Cultural Differences

Note:
I wrote this blog on 25 June, almost a mont ago, and forgot to post it.

After a trip to the States, I arrived home a few weeks ago around 1:00 a.m. I’d forgotten to tell the friend who was watering my plants and paying my bills that the cable company does not send them. You are expected to pay your bill no later than the tenth of each month. Mine wasn't paid and my cable and Internet were off—no way to communicate.

The next morning, as soon as I had coffee, I headed out for the cable company. Enroute, I ran into my landlady’s sister and their mother. Her sister said an architect from Queretaro was coming at 4pm to look at the skylight that was leaking. I tried to explain that this was not convenient but was not communicating--she didn't speak English and my Spanish, after numerous classes, is still rudimentary. They had a set of keys. I asked her to use them but she said I had to be there at four.  The skylight needed to be fixed before the rainy season began. So, finally in frustration I said, “fuck it, I’ll be there,” and rushed off to MegaCable. 

The next morning my landlady, who lives in Texas, called.  She started with, “My mother is the most important thing in the world to me.” And ended with, “Why did you say fuck you to my mother?” 

I was dumbfounded. “I wasn’t talking to your mother.” I told her. “Plus I said fuck it, an expression of frustration, not fuck you.”

My rental is one of four houses in a compound owned by the same family. I’d cultivated a good relationship with her relatives. Had invited them to dinner the first time my landlady visited them in San Miguel. Given them leftover desserts for the kids and grandkids after my dinner parties.

“You know me,” I continued.  “Why would you think I’d insult your mother?”

This was a misunderstanding, something I felt sure could be straighten out with conversation. I found someone to translate, a bi-lingual Mexican friend to avoid further cultural misunderstanding, and went to talk with her mother. She wouldn’t open the door. Less than a minute later another daughter, who lives in the house to my right, came to my house. “My mother does not want to talk with you, not now, not ever,” she said shaking her finger in my face like I was a wayward child.

Her mother was close to my age, a grown-ass woman who was behaving like a child. I was pissed. She took me to my dark side. The me who sought revenge, that part of me I worked so hard to get control of in my thirties.

When my landlady came to San Miguel tempers had subsided. She said that she that since she lived in Texas she relied on her family to maintain her house in Mexico. “They refuse to work with you,” she said. "I'm between a rock and a hard place. But no rush, take as much time as I needed to find a new place."

I was determined to find something quickly. Living is a toxic environment is not good. Every time I saw her mother she ignited my anger when she looked away from me with a humph. Once when she did this, I asked in anger, "How old are you, twelve?"  

I found something less than three weeks after the conversation with my landlady. Three weeks that had felt like twelve. There are pluses with the new place, no more stairs, a washer and dryer, and a small patio--and minuses, more money and less square footage.

A new chapter begins. Moving date is July 15.

The Vagina Monologues

Recently I read one of the monologues for San Miguel’s tribute to the 25^thanniversary of Eve Ensler’s play. Close to two years ago, I’d said ‘no more acting’ after doing Building the Wall. But, like Robert Schenkkan play, The Vagina Monologuesis part of a movement. For some reason, that I’ve yet to figure out, movements attract me these days.

I knew I hadn’t seen the play; thought that I’d read it but realized I hadn’t when I downloaded it on my Kindle I. I liked most of the monologues. Loved the humor—often Ms. Ensler had you laughing while she delivered a punch. Several were sassy—put me in the mind of the Lady in Blue, one of the Colored Girls, in ‘Zake’s (N’tozake Sange’s) play. But only one, “My Short Skirt,” reflected my experience. I’ve loved lots of books and plays that didn’t reflect me. But this was the Vagina Monologues. I wanted to have more commonality.

I had no commonality with the women who hated or were disconnected from their vaginas. I’d always thought mine was a magical place. It started in kindergarten. My nursery school was part of a test group that screened a film on birth designed for five and six year olds. Of course the mother was draped. We did not get a full frontal view of the delivery. It seemed like a magic trick when the doctor displayed the baby. When I got home from school, I examined my vagina. Looked and looked, searching for someplace where a baby could exit. I couldn’t find it. When Mama got home I asked. How does the baby get out?Through the birth canal, she said. It expands when its time for the baby for the leave. It had to be a magical place if it could expand enough to accommodate a baby’s head. 

The only non-magical thing about vaginas was periods. The monthly drip, drip, drip. Kotek, the pad we wore between our legs to catch the drip, anchored by a sanitary belt that never stayed in place. Pads that were hot and stinky in summer. Horrible. Then I discovered tampons. My reaction to them was the direct opposite of the woman in the Angry Vagina monologue. I loved them. They were a thousand times better than Kotek. Okay so the cardboard applicator wasn’t uncomfortable but only for ten seconds. Ten unpleasant seconds to replace a hot, thick, wad of cotton between my legs all day was definitely better. Two years later I discovered OBs—the tampon supposedly designed by a female gynecologist, with a lubricated and no applicator. You had to be intimate with your vagina to use OBs. They were inserted with your finger. And while I was inserting one, I accidently discovered my clitoris. The magic of my vagina increased tenfold.

Eve Ensler’s vagina stories weren’t mine. There’d been abuse in my life, not much and never violent. Wounds festered for a moment, then healed. I’ve learned to count that as one of my blessings. Little drama in that.

What Did Last Night Mean?

I’ve tried to put the Pollyanna spin on this year’s midterms but I was disappointed. For sure Democrats gained 27 seats, potentially nine more (23 House races remain undetermined). But am I supposed to be happy about gains that were less than half of the 63 Republicans gained in 2010, Osama’s first mid-terms. And, in the Senate, the Repugs picked up seats. In 2010 Dems lost six. 

What did energize me was how many women ran and were elected. This was the second year of the woman. The first was in 1992, following the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation by an all male, all white confirmation committee. Pissed off women organized and, for the first time in American history, in a single election year four women—Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, both from California making it the first state in the nation to be represented in the Senate by two women, Carol Moseley Braun from Illinois, and Patty Murray of Washington—were elected to the Senate. And the House got fourteen. 

