i know this sounds stupid but...

when you live in new york city, it’s so easy to fall into a daily grind that blots out the world. and that’s kind of bizarre, because compared to other parts of the country, everything is here. it’s kind of like going to a lavish exotic smorgasbord every night for dinner and walking away with a tuna sandwich on your plate.

some time ago, i promised myself that i wouldn’t live that way, that i would make the best of my time in the city. i got a membership to the Met and set aside one day a week to visit museums. i figured that since there was at least 100 of them in the city, i’d stay busy. and i was right. it got the ball rolling in the right direction. my fun day expanded to include apontaneous day trips, exotic foods, long winding walks exploring the city and of course, cool friends. like beauty day, when fun day isn’t there, i feel it in the rest of my life eventually.

that was an important lesson to learn: that if you don’t set the time aside for whatever it is that you want to do, it just won’t happen.

being a part of this group is one of those tools i have in my secret arsenal that guarantees me a certain amount of equilibrium in my world. i’m elated that this ball is still going to roll. count me in. it’s going to be a great year.

See more progress on: enjoy the second quarter of 2008 by having one new and fulfilling experience in April, May, and June. Woo Hoo!

the day before the day before the first day of summer

i wanted us to get away to a place that would make us feel as though we had actually gotten out of the city without actually having to leave -- so we went to coney island. i'd never been there before but i'd heard lots of stories about it when i was a little kid from my father, who still occasionally waxes poetic now, at the grand old age of 90, about the fun he'd had there as a young man. the question floated before me like a mirage: would i see any of the coney island that my father knew?

everyone on the train was so upbeat about being there. as we headed towards the water, we were surrounded by people of all ages in varying stages of undress. they wandered around strategically and ate all kinds of things, and spoke very little english -- to each other, at least. lots of sailors, too. (i totally forgot that it was fleet week.) and there were other things going on, too -- pretty girls on stilts waving little flags, a tatooed lady here and there, some guy with a puppet that sang and sang. it was a permanent oceanside carny, not unlike any i'd seen and performed in when i lived in texas. too bad there was no frito pie.

sure there was no nathan's hot dogs in the panhandle but there was way better food. every stand seemed to offer the same things: roasted meats on a stick, italian sausages, hot dogs, french fries, hamburgers. fried chicken, fried clams, fried shrimp. fried, fried, fried, with nary a vegetable in sight -- unless you wanted some onions as a garnish. (and yeah, those were fried, too.) it was somewhat crowded, quite relaxed and just a little bit glorious. a punk rock three piece at one end of the boardwalk. a live latin outfit at the other end, with a crowd that leaned in to watch people dance. bad r&b blaring out at you as you passed some ride, some hit or miss game, some spin and barf with the added plus of letting you sail through the air over and over, like a well-controlled well-oiled slingshot. cleaner than average carny. and yes, after listening to story after story of how filthy all of it was supposed to be, the beach was surprisingly clean. it made me giddy, looking out onto that blue horizon line and drinking in all of that fresh breezy sea air and sunshine. my friend was like a tour guide, prattling off facts, leading me this way and that.

which ride would be first? the wonder wheel.



this was a piece of history that my father rode as a kid. how could i say no?

of course, i should have rethought that before i jumped on the cyclone. i think that thing realigned my spine. i'm pretty sure that if i'd eaten something substantial beforehand, i would have involuntarily flung vomit out of the pit of me, far and wide, in wide sloping technicolor streams of undigested glop that would arc high into the air just so and land, hot and steaming and merciless, on the unsuspecting heads and shoulders of most of the small children in the kiddie park directly below. but that's another story.

i'm glad i rode the cyclone and i'd probably do it again just to say that i did it but deep down i wish i hadn't. i should have known better when i saw how padded our seats were. heh.



this is a shot from somewhere atop the wonder wheel.

afterwards, in spite of the fried greasy everything that everyone gorged themselves on, i found a stand that sold nothing but fresh chilled fruit. as we settled into the freak bar and wondered about the demise of coney island, i munched on sliced chilled mango. we fantasized about what it might be like to live out there, in some wide open space with a car, maybe. then again, maybe not. no grocery stores. high crime. high development. that's gentrification in new york city for you. in a few years or so, it'll be the place to live. and everyone who stuck it out and bought something will be saying, "i told you so." yeah. maybe.

