Community Blog

As National Poetry Month draws to a close, we thought we’d leave you with some voices from around the world.

THE JOURNEY
Margaret Reckord, Jamaica

Moon-soaked
she emitted
a cold radiance
that made all
who loved her
leave her alone
As well
they might -
hers was the single
silver track
upmountain
to the moon.

TO MY UNKNOWN FRIEND
Irina Ratushinskaya, Ukraine & Russia
(translated by David McDuff)

Above my half of the world
The comets spread their tails.
In my half of the century
Half the world looks me in the eye.
In my hemisphere the wind's blowing,
There are feasts of plague without end.
But a searchlight shines in our faces,
And effaces the touch of death.
And our madness retreats from us,
And our sadnesses pass through us,
And we stand in the midst of our Fates,
Setting our shoulders against the plague.
We shall hold it back with our selves,
We shall stride through the nightmare.
It will not get further than us - don't be afraid
On the other side of the globe!

LIFE-HOOK
Juana De Ibarbourou, Uruguay
(Translated by Marti Moody)

If I die, don't take me to the cemetery.
My grave is opening
right at the surface of the earth, near the laughing
clatter of some birdhouse,
near a fountain and its gossip.

Right at the surface, love. Almost above ground
where the sun can heat my bones, and my eyes
can climb the stems of plants to watch
the sunset, its fierce red lamp.

Right at the surface. So the passage
will be short. I already see
my body fighting to get back above the soil,
to feel the wind again.

I know my hands may never calm down.
The ghosts around me will be dim, juiceless, but my
     hands
will scratch like moles.

Sprout seeds for me. I want them growing
in the yellow chalk of my bones.
I'll climb the roots like a grey staircase, and watch you
from the purple lilies.

In honor of National Poetry Month, our Women’s Wednesday post this last week featured Olivia Gatwood. For this week’s blog, we offer you the first poem of hers that our founder ever heard – so profoundly impacted, she immediately purchased Ms. Gatwood’s collection, “New American Best Friend” and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Check out the links below the poem too!

(Please note that the pieces in italics should be indented, but the formatting is being fussy.)

ODE TO THE WOMEN ON LONG ISLAND
after Jennifer Givhan

I want to write a poem for the women on Long Island
who smoke cigarettes in their SUV's with the windows
rolled up before walking into yoga, who hack and curse
in downward dog and Debra from the next block over, who
has strong opinions about Christmas lights after
New Years, who says that her body isn't what it used to be
but neither is the economy or the bagels at Rickman's Deli
so who really cares, who, during Shavasana, brings up
the rabbi's daughter, who got an abortion last spring,
and Candy in the corner, who is mousy and kind but
makes a show of removing her diamond ring before 
class because it's just too heavy, calls Debra hateful
and the class takes a sharp inhale through the nose
then out through the mouth. and after class, after Candy
rushes home to check the lasagna, Debra lights up
a smoke and calls her best friend Tammy
So then the girl calls me hateful
hateful, can you believe it? What a word
some kind of dictionary bitch over here
and so you know what I says? I says
you don't know the first thing about hateful,
wanna know what's hateful? Menopause.
And it doesn't really matter if Debra actually said that 
to Candy (which she didn't) because Tammy is so
caught up that Candy called Debra hateful (which she did)
that next week when Tammy runs into Candy while
shopping in Rockville Center and Candy asks Tammy
how she's doing, Tammy will adjust the purse strap
on her shoulder and say, We all have a little coal
in our stocking, Candy, and Candy will shuffle away,
certain that Tammy knows something about her marriage
that she shouldn't and she doesn't, she just loves
Debra, who just has a lot of opinions and had Candy given
her the chance to finish her sentence, Debra would have 
talked about the reproductive rights march she went to 
in the sixties and the counterproductive sex-shaming
methods of organized religion. I want to write a poem
for the women on Long Island, whose words stretch
and curl like bubblegum around the forefinger, who
ask if I have a boyfriend and before I answer, say
Don't do it. Don't ever do it. You know
my friend Linda, she's a lesbian,
like a real lesbian and whenever I go
over there, she lives on Corona by
Merrick, by the laundromat you know where
I'm talking about? Whenever I go over there
and see her and her wife, what's her name
I can never remember the girl's name
anyway whenever I go there I says you know
what I need? I says, a girlfriend, that's what I need.
The women on Long Island smoke weed once a month
on the side of the house after their husbands - Richard Larry
Gary Mike or Tony - go to bed, they let their teenage
daughters throw parties in the basement while they watch
the Home Network upstairs and keep a bat by the couch
in case anyone gets mickied, even if it's their own son
who did the drugging, the women on Long Island won't
put it past any many to be guilty, even their kin who,
after all, have their husband's hands and blood and
last week, when a girl was murdered while jogging
in Queens, the women on Long Island were un-startled
and furious, they did not call to warn daughters.
They called their sons. Took their car keys, their coats, 
locked the door and sat them at the kitchen table,
If you ever, and I mean ever, so much as
make a woman feel uncomfortable
I will take you to the deli and put your
hand in the meat slicer, you think I won't?
You hear me? I will make a hero out of you.
With mayonnaise and tomatoes and dill and onions
I want to write a poem for the women on Long Island
who, when I show them the knife I carry in my purse,
tell me it's not big enough, who are waitresses
and realtors and massage therapists and social workers
and housewives and nannies and tell me they wish
they would have been artists but
Life comes fast. One minute you're taking typing classes
for your new secretary job in the World Trade Center
and the next it's all almost over, life I mean, but I kicked
and screamed my way through it, and so will you,
I can tell by the way you walk. One more thing
when they call you a bitch, say thank you,
say thank you, very much.

