Christmas at City Center

We went to the Holiday concert of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on Xmas Eve at City Center. We came in town early enough to have coffee, tea and chocolate cake at a coffee shop near by. City Center has undergone a beautiful renovation. We were visiting for the first time and were greatly impressed with the beautiful, opulent Moorish decor/architecture. Our seats were on the stunning Grand Tier.
The program was an intellectual and emotional delight. Much of our past –– distant and recent – was celebrated and explicated in the dances. We loved ARDEN COURT choreographed by Paul Taylor. We saw CRY, THE HUNT, REVELATIONS. We loved them all. It was rewarding to see REVELATIONS. We left the theater feeling a little as if we had danced – as though we had participated in the energy of the performance. We were in an audience of people around whom Alvin Ailey – the man and the dance company – have built a tradition. I understood things more deeply after these many decades and it was thrilling to discover this. And they were/are venerable. I was a kid when Mr. Ailey started his company. I’m not a dancer, but I am touched personally by people who have danced in the Ailey company. My experience is as an audience member. I’m venerable,too now. I have sat and watched and moved my butt about in my seat at Ailey for a lot of years. On Christmas Eve I felt exhilarated that there were movements, moments that were still being done by a different company of dancers and still eliciting a gasp of delight or throb of tearfulness. But then Christmas is the time for the shameless sentimentalist. And that was it in a nutshell for me! The Ailey program allowed me to feel sentimental, nostalgic and celebratory. But they did not stay in the past so long that they seemed mired in it. In fact they whetted our appetites to see more modern dance. I left feeling aloft. My most selfish and self revelatory reaction to the performance was that The Company, the choreographic legacy, the traditions and I/We have aged well – we’ve weathered (dare I say it ;–)) beautifully. We had a lovely time! We had a Christmastime made more festive and more bountiful by Alvin Ailey and the Ailey Company.

Dry-eyed and hope ascendant

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Moseley



Well Walter Moseley is a wizard of fiction. THE LAST DAYS OF PTOLEMY GREY is a graceful book that made me feel better about myself. Moseley's novel reminded me of the very important novel, A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines. This,too,is a graceful reflection on the purpose of life that speaks eloquently - certifying that the length of time left in a life is not what makes it meaningful. I ought to have cried at the end of this book. I didn't. I am a known crybaby. But this novel is about finishing up not dying. Perhaps I have attended to dying often enough now to NOT cry at death. Sometimes it isn't a tragedy to die but a worse one to keep on living in pain and confusion. My sisters and I have attended to the passings of our parents and their siblings. We know how it goes. The book gives it to you in much the way of it. It isn't a sad and mopey book. And it is not falsely hopeful either. This is a novel of life in the contemporary urban ( as always it is Moseley's L.A.) without the grotesque violence and sex depictions of much contemporary urban fiction. It is nevertheless real - real life.  And it is in every way a hopeful book . It is life-affirming. The cleaning and packing up was evocative and familiar and was a lovely platform to reveal the story and connect the characters. As always in Walter Moseley's fiction there is a plot. There are actions and there is suspense and there are interesting people to do it all.

Beloved parents gone

My father died at ninety-six like Ptolemy Grey though his  life was not that similar. The precious last days as rendered -  more than a picture and more than a map -- by Walter Moseley felt right. I imagined that my father may have experienced similar things. My mother's  going was different. We can't actually know what thoughts the naturally occurring brain chemicals cause when the body winds down. And we can't know what effect a drug that is supposed to work for the kidneys or the liver or the heart is doing to the brain. But we who've attended the last of a parent or spouse know that all the action is in the brain. Walter Moseley has shown his prowess by putting us in that courageous, failing, struggling, triumphant brain. I felt good and satisfied at the end -- less afraid and dry-eyed.

the sacred and human intimacy

Human beings are being at their best when they give and receive love and friendship

What I think I like most about Mary Johnson's memoir AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST: FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN AUTHENTIC LIFE is that it satisfies curiosity. It answers questions that I've nursed a very long time. I went to Catholic school as a youngster in Washington, D.C. Catholic schools were a good, educational alternative to the District's school system in the sixties. My father was raised as a Catholic though my mother was not. My sisters and I were baptized, confirmed, attended the schools, prayed in the parish church and had rosary beads.
A former nun’s memoir? Wow!  AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST satisfies curiosity about vocations, the day to day schedule in the convent and and the personalities of nuns. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I thought nuns were truly fascinating. I felt a bit of that admiration and understanding return with the reading. 

