Tonight was “Music of Our Lives.” The fundraising event for Park Avenue Youth and Family Services CDF Freedom Schools Program. The music, the crowd, the food, the venue were all fantastic and above all else, people gathered to support a really phenomenal program for kids. …
Video from 2011 Music of Our Lives Tickets are $50 at the door and support the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School® at Park Avenue Youth and Family Services. There will be an hors d’oeuvres and cocktail hour from 6:00 to 7:00 with silent auction and the …
Brené Brown, my favorite blogger, speaker, author and generally wise woman speaks of courage:
“The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart…
Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”
Telling our story is incredibly dangerous. Scary. If I tell my story, you might realize just how dangerous/different/terrible I am.
I love this picture from Darwin Bell, the way he captured a heart in peeling paint. There’s something really honest about it. Some days our hearts feel just as fragile and impermanent as flaking paint.
In researching The New Jim Crow this week I came across a poem “Telling” by Laura Hershey in a study guide.
What you risk telling your story:
You will bore them.
Your voice will break, your ink will
spill and stain your coat…
…Your happiness will be called
bravery, denial.
Your sadness will justify their pity.
Your fear will magnify their fears.
Everything you say will prove something about
their god, or their economic system.
Your feelings, that change day
to day, kaleidoscopic,
will freeze in place,
brand you forever,
justify anything they decide to do
with you.
Yet if I never tell you my story, we will never get to know each other. When Brené Brown spoke here in the Twin Cities this fall she argued that everything valuable in life requires vulnerability. There is nothing worth having, experiencing or being that does not require an amount of risk.
The challenge for us then, is not only to be willing to take the risk of telling our story, but to be a safe place for others to share with.
Yesterday I mentioned that I would start featuring good children’s literature featuring non-white protagonists. I’ve been reaching out to all of the mom’s and dad’s of pre-schoolers that I know for Early Childhood books, but I thought that I’d start out with some from my …
Education Week’s Early Years Blog reports that preschool teachers cannot name books with non-white protagonists, even as 40% of our students are non-white in the United States: A group of more than 100 current and future educators in Shelby County, Tenn., could identify no tales …
This is a passage I need but don’t want today.
Could I just skip the suffering, endurance and character and go right to hope?
After a week of thinking about Education Justice and Mass Incarceration…I am longing to see hope. But hope will come through suffering, endurance and character. Hope is not magic. So I roll up my sleeves, get down on my knees and share the stories with my family and friends. The work begins.
Tonight I was able to attend Michelle Alexander’s lecture at the University of St. Thomas. In her talk as well as in her book, Ms. Alexander laid out a very well researched and …
Spunk! was fabulous last night. If you are in the Twin Cities you really must go see it, there is only one week left.
Each act of the play is the telling of a different short story by Zora Neale Hurston – the cast tells the stories through narration, action and dialogue, but every word spoken comes from the short stories themselves. The only Hurston I have read before this week is Their Eyes Were Watching God. These three stories inspired me to read more.
The costumes, set and music were beautiful. The stories were heart breaking at some points, funny at others and even heart warming at others.
What I loved about a play featuring three short stories was the diversity of experience in African American Life in the 1930s and 1940s that it was able to portray. In “Spunk!” you don’t get a two dimensional picture of Black Life, nor are the characters stereotypes. The characters are diverse, from kind a kind and loving husband, to a swindler, two male prostitutes, a long suffering wife, a wife who makes a mistake and finds redemption and a woman who is not going to suffer fools.
Before last night’s performance there was a short reception put on by on of St. Paul’s City Council Members Melvin Carter III and Mayor Chris Coleman. They each spoke on the impact Penumbra Theatre Company has had in the city of Saint Paul and the larger arts world and expressed gratitude that Penumbra is back. The theatre had to close its doors and cancelled most of its 2012 – 2013 season due to financial troubles.
Here’s to friends who are there through good times and bad. And a goddaughter so cute I could scream . And to family, I ran into my cousin at the zoo and got the best hug from him…