Women smashed records this election cycle. More ran, more became their party’s nominees for House, Senate and gubernatorial races—women more than doubled gains made in 1992. The House will get thirty-five new female members. Eleven women were elected to the Senate (nearly all Democrats). And nine women won gubernatorial races. White men will be at historic lows in the 116^thCongress—60% in the House, 71% in the Senate. And January’s congressional makeup will be more diverse. Africans Americans, Hispanics, Asians and the L.G.B.T. community are at record highs. Plus, for the first time, two native Native American women and two Muslim women were elected to the house, and Vermont elected a Transgender woman governor. The Senate, for the first time, reflects the American population.

And both sides were energized. In early September, it looked like the Democrats were doing a better job of energizing their base. Then the Kavnaugh hearing happened. Demonstrations against his appointment invigorated the Republicans. An estimated 113 million people voted in this midterm, 13 million more than the previous high.

Plus there was no overriding theme—far right, far left or centrist. Results of the midterms mirrored the divided country—split along race, education, and geographic lines. The schism of what America and is and should is more splintered than it’s been during my lifetime.

Progress was made but it’s gonna be slow. I’ve yet to master patience so this pace is infuriating. At this rate I won’t live long enough to see the US get back to the place we were in the 70s, the time I came of age. I thought we were moving toward inclusivity. Was I wrong? Was I naive? It doesn’t matter. It’s where I thought we were and at this pace in all likelihood, I won’t live long enough to see us get there again.

Sad.

A Little Sad

I was surprised that I felt a little sad when Bill Cosby was carted off to jail. When he took off his jacket, before they cuffed him, he was thin. His suspenders weren’t a fashion statement, they were holding up too-big pants. He could afford a tailor. He was playing us—always the performer, creating an image that might evoke sympathy. Not only was he guilty but remorseless. Yet there was an empathetic moment when they cuffed this feeble, old man.

I discussed this with a friend. We both knew that he was guilty but still had this moment when we saw him handcuffed and taken off to jail. What saddened us was his fall.

I was a teen when Cosby became the first Black actor to co-star in a leading dramatic role on network television, I Spy. He got an Emmy Award for playing Robert Culp’s eunich sidekick. As Culp romanced everyone, Cosby, fine as he was, didn’t get to kiss a girl until the last season. 

During the blaxploitation era, Cosby paired with Harry Belefonte who, frustrated with how Hollywood portrayed black men in film and television, spearheaded three Black comedies—Uptown Saturday Night(1974), Let's Do It Again (1975)and A Piece of the Action (1977). These low-budget movies were box offices successes and depicted Blacks in a more dignified manner. They showed Black characters taking charge of their own lives and reflected the self-empowerment theme of the Black Power Movement.

Then in ’84 Bill gave us The Cosby Showthat radically changed white America’s perception of us Blacks. These were not Norman Lear’s Black folk—the lower-income, project dwellers, trying to make the best of things, in Goodtimes, or the nouveau riche, loud-mouthed, opinionated George Jefferson. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both of these shows but cheered the first time I saw The Cosby Show, an upper-middle class African-American family like people I’d grown up among in my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. Cliff (Cosby) and Clair (Felicia Rashad) Huxtable were professionals, a doctor and lawyer respectively, raising their five children in their Brooklyn brownstone that housed Cliff’s office on the ground floor. Everyone loved the Huxtables. Cliff became one of the most popular dads in television history. The Cosby show rocked the ratings and ran for eight seasons. When it went into syndication, Bill donated twenty million dollars to my mother’s alma mater, Spelman College

I could continue listing Cosby’s numerous accomplishments—his book on parenting, Fatherhood, sold millions of copies and became a best seller. He was also drugging and sexually assaulting women. He deserved everything he got. But this dichotomy dispays me.

And where was Camille?

Aretha

A few days before Aretha died, a friend who grew up in Detroit told me she probably wouldn’t make the week. I tried to pooh-pooh it but my friend said, “Cyn, Aretha’s down to ninety-two pounds.” So, I was expecting it, but still wasn’t prepared.

I pulled up all of Aretha’s cuts on my playlist and made her the background of my day. I searched the Internet for her discography. “What was the first Aretha song I heard?” Damn, I hadn’t remembered that it was Mama, not me, who first brought Aretha into our house—yesterday I sang a love song, today I sing the blues. Aretha wasn’t singing my kind of music during her Columbia days. I was in high school then. My musical pallet didn’t expand to include the jazzy blues she recorded at Columbia until I was in my late twenties. 

Aretha became my girl when she moved to Atlantic Records. “Respect” rocked my freshman year at New York University. And “Natural Woman” was how my first love was making me feel sophomore year. 

I remembered Aretha with Don Cornelius on Soul Train. Seeing her close out the 25^thAnnual Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans. Aretha taking the stage, time and time again, in her fur coat that she let fall to the ground when she was getting ready to cut loose. Teena Marie giving the knock out performance at BET’s tribute concert to Aretha fifteen years ago.

People who’d known Aretha were interviewed all day August sixteenth, the day we lost her. The one I felt most was Smokey’s on CBS This Morning. He spoke of hearing Aretha for the first time when she was five. Smokey said she was still planning to record when he visited her five weeks before her death.

Before I could post this blog Randy Weston died, a master pianist who synthesized African elements with jazz. Composer and vibraphonist Cecilia Smith posted this on Facebook. “They both possessed a unique gift of music that reached levels that does not come through practice! Both brought a transcendental power into the room when they performed, that was beyond the definition of amazing.”

So many musical holes. Whose gonna fill them?

So You Didn’t Vote

Or you threw your vote away voting for the Green candidate, which at best was symbolic. And those of you who voted Green do you see the irony in that now? You helped elect a president who doesn’t even believe in climate change.

I knew I was pissed after the election at Bernie supporters who didn’t vote or voted Green. I was never going to agree with what they’d done but I thought I’d gotten over the pissed off part. Then a few days I exploded when a progressive said, If the democrats hadn’t stopped Berne from getting the nomination, we wouldn’t have Trump.

I barked back, No we wouldn’t because Hilary supporters no matter what we thought of Bernie would have voted for him. We wouldn’t have taken the chance that Trump might get elected or that the Supreme Court might go to the extreme right. 

