The last few weeks' roundup (aka: I been too lazy to update)

Awight, so iss bin a minit....

Finally finished the Willie Wells Story run. After a few days of bull$#!! leading up to it, the last day actually went pretty well. Lucien Douglas came out to see it. As did Deepti and Larry. The last few shows went pretty well, I think. There were a few moments when I was really goin' for it, but I don't think I acted it up too bad. I should also mention that Elena and Melinda came to the show as well (they seem to have formed the "Desparately Seeking My Brownness Dream Team). So I'm doin the joint, feelin' alright. I wasn't trying to hard the way I did that time Flordelino came. I get to the end of the outfield sequence and make my brief exit to stage left. I get off, and suddenly I hear the vigourous clapping of hands...one set of hands. I knew immediately who it was, but for the sake of eschewing presumptuousness, I assume that it could have been one of the two classmates in the audience. Of course, it turned out to be Melinda whom God has seen fit to give an abundance (!) of enthusiasm. I had to fight a smirk coming back on stage, but I managed to get through it.
So we back at school now. I keep walking past the fountain in front of the MLK statue thinking, "now, just what kind of interesting thing am I going orchestrate in this glorified (though quite nice) bird bath. I'm still mulling the idea of a swordfight over, but I wouldn't want the swords to get scummy. I guess I could just clean them directly afterward. There is also this idea of having two people mirror each other for about an hour before finally having them begin to play in the water. Gotta do something. One's muse fades when not given the chance to see her inspiration utilized.
Let's see, what else.
I asked this young lady (who appeared to acrifan {<- be="" br="" dissed.="" down="" for="" got="" hmmmm...="" if="" intentional="" interviewd="" mama.="" my="" next.="" pen="" put="" red="" she="" spelling="" the="" thesis.="" to="" willing="" would="">Reading some interesting stuff for my Black Feminism class. I just read this article by Audra Lourde which says that the erotic is the opposite of pornography (pornography v erography?). Her basic argument is that women are denied their inherent need to explore the erotic. The erotic according to her is not just about sexual joy, but any true joy, period. This is either a quite inciteful and intriguing critique of western society, or her way saying that people gettin' happy in church are just getting off on Jesus. Look, I'm just sayin'....

progression of the 'lock alternative

I relaxing on the ol' futon of soul(tm) checkin' TV and what not. For some reason, I thought about my naps and reached up there to see what was going on. So, I touched the top of my head and felt some hair sticking up. I rolled it up. A couple of minutes later I felt up there again and checked to see if there was anymore loose stuff. I came upon what felt to be a set of hairs naturally coiled together and went to the mirror to check it. Lo and behold I saw what looked just like a small yet burgeoning lock.
Unfortunately, it occured to me that that was the first set of hairs that I'd just twisted. It was still an encouraging glimpse into the possible future of the experiment currently underway on my head. I still wish my hair grew faster, though...

feed yo kid befo mah sho

So, I was doin' the show this past week...
The audiences had been particularly small. Usually, there would be at least a couple times during the day where there were at least ten people, but this day there had been only 2 or 3 people at each show.
A larger (relatively) audience finally came and they seemed pretty interested. In particular a lady with a family was really into it. She was holding a squirmy little boy, but seemed as though she was handling and managing to still pay attention like she'd done it before.
So, I'm up there doin the dang thang, people are liking it and the little boy is squirming. At some point after I'd gotten the show going for a while, I noticed her flip him over as though he was getting ready to let loose with a bit of wailing. She turned him perpendicular to her and I thought I saw her raise her shirt. Now, this is not the first time that I thought that a mother was breast-feeding during the show. I thought I saw it happen before, but then figured that it was just the result of staring out into an almost completely dark audience while having high temp stage lights shooting in your eyes. So, I'm continuing with the show and I see her flip the child, and without doubt raise her shirt and stick him underneath it. It happened one or two more times before the show was over.
Now, I don't think it's completely strange to have a mother breast-feeding in public. I certainly like to think that, if I ever have a child, that he/she will receive the blessing of nourishment directly from the source. But when you're up there on stage trying to concentrate and what not, it seems ABSOLUTELY strange. After she flipped the kid back and forth a couple times I found myself struggling to not stare at her feeding. Then it actually wasn't so much about me keeping my concentration as it was me feeling bad for looking. Compounding the problem was the fact that she seemed to the most into the show of anyone in the audience. I really was amazed at the way she was adjusting this kid and her clothing while never taking her eyes off of me. Yet more evidence that mothers, if not women on the whole, can't be faded when it comes to multitasking.
Nevertheless, feed Billy before you come into my show... got me all discombobulated tryin' not to look... knowin' I like breasts AND feeding.