Of course it is the sex that fascinates. How could they swear to go without?  This is bull session fodder for Catholic school girls everywhere I suspect. It's what my suite-mate and I discussed in our college freshman year at a formerly Catholic girls' school that went secular. We had our "firsts" that first year and we shook our heads and asked how the nuns could have given up a thing like that without knowing about it -- without experiencing it. How much we pitied the poor girls that had.We figured the girls who'd gone to the convents had really been duped -- giving up the wonderful world of sex. 

I've had that stuff in a drawer for a long time. I've had two marriages, a child that came and went and other exchanges since I've thought much about the Catholic Church.  AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST has made me think back about a few things. 

But that wasn't all of it. Maggie and I both knew that sex wasn't the all of it about nuns. These weird women and girls had made a bold choice. We had a lot more honor and understanding of it -- the nun's vocation -- than either of us would have admitted in the late nineteen sixties. We knew nuns were supporters of the status quo. We knew them as individuals, too. We admired some of them. Paradoxically, some of them pointed us away from the provincial world of Washington, D.C. toward a wider world.
 
And I was moved to tears while reading AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST. It made me long to be a naive believer again. I continue to be too cowardly to admit publicly that I am an atheist. I prefer to say that I am agnostic. I can then be polite about how I feel. It is sometimes very difficult to assert yourself as a decent and moral individual who questions religious organizations. And it is tempting to deny being influenced by the tenets of the religious organization you were raised with. I attended Catholic elementary and high school. It was a very good education then -- and affordable. So my thoughts about my life with the church are mostly about academic rigor. I was a successful student -- encouraged as being smart -- you know: a smart Black girl. But the summer that I worked on The Poor Peoples' Campaign in Washington, D.C. and the nuns who taught at my high school refused to allow desperate people to shelter in our buildings I knew finally that they suffered from the same shortcomings as everybody else. Though they were pledged to charity they weren't much better at applying it to day to day living than anybody else. 

The strength of AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST is that its exploration of the nun’s vocation validates those vocations as a life choice not an ignorant, unexamined, desperate act. Unfortunately, many still hold to the idea that nuns are rejected, undesirable women whom only God would want. It’s a frequent point of humor. That we don’t know much about the day to day life of nuns is probably because to expose the private side of the vocation as Mary Johnson has so bravely done, is to open a sack whose contents can’t be controlled. I hadn’t realized how imperiled the individual personality was in the traditional religious order. Mary Johnson gives us a unique and unsparing glimpse at the destruction to individuality while honoring the grand design of it. The cult of selflessness itself is what destroys the nun’s utopia. Human beings are being at their best when they give and receive love and friendship. So that the extreme celibacy of religious orders would seem to work against a social human's true vocation: to love one's neighbor AND one's self. For the truly troubling thing that AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST  elucidates is that it is not only sexual intercourse, genital to genital contact and sexual foreplay that are prohibited, but everyday, ordinary touches and friendships -- interactions that  make a woman or man socially adjusted. 

Then there is Mother Teresa herself. AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST: FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN AUTHENTIC LIFE is a book that reads like less about Mother than her work and the organization of her sisters. This is perhaps the thing about which she would be the most pleased. 