Clearly I was still pissed.

Forbes, among other news sources, credited the low Democratic turnout for Trump’s win. In Michigan alone, Clinton received 300,000 less votes than Obama did in 2012. As we watch the dismantling of environmental regulations, watch as the far right embraces racism and bigotry, watch as the president constantly vilifies the press, don’t you wish you’d voted in 2016?

I have been watching news reports this week that say only 30% of millennials are planning to vote in November. Many more demonstrate, often. They care enough to march but won’t vote? WTF? I don't get this. Just like I didn’t get when Susan Sarandon said (and I’m paraphrasing) that maybe a Trump presidency would be a way at shake up the country. Well he certainly did that. Is this what you wanted Ms. Sarandon? I

Yeah, I’m still pissed, and maybe a little irrational. But I hope that all of you who sat out 2016 will vote in November.

A Little Bit Right

Did he think we weren’t going to care? Did Trump believe Americans wouldn’t care that he was separating children from their parents? If he thought about it at all I’m sure he thought, Why should Americans care what happened to immigrant babies?He’d been able to get away with everything else. I’m sure he thought he’d get away with this too.

Thank God he was wrong. We did care. It wasn’t just Amy Goodman and Rachel Maddow and other leftists. Women and men on both sides of the aisle demanded this barbaric practice stop. When he ended it, close to 2,500 children had been separated. No more parents would lose their kids at the border but no immediate plans were made to reunite those who’d already been separated. And they didn’t know who the some of the children’s parents were. When they took these children from their parents, they didn’t care if they were ever reunited.

As this unfolded, frequently I thought of the play Robert Schenkkan wrote in a response to Trump’s election,Building the Fall. The play begins two years following Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s policies have resulted in the mass round up of millions of illegal aliens whose numbers have overflowed into private prisons and camps reminiscent of other interments—the Japanese, the Germans. I didn’t want to do the play because I thought it was too far-fetched. I thought the play would shake things up, ignite conversation but I never believed any part of it was possible. I agreed to do it because I wanted to add my energy to the resistance.

Trump’s roundup was a pittance of the numbers Schenkkan imagined. But it happened, Trump started rounding up people at southern border, many who are assylm seekers not illegals. If they hadn’t separated parents from children, would be have noticed. Would we have cared? Could the numbers have grown to exponentionally  if families had remained intact.

Just asking …

Degrees

“Not Morgan.” I thought. “He’s also part of this Me Too  shit?”

The CNN article posted on my FB feed said eight women had accused him, seven of these for lewd comments and inappropriate stares. Employees at his production company, described him as thecreepy uncle. Hell, I thought when I read this; I’ve been dealing with the creepy uncles since I was eight or nine. Grown ass men, some old enough to me my granddaddy, would leer and say the most disgusting things to me when I ran to the store on a hot summer day in shorts. Was I easily able to forgive Morgan for this because I’d been dealing with it all my life? Hell southern women my age had a name for it, “men who talked up under your dress.” We laughed about it and moved on. But I remembered how I felt the first time one of them said something about wanting to get in-between my magnificent thighs. Girls shouldn’t have to experience that, women either.

One woman accused Morgan of unwanted touching. Although he never succeeded, she asserted, he would touch and/or rub her lower back and try to lift up her skirt, asking, are you wearing underwear?Unacceptable. Not of the Harvey Weinstein magnitude but not okay.

Higher on the not okay spectrum was the allegation (2006 National Enquirer) that Morgan had a romantic relationship with E’dena Hines, his step-granddaughter, which alleged began when she was a teenager in his household. This allegation periodically resurfaced, most recently during her murder trail, E’dena was stabbed to death in 2015, by her boy friend Lamar Davenport. 

It is hard for me to believe this about Morgan. Someone I met, during his Electric Company days, more than once. My perception was, nice man. But you’d probably think the same thing after you met a sexual predator? They would be charming, right? Cosby was, I’d met him.

And if it was true, that Morgan had had an inappropriate sexual relationship with his step-grand daughter, does that automatically make him a sexual predator? Where’s the line?

Generationally the line is different. Most of us baby-boomer women take the talking up under your dress shit in stride. I’d learned to deflect with some smartass response by the time I was twenty. Sometimes I think millennials are too thin skinned and then feel guilty for having that thought. Since the goal of my generation was to make it easier for our kids, consequently doesn’t that make them softer?

 A conundrum cycle, one question leads to another.

I'm Nervous

Trump’s approval rating is up four points since January. It’s at 40%, the highest it’s been since his first 100 days in office. People have a few extra dollars in their paychecks, not because they got raises, salaries are for the most part flat, but because of tax cuts. Who cares that the already astronomical deficit will be kicked into the stratosphere or worries about the environmental consequences of the loosened regulation? The scrapped environmental regulations will be good for manufacturing. Hell some coalmines have reopened. 

Trump followers are about the here and now. They’re not picture folk.

Last month the White House confirmed the planned meeting between the United States and North Korean. What kind of ratings boost will Trump’s get from that? And yesterday North and South Korea talked and agreed to work to remove all nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula. I know Trump will convince his supporters that he’s responsible that too. He works on the premise that if you say something long enough loudly, it becomes truth.

Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in a special election in Alabama in December; Dems picked up seats in Florida and New Hampshire in February; Lamb defeated his Republican opponent Saccone in March. They are united and energized by their shared disgust for Trump. But what do they stand for? If Democrats don’t refine their pitch to alienated white voters, Trump could win re-election.

Don't Click

I’m secretive. I don’t know if it’s my natural inclination or did it evolve because I’m an only and didn’t have a confidence-sharing sibling. Or am I secretive because, I moved to George School, a non-trusting environment, when I was thirteen. Regardless of the reason, I keep my own counsel; don’t share personal stuff with many people. I read my FB feed daily, it’s the way I keep up with friends and family who don’t live close, but seldom post personal information.

How is FB monetized? Nothing’s free but we don’t pay a fee for our accounts. Of course there are the ads, targeted to our interests, but what else? All those sites that wanna collect your personal information? What do they do with it? Every time I clicked on something that asked if they could collect additional information on me, I opted out.