Recommended Links of Olivia Reading

Featured poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqpip0H1QTE

2019 at the strand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gxCveb9ZBE

2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ8W522jPyk

By Leah S. Abrams

What I hope is that we learned, learned so very much, about how to make a different world rather than the familiar, severely broken one, how to live up to the promise of our species.

But we have been here before.  Nothing, except maybe The Big Bang, and probably not even that because surely it too was replicating a previous event, is actually unprecedented.  I am about as weary of that term as I am the word “pivot” and the most worn-out phrase of them all, “lean in.”  How many songs, poems, essays, lectures, etc., etc. tell us how “it’s all just a little bit of history repeating”? (If the reader is interested, the writer hears the great Shirley Bassey in her head while typing that.)

At the cult favorite’s highly contested final episode of the early 00’s “Battlestar Galactica” remake, I wept, a good deal.  Now, if you’ve watched a show or film with me, you know this is not all that unusual.  Early on, I learned that the people who torment you for being too sensitive, crying too easily, will largely give you a pass on the behaviour if it’s in a dark theatre, in response to something seemingly external like, say, “E.T.” (And here the writer would like to thank Adam F. Goldberg for “The Goldbergs” episode addressing those of us who had a hyper-emotional response to the 1982 Stephen Spielberg hit.)  The art that affects me that powerfully hits somewhere fundamental to my core, often a message I take as commentary on the human species at large.

I remember watching that last “Battlestar Galactica” episode and thinking I would opt for Captain Adama’s choice – just sit it out, alone, peaceful, quiet, with a stellar natural view, lost in time with recently deceased love-of-life.  (Did I not warn you that there are spoilers? They remade the thing nearly two decades ago, so this is on you.)  After all that battling and seeking, to come to realize there’s nothing most humans (or cylons) can offer that will bring the calm of solitude, of giving the brain over to the person who created joy, inspired, was your comfort and confidence and confidant, even if they’ve departed to another dimensional energy.  For me, then, I imagined spending eternity with memories of my dad who died a couple of years before the show came out.

If I could, though, I also thought at that viewing, I would opt for the Starbuck out.  To realize the pattern never ceases repeating, that the only way out for real is to let go entirely of the self, to accept that a thousand lifetimes will pass and the humans will keep not retaining the great lessons supposedly learned, doomed to be the species that willingly rejects its ability to transcend all its innate potential, forever choosing instead to give over to its most base selfishness and savagery.  One may say it’s the chimp in us beating down the inner bonobo.

