the congregation on a hot day like a flock of cooing pigeons at rest, so carefully stapled to small wooden handles, solemnly advertising local funeral homes on one side with a rather formal photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed, inevitably, on the other; the sea of beautiful seasonally appropriate ladies’ hats that hovered head and shoulders above the congregation; the organ and the piano that mirrored each other in their placement in the sanctuary and augmented each other in sound, like clasped hands; the ladies dressed in white who looked more like elegant nurses than usherettes, my father, painfully well-dressed and dignified, a large well-worn Bible in his lap, tilting his head and making a face at me as I looked over my mother’s shoulder and caught his eye. The amen corner. The church mother. The visiting missionaries. The junior choir. The sacred alter before us. Jesus amongst us. All of us, praying as one and bound together as brothers and sisters -- in spirit and in truth, and as black folk.

In the parlance of the day, black people referred to each other as brothers and sisters and it was a heavy thing because of our collective history. In the church, it carried even more weight because it held its own spiritual significance. To this day, there are some that I know and remember fondly from this church that I still refer to in this way. Even as I pass black folk in the street, I hear myself say these words in such an effortless unaffected way. Somewhere in our collective being, we know that once upon a time, when all we had was God and each other, our unity meant everything. And although we may not have known it when I was little, it still mattered a great deal. We are a family.

All those tears. Where did they come from?

NaBloPoMo!

yeah, so i figured that if i'm going to write a book in a month, i may as well blog everyday this month, too. i don't know how i tripped up over National Blog Posting Month. what a cute idea. it must have been kismet. what kind of an avalanche of words will come out of my head in 30 days? at this point, i'm going to need a tidal wave. shouldn't be a problem. lately, it feels like i'm always riding one. but where is it taking me?

who knows -- maybe i'll shake some great ideas loose. scribble, scribble, scribble!