my friend wouldn't take me to the sideshow because he said he'd had enough of freaks. and bars, too. i wanted to see chuy the dog-faced mexican. next time, he promised. and there has to be a next time because this is coney island's last time, or at least, it's the last gasp like this: old-school, wide-open, neo-burlesque, cheap, freaky fun.



from what i'd been told, this was coney island's last summer before a massive renovation that would sweep away much of the boardwalk and fill the strip with expensive condos that would stand in the shadow of the high rise projects nearby. in our walk along the dock that extended over the water, one of the city workers confirmed what i'd been told: coney island would be a playground for the rich. astroland would stay and so would the freaks, probably. the developers had even bought an old deserted bathhouse that we'd glimpsed just down the boardwalk. there was just no stopping them. what a mess. the question that no one can answer is, where will the poor people live?

so this is the beginning of summer. almost. do i look like i'm ready for it?



one thing is certain: happiness isn't something that happens to you. it's a choice. i'm really really happy right now. gleefully, giggle-out-loud, throw-my-hat-up-in-the-air, walking-around-smiling-for-no-reason happy. and so is my friend. in a way, it doesn't get any better than that.

queen esther the photographer?

i've got two photos that i took of harriet tubman's property last year that are going to be in a children's book about her, to be published by sterling publishing (this fall, i think). this one is her house.

i remember showing this photo to some black someone that i was doing theater with at the time and he gagged and blurted, you mean she didn't live in some lean-to shotgun shack somewhere out back or something?

no. she didn't.

at a time when it was illegal for black people to own property, william h. seward, the former governor of new york and a very close friend of hers, stepped in to make sure that she'd be able to purchase a plot of land in auburn -- a few miles on the same road as his place, actually. in their ongoing excavations/renovations of the property, they found the remains of a kiln that was located some distance from the house while i was there late last spring. as it turns out, her husband built a beautiful two story brick house there, from scratch. what was appalling is that her family lost the house right after she died because they didn't pay taxes on it. (!!!) one other family occupied the house until the mid to late 1980s. someone had the bright idea to turn her property into an historical site, amongst other things. it's still in the works. i hope it happens. as of yet, we don't have a national museum devoted to the black holocaust or our history as african americans.

her husband building that house from scratch wasn't that deep to me because i watched my grandfather do it in charleston, south carolina when i was a little girl. he used brick that had been discarded from a nearby construction site and made the beautiful four bedroom/two bathroom house that filled much of my childhood memories.



this one is the home for the aged that she built to help the old and the sick.

i'm relieved that they're going to use the photos because they're really beautiful (it was a picture-perfect blue sky day when i took them) but also because they singlehandedly deconstruct a lot of myths about who she really was and how she lived her life in her last years. it's hard to get to know an icon but when it's someone that casts such a long shadow throughout our recent american history, you have to try.

seward was no slouch, by the way. not only was he was a lawyer, a new york senator, a globe-trotting diplomat and a secretary of state under lincoln (and andrew jackson) -- his mansion was a pit-stop on the underground railroad. there's an infamous letter that he writes to his wife (who was a quaker, interestingly enough) where he's positively giddy about everyone thinking he's this fine upstanding citizen and all and there's half a dozen runaway slaves hidden in his basement. i couldn't wait to wander around in this place. as luck would have it, i had my own personal tour guide who was absolutely delighted to answer all of my bumbling idiotic picayune annoying questions about architecture and family portraits and credenzas and such (stuff like, "where did sewell die?" "was it this fainting couch or that one?" "who found him?" "is this place haunted or what?" oh, and here's a real winner: "i know i can't sit in that inaugural carriage that seward and lincoln rode in - but can i touch it?") i figured they didn't bounce me out of there because i was featured in the hit musical in their town that summer and everyone was talking about it.

of course, they wouldn't let me take any pictures inside, but they did let me stand for a few minutes in that very room where those slaves hid. leaning against those walls had a strange effect on me. i could feel them resonating into my bones.

i thought that it was kind of fantastic that his house was a part of the underground railroad but from what i was told by my tour guide, there are lots of houses in auburn and in other towns upstate that were pit-stops, too: they were filled with hidden doorways, cabinets and bookshelves that moved to reveal some other room or that led to some other part of the house, unused cellars and attics. what an all-american treasure all of that is. i suppose there would be a movement to show those hidden rooms and such in those homes but people still live in them. someone should take pictures of them, at least. document them, somehow.