But the truth of it is that I’m still a bit of a Lee Adama – having seen the potential to do it all differently, holding onto the dreamer’s vision of actually creating a global society where cities and countries and borders are at last dispersed with in the great realization that they are a construct like so much of our lives.

Frankly, it is a shame that our global pandemic has not featured a universal required viewing of that “Battlestar Galactica” redux.  There they were – years of warring and re-learning to literally save the species from extinction, a species thrown from its own planet, searching for this mythical Eden called Earth.  Too many of us humans refuse to recognize just how close to the brink we are and that our supposed progression has largely amounted to over-population and unnecessary infringements on our planet, resulting in catastrophic destruction.

Chew on this offering from biologist Edward O. Wilson on if humans were to suddenly disappear: the earth “would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten-thousand years ago.”  But “if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”  Why do I raise this point?  Insect numbers and diversity are declining at alarming rates:  a decrease of 80% in numbers and 40% in diversity of New Hampshire’s beetles, Netherlands’ butterfly numbers down 85%, in Germany, a 30% drop in species in widely protected grasslands and forests. (Kolbert, Elizabeth; “Where Have All the Insects Gone,” National Geographic, 05-2020.)

There is only one answer for surviving ourselves and we learned, throughout this last year, that it is achievable.  Already, though, I fear we are largely turning our back on the lessons.  Our worldwide break from “flying the friendly skies” and clogging up roads and bridges every morning and night in some bizarre insistence that all the humans go to their little cubes at the same time, largely resolved our climate impact problem.  I am not suggesting we stop everything for all time, but what if we were able to collectively celebrate that success, so inspired by its actuality that we came together and rose to our potential?

We choose to poison the planet.  We choose to create societies around money and power, both made up by us.  What we value, how we categorize and judge and demonize other members of our species?  It is all made up by us.  We have within us, and we have now seen real-time evidence of this, the ability to team up more universally to create a better reality for the entirety of our own species while simultaneously reversing our massacre of every other living species and our shared home, a planet revered above all else in “Battlestar Galactica.” 

The more time marches itself along in the linear fashion we’ve put upon it, the more confounded I am by we humans.  Over and over, we willingly battle; destroy; see things as winning over someone else, succeeding only when we can see another lose, suffer.  Instead of realizing that the energy spent tearing others down could be rerouted to create what amounts to “paradise on earth” for all, we prefer to boost ourselves at the expense of others.

Still, like the younger Adama, I can’t quite let go of the glimpse of the possible.  And I can’t quite help feel but the last year has taught me more about what is actually important and how our time could be spent if we weren’t in such a hurry to return to the constructs of martyring behaviour that leaves us at our worst, doomed forever to the repetition of global illness.

By Leah S. Abrams

Clove cigarettes
the scent of them
wafting on breath
of breeze
tasting like 
dreamy memory
pure delight of
small human
in its natural habitat
outdoors
the constants
the guaranteed smile
makes you
PAUSE
Breathe deep
Become aware of
the world
that is beyond
the world
In childhood
nothing so sweet as
smell of spring
fresh grass
warm cushion of it
idyllic sun-basked bed
And now
Here
May 2020
empty hillside
clover green
beckoning
as a lover
unmasked
as satisfying
air filling the senses
a gift from
the heavens themselves
and you
who does
follow
fathers’ advice to
stop! smell the roses
cannot fathom
how much more
glorious
could be
so forbidden
stealing
a thrill
beyond
imagining…

A poem by Jamie Rosler

I hold grudges
Or maybe
they hold me

Time and again
I remember
The things I didn't say
The points I didn't make
The wrongs I didn't right

Or you didn't

Or we

Forgiveness
without an apology
Forgive you
For me

Old friends & ex-lovers
visit dreams
Surreal impossibilities and mundane meetings,
in the world
in my head
Interrupted sleep
Startled by imagined moments