Some of my FB friends were ballistic about the Cambridge Analytica data breech, furious that it took Zuckerberg several days to respond. What could he say beyond we fucked and propose new measures he hopes will work? The uses and misuses of social media seem to expand exponentially each month. How do you stay ahead of that curve? Whoopi’s solution one morning on The View was don’t click.

But it’s too late. I was shocked to learn how much algorithms learn about us exclusively from our “like” clicks. I didn’t click any likes on FB for several days after I read that article. But what does stopping now accomplish? They’ve already accrued too much information.

Sixty-six

I started looking for it at sixty, signs that my body was starting to decline. Really at fifty-nine but I wasn’t looking for decline that year, I was semi-anticipating death. Mama died when she was fifty-nine. She had cancer; had finally lost an almost twenty year fight. I was healthy—I’d had every imaginable test the month I turned fifth-nine. Everything was fine. Still I thought, kinda, that I could die that year.

I didn’t and sixty was a great year. Maybe I wasn’t lunging quite as deep in warrior pose at yoga class but otherwise it was damned good. A very dear friend gave me a belated sixtieth birthday trip to NYC that summer—plays, great food and old friends. And I lost the last of the weight I’d gained from steroids I took thirteen before ago following spine surgery. A friend asked me to test his new weight lost product. It worked. I lost that ten (the steroids had added twenty), plus ten more. Was down to a weight I hadn’t been since I was forty. It made me flirty. I immediately connected with my girl. I didn’t know how to find her in a fuller body—as much as I’ve tried to embrace my plumper self; I hadn’t gotten there yet. Lean, not thin, is what feels good to me.

Nothing changed until sixty-three, my blood pressure spiked and I couldn’t bring it down with diet and natural supplements. I hated being a cliché—a black woman with hypertension. Hated that something in my body was so out of wack that it could only be controlled with daily medicine.

At sixty-five I was thicker, nine maybe ten pounds, close to five pounds more than I swore would be my maximum when I’d dropped the weight five years before.  I was taking yoga, three, four times a week—hot yoga at that, dripping sweat after class, wet down to my ropa interior. I wasn’t eating more and still I was expanding. Shit, could I never have a glass or two of wine, a small bag of chips, the occasional dessert without weighing more than I thought was ideal? I comforted myself, or tried to, with, but I’m firm. The thighs were a little juicy but taming them had always been a rough.

My right knee started to bother me mid sixty-six. Diet and exercise can help with lots of things but not your joints. And joints get a workout in this town, cobblestones and uneven sidewalks. Curb heights vary. I started cabbing more, going to yoga less. After a few months my knee stopped bothering me or did it just recede to the background because another pain took center stage? Nerve pain. I’d been down that road before. It had ended with spine surgery and I wasn’t doing that again. By that time I went to the doctor I wasn’t doing any yoga, was hardly walking and was big as a house.

Body breakdown—this wasn’t supposed to happen to me—miss organic, miss keep-the-body-moving (African dance until I had to give up aerobics, yoga after that). I was older now, didn’t want to undertake another big fight. But what was the alternative? I put on my boxing gloves.

Not a Patriot

My Goddaughter, who has dual citizenship with Canada, recently expanded her job search to our Northern neighbor. To her surprise she discovered she was a patriot. Just looked up the definition. Maybe that’s too strong a word because I’m not sure she’d defend America. But she realized that even though she could write a chapter, maybe a novella, on the ways she’s been screwed in her native land, she saw the US as her country.

I don’t. I’m not a patriot. I usually don’t say that because it pisses people off. But the why of this is something I’ve been examining since Obama became President. I watched he and Michelle, wondering how they got there, to the place that they could love a country that still exhibits so much hatred toward us. They’re not masochists. Is it because they’re Christians? I’m not but granddaddy was and it didn’t make him a patriot.

I come from a non-patriotic family. In the 50s, granddaddy was what they used to call a race man—family first, Negroes second. The U.S. wasn’t part of his equation. He felt he achieved, in spite of, not because he lived in America. I don’t know how he learned his trade. Maybe his father, who was born in slavery, lived on one of those plantations where the slaves did more than just work the fields. However he came to it, granddaddy was a master carpenter. And he was civil minded—he and his crew donated their time to build the first colored high school in Williamsburg, Virginia. (Members of the community, both colored and white, donated the money for materials.) Anyway, he never waived the American flag. He was against colored men serving in the military. I heard him say, more than once, why should we fight for a country that does not fully enfranchise us? And he said we were Africans living in exile in America. Not the language of a patriot.

I had learned my I-am-not-a-patriot lesson by the time I was six. I refused to pledge alliance in school until I no longer had to sit in the back of the bus. Let me give you context for this. The weekend before I refused to pledge, when I was sitting on one of the long seats in the front of the bus, an emaciated, stringy-haired white woman told me to get my nigger ass to the back of the back where I belonged. We didn’t ride the bus often. Mama went to the back but I always sat up there. Mama had never told me about the law, that coloreds had to sit in the back, but she was forced to that day. The following Monday, I wouldn’t pledge allegiance at school. Luckily I went to a private, colored school. I wasn’t putout or forced to say something I didn’t believe. They understood and worked out a compromise. I would stand, and put my hand over my heart but wouldn’t have to say the words.

I teetered on patriotism in my 20s and 30s when it looked like the country was moving toward inclusiveness. But we didn’t get there and I didn’t either—to patriotism that is.  I wonder if being a singleton has contributed it to my lack of patriotism. I don’t have siblings, a husband or children to anchor me to the States. Would immediate family have made me more patriotic? I don’t know. What I know is I am not, and I’m not afraid to say that anymore.

All I Love and All I Hate

The theatre was freezing. I hadn’t thought about that possibility when I agreed to remount Building the Wall, a play Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright Alan Schenkkan had written in response to Trump’s election. I’d thought I was done with acting when I relocated to San Miguel. The plays they were mounting didn’t interest me, didn’t ignite a burning desire to be on stage again. But Schenkkan’s play was different. It would allow me to participate in the resistance to Trump’s presidency, in Mexico, via one of the things I love most, theatre. And it was a happening. Several theatre companies in major US cities, including Austin, Denver, NYC, LA, Tucson, Chicago, and Louisville, mounted the show in this year.