bizarrely, his mansion was also party central for a host of dignitaries and the like. i remember walking around thinking, how could you throw parties all the time and hide runaway slaves and never get caught? so yeah, i went a little nuts over the china, the furniture, the sitting rooms, those exquisite pocket doors and all of the beautiful decor from asia. (and there was a lot of it.) but i never forgot that hidden room. i love it when history stops wallowing in books and becomes real, even if it's in the form of some handmade bloody bedsheets that seward lay on while recieving medical care after that attack. all i could think was, this really happened! but more on that some other time.

so yeah, those photos. i'm not surprised that harriett tubman decided to settle in auburn. it's so close to canada and it's a really beautiful place. it's much more rural than i thought it would be -- lush and green and pretty -- but my friend kept calling it the suburbs anyway. with seward so nearby, she could own land and help others. and she did -- she opened a home for the aged. ironically, in her old age, she actually moved into it.

hm. i'll bet her husband built that house, too.

everyone's seen it but me

i'll figure out a way to post it here eventually but if you want to see the prego commercial that has me in it (it's actually called "rosemary and herb"), click here.

did you think i wouldn't get it?

to tell you the truth, i didn't think i would, either. but lo and behold, i got the comedy central promo -- afro and all, much to my father's surprise. (sigh.) we shoot it tomorrow. someone is calling me with details this afternoon.

i would kick up my heels right now and scream yippee!!!!!!!!!!! but later on today, i've got a look-see for Dell in midtown and an audition for a Deloitte industrial. i feel like i hit the ground running yesterday and my legs are still moving. more details as they unravel.

guess i'll have to scream and jump up and down on the inside.

where's the avalanche?

Not that I believe in this stuff or that I make a habit of reading it or that it means anything at all but this is what greeted me today in the horoscope section of MyYahoo.com:

"Your relationship with money is about to go through a very interesting phase. You'll be tasked with managing a far larger amount than you were prepared for, and you should not attempt to go it alone. The sums involved could cause you to make incorrect assumptions. If you don't understand something -- even something small -- seek out professional advice. These are murky waters, and you definitely don't want to get in over your head."

Mismanagement of funds, hm? Ha. I've been broke for so long, it would take an avalanche of money just to set me straight.

well, guess what?

got a call yesterday from my commercial agency. i'm on hold for that comedy central promo i auditioned for on friday. imagine that.

about that comedy central audition...

i got seen for a comedy central promo on friday. i didn't know exactly what that meant -- promo. i'm thinking, it's kinda like a commercial, right? no matter what it actually is, the audition will feel like a commercial one: i'll say the lines, they'll give me direction, i'll readjust -- but not too big -- and then maybe more direction, more readjustment, a thank you and i'm out. it's a routine that hardly ever changes with camerawork. no matter. i'm ready.

they said casual business attire. i wore a button front denim dress because i didn't have any cash money to run out and buy something to wear for the moment, like i usually did when all of my clothes were dirty. why didn't i have any clean clothes? because the elevator in my building is being upgraded and i didn't feel like hauling three large loads in a rickety cart up and down three flights of stairs. that's why. i waited until everything was dirty and it still wasn't fixed. oh, well.

which wig did i wear in my arsenal? did i do something extra-fancy with my natural hair? what about those cornrows? frankly, i didn't have the energy to bother. i decided to wow them with something really spectacular: my self. i came to this decision in part because of a conversation i had with my father, wherein i told him i got the prego commercial and that it was running but he probably wouldn't recognize me because i had that wig on (come on, you know the one) and then he told me that the reason why i got the prego commercial was because the wig made me look like a lady. then he said a lot of other stuff. like how he was kidding, and how i was supposed to be intelligent enough to know when he was joking. so i told him that i was completely daft but i knew enough to know that people say what they really mean when they're kidding around. and that was his passive-aggressive way of telling me what he thought of my hair. and why did i go for years wearing wigs to auditions and getting nothing. and yeah, he could give my mother the phone back now, and he's like, no, let's talk. and i'm like, i don't have anything to say to you. and that's when we were off to the races.

so when they called me in, i thought, you know what? i don't have the energy, the wherewithal, the time or the inclination to try to figure out what these executive corporate white people -- or my stubborn father, for that matter -- want me to look like as a black woman. they all think they know me, they all think they've got me figured out, and none of them do. especially my daddy. i mean, i've had it.