There was a wake yesterday
I've been sleeping better

One less grudge
One loss I'm not sorry for

Not sorry for me
Though
sorry for a mother's loss

Forgiveness
without an apology
Forgive you
For me

I hold grudges
Or maybe
they hold me

By Chrissy Brooks

Chrissy Brooks is a San Francisco Bay Area wife, mother of 2, actress, singer, dancer & blogger. Check her out at: chrissybrooks.com

On March 13, 2020, amidst the settling of the bleach-like powder in the audience seats, sprayed earlier in the day by men in white medical grade suits in an effort to disinfect the theater, I belted out Climb Every Mountain to an audience of a select few. As I performed this stirring aria, I tried not to choke on the chemicals floating in the air, or the emotional finality of the performance. The audience, the actors, and the backstage hands – we all knew this would be the last of our live performance opportunities for a long time. The musical, The Sound of Music, produced by Broadway By the Bay, was never opened to the public, and our country was on the brink of complete shutdown to address the COVID-19 spread.

And now here we are, one year later. I have not returned to the stage since March 13, 2020. Over the past year, I have spent the majority of my time tutoring my 10-year old. She struggles with the stress of online learning, like so many others. So, I am able to, and have chosen to focus my energy on helping her power through this tough time. With in-person learning on the horizon, soon she will be back in school; and I will have time on my hands again. But what should I do?

The performing arts world has come to a screeching halt, and jobs are difficult to find. Instead of going to a Palm Reader, which I seriously considered, being a virgin to palm reading, and so desperately needing guidance, I decided to ask my colleagues and friends for help. I wanted to hear other people’s stories in hopes it would help me find inspiration and direction, so I reached out to a few of my colleagues I have met over the decade of my life performing, working and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. These lovely humans are just a few of the brave people I know who have pivoted during the pandemic.

They are:

• Leandra Watson (Pre COVID: Costume Designer / Present: in process of rebranding herself)
• Tripp Hudgins (Pre COVID: Admin & Student / Present: Communications Catch-All)
• Katie Coleman (Pre COVID: SF Hamilton Pianist & Musical Director / Present: NYC Real Estate Agent)
• Nina Meehan (Pre COVID: Artist Director of BACT/ Present: CEO and Founder of BACT)

Leandra Watson, 32, was a full-time costume designer for theatre and opera. PreCOVID, she was traveling the high seas as a wardrobe supervisor for live entertainment on cruise ships. But once COVID-19 started affecting her work, she had to pivot. “Yes. At the time, it was out of necessity for survival,” Leandra explains. She was not making enough money doing theater, and her job kept her from making her health a priority. She continues, “I used it [her job in theater] as an excuse not to take care of myself, letting my health get pretty bad. It prevented me from having much of a social life or dating. And I couldn’t see it at the time, but it stood in the way of a lot of dreams and goals I have for my life.” Leandra hopes to have a career centering around herbs or interior design, but also hopes to settle down and raise a family as a full-time mom. Looking back, Leandra feels grateful for having to pivot careers, and she advises others looking for a career change to not “let fear hold you back from seeking your highest potential!”

Tripp Hudgins, 51, is a “communications catch-all at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, VA”. Prior to this position, he was writing his dissertation and working for Design Set Match as an admin in Berkeley, CA. “Then, everything shut down and the almost full-time nature of my [his] job ended as he went online. I worked far fewer hours from home. My wife’s position was also terminated. Then, to make matters more interesting, my family and I had to move. Our building scheduled to be torn down. This was not a surprise, but we were forced to move about a month after everything was shut down in the Bay Area. As fate would have it, we found a place to live all the way across the country in Richmond, VA so we could be near family.” Tripp is still looking for full-time work in and around Richmond, and even so far as D.C. His family’s move across country was necessary and motivated by the pandemic. His advice to others looking to pivot is, “you have to be really flexible and imagine ways of rebranding yourself as an employee. Get creative with how you re-imagine yourself. That’s what I have done and I have a phone interview tomorrow.”