Rehearsals, maybe the part of this process I love most, started in May. Director Alan Jordan reminded me of one of my favorite directors in the States, Ernie McClintock. Both were consumed by theatre and filled with innovative ideas—try this, try that. And David Galitzky, my partner in this two-character play, was a joy to work with. He absorbed Alan’s direction like a sponge. 

Unfortunately, my 67-year-old mind was having trouble learning lines. I hadn’t expected this. Learning lines had been a breeze for me before. Most of my lines had no narrative arch—I was the interviewer—and I found these more difficult to learn than those that told a story. A host of friends came over to run lines with me but they weren’t sticking. Two rehearsals before opening I was still blowing some but the theatre fairy waved her magic wand and on opening night I was fine. I’m sure I paraphrased a few, which drove Alan crazy, but I was cool with that. Some of my lines were awkward; their cadences didn’t reflect African American speech patterns.

By the second performance, we were sold out for the run, a rarity in San Miguel. Rather than extend the play, Alan decided to re-mount it late November when our town would have a different group of tourist. This November was colder than most. The Shelter Theatre, like most buildings in San Miguel, has no central heat and it’s a black box, no windows. No sunlight to warm the building during the heat of the day.

When I got home, I immediately lit the fireplace and warmed myself in bed under the electric blanket until the fireplace heated the living room. As I warmed up in bed, I remembered a similar situation. In my 30s, when I was working with Ernie’s 127^th Street Repertory Theatre, the furnace died. It was the middle of winter; my costume was a thin cotton dress and because it was the 60s only two inches below my butt. That night when I wasn’t onstage, I was bundled up backstage in my thrift shop fur and long woolen scarf. The forecast for the following day was low teens so the cast and crew decided that the show would be cancelled the next day if they couldn’t get the furnace running. No one had called to tell me not to come to the theatre so I assumed the furnace had been repaired. It hadn’t. The building was freezing when I arrived at half hour. Ernie had talked with the other cast members and convinced to do the play in the freezing cold theatre. I refused. And because I didn’t have an understudy they had to cancel the show.

I was livid on the cab ride home. Why did directors expect actors to perform under hideous condition? Didn’t they respect us? Did they think we didn’t respect ourselves? And what about the audience? How could you ask them to pay money to watch a play in a building with no heat?

When I got to the Shelter Theatre the next day and nothing had been done to make me more comfortable, I was tempted to walk out. But I sucked it up. This might me the last time I was onstage and I didn’t want walking out to be my swan song. By the third rehearsal, our assistant director, David Johanssen, had brought in a powerful gas heater that we used on stage for the balance of the rehearsals. Performance days it heated my dressing room. The Shelter Theatre is small so once the audience got in the theatre it was warm enough.

Alan wasn’t around when I left the dressing room after each performance. He never said thanks, didn’t speak to me after the last show. Was this arrogance or just bad home training? I laughed and sloughed it off. I’d worked with directors like him before.

I was glad I did these last five shows. People I knew who couldn’t get tickets before got to see the show. And I had a better understanding of the character. My performance was stronger, more nuanced.

After a twelve-year absence from the stage, this production of Building the Wall reminded me of everything I loved and everything I hated about theatre.

Why So Long?

Finally, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s article in the The NY Times, brought the sexual assault that women have been experiencing for years to the forefront. Their article chronicling Harvey Weinstein’s decades long sexual harassment of women started a maelstrom of me toos—first against Harvey, then spreading to others in the entertainment industry, finally moving like a rapidly spreading flame to other segments of our society. The numbers were astounding—and I’m sure this is only the tip of the iceberg. I was stunned by some who were accused, paramount among those was Charlie Rose. I had perceived him as someone who was too comfortable in his own skin to need to prey on women. Likewise Russell Simmons even though the hip-hop community is known for being an exceedingly misogynistic environment. I thought these two men were above that. In both instances I was wrong.

Many in the movie industry claimed they didn’t know about Harvey’s behavior but there were too many “me toos” for me to believe that. Like Bill Cosby, I’d heard rumors about him since the 70s, Harvey in all likelihood was another well-known secrets. Respected screenwriter Scott Rosenberg cosigned on what I thought. Everybody fucking knew, he wrote in a near novella-length Facebook response to those shrinking away from responsibility in enabling Weinstein's behavior. As a society, we have looked the other way. We’ve maintained a boys will be boys mentality. As a teen, a woman that I both loved and respected was bragging to my mom about her son’s sexual exploits. Her Casanova son had humiliated girls that I knew and caused them heartache. I never looked at her the same way after that day. She lost my respect.

I am elated that women are finally speaking up but I wondered why had it taken so long for them to speak out. I voiced this at a gathering of several women and one said, Cynthia if you spoke out your career was ruined. She didn’t think I knew this? I spoke out about a director who had been sexually aggressive with me at an audition and never worked for him. But I was willing to pay that price. The next time I voiced this opinion I got a feminist lecture on the history of the female domination by men. So I decided to keep this opinion to myself. But I couldn’t. The numbers of women speaking out about their sexual harassment has been astronomical.

An ABC Pool published on October 17^th found that more than half of all American women—54%—have experienced unwanted and inappropriate sexual advances at some point in their lives. Thirty percent of women have endured such behavior from male colleagues and 25% identified men with sway over their careers as the culprits. Why didn’t women speak out sooner? Newscasters said that before the environment was not safe for women to speak out. Why did it need to be safe?

I grew up during the Civil Rights movement. Nothing about that was safe. Then the danger wasn’t about jobs and careers, it was about lives. And many people put their lives on the line. To gain you have to be willing to risk. Anita Hill is a few years younger than me but she also grew up during the Civil Rights movement. Did watching people risk their lives for Black equality give her the courage to testify against Clarence Thomas twenty-six years ago. Four other women were supposed to testify after Hill but, according to the Los Angeles Times, a deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Democrat Joe Biden (who I generally think of as a good guy) stopped their testimony. But what stopped other women from speaking out then? All were silent as they watched the press destroy Anita Hill. Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against Present Clinton eight years later did not start an eruption of me toos. Scores of women shared their Cosby sexual harassment stories but it did not progress beyond him.