don't get me wrong. i'll work harder than anyone. i'll readjust. i'll wear a wig. why not? i like wigs. but this -- telling me in no uncertain terms that i'm patently unattractive because i don't straighten my hair -- this is over the top. the world tells me this every day but i don't listen. it shouldn't be a struggle to know that what i am is enough and to live that out in the ordinary moments of my world.

i know what you're thinking: it's just hair! but you know what? it's not. not when you're black and female.

so i showed up at liz lewis casting on time with a tight afro wearing a denim dress and some boots, took my polaroid smiling like mona lisa, and sat amongst gleamingly permed hair-dos and office casual outfits straight out of central casting until my name was called. i remember something about jack link. i remember having them pitch different office scenarios at me. i remember some white guy talking like mr. t at me, and me having to react to that, and everyone in the room laughing at what i did. wierd.

and then the next thing i knew, i was back on the sidewalk making my way through the breezy sunshiny streets, wondering what happened and somehow knowing exactly what happened. telling myself i didn't care -- and meaning it. i've always got way bigger catfish to skin and fry. it won't be the beginning of the world if i get it. it won't be the end of the world if i don't. but i would like to get it, just to leave my hair the way it is and in so doing, to silence my father -- if that's possible. and it isn't.

bang! bang! bang! - alt theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part three

my friend renee got cast in a short film awhile back. sometimes when we hung out, she'd let fly with all of these tidbits about what the process was like. she thought that i should meet ed durante the director of the short film because he seemed to be as much of an anomaly as me. and strangely, he was. after we'd met, renee showed me his reel of short films. i thought that much of what i saw was filled with beautiful imagery that was compelling and, well, interesting. clearly, he knew how to tell a story with visuals. that alone was enough to put him a cut above a lot of people who called themselves filmmakers. i was intrigued. okay, i thought. he knows how to do what he does -- no small feat there. now what does he want to say?

but i digress.

where did the initial introduction take place? there are so many moments that blur together, like some strange syrupy goo: the video shoot for renee's dance project, where a hardworking focused ed (surprisingly) gave it his all, with beautiful visuals and real direction; the sit-down dinner at ed's girlfriend's place, wherein we showed up later than expected because we expected something a little more casual, much to ed's bemusement and (slight) chagrin; ed, telling me that i was really onto something with my whole "black americana" thing and how we should make a video of the song "stand by your man"; ed, looking at my photos on myspace.com and telling me how bad he thought they were; and of course there was the burlesque show at the slipper room, wherein during the go-go section of the show, ed's righteous black friends asked rather indignantly how long to we have to watch these flabby white girls jiggle around, anyway? what a fun night that was. i distinctly remember that ed freaked himself out when he realized he was turned on by little brooklyn's clown moment.

i'm not sure when it happened but somewhere in there, ed and i connected. and then we bonded. renee's project brought us together and i figured another one would probably happen along, but i had absolutely no idea what it might be. and besides -- i wasn't sure ed would work with me because i didn't have a lot of film experience. there were a few el-lay moments when he'd go on a little too long about what someone looked like on camera that he wanted to work with, not knowing or caring whether they could actually act. as an actor that can act, that bothered me. but whatever. for some strange reason, he called me in to read for his first feature length film and for some strange reason, i auditioned well and for some strange reason, he kept calling me back until he finally offered me a part.

the first problem, it seemed, was that we would shoot on the weekends in april, which meant that my hair had to be consistent. so my first question was, do i have to straighten it? needless to say, ed is progressive enough as a black man to find black women attractive in their natural state -- so we agreed that my hair would stay the way it was. i was warming up to the fact that my character seemed to be such a smarmy high-brow back-stabbing two-faced hedonist. all that detail right below the surface seemed drama-ready -- and after giving the script a thorough read, i realized that really, that was the whole idea.

film is a funny thing. you can read a play and know if it's good but you don't really know what you've got with film until you're looking at the final edit. (and i mean final.) to be honest, it's hard for me to trust anyone. and here i was, trusting ed. he knew what he was asking, of all of us.

before i left his apartment, i remember him telling me, "this is going to be a crazy adventure and you're going to hate me by the time this is over, but you're going to be glad that you did this." and i think he said something or another about making me a star. i can't remember. i was too busy thinking about the crazy adventure and the hate and the happiness.

i remember walking down the street thinking, ed may be nuts -- but he is talented. and he is my kind of nuts. so this just might work...