Katie Coleman also left the Bay Area for the East Coast, after the pandemic hit. She moved out of necessity and was motivated by the pandemic. Katie is a professional pianist, and pre-COVID she was a musical theater director and pianist for the SF company of Hamilton. In March 2020, the SF Hamilton show abruptly closed. Katie then waited for months, not sure if the show would open again. She writes, “For the first six months of quarantine, there were a lot of teasers regarding when theater would come back. At first we thought we’d be shut down for 3 weeks or a month. Then two months. Then it was announced the show wouldn’t reopen in San Francisco.” Knowing eventually she wanted to end up in New York City, she decided to move across the country where she eventually got her real estate license. She officially started her new career as a real estate agent on February 1, 2021 in NYC. Her advice to others is “try your best to not have imposter syndrome, and instead, fully embrace FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.” She has re-invented herself many times before, and thinks that this won’t be her last.

Nina Meehan, CEO and founder of Bay Area Children’s Theater Company (BACT), has gotten creative with her pandemic pivot. She used to hold the title of Artistic Director at BACT, but since the pandemic hit, she changed her career path to help her company survive. She writes, “my job involved the art on the stage, the education programs happening all over the Bay Area, the audience experience, selecting future seasons…There was a lot of hands-on work that it takes to create live theatre.” Since live theater has suffered during this time, she pivoted to focus her efforts on creating Audio Musical Subscriptions boxes. She oversees a team in charge of packing, shipping, and creating online audio-musicals kits called Play On!. She views her pivot as necessary to her company’s survival, and is glad she made the shift in her career. Her advice to others having to change careers is to “try to give yourself the space to see the positives and the opportunities.”

It’s now March 13, 2021, and the world looks very different than it did a year ago. So many lives have been lost, jobs have been laid off, schools are struggling to open, and our country’s division and history of inequity has been brought to the political forefront. The physical and emotional strain of today is unprecedented, but we still must survive.

I am proud to say these brave few, interviewed in this article, are my colleagues and friends. They have persevered in unique ways to evolve in the world around them. Although their situations can appear to be unique to the Bay Area, we can all relate to their struggles. Their need to pivot during the pandemic is a global reality. These inspirational stories have helped me gain the confidence in making hard decisions.

This seems like the right time to take a leap of faith, to be brave, and to look for new opportunities. Once my kids are back in school full-time, I will be committing to a new career. What that career is yet, I don’t know. Although I am looking forward to the return of on-stage performances, I need to take this chance to explore other career opportunities. The performing arts world has been devastated by this pandemic, and it will need time to recover and renew. So, check back on June 14th at undiscoveredworks.org for an update on my pandemic pivot. I promise you this: I will be brave.

By Dylan Goodman

“When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit.” – bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

I can mark the changes of a year’s worth of living alone in quarantine by the abundance of silence. It did not used to be this way. Me, a queer Jewish unicorn with extroversion to spare, making it work in Brooklyn. In fact, I used to wonder if what I was missing in my twenties was an ability to sit still. Well, be careful what you wish for.

Under the pandemic, my life is slow now. I regularly fill my evenings with the time it takes to make dough from dollops of butter, eggs and flour. How the methodical kneading against the bowl can meld these disparate materials into a cohesive, sticky whole. I get lost in the routine of a baking recipe. It still feels like alchemy the way the same few ingredients, in slightly different combinations, make multitudes. A cup of bone-dry yeast, with some warm milk and patience, murmurs with bubbles – like dust into life.  As much as I want to control the outcome, the ultimate ingredient is time, waiting for the right chemical reactions to create a change.

I like noticing the way the smell of my apartment blooms with sweetness once my latest concoction is done. Of course, it also helps me track my Covid status. That I still have the ability to smell, a luxury I didn’t even know to be grateful for. 