I’m glad the women now feel that the environment is safe enough for them to share their stories. In this new safe environment, scores of men have lost their jobs because of their sexual harassment of women, and in the case of Kevin Spacey men. But it pisses me off that they waited until they felt safe. This went on for longer than it had to because of their silence.

July's Racism

Each month since Trump won the election, I’ve experienced racism from an unexpected source, racism the startles me. Racism is familiar—I’m 67 and was raised in the south—but since the early 70s I’ve experienced it less and less. It still happens, the everyday slights, the little ways that some people still need to let you know that they don't think you're as good as they are. But I’m accustomed to those. I’ve developed a thick skin. Those incidents don’t suspend my breath.

But since Trump won the presidency things are different. We’re peddling backwards, rapidly. Each month there is at least one personal affront that hits me in my solar plexus, a “naw, he didn’t say (do) that” moment.

The standout, everyday racist moment in July was interrupting the regular programming of every network channel and CNN to broadcast O.J. Simpson’s parole hearing. I watched as newscasters referred to O.J. as a murderer, he was not convicted of that crime, and one of the most notorious defendants in American history. Really? You’re putting O.J. up there with Jeffrey Dahmer, Dylan Klebold and his partner in the Columbine Massacre Eric Harris, and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber)? Let’s be real, the reason the media was following O.J.’s car down the highway in 1994 was because they thought he had murdered a blond. If he’d killed his first wife, high school sweetheart Marguerite, trust me there would have been no news coverage. But that’s the everyday racism, the kind that doesn't penetrate into the soul.

The take my breath away racist moment happened at a potluck. Four of us had gotten together at a friend’s house for lunch. One of the women mentioned that her sister had recently received surprising DNA results from Ancestry.

Matter of factly I asked, “did she find out she had a different father?”

“I guess being African-American,” her husband responded, “you would know something about that.”

I felt my blood pressure rise. I wanted to blow up the spot but we were in the country and my ride back to town wasn’t coming for more than an hour. I sucked it up and after counting to 100, twice, said, “Their marriage wasn’t always happy and sometimes when people are unhappy in a marriage they stray.”

Later he made another racist comment. I don’t need to detail it; what I wondered was why? This was a man I’d thought was progressive—an active member of the Unitarian Universalists, Jewish by birth. How had shit like that spilled out of his mouth? If that’s what he felt, it was better to know than not know. But it made me sad. This was a close friend’s husband and I couldn’t be around him anymore.

On Stage Again

When Alan Jordan emailed to see if I was interested in working in a play he was directing, I gave my standard, last 10-years answer, “I’m not doing that any more,” and wondered why a director in this community who choose a play that required a Black actress. Alan persisted and sent me information on the writer, Robert Schenkkan. His credentials were impressive—a Pulitzer prize, Tony Award, and Writer's Guild Award winning playwright and screenwriter. Building the Wall was Schenkkan’s response to the Trump presidency—written in what he described as a white-hot fury that imagines a not so distant future in which now President Trump’s racist campaign rhetoric on emigration and border security has found its full expression. I couldn’t just walk away from this. I asked to read the play.

The Pollyanna piece of me wanted to believe Schenkkan’s scenario was inconceivable but I knew it was plausible. I’d known that Obama’s Presidency would unleash long-suppressed racism in the U.S. but it was much worse than I’d anticipated—three to four times worse. And internationally people were moving backwards, wanting to retract from rather than embrace globalization. Internationally racism, intolerance and isolationism are on the rise. Something as dark, as apocalyptic as Schenkkan imagined could happen. Did I want to live with this darkness for the next two months?

I like being blessedly removed from the turmoil in the U.S. and am glad that I don’t live there now. But I still want to add my voice to the resistance of Trump’s presidency in as many ways and as loudly as I can. Building the Wall would provide another vehicle and was ultimately the reason I decided to do the play. That and the need to shake things up—life in San Miguel was beginning to feel ho-hum. Plus I liked being part of the Building the Wall movement, being one of the cities, and the only one in Mexico, to participate in this rolling 2017 premiere. Two cities, Los Angeles and Denver, had already mounted the play and fives others had also committed to produce it.

We had our first read through a month before rehearsals started and Alan wanted us to be off-book (lines learned) when rehearsals begin. This was different from what I preferred—I liked to learn my lines with my blocking and the first read through was usually the first day of rehearsal, not a month before. But I was glad we did it early. It got me excited about being on stage again. I had a great rapport with David Galitzky, the actor playing Rick. I felt that little jolt, almost electric, I used to feel when I was on stage.

This was a different kind of role for me. Gloria was the interviewer; mostly she asked questions. There was almost no narrative arch to her lines, which I was catching hell trying to learn. I’d sloughed it off when a couple of people I knew joked about how my memory must be much better than their since I’d committed to do a two character play. It had always been easy for me to learn lines. I hadn’t considered the possibility that it might be different now at 67. The words weren’t sticking and Alan wanted us to be word perfect. He didn’t get what he wanted but they were 95+% there by opening night. I loved the directorial choices Alan made—Rick wasn’t a monster and Gloria wasn’t a passive interviewer. This play had the potential to be deadly dull but Alan created on-stage excitement.

There’s nothing like working in front of a live audience. It’s not just the interplay between the actors but that third live component that creates the electricity. We were sold out every night which means we’ll probably reprise the play in late November.

I’m looking forward to it.

Sally Hemings

About a week ago a friend forwarded an article from the Washington Post, “For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings.” I threw my head back and laughed, glad that I could now. For years, I couldn’t.

Almost 40 years ago I developed a one-woman show about Sally Hemings. A close friend, Saundra Franks, had developed a piece on Harriet Tubman and I copied her initiative. It appealed on several levels—exploring a Black woman’s life, creating a vehicle that showcased my acting range, and control. An old boy friend labeled me a control freak. I called him a liar but he was probably right. Having my own show, something that I could market without waiting for someone to cast me was equally as important as the creative aspect. I started to search for someone whose life I might want to recreate.

