The excellent Stacia L. Brown on “The Luxury of Hope”:
During the weekend of rejoicing and resistance that followed the presser, I checked in with old friends to see if they were feeling as invigorated as I was. Did Mosby’s bold statement that “no one is above the law” resonate because she was backing it with felony charges, or did it ring as hollow as other similar statements had in years past? Did this moment feel as seminal to them as it did to me? I asked writer Koye Berry, certified nursing assistant Katrice Evans, and mother Nikia Washington to tell me what they thought the future might hold for our city.
“Reporters were always crossing rooms to talk to Mallory, but this one was coming to talk to me“:
Between editing the Toast, being a wife, and mother of two, and also being prolific at tweeting, how do you do it all? What’s a typical day for you?
My husband also works from home, so that frees us both up a little. I wake up at six, I make coffee and eat breakfast and check Twitter, I putter around doing dishes and laundry. My daughter wakes up at seven and I grab the baby on my way into her room. I feed him while hanging out with her and listening to the Lion King soundtrack. My husband takes her about half an hour in and they watch Scooby Doo and then he does the preschool run. I put the baby in the car and drive to the gym, he sits under a table and listens to ’90s hip-hop while I do boot camp, we drive home, I feed him again, he goes down for his nap, I do my work, he wakes up, I feed him, he plays on his mat, I do my work. This continues until my daughter gets home from school. We hang out together, she eats, like, half a cracker for dinner, she has a bath, we read books. My husband carries the baby around in a sling for a bit. My daughter goes to bed. I make dinner, we eat it, the baby goes to sleep, and then we watch about three straight hours of television together and then go to sleep, I wake up once or twice to feed in the night. And I can Tweet while he eats, blessedly.
*
I still get a full-body shiver when someone says “real estate broker”:
When we got to the apartment he was about to show us, the broker had already been attempting to access the building by dialing up random tenants and asking them to buzz him in. “Can you try buzzing someone?” he asked my roommate, raising one of countless red flags. “This one guy already yelled at me, and they might be kinder to a female voice.”
After someone buzzed my roommate in, we entered a strongly pot-scented hallway and turned towards the stairwell. Then the broker realized that we had already passed the apartment in question. We doubled back, only to realize the door was locked and, surprise!, our broker didn’t have the keys to that either.
“Should we call that?” my roommate asked, indicating a sign with a phone number taped to the door. “Sure,” the broker shrugged.
*
Rebecca Carroll on how the police meet black women with both racism AND sexism (and also how transracial adoptive parents need to do a better job):
I have never conceived of the police as there to serve and protect me: not as a woman, not as a black person, certainly not as a black woman and now – every minute of now – not as the mother of a black son. And although I have had numerous variations of “the talk” with my son, I never heard it growing up as a black child with white parents. Can’t help but to think it may have lessened the blow when as a kid I overheard police officers say things like: “Blacks don’t know shit.”
*
*
Love this story about a teenage Orson Welles auditioning for a play in Ireland:
So. Orson Welles, a precocious and bold teenager, who had already had much success in his high school years, appearing on radio shows with his own adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story, and basically taking over the drama club, strolled into the audition, unannounced, unheralded. No one who was there forgot that day.
MacLiammóir’s stories of Welles’ first audition for them are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLiammóir, in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several, as I mentioned) describes being told “There’s an American teenager in the lobby … he says he wants to audition … what should I tell him?” … This “American teenager” claimed he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (which, of course, was totally untrue). Welles was basically standing out there demanding an audition. MacLiammóir said sure, send the kid in, and in walked Orson Welles.
*
u were wrong, darksithbunny pic.twitter.com/rBIU7ZbgXT
— Anna Marquardt (@ajlobster) May 6, 2015