I fill the quiet with thoughts, as well. In my notes app, I scribble down ramblings about the world, and how I want it to be better. I think about immigrant detention centers, and wonder that our government fears immigration by land so much because it’s a reminder that borders are not real. I wonder about capitalism, how the U.S. only values its citizens as much as we’re able to do a job, evinced by the lack of urgency around any kind of comprehensive stimulus. I wonder about the Covid vaccine distribution; every boyfriend I’ve ever loved and what they’re doing now; the white supremacy of America; abolition of the police; my own mortality. I miss my friends. I wonder if it’s so hard to date these days because everyone else is thinking about their mortality too, and the stakes of finding a partner feel unrealistically high. But then again, the reality is that 500,000 people (and counting) have died.

In the early part of the pandemic, I flew to Hinge in hopes of finding an apocalyptic companion. “Looking for a partner for the end of the world,” I texted one of my matches. He said, “Me too.”

We fell out of touch because I realized he only wanted me for sex. Everyone copes in different ways.

It’s hard to accept that this gap in my life where easy chaos used to dwell is simply gone, cannot be replaced. I miss the tumult. I miss being surprised.

My therapist, over Zoom of course, encourages me to go outside more often. As cruel as Covid can be, she urges that – in my precise situation – the mental health challenges of such immense isolation are beginning to wear me down. After all, I had only just moved to New York in the fall of 2019; and the world went into lockdown just as I was beginning to make friends. Those people mostly left.

The isolation is its own kind of loss. And it is particularly invalidating when the loss cannot be witnessed.

A part of me is writing to you right now because I want to be witnessed, and to let you know that we might be grieving the same thing. We might not be alone.

A year ago, both of my housemates left our apartment in Crown Heights under the impression that they’d be gone for “two weeks” – each packing suitcases haphazardly for last-minute tickets. Whether by denial or obstinacy, the thought to escape never crossed my mind because I didn’t know what I was running from. Hugging each of them goodbye in that faithful week in 2020’s March ended up being our last shared moment. None of us could have predicted that a microbe would upend the very fabric of what we consider “normal.”

Within that first week of quarantine solitude, I journaled, “And I want to live. It came rushing into me all these days alone. I want to live so bad. I want to survive. And this determination balloons my spirit and fires my soul.” Even though this statement came from a place of rose-colored adrenaline, the words still ring true, and I can say with defiance that, even when my world evaporated into fragments, I still find G-d in the absences.

What I mean is that one small brown bird landed on my sunlit fire escape on a Friday morning, chirping; and I noticed, remembered its shape even, and looked back into its eyes. I have since replaced chasing men with chasing fresh fruits and veggies at the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market. I understand that taking the time to boil water and hear the gurgle of steam soaking coffee beans is equally as rejuvenating as that first caffeinated sip. When I see other people in my apartment pass me by, I try harder to extend kindness. One man on the floor below remembered my name to say hello as we passed each other in the hallway, and he chuckled, “We’re officially neighbors now.” It wasn’t revelatory or romantically charged – plus, I’m very certain that he is “a straight” – but it mattered all the same: the remembering.

So, even as I am grieving, I still have hope. “I want to live so bad” because the pandemic has reminded me that, in slowing down, I see that beauty never left, and there is so much peace to be found in stillness, in waiting. What I’m searching for as a twentysomething continues to evade me, but the grace of this collective pain is that I’m gaining the trust that I do not need an answer to be happy. Being is enough.

By Gyasi N. Barber

After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

I’m sure some of you have taken the “opportunity” since we’ve been working from home to pick up a hobby, do some leisure reading or something else to make up your time. If we took all of the people who picked up a COVID hobby, we could make a pretty large club. 

In the first few months of the pandemic, I definitely watched a lot of movies, read some books and spent a lot of quality time with my partner, Maddie and our dog, Champ. I also decided to gain a better understanding of and control over my finances. Before the pandemic, I always found different opportunities to spend money as a young adult with very few responsibilities living in the greatest city in the world (<3 NYC). 

