How far would you go for love?

Photo: The Loving family - Grey Villet

I wanted to time this post to coincide with the International Center of Photography's exhibit of Grey Villet's photos of The Loving family but I blew it. The exhibit closed earlier this week. But given the recent vote in North Carolina to ban gay marriage, sharing the story of the Loving family became more relevant than ever.

"Forty-five years ago, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage. Then, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred Loving, a woman of African American and Native American descent, who had been arrested for miscegenation nine years earlier in Virginia. The Lovings were not active in the Civil Rights movement but their tenacious legal battle to justify their marriage changed history when the Supreme Court unanimously declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation law—and all race-based marriage bans—unconstitutional. LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet's intimate images were uncovered by director Nancy Buirski during the making of The Loving Story..." (source)

Although the ICP exhibit in now closed, its related documentary film is still available on HBO GO. While watching it I found myself wondering what I would have done in a similar situation. My husband and I are not an exact match either (age and religious differences). He tells me I give up too easily and sometimes he's right.

How far would you go to fight for something you believe in? How far would you go to fight for love?

2 more Parking Lot Movie days!

The Parking Lot Movie Trailer from The Parking Lot Movie on Vimeo.

The one week run of The Parking Lot Movie ends tomorrow (8/12) - catch it if you can:

Yo La Tengo bass player James McNew used to work there, as have grad students, overeducated philosophers, surly artists, middle-age slackers and more from the fringes of Charlottesville, Virginia. Irreverently but warmly celebrating a brotherhood of eccentric attendants who man a unique two-acre lot from the most ramshackle booth ("like something you might discover in Albania at the border"), THE PARKING LOT MOVIE humorously reveals class warfare within its blacktop microcosm. SXSW 2010's "most feel-good film" (The Wrap) makes its New York premiere with a week-long engagement, August 6 - 12.

Three years in the making, director Meghan Eckman's documentary portrait shows how certain details and themes gain profundity through the daily scrutiny of these parking lot attendants: car culture, capitalism, entitlement, fury and justice, public drunkenness, spiritual awareness, societal frictions, and other existentialist cries from the service sector. If the intersection between the status quo and the quest for freedom is their ultimate challenge, could a slab of asphalt be an emotional way station for The American Dream? As one part-timer laments, "We had it all in a world that had nothing to offer us." (source)

LookBetween

Do you know what I love most about Look3? It, very much like my beloved Doo-Nanny, started in someone's backyard. Look3 returns to Charlottesville in 2011 with guest curators Scott Thode and Kathy Ryan. In the meantime, they had a small gathering called LookBetween this past June:

LOOKbetween at Deep Rock Farm from Andrew Owen on Vimeo.

BOOK: Mattaponi Queen tonight (6/21) @ BN Tribeca

Belle Boggs will read from her debut collection of stories Mattaponi Queen at Barnes and Noble in Tribeca on Monday, June 21 at 7:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public.

Location: Barnes and Noble Tribeca (97 Warren St., New York, NY) Contact: 212-587-5389 REVIEW FROM KIRKUS: Boggs's sure-footed debut collection, winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, is set on and around the Mattaponi Indian reservation in Virginia. The Mattaponi is formed by the confluence of four small rivers, and the author employs it deftly as a metaphorical merging of working-class folks of every race and ethnicity. She braids the stories together with recurrent characters and locales, but the stories nimbly evade the first-collection pitfall of too much sameness. The recurrent figures include Loretta, the caretaker for a cranky white octogenarian named Cutie. Loretta is biding her time and planning her retirement, which she'll spend on the small, old-fashioned boat that gives the collection its title, a boat being lovingly rehabbed by a solitary guy named Mitchell, who gave it to his ex-wife as an extravagant present and for whom the boat is now both an emblem of lovelessness and the only thing he has to lavish love on. There's the school principal, also lonesome, who gets cajoled into holding a Career Day, then is flummoxed because she "had honestly thought their county could produce more careers than four," by far the most lucrative of these being the ownership of a McDonald's. Her search for broader horizons leads her first to seek out a musician ex-boyfriend who tours the country's amusement parks with Patti LaBelle, then back home to a sweet-tempered, travel-loving policeman who becomes her beau. The stories are not heavily plotted, and Boggs doesn't always find satisfying exits, but even in those that seem to tread closest to cliche, for instance the one about the aging husband who announces that he wants a sex-change operation ("Jonas"), she writes with subtlety, empathy and command, so that every page features small surprises: jolts of recognition, pungent dialogue, keen observations. Unfussy, understated and richly varied stories-a promising debut. (source)

RIP Jimmy Dean

FROM CNN: Country music artist and sausage entrepreneur Jimmy Dean died at his home in Varina, Virginia, Sunday evening, police said. He was 81.