A friend suggested Sally Hemings. I had never heard of her. But my friend said her name off-handedly, like I was supposed to know who she was so I didn’t confess my ignorance. This was pre-Internet so I went to the library. What I discovered fascinated me—a slave who moved from Virginia to Paris and back. What did that feel like—both the going and the coming home?  Did she fit in either world?  And what did Sally, a slave and Jefferson's dead wife’s half sister, and Jefferson, one of the most dynamic men of the 18th century, share? I wanted to explore that, wanted my one-woman show to be about her.

Sally was a bitch to develop. The few Jefferson historians who mentioned Sally denied that she’d had an intimate relationship with the President. Like Jefferson’s oldest daughter Martha, they claimed Jefferson’s nephews Samuel or Peter Carr, or both, fathered Sally’s children. What was written about her could be summarized in one page. There was no Sally Hemings’ story. I’d have to invent her life.

Finally I had a script, one that I wrote after my attempts to collaborate with writers failed. I got a grant from the Atlanta Arts Council to produce it, and landed my first gig. I started to fantasize. Soon I’d be booked solid like my friend for most of February and March (Black and Women’s History months). Make enough during those two months so I could coast between acting jobs and not have to do temp work. It was a great script but life didn’t follow it. I couldn’t get a booking agent. Everyone I contacted, and I contacted plenty, had the more or less the same response—what proof is there that this relationship existed? I knew Sally was controversial. Knew most historians didn’t agree with Professor Fawn Brodie who methodically documented Jefferson’s relationship with Sally in her biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. But I didn’t think controversial meant un-bookable. If anything I thought there would be more interest, you know salacious and all. But people weren’t ready to be salacious about Jefferson, one of the founding fathers.

Doing Sally of Monticello stretched me, in a multiplicity of ways. I wasn’t scholarly when I undertook the project but became an excellent researcher. I’d never written a play. I’d never done marketing. As an actor, I had a dream role, a character that ages 15 to 56. I learned plenty but didn’t get many bookings and that pissed me off, for years.  So I was glad that I could laugh. No longer angry that I’d been ahead of the curve but amused by it.

Movie Mania

One of the things I missed most when I came to San Miguel was film. Movies were always part of my life.

I was a little girl, maybe five, the first time we went to the movies to see Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones. We went right after church, dressed in our Sunday best. We couldn’t go see our Negro movies stars in everyday clothes. That would be insulting. Dorothy slithered and strutted so that even Granddaddy, who was as straight up and down and they came, ogled her. She strutted across the screen singing, “I go for you and I’m taboo.” All three women, Grandma, Aunt Hazel and Mama, transferred Harry’s seething desire for Dorothy to themselves. They vibrated at a high frequency during dinner that night.

The movies I watched were light fare until I took a foreign film class in college freshman year —once a week at the theatre on 6^th Avenue, opposite West 3^rd Street. Our class met in the morning before the theatre opened to the public. These movies were slower, had less dialogue. Directors, not the actors, were the stars of these films: Kurosawa, who showed me that perspective is everything; Fellini, blending seemingly discordant elements; Godard, who mixed popular American culture with Marxist ideas; Truffaut, who exposed my naïve seventeen-year-old self to a tragic love triangle; and Bergman, my favorite, who coaxed the most amazing performance I’d ever seen by an actress from Liv Ullmann in Face to Face. Movies take me to other worlds, something I’ve needed to do more and more since Trump became the president. Thank God we have them now in San Miguel.

When I arrived almost twelve years ago there were none—well not exactly. There was one movie theatre in the old Gigante mall that primarily showcased blockbusters, a hotel in Centro, the Jacaranda, which projected classics on a pull-down screen, and a poorly stocked Blockbuster store. I caught as many movies as I could when I was in the States, friends sent bootlegs from New York but me, the woman who saw everything, had seen less than a quarter of the films nominated for Globes and Academies my first year in San Miguel—something else that made me feel disconnected from old life.

Then the bootlegs came. Initially I resisted. I wouldn’t buy them in the States because I thought it was fundamentally wrong to profit from someone’s creation without paying them. And lots of my friends were actor and musicians who needed their royalties. But I quickly abandoned my scruples. I remembered something one of my aunts said when she was in her 80s, “Cyn, you trade-in some of your righteousness for pleasure when you get older,” and made that my rational for abandoning my principles. Movies bring me pleasure and I need all I can get now that this misogynistic, ego manic is running America.

Daily I vacillate. How do you categorize what’s happening? Is it a farce or a nightmare? Ben Carson to head HUD (because he’d grown up in a housing project), Scott Prutt, an anti-climate control guy, in charge of the EPA, and Trump’s constant interference with President Obama’s last months of governing.  But regardless of how you label it, I need something everyday to adjust my attitude. A steady dose of alcohol at Christmas parties got me through December. Movies took over in the New Year. In January, the for your consideration DVD copies of Golden Globe and Academy Award nominees started to make their way into our community and my intense movie binge began. The behavioral pivot I was hoping for after the inauguration didn’t happen. My movie consumption doubled. Once the awards season ends bootlegs slow to a trickle and the movie house seldom screens anything I want to see. How will I assuage my soul in February?

Choosing Chacala

I wasn’t excited when Emilia Robinson, director of Chacalit, Chacala’s first Literary Festival, asked me to teach during my writing residency. Who wanted to take a writing class while they were chilling at the beach? Maybe some of the locals but I’d have to teach in English, and how many locals were bilingual? Would beach-adled minds be serious? I’d feared the class would be painfully small, six at most. Twelve attended my first class and only one was a Mexican local. Most were foreigners from the U.S. and Canada.

I was surprised at the size of Chacala’s expat community, proportionally at least as large as San Miguel’s. Hollywood has infused my notion of who hangs out in a small Mexican village, people who need to hide—hoodlums, druggies or errand heiresses (or heirs). None of the expats I met in Chacala fit this mold. They included a retired Canadian judge; a Mormon couple from Utah; a yoga instructor who had a traveling practice (Hawaii will be her next stop); and a real estate who’d come to Chacala for a quarter to sell local properties. Some were full-timers, others, part-timers who owned homes. I understood the retirees like David, who moved there from Seattle. David came more than three years ago and spearheads Chacalart, the visual art component of The Chacala Cultural Foundation. But young people who are still working and have families—why would they choose to live in a place where nothing happens. I spoke with some of them to learn why they’d chosen to move to Chacala.