SO.... I'd finished my last show today and was feeling like I'd done a pretty good job. There was a black couple in the audience, the female half of which I could see smiling through the whole show. I found myself trying not to play just to her or her companion. I duz try to spread my brilliance throughout the crowd (as minimal as my brilliance and the crowd tend to be).

Anyway, I noticed her going into the gift shop on my way out. I finally gave in to the lusty urge to be recognized, so I headed into the store.

As I walked around avoiding eye contact with the young lady (because you just can't be obvious about these things), I noticed an Asian (I believe Chinese, but I couldn't quite tell the language) lady walking around with her child. The little girl stood out to me because she was wearing a dashiki. I saw them again later with the rest of the family. The girl had a brother near her age that was wearing matching dashiki. Perhaps I'm unique here, but there's something about two small Chinese children in dashiki's that I find terribly intriguing. I wondered how they came to have them - if the kids chose them, the parents chose them (they were, after all coordinated). The thing I wondered most about them was if they saw the shirts as being just nice pieces of clothing or if they were a particular signifier of Afro-centered culture - the way I look at them. It was one of those times where the junior sociologist in me wanted to interview the mother. I was fairly tempted to go and ask the mother where she'd gotten the dashikis. Of course, the real question that I'd have been asking was, "why did you choose these shirts,". A valid question I guess, but it seems like it would be hard to ask without giving the impression that I was questioning the validity of them as people not of African descent wearing African (edit: African-themed) garb. Or maybe that's just me...doesn't really matter since I didn't ask her.

And the sister from the show did recognize me as I was walking out of the museum. I timed the eye contact just right...

So I'm driving down 183 on the way back to the crib. I was enjoying a successful test of my most recent adjustment the cruise control I installed on the ride when I noticed a group of black people on the ground below playing something in a field. Now, I find just about any group of black people engaged in a sport that ain't basketball out of the ordinary, so I was interested. I realized that it was mostly women and, at first I thought they might be having a little soccer practiced for the kids. I looked again and realized that there was somebody rolling a ball toward someone in a batting cage. Right then I knew what I had witnessed: black women playing kickball.
I swung back around and drove over to the field they were in. Turned out that they are in the Austin Women's Kickball league. I'd heard of grown folks playing kickball and I'm pretty sure that I'd heard of AWK before. They said that there were some co-ed tournaments.

I will be involved in this before the end of the summer.

Ok, a couple of months after creating a webpage on the U of Texas server, claiming that I'd use it as my blog, I'm finally putting one up. It's actually only because I saw somebody else's blog while looking up stuff about that girl that's accused Kobe of the unauthorized pleasure (put me down for not guilty - hey, sports wives and girlfriends, go with them dudes when they travel and save us all the trouble of watching this crap).

One quick thought:
You know this Fox produced syndicated live show "Good Day Live", I had the idea for something like this about 3 and a half years ago. Except my idea didn't include annoin'-@$$ Gillian Barbieri. I worked at a Fox station back when this show first got on the air. We were running nothing but talk show garbage and were told that it was going to get replaced with a live news show. It sounded to me like an afternoon version of the show that comes on Fox News Channel in the morning. But it turned out to be this crap. I suggested it to a radio personality that I was producing for on the weekends at the time. She was not at all interested. Guess I shoulda used powerpoint...

peace