Category Archives: Uncategorized

Compromise. A bad word in the English lexicon, right? Don’t ever compromise, we are warned as some kind of encouragement to grab for that proverbial brass ring. There’s the famous Compromise of 1850, for example — not a good thing whatsoever. It has been drilled into us that compromise is for those not willing toContinue reading “Tomorrow is Not Promised, So Compromise Today”

I’m moving. Such a funny word, moving, for this thing we do when we pack up our belongings and relocate ourselves. I mean hopefully we’re always moving, in some form or fashion. “Big move,” people will say when they learn I’m heading to the opposite coast. Aren’t they all big? Or don’t they at allContinue reading “Life Might be Like a Box of Chocolates, but the Pandemic is Like Musical Chairs”

Not everything is a debate. Not everything has a conclusion, a summary, a finite judgment. Our need, our desire to wrap things up — usually with a bow of I’m right, you’re wrong — is a contributing factor to the diseased communications we are witnessing at this moment. What happened to exploring together, simply wonderingContinue reading “Not Everything is a Debate”

During the AIDS epidemic I was deep into my 20-something life in New York City. I was an actor, I was in food service; gay men were everywhere. Until suddenly they were not. Little by little my friends and co-workers disappeared. I would walk down 7th Avenue South passing emaciated men, Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions prominentlyContinue reading “Killing Dreams”

Today’s Zoom sermon was entitled, “When Haters Hate.” Now, many of us have encountered haters. Jill Scott said it in her song, “Hate on Me” (which I hum to myself quite often as a kind of mantra): “If I could give you the world/On a silver platter/Would it even matter? You’d still be mad atContinue reading “The Answer is Fear”

In a few weeks I am presenting a brief workshop on oral history for a local public library. Via Zoom. I’m going to explain what the field of oral history is about and show them examples of oral histories and their uses. I’ll also provide some worksheets, like a guide for the process of takingContinue reading “Story Promoter”

Today I was going into a store — alright, a liquor store — and encountered an awkward moment wherein a man was insisting on coming out the same door, the entrance. I stood still, waiting for him to figure out he should step to the right, to the exit door, but he didn’t. Instead heContinue reading “In the Out Door”

Today, as I walked in the 97 degree heat, I listened to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer interview scholar Eddie Glaude, chair of Princeton’s African-American studies department and author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Glaude’s sensibilities surrounding where we are right now in this world, and what Baldwin might have hadContinue reading “Pain is the Bridge”

Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby, is a handbook, a history book and could even be called a self-help-book-for-the-moment. I am so grateful to the amazing couple who introduced this work to me and then took their time to create a reading group around it. This sort of thing is happening everywhere and, inContinue reading “Women’s Stories Yet Untold”