Mother Teresa emerges from AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST as a broad-shouldered charismatic -- a John the Baptist kind of person, a Joan of Arc - type -- filled with God's fervor and acting on direct instructions from God. We are well able, through Mary Johnson's soulful testimony, to see her magnetism. We can feel her bursting through the doors of other peoples’ limitations and getting it done for the desperately poor of the world. One is not left wondering why any woman would join with Mother, but why there could not have been an easier way to do so.  
Like the vocation of Mother Teresa the language of this memoir is simple -- not elemental, simplistic, naive or raw - but un-embroidered and clear. Mary Johnson has managed to be gentle in her treatment of the subject -- loving without being namby-pamby and unquestioning. I was so surprised to be tearful -- to be moved when Sister Donata left the order. It broke my heart some that she couldn't make it work. How else would I have met Mary Johnson though? How else could she have written this fascinating and affecting memoir?  

FIND links to more of Mary's thoughts and to her memoir at: http://marycjohnson.squarespace.com/book-an-unquenchable-thirst/


An interesting connection also is the remarkable story of the founding of A ROOM OF HER OWN FOUNDATION based on the surprising coincidence and commitment that brought Mary Johnson and Darlene Chandler Bassett together. Check out the organization’s story at:
http://www.aroomofherown.org/home.php

BLACK GOTHAM by Carla L. Peterson

I think of New York City as being a big bite. I fear it is too much to get the lips around -- when I'm thinking of wolfing down some chronological history. It is unwieldy because of its density. So the histories of New York that I generally go for are ones that slice off a bit and serve it up. I have been thrilled in reading BLACK GOTHAM by Carla L. Peterson to discover a good-sized, palatable chunk of history about Blacks/African Americans in nineteenth century New York. Enough about food -- consuming. This book is smooth reading. Peterson leads us through the lives of her ancestors/forebears with grace -- looking at them with respect, candor and scholarship. There are familiar names: Henry Highland Garnet, James McCune Smith, Alexander Crummell and Thomas Downing - woven in with Peterson's lesser known relations. I'm a scholar of African American history in the mid-atlantic so I've come to these names before. Peterson brings them together in historical chronology and in an interesting New York City social landscape. And yes, that's the part I like. These people needed to be put back into the landscape. Their churches, their houses, their schools, their businesses needed to be considered again. Okay, so I'm keen to imagine the lives of nineteenth century African peoples in the mid-atlantic -- the Atlantic Creole Nation. I think BLACK GOTHAM has wide appeal. New York City civic life was not and has never ever been unaffected by the lives and contributions of African and Atlantic Creole people. If you're going to know the history of New York, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Long Island, Connecticut, etc. you have to take account of these lives, as well as, those more closely identified with Europe. Carla Peterson leads us through her own genealogical research skillfully. Her hand is light and deft here so as not to bog down. Peterson has shown useful restraint in descriptions and depictions of skin color and hair conformation. Drawings, photographs and biographical information suggest plenty, but textual characterizations are fewer. More concentration is placed on economics, jobs, professions, educational opportunity and achievement. I liked this. By the time I reached the conclusions of the text I realized how much had been revealed without spotlighting racial appearance. Not ignoring -- not accounting -- not belaboring. Care was also taken in description of the events of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. These rows have, of course, been plowed before. Peterson gives us a harrowing though succinct account of the events and their effect on the people whose lives the book follows. The book's attention does not stray from the Black elites so that we understand little of what happens to those who have less property to lose and more vulnerability. The point is made, however, that the racial violence of the Draft Riot, created chaos for Blacks of all social strata and economic circumstance. It's disappointing, but not surprising that less is known about the women of the periods covered. However, the author relies on Maritcha Lyons' MEMORIES OF YESTERDAY to add to depictions of individuals and institutions.
Also noteworthy and delightful is the detail of information about the nineteenth pharmacy profession and the career of pharmacist, Phillip A. White. Particularly painful are the struggles of Peter Williams Ray and John DeGrasse to be educated and recognized in the medical profession.

All too often the people who get most literary attention are the individuals of outstanding achievement or the colorful rogues and miscreants of history. As BLACK GOTHAM aptly proves ordinary people, emboldened by their personal triumph over adversity, are very interesting.

As a novelist with a keen interest in the biographies of African American identified people who gets nourishment from reading -- I give BLACK GOTHAM by Carla L. Peterson five biscuits and a few pats of butter for a book well done! Strawberry jam? Honey? You choose. EAT THIS BOOK!