Dean, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, was with his wife, Donna, at the time of his death, which appears to be from natural causes, said R.J. Clark of the Henrico County Police department.

Musically, Dean is best known for his song "Big Bad John," which made it to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1961 and was honored with a Grammy. His narrative style of song also produced hits like "Little Black Book" and "P.T. 109" -- a song about John F. Kennedy's command in the South Pacific during World War II.

SCOOP: NY Times' "36 Hours In Richmond"

From Sunday's New York Times: AS the heart of the old Confederacy, Richmond, Va., watched with envy as other cities like Atlanta and Charlotte became the economic and cultural pillars of the New South. But Richmond may finally be having its big moment: a building boom in the last few years has seen century-old tobacco warehouses transformed into lofts and art studios. Chefs are setting up kitchens in formerly gritty neighborhoods, and the city’s buttoned-up downtown suddenly has life after dusk, thanks to new bars, a just-opened hotel and a performing arts complex, Richmond CenterStage. Richmond is strutting with confidence, moving beyond its Civil War legacy and emerging as a new player on the Southern art and culinary scene. (Read more of Justin Bergman's piece here)

ART: Cy Twombly @ Gagosian thru 10/31

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new bronze sculptures by Cy Twombly.

Since 1946 Twombly has fashioned sculptures from everyday materials and objects, usually painted with white gesso. In 1979 he began casting some of them in bronze, thus unifying, preserving, and transforming them into cohesive wholes, independent from the original bricolages. The surface and patina of these cast bronzes evoke weathered artifacts that have been exhumed from the earth, an effect that is heightened in those that have been coated in white oil paint.

Born in 1928 in Lexington, VA, Cy Twombly studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947–49); the Art Students League, New York (1950–51); and Black Mountain College, NC (1951–52). In the mid 1950s, following travels in Europe and Africa, he emerged as a prominent figure among a group of artists working in New York that included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 1959, Twombly settled permanently in Italy. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Center mounted his first retrospective. This was followed by major retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1987) travelling to Madrid, London and Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994) (travelling to Houston, Los Angeles, and Berlin) and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006). In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery opened at The Menil Collection, Houston, exhibiting works made by the artist since 1954. The European retrospective "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons" opened at the Tate Modern, London in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Museum of Modern Art in Rome in 2009.

Twombly lives in Lexington, VA, and Italy.

BOOK: Shop Class As Soulcraft

A philosopher / mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high- prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one’s hands

Shop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite common, but now seems to be receding from society—the experience of making and fixing things with our hands. Those of us who sit in an office often feel a lack of connection to the material world, a sense of loss, and find it difficult to say exactly what we do all day. For anyone who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing. (source)

Crawford operates his shop in Virginia.

You Are Invited to Concord , Virginia

Concord, Virginia - Performance and Book Release Party tonight (7/7) @ 7PM at Dixon Place (161 Chrystie Street, NYC).

Having begun the saga of Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories at HOT! 2006, Peter Neofotis celebrates St. Martin Press’s release of his award-winning book - based on his Dixon Place show series - by performing The Botanist, a gay trial tale; and The Builders, a Prometheus Bound story. (source)

St. Martin's says:“In the places set between folds in the Earth, voices echo against mountains…”

So begins the story of Concord, Virginia, one of those places set between folds in the Earth. It’s a place like almost any other Southern town, filled with self-righteous preachers, descendants of slaves, upstanding town leaders, and the ladies of the local bridge club. But Concord has something else: a dark heart. A church has been abandoned. Vultures have been roosting in the trees at George MacJenkins’s house. Poisonous snakes follow Rachel Stetson into the river for a swim. And the ghost of Thomas Jefferson has recently spoken through a man chained to fate. Deftly spinning a web of stories from the voices of the town, Peter Neofotis creates a captivating portrait---comic, dramatic, bombastic, and tragic---of a place trapped in time and possessed by the valley landscape that surrounds it. In the tradition of great Southern gothic writing, Peter Neofotis brings to life the town of Concord, Virginia, allowing even the ancient voices there to swirl through the glazed brick streets like the Fork River. It’s a pulse-raising debut by a writer who’s created a place the reader will never forget.

ART/SCENE: Central Green (VA) fundraiser @ Honey Space tonight!

Monday evening, May 18, Honey Space will host its first fundraising event for its next phase. The event, titled Visions and Sounds, will be a joint fundraiser and celebration with friend Tucker Robbins in mutual support of projects here, and Tucker Robbins' Central Green, Tucker's vision for breathing life into an historic community center- Central High School, in Painter Virginia. The event will be built around food and sound- a gourmet buffet dinner accompanied by The Gamelatron, the world's first and only fully robotic Indonesian styled Gamelan Orchestra by Zemi17 and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR); a live performance by songwriter Emily Arin, and sculptural sound installations by Thomas Beale and Adam Stanforth. Tickets are available online and at the door on a sliding scale of $35-$100. You can purchase them online at by following the link here.