However, when things closed up, so did my spending. I missed the flexibility, but I grew to appreciate the time to evaluate what I was spending and what I was actually getting out of it. I came to realize that I wasn’t getting much. Nice clothes, electronic goodies, falling for Instagram sponsored content. Not a good look for your boy. The reason why I wasn’t getting much is because of how I defined “much”. I was getting goods, yes, but those goods wouldn’t appreciate or help me in the future. 

So I reevaluated. I didn’t stop completely, but I made a conscious effort to think about what I was consuming. If I saw a nice candle on Instagram, I still bought it. However, it was nice to have a little extra money to pay down my credit card bills, student loans and actually start saving. I do want to take this time and say that, during the pandemic, I was able to keep my job and I already make a decent amount of money. For that, I am truly blessed.

I started reading more about basic finance, investing and anything related to it. I took a few classes on Udemy that were really insightful and got me thinking about how I could continue to help myself and the people around me to gain some control of their financial future. 

It took a few months to really understand everything that I needed to do to get my financial education on track. I figured out the best way for me to set a budget, I made a short-term plan to pay down my high interest debts and I started putting money away for an emergency fund. Then George Floyd was murdered at the end of May, and everything changed. 

It was a pivotal moment–especially for me, a Black man in the United States of America. It took me a while to come to terms with what everything meant and how I felt about it. I decided to enlighten and educate White people so they could understand how this all came to be, but to be honest, I felt angry, tired and I really wanted to give up a lot of the things I had taken on during the last few months. 

While I did donate a lot of my extra money over the following few months to various charities, bail bonds funds and really anything I deemed worthy, I decided that my long-term financial goals should not change. After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

Just as I did during the immediate months following the murder of George Floyd, I’m now choosing to help enlighten and educate people on their understanding of personal finance. I believe that there are people out there who were just like me last year. At the beginning of last year, I did not have a handle on my high interest debt, I was spending more than I was making and I was thinking too emotionally and not financially enough about my non-essential purchases. So I am starting a blog that will uncover my current journey as well as the journey of others. It will also break down why we as Black people are in situations like I was in last year to begin with.

I hope to help some people, but I hope you will enlighten me in return. I hope you’ll join me on this journey, and that you’ll use this space to connect, ask questions, and empower yourselves along with me. You can look forward to a conversation about the psychology of money and how our backgrounds affect how we consume as well as an honest conversation about the difficulties of setting budgets (but hopefully how to set one anyway).

By Leah S. Abrams

If you are an art enthusiast or a casual fan of the visual arts of any kind, this is the time to be in NYC. This is unlikely what you’d think in the midst of a pandemic that has been unbearably destructive to the arts and cultural organizations around the world, not just here in the home of Broadway and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Right now, at the city’s New Museum in the Bowery, there is a 4-floor exhibit accomplishing exactly what some of us insist art can do – it illustrates with an immediacy our individual and collective stories, impacting the viewer on a visceral level that opens the door wide for taking in different perspectives.

The exhibit – “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” was originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor who, in 2018, offered: “The crystallization of black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance represents the fulcrum of this exhibition. The exhibition is devoted to examining modes of representation in different media where artists have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of black grief. With the media’s normalization of white nationalism, the last two years have made clear that there is a new urgency to assess the role that artists, through works of art, have played to illuminate the searing contours of the American body politic.”

Much praise and gratitude should go to artist Glenn Ligon and curators Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, and Mark Nash for bringing Enwezor’s vision to fruition after his 2019 passing and the show’s COVID-related postponement that prevented its intended opening prior to the 2020 election. The notion of mourning as action rather than a state of being is empowering as the idea of freedom as a verb rather than a noun expressed in another artistic medium via a Daniel Kahn lyric. Every work featured in “Grief and Grievance” suggests movement over stasis, processing over stewing.

Without taking the reader on a tour of the nearly forty contemporary artists included, there is one piece in particular that exemplified for me what visual artists can uniquely express. Imagine, if you will, that I share with you a statistic – I tell you that, in 2018, 14,719 individuals were shot and killed in the U.S. How can you possibly conceive of such a number? How can you connect with it, feel what it means rather than trying to intellectually process it?