hey! is that thing loaded or what? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part two

the real reason why i never bothered to audition for film or tv before was because what you looked like seemed to matter way more than whether or not you could actually act. frankly, i didn't think that i was light-skinned enough or conventionally pretty enough to seriously pursue it. i didn't believe that most film actors were especially talented because most of them had never done any theater. film is not an actor's medium, contrary to popular belief. theater is. to my way of thinking, an actor that's never done any theater is like a surgeon that's never actually operated on anybody. and truth be told, when film actors did do theater, they almost always sucked at it.

and another thing. film people -- directors, editors, producers, the whole lot -- were freaking annoying. they walked around like they were breathing some rarified air that the rest of us knew nothing of, for the sake of a genre and the fame that somehow elevated all of them. i would go into these auditions and they would say, what have you been in and they would look at my resume like it was a blank piece of paper because i didn't have any film work on it. well. a lot of them just flat-out didn't know what they were doing. it was disturbing: all of these people, wallowing in gobs of money, running around hob-nobbing, and for what. wouldn't i always be too old, too young, too black, too patently unattractive, too strong, too...something to these people? why should i have to convince them of anything? wouldn't success make me beautiful (ie bankable) in their eyes? it certainly seemed to work that way for everyone else.

it didn't help that i had befriended one too many film majors when i was in college who would sit around and and argue endlessly about who was brilliant, who wasn't and why. hardly anyone was making any art -- and if they were, it was derivative and boring and encrusted with scholastic excess. i suppose it was way more interesting to trash everyone else's work than come up with something original. or at least cool.

by the time i decided to take acting seriously, i already knew rejection -- the hard way.

i was called a white girl in grade school like that was my name and roundly ostrasized because not only did i know how to read but i actually enjoyed it. thanks to intellectual pursuits that included reading dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun along with the clothes that my mother lovingly made for me turned me into a garden variety wierdo in the african american community and made me the object of ridicule amongst my peers for most of my youth. somewhere in there, when i was 8 or so, my mother accidentally dropped a straightening comb on my neck. i told myself that there was nothing wrong with my hair in its natural state when everything in my world told me otherwise. afterwards, i promised myself that when i grew up, my hair would be natural. i never fully understood why i had to straighten it to be considered pretty but that's a whole other conversation.

so i had already endured a lifetime of "no" by the time i hit puberty. what i endured in my early years in new york city was nothing in comparison. it was luncheon and an afternoon nap in a field of wildflowers and daffodils. it was a walk in the freakin' park.

circumstances of my youth may have convinced me that i was fugly, but no one ever disputed my intelligence or my talent -- expecially the people who ridiculed me in the first place. i put all of it behind me and i kept going and going and going...

just as i'd hit a wall with alt-theater/off-broadway, everything shifted gradually towards tv/film and commercials. the first step was bravo's the it factor. i did it because i had little or no camera experience and i had no money or time for on camera classes. i needed to learn how to be comfortable in front of a camera and i figured having a crew follow me around for six months or so would compel me to break some bad habits. it worked. i got my SAG card when i got RENT but i finally used it when i got a part in Marci X that didn't end up on the cutting room floor.

the next step was auditioning like crazy. but there were obstacles. to find them, i had to be objective about my physical self. i quickly learned that how things look in a camera's eye can be very different from my own. i had to see things differently. there were some concessions i wasn't willing to make -- like straightening my hair, for example -- but now that i got rid of those annoying tics that seemed to happen if i was on camera for too long, i had to work hard to lose the chunk that made me look heavier than i actually was and get my teeth fixed, an extremely expensive proposition. most importantly, i had to learn how to audition on camera well. this would take time, but i was up for the challenge.

i had a million auditions and callbacks before i got anything. but finally, something happened: in october, i got my first national commercial, for ocean spray. two weeks ago, i got another national commercial, for prego. and somewhere in there, i met filmmaker ed durante, and his feature length project "jake gets paid" happened.

how did i meet ed durante? now that's a long story...

what are you going to do, shoot me? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part one

a few years ago, it seemed that i couldn't sit through a movie preview without seeing someone that i knew onscreen. i'd think back and remember which off-off broadway play or musical we'd done and when, and in my head i'd feel a strange sense of pride and glee for them, that they'd gone hollywood and "made it"-- not fame, really. just steady work. and to my way of thinking, that was making it. mazeltov.