About Central Green: Tucker Robbins' Central Green, currently in development with a planned opening date of late 2009, is a vision of a sustainable community center in Painter, Virginia, built around the traditional arts and local community and environment. Encompassing 23,000 square feet of historic Central High School, Central Green will include a residency program for both local craftspeople from the Eastern Virginia region and remote cultures abroad, an organic garden and restaurant, educational programs, and meditation and yoga classes, all powered by green energy technologies. You can learn more about Central Green here.

SOUNDS: Ralph Stanley & His Clinch Mountain Boys

Most folks in NYC are probably most familiar with Ralph Stanley from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou. Ralph was born in Dickenson County, Virginia, where he still resides when he's not on the road. After 55 years in the business, he's still the best banjo picker and tenor singer in bluegrass music. As a recording artist, he has performed on more than 170 albums, tapes, and CDs. He's also written many songs himself and with his brother, the late Carter Stanley. Ralph's played throughout the United States and in many foreign lands, too, including several tours of Japan. In addition to the many honors Ralph has received as a bluegrass musician, including membership on the Grand Ole Opry, he is also a Shriner, a member of the Primitive Baptist Universalist Church, and active in his local community, having served on the Dickenson County School Board.

The Clinch Mountain Boys currently live in scattered communities in the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. They meet up in Coeburn, where their tour bus is parked and head out on the road. Their typical work week starts on Wednesday or Thursday and wraps up on Sunday, when they normally head in home for a couple days of well-deserved rest before starting out all over again.

Dr. Ralph Stanley & His Clinch Mountain Boys bring bluegrass down from the mountain and park it on 42nd Street tonight (2/18) @ BB King's.

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS: House Show Series/Reston VA

Melissa Branin's "House Show Series" in Reston, VA is back in full effect with shows booked thru March, kicking off tomorrow (1/30):

Jan 30 2009 8:00P	LAURA TSAGGARIS and Melissa Branin	Reston, Virginia
Feb 21 2009 8:00P	JONATHAN VASSAR with Melissa Branin	Reston, Virginia
Mar 21 2009 8:00P	VICTORIA VOX and Melissa Branin	Reston, Virginia

The House Show Series is a concert/listening room series begun by Melissa Branin in Reston, Virginia. The shows given in this intimate townhouse are acoustic, up-close-and-personal performances from some of the areas best songwriters and musicians. Audience members have the opportunity to really listen and absorb in an environment that is supportive and positive. Performers have a unique opportunity to really communicate with their audience, an experience that is hard to come by when playing in restaurants, bars, and noisy, crowded venues. The House Show Series is a listening room, but more than that, it is a place for us to come together to share our passion for the energy and creation expressed through music made by people for people.

Pretty cool!

STAGE: The Protestants in Bklyn thru 2/14/09

Now at The Brick Theater in BKLYN: When Scottie, the eldest, returns home to Virginia from his NYC sojourn for the marriage/departure of his chronically negligent mother, he discovers his biologically-ruined brother wilting, his emotionally-untethered brother firing, and his baby ‘brother’ Tippy becoming a woman and the family’s final hope. Tippy’s tough-as-nails best-bud Ruby, a Nurse fallen from the pages of Chekhov, and Scottie’s cosmopolitan girlfriend Virginia round out this frenetic yet heart-blooming world.

Told in evocative, free-wheeling scenes, The Protestants penetrates the rural, central Virginian landscape with characters of big desire, personality, and problem—one part The Royal Tenenbaums, one part Faulkner. It delivers a South where pain and humor intertwine, with both aiming for the last laugh; where the need and the notion of God lurks throughout to order and illuminate things forgiven, things forsaken.

The Old Kent Road Theater (OKRT) is proud to return to The Brick, site of their festival hits The Children of Truffaut (Pretentious Festival) and Death at Film Forum (The Film Festival: A Theater Festival). The OKRT has also produced at the New York International Fringe Festival, Midtown International Theatre Festival, and the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator Program. Its plays have been noted for their ‘vibrant characters…heartfelt passion, and spirited volleys of non sequiturs’ (Village Voice) and described as ‘pure inspiration’ (nytheatre.com) and ‘downtown theatre at its best’ (New York Cool.com).

Eric Bland, writer/director, received his MA in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His play Death at Film Forum will be published in the NYTE anthology, Plays and Playwrights 2009.

STAGE: Streamers @ Roundabout Theatre in NYC

David Rabe's award-winning drama, Streamers, is playing at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre in NYC thru January 11, 1009.