Now, imagine instead that you come upon a narrow flight of stairs and draped down above them, from a ceiling you cannot see, are dark blue banners with countless white stars in neat rows, military like precision in their placement, reminiscent of the U.S. flag. They are striking and you can’t get them out of your head as you move from room to room, floor to floor, taking in Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin set to classical music as you read along on massive canvasses, photographs illustrating lives of families in America’s stripped industrial cities that are not the families you typically see in such stories, installations that gob smack you at first sight, until you come to the top floor, turn a final corner, and find yourself at the top of that staircase.

You stop now to read that you’re looking at Hank Willis Thomas’ Title 14 719, commemorating the number of individuals shot and killed in the U.S. in 2018; that the most likely way for a young African-American to die is by gun violence; that the artist remembers joking with his cousin, at age 21, that being that age and Black, they’d “made it” before losing that cousin to gun violence just a couple of years later; that this artist is just a few years younger than you.

And then you descend those stairs, staring upward, taking in how you, who likes to count everything, couldn’t fathom counting all those little stars, so many you can’t even seem them all, realizing now just how high up they stretch, how you feel as though you’re in a funeral procession.

That means something a statistic will never convey, that, frankly, as someone whose primary artistic proclivities are in the theatre and written word, cannot be accomplished there either. It is only the visual arts and music, all ingeniously on display at The New Museum, that can accomplish the immediacy of the situation facing us.

Over in Chelsea, you don’t want to miss actor and visual artist Tricia Paoluccio’s pressed flower exhibit, featuring a centerpiece canvas that is a Steinway piano, at the HIGH LINE NINE, currently hosting artists who would, in pre-pandemic days, have been unlikely to show there. Tricia found herself, like everyone in our theatrical and film/TV industry, facing an uncertain future last year as projects were cancelling for months on end – a whole season of work disappearing.

With a husband also in the theatre, they quickly left to stay with family in Northern California where Tricia dove into what had been a lifelong passion of flower pressing. The result is the collection, “I’ll Meet You There” (inspired by a Rumi poem), on display through month’s end.

Ms. Paoluccio is donating 9% from gallery sales to the COVID 19 Emergency Relief Fund and 1% to the CA Native Plant Society, offering yet one more example of how artists contribute directly back into the health of our communities and the larger world around us.

While you’re in that neck of the woods, brave the kinda scary building at 547 West 27^th Street to see Susan Grabel’s “Homeless in the Land of Plenty – Redux” at the Ceres Gallery. The striking sculptures of our homeless neighbors were originally displayed in 1989, but not knowing that when I wandered in, I’d assumed they were newer work. These pieces don’t tell the story you expect – Ms. Grabel said she was confronted with the burgeoning population of homeless people on the city’s streets while commuting in the 1980’s and set about creating a series aimed at bringing these folks’ plight to attention, focusing on their humanity.

She is quoted: “We usually ignore homeless people; we pass them by as if they were invisible. They represent the failures of our society and we don’t want to face them.” The craftsmanship, artistry, and humanity on display here are extraordinary. You’ve got ‘til the end of the month and Ms. Grabel is scheduled to be there on the 27^th, 3 – 5pm.

Finally, while you’re on the 2^nd floor of 547 West 27^th, I leave you with an offering of pure visual delight, free of any of the societal commentary I’ve focused on or COVID associations: end your day at Blue Mountain Gallery for Kim Van Do’s “Light and Air of Summer.” If you have been to the Catskills or Northern California, you will be immediately whisked back there in what I can best describe as akin to a VR experience through painting. And if, like me, you’re a bit of a geek for old tools and untraditional canvases, the scenic saws will delight you.

The truth is, I’ve given you the tiniest sampling of all that is out there to soak in and now’s the time. Do you know how crowded art museum and even galleries can get? How many germs go flying about? Go now while double masks are all the rage, crowds are limited, and there is an embrace of so many artists whose work is not always given the prominence I’m sure you’ll agree is deserved.