but then one day i turned on the television and they were there, too. almost every commercial break meant having to sit and watch someone i knew hawking cookies or room sanitizer or God knows what all -- which was hysterical, if you really stop to think about it. i even recognized a few here and there with roles on sit coms and tv series. eventually, a passing conversation with an actor-acquaintance who gave me a ball park idea as to how much they were probably making made my jaw drop. was i missing the boat here?

when i had this epiphany, i had been doing theater in nyc professionally for about 10 years. i don't dance, so i knew that the broadway chorus wasn't anything for me to consider. once i understood that the great white way tends to favor heavy-set black female performers, i began to lean towards a much less conventional approach. eventually the breakthrough happened when i made the original cast in the national tour of RENT on a cattle call -- no representation, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. but for several years before that happened, when i got here from down south and everyone pretty much ignored me, there was no work. so i developed my own ideas -- in alt-music and alt-theater. with the two one person shows that i wrote and performed, i proved that i was an originator. with the various roles in george c wolfe's "harlem song," i proved that not only could i could carry the lead in a broadway caliber musical but that i could originate work on a grander scale.

after one evening's performance, my mentor the director jeff cohen met me at the stage door. somewhere in the conversation that ensued, he said, "you'd better enjoy this moment, because this probably won't happen again for you for another 10 years." he was right, of course. downtown rags described me as an "alt-diva." casting directors said that i was "quirky." the general vibe was that i was "unconventional" -- simply put, that i wasn't the black girl that they thought i should be, the black girl that they could easily recognize from their deepest imaginings or the most innocuous media saturation or even around the way. the fact of the matter was, i was unlike anything they'd ever seen. or heard.

more often than not, my uniqueness was percieved of as a threat. why? because i wasn't behaving like a stereotype. because for some, the unfamiliar and the unknown are things to be afraid of, especially where black people are concerned -- and especially with black women. because i wasn't sitting around trying to figure out which black girl to turn myself into, to get the job. i wasn't desperate -- and to be honest, that must have made me look like an uppity negress. but because i actually am an uppity negress, i really didn't care. and i still don't.

i was just being myself. was that so wrong?

all apologies

sorry i didn't post any pithy remarks about black history month in february. i'm usually so good about that stuff. the thing is, i don't walk around thinking about what a wonderfully uppity negress i am. to quote zora neale hurston, i'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife. actually, i don't think anybody spends a whole lot of time dwelling on their race or gender unless something happens that draws their attention to it. and if you're black, something is happening all the time. the difficulty is to not meditate on it.

when my blackness isn't brought to the forefront of my daily goings on, i'm thinking stuff like, i can't believe that i need four sets of boot trees or i'm almost out of vitamins or i'm not going to make it to jef lee johnson's show at the jazz standard next week or boy, do i love lobster bisque or i should call my grandma tomorrow. until something happens, i'm just another person, reaching for enough miracle whip for my sandwich. believe me -- the stupid things that can happen to people of color even in a place that's supposed to be as cool as nyc can turn anyone into a militant/activist. and in that regard, brothers and sisters, there's a little malcolm x (or a little betty shabazz) in each of us, no matter where we are in the world.

so here's a little cheat sheet of what's going on in my black world:

1. i need (yes, need!) three box sets: another one in the bob dylan bootleg series, willie dixon on chess and the layla and other assorted love songs 25th anniversary re-issue. listening to a lot of charlie christian and johnny cash these days, and i'm learning how to play bar chords and power chords.
   
2. i love playing guitar so much, i've already picked out my next one: a beautiful scaled down A & L parlor guitar, in a strange shade of blue.
3. believe it or not, i found a restaurant in east harlem called creole that serves real honest-to-goodness bona fide alligator etoufee.
   
4. my friend and i are going to see new york divided: slavery and the civil war this weekend. (maybe we'll have gator afterwards...)
5. congratulate me: i've finally perfected my ultra-southern sour-cream chocolate cake.
   
6. i think i'll bake one and take it to abdul at a. bistro in brooklyn. i miss my african chef.
   
7. i'm reading odimumba kwamdela these days. (if you've never heard of him, i highly recommend the semi-fictional novel/underground classic niggers, this is canada.)
   
8. if you want to get a real taste of dany laferriere's work, skip the movie how to make love to a negro without getting tired and read the book. or if you want to see one of his movies, please do yourself a favor and go see heading south. it's effing brilliant.
   
9. now that every available windowsill in my apartment has a thriving philodendron, i've decided to grow something that blooms: an amaryllis.
10. i really need (!!!) to go see the allman brothers at the beacon this month, for march madness.