Dear O,
Krisha is staring at the rehearsal, watching the makeshift revolve rotate six women with varied vocally delicious ways of advising “Hell No.” Brandon is comfortably asleep on her thigh and I struggle to understand how the rest of his body holds no complaint about the way he cluttered it on the adjacent chair just so that his head could rest on her lap.

Gonna be your rock
Gonna be your tree

Meanwhile, Krisha’s lap is fine and she is comfortable too. I imagine it’s because she is smiling inwardly at a personal connection to this particular song, a song that the writers nailed because they must have realized most women in the world will have personal connections too.

All my life I had to fight.

She is so relaxed I can’t see the breathing I know is going on. The denim-covered thigh not consumed by Brandon’s head seems softer with the cottony skirt over it. Oblivious to her dozing colleague/friend/pillar she is certainly relating to the Hell No. She has said it several times – once to her ex-husband when he made the mistake of thinking she might be trample-ready; before he could take his first misstep on that mis-thought, she pulled out her shotgun and reminded him that she was trained well and knew its properties better than he.

Squeaky she is not, at least not in real life. Alice Walker noted this from the voice pitched naturally lower than the mechanical feat Krisha pulls off to make Mary Agnes come alive. “Perfect,” Ms. Walker had said of her performance in Atlanta.

Ahh you better learn how to fight back while you still alive
You show them girl, and beat back that jive.

But really it’s the big hell no that sticks out, the one spelled out in the resolution of the Trini supple skin sealing all that knowledge, the one that cheerleads her integrity. That hell no was resonant, a siren louder than the neon of lights in Times Square. It pushed through calmly when she was fired from a first tier prominent world renowned dance company whose environment swallowed her spirit while the artistic director watched.

Sick and tired of woman still live like a slave.

The integrity prevailed though when it was time to stand up and acknowledge that with a new 53 million dollar facility and a legacy Gibraltar-solid, it was cruel to continue paying dancers slave wages to pirouette on its cement. Yes it’s easier to gather money for development than for operations but it’s not impossible. Feasible actually, she suggested, especially when dancers cannot afford to live after work in apartments that are as comfortable as the new building. Hell no a union company performing in a union house in a metropolitan city on tour should not hire non-union gospel singers to sing live for the performance, at least not without paying them accordingly. Union rep responsibilities plus cajones summoned from the jerk and aloo and the blue of Carribean water in her lithe Graham-trained body stood her up again, led her to call the union and alert them so that these singers could get the pay they deserved. She knew it would be pink paint for the slip that undoubtedly materialized when the powers that be realized her gumption, realized that hell no she was not just a dancer to settle into the docile insanity of complaining copiously after the curtain drops while picking cotton dutifully on the clock.

Francesca has just come by Felicia to sing,

Something to hold on to in your time of need.

Krisha’s chest jumps a little with excitement and Brandon reacts through his sleep, adjusts his position some. Suddenly it doesn’t surprise me at all that she was voted one of the Equity union reps right away when the question was posed. It’s a good choice. Probably nobody in the room could do it better.

“Yes ladies,” she says, as the women finish the last chord of the song. And I realized I have enjoyed watching her watch them. Because I rejoice in Krisha identifying. She ain’t no punk.

Hell no.

Pre-Tact

It was already a weird day with the airport staff having foiled a liquid-involved terrorist plot that rendered lotions, gels, shampoos and other bottles forbidden as carry-ons. I was sitting in the McDonald's with Jeremy and Bernard, two of my baby brothers from the Lula's company (home for me) in Los Angeles and we were devouring our varied choice fast food digs when the woman across from us asked if Jeremy is an actor, the beginning of a conversation that added light to the day.

"I'm a dancer," he said.

"She thinks she saw you in a concert recently," the woman said, indicating the marble-eyed child sitting across from her.

"You probably saw us in a concer in the park Wednesday morning," Jeremy said. "Did you enjoy it?"

"I was there," the little girl said. I dropped a huge glob of rice and beans from my burrito as I struggled not to laugh out loud. She was was clearly too young to have learned shade. She continued. "It was hard to stay awake. Tony fell asleep on my shoulder."

"Oh did he now?" Jeremy said. "Well it was really hot outside." Of course, this was probably the truth but the little girl did not see any reason to clarify.

"Tony is my boyfriend and I'm his girlfriend," the child said.

Bernard began choking on a french fry because the laugh attack was more than he could take.

"How old are you?"

"I'm five and my birthday is September 22."

"So is mine. Happy birthday coming up."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-four," she said. "My daddy is 44 and my Mommy is 42."

Bernard and I loved how age five permits you the opportunities to just tell everyone's business and get away with it. Unsolicited or otherwise. Plus, the connection she made between her dad and Jeremy hapened so instantly, although no one was ready to ask how she got from one point to the other (it wasn't just age).

Jeremy turned to the woman across from the little girl. "Are you her mom?"

"No, I'm her babysitter."

"My babysitter is 43," the girl said pointedly. By this point it was too funny and I was done.

This went on for about two more minutes as I delighted in the intrinsic candid quality of this little girl, whose name turned out to be Ruthy. To think, in a few years society will teach her tact and she will learn to temper her responses for the sake of politeness. How unfortunate! :-)

Anniversary

Phillip Miner, whom I affectionately call “Daddy” because he has maintained a closer paternal relationship to me than any other man who could (my biological co-parent included), brought his lover of 20 years with him to New York to vacation and celebrate the their marriage. I turned on fires in my kitchen, something I haven’t done in a while with all the people in and out of the house lately, and cooked them a full out dinner, full out with Fetzer and garlic bread.

The strength of their marriage is still utterly miraculous to me – they have the interracial card, the gay card and a few other smaller cards in the game. The gay card has to be considered almost the way we differentiate dog years from human years: a gay relationship is worth at least three years of heterosexual marriage. Anyway, when I asked them how they’ve managed to make it this long, Daddy dropped his pearls.

“You know, son you have to start out every argument with ‘Ain’t nobody going nowhere’ and it works out.”

Something to consider indeed.