Love brought Emilia Robinson—an Oxford grad who studied French and Italian language and literature—to Chacala. When she was 19, a volunteer project brought Emilia to Guadalajara to teach English. She met husband, Arturo, three days after she arrived. When Emilia returned to study for her degree, Arturo decided to check out London. He loved it, and stayed working primarily in food services. They toyed with opening a Mexican restaurant in Oxford after Emilia finished her degree, but discovered Chacala—the perfect beach town that only lacked one thing, a friendly place to get good coffee and decent wine. In 2007, she and Arturo opened a breakfast café that evolved into Chac Mool, a beachfront restaurant that is open from dawn till past dusk. Now that Chac Mool is established and Emilia has two girls, she has relinquished on-site responsibilities and works from home.

Emilia also works to impact her community. Chacala will grow, she knows that, but feels that the present community is in a position to influence the direction of that development. She’s proud of Chacala’s efforts to improve the formal education of the local children. This tiny community has a Waldorf & Montessori School that offers scholarships to 90% of their students. And Emilia has been the motivating force behind Chacala’s Saturday market and has established Chacalit. “It is easier,” Emilia said, “to make a difference to a small town.” She thinks bringing musical, artistic and literary events to town enriches experiences for local people and visitors, including opportunities to perform and produce work. They also bring high quality artists to the area. Emilia feels the arts are empowering, sustainable and encourage diversity, qualities that can benefit her community.

Debbie Slobe described her family as “typical suburbanites.” Before they came to Chacala they lived in Louisville, Colorado, a city that multiple national publications rated as one of the top five places to live in the U.S. Debbie, a manager at a nonprofit PR agency, and husband Brian, a middle school science teacher, choose a place with good schools, safe neighborhoods and a sweet little downtown to raise their daughter. But that’s where typical ended. Both had lived and worked outside the U.S., and they planned to take an extended break from everyday life before retirement. The suburbanites I knew weren’t thinking like that, hadn’t lived in places like South Africa before they started families. The Slobe family isn’t my idea of typical.

It took four years to save for their year off. Debbie and Brian knew they wanted to spend their down time in Mexico—a place they’d both visited, a culture they both loved, a place where they could improve their Spanish. The cost of living was inexpensive enough to make a year off feasible and they’d learned, from previous trips, that Mexico was family friendly.

They considered Sayulita but it wasn’t for them—too expensive, too crowed and polluted. They weren’t sure where they would land until a friend recommended Chacala. Their friend loved the village when she stayed at Mar de Jade, Chacala’s yoga, wellness and vacation retreat center and told them about the town’s new Montessori school. They arrived last November. They should have gone home last month but have been so happy with their decision to relocate in this fishing village that their one-year sabbatical has morphed into two. To finance this additional year, Debbie has gone back to work again, part-time, through the Internet, as a freelance communications consultant.

Jen Barnett and husband Boe have not taken the beaten-path. They lived in Alaska for 15 years before relocating to Mexico. Jen discovered Chacala in 2002 when she brought a group of her homeschooled high school students from Alaska to Chacala for language, culture, & leadership studies. After the program was put on hold because of increasing safety concerns with travel to Mexico, she and Boe vacationed in Chacala as a reprieve from the harsh Alaskan winters when they could afford it. Mid-way through their Alaskan chapter, they started a microbrewery and restaurant with another business partner. It grew so rapidly that they quickly found themselves up to their eyeballs in a lifestyle they didn't enjoy. They bought a 1968 Airstream, sold everything that didn’t fit inside it and started to drive south in search of a new place to call home.

They wandered aimlessly for a year and a half before they headed to Chacala uncertain about which direction they wanted to take—someplace all too normal like New Mexico or move somewhere halfway around the world that would cut themselves further from convention. They didn’t do either; they stayed in Chacala. Their children, Enli (ten), and Parker (six), love life there and are almost bilingual. Previously homeschooled, they are attending school for the first time at the local Waldorf and Montessori School. Boe, a poet and writing teacher for homeschooled high school students, has secured enough work online to keep the family afloat. She and Boe are about to open a little artisanal brewery in Chacala that they hope to build slowly until it sustains them.

Kristina Kieffer and her husband Andy were living in San Francisco. Andy developed business software for various companies and Kristina had been a global project manager in the high tech industry. They were good at their work and it generated a ton of money, recognition, and the opportunity to work with smart people from many parts of the world. But it wasn’t a calling for either of them. Adventure was their calling, backpacking to far off lands. Andy developed a passion for surfing, Kristina’s joy came from her volunteer work assisting refugees adapt to their new U.S. lives.

When their daughters were born, Kristina became an at-home mom. The toxic combination of social isolation, boredom, grey San Francisco skies, and dwindling finances, she said, pushed her into post partum depression. They were walking down a beach in Puerto Vallarta, during a spur of the moment trip, when they decided to pull up stakes and start over. It was important to them that their children learn another language and culture so they decided on Mexico. They wanted a city because of schools, financial opportunities, and easy access to an airport that was close to the warm water surf Andy required. They decided on Guadalajara, a huge city only 3½ hours from the beach. Their work is variations of the kind of work they did in the States—Kristina teaches business English and coaches young professionals on their careers. Andy opened a tech investment fund that focuses on Mexican business problems.

There is a famous surf break just around the point in Chacala. The Kieffers came for a long weekend so Andy could check it out and ended up buying the house they’d rented. They love Guadalajara but it's huge and noisy and dirty. Their girls are 12 and 14 now and they expect to spend more time in Chacala as they get older. And activities of Chacala’s Cultural Foundation will only make the village more appealing. Kristina had only planned to spend the weekend in Chacala but extended her stay so that she could take the memoir workshop.

Emilia thinks the reason they are drawn to Chacala is the simplicity that comes with the old school way of life. Chacala’s current residents have decided that living simply does not have to mean devoid of culture. They have found ways to attract cultural happenings that generally are found in more populated cities to their village.