Set in 1965 Virginia, Streamers is the story of four soldiers just out of bootcamp who, according to NY Mag, grapple "with race, class, and sexuality as tensions rise in Vietnam."

BOOK: The Wettest County In The World

From the John C. and Olive Campell Collection Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina

I went hunting for moonshine once. Tooling around the backroads of southeast Alabama, with bright splashes of sunlight playing peekaboo from beyond the tippy tops of tall pine trees. We zoomed past the spot where the glittering sign once stood for the Big Daddy Club, a makeshift juke joint set up like a tent revival in the open space of a dirt yard in front of someone's trailer home. We ate lunch a bit earlier at a meat n' three in Hurtsboro and went to visit with some outsider artists in their humble and tidy unmarked homes. Yes yes all interesting stuff but we were looking for moonshine so kept on rolling along until we got to the rickety shack of an old bluesman....but his still had run dry.

Reading about Matt Bondurant's new book, The Wettest County In The World, got me remembering my almost brush with white lightnin'. But Bondurant's tale, albeit "a novel based on a true story," is the real deal. Sounds like some good holiday reading to me!

From Scribner: Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition and in the years after. Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die, their father's business fail, and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought.

White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut -- whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson, the journalist and author of Winesburg, Ohio, was covering a story there, he christened it the "wettest county in the world." In the twilight of his career, Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers, piece together the clues linking them to "The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy," and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County.

In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men -- their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires -- to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.

SCREEN: LAKE CITY opens 11/21 @ Quad NYC

In this searing Southern drama, a mother and son reunite under desperate circumstances years after a family tragedy drove them far apart. Billy and his son Clayton are on the run from his estranged wife's drug dealer after she stiffs him and disappears. With nowhere else to go, Billy returns to his mother's house in the Virginia countryside to hide out. As he searches for his missing wife, he reconnects with his childhood friend, now a local police officer and begins to confront his troubled past.

Dave Matthews plays a scary thug and Sissy Spacek, well, you know, she's the bomb in anything! Lake City opens in NYC and LA 11/7 and everywhere else a week later. The film is directed by Perry Moore and Hunter Hill, and produced by uber-fab socialite/art patron/actress Allison Sarofim.

Film opens at QUAD ON 11/21!!!

EAT: Filth from the Swine by Michael A. Gonzales

photo credit Jared Swafford/Flickr

Perhaps if I had known exactly what chitlins were (or chitterlings, as some people spell it) when I was a boy, I never would have eaten them. Though the funk that wafted through the apartment when grandma stood over the sink cleaning them should have clued me in, how was I to know that my favorite meal was cooked pig intestines.

Though some families only prepared chitlins during Christmas and New Year’s Eve, grandma was not a creature of ceremony. Whenever I saw the white ten-pound buckets taking-up space in the refrigerator, I knew there would be a feast by the end of the week. Raised in Virginia, grandma knew how to “put her foot” in a pot of chitlins.

Dumping the slimy swine parts into a large pan in the sink, grandma gripped the black handle of her long bladed knife with the skill of a butcher. Wearing a flowered apron tied around her thin waist, she managed to look lady like while doing one of the nastiest chores on the planet. Holding our noses, me and baby brother rushed to the front door and went outside to play.

Boiling the chitlins in a giant silver pot of salty water seasoned with celery, onions and vinegar, the entire flat smelled like pork heaven when we returned home hours later. “Are they ready yet?” I screamed, hanging-up my coat in the foyer closet.

“Boy, stop making all that noise and go get cleaned-up.”

After washing our face and hands, we sat at the faux-wood kitchen table, and shook crimson droplets of Red Devil hot sauce on the soul food that also included potato salad, black-eyed peas and collard greens. Devouring my grub with the quickness, I sopped-up the flavorful juice with cornbread and was ready for more. “Your eyes bigger than your stomach,” grandma laughed, as she proudly put more chitlins on the plate.

One thing about grandma, though she never ate much, she got joy from watching other folks eat.

Years later, when I was a freshman at Long Island University in Brooklyn, I hung-out at the college radio station and became friends with an overweight pothead named Gary. With flowing dreadlocks and a thick accent, Gary was an on-air personality (although the station only broadcast on campus) who introduced me to the music of Lee Scratch Perry, Peter Tosh and other reggae artists.

Enviably, when you get two fat guys in a room together, the conversation soon became about food. “You like what?” Gary screamed, not wanting to believe my culinary ignorance. “Man, do you know what chitins are? It’s the pig intestine; you know, what the shit goes through.”

“Get out of here…for real?” I looked at him as though he had gone rabbit hunting on Easter morning or lit the fireplace on Christmas Eve. “You’re joking, right?”

“No joke,” Gary assured me. “It’s the part of the pig that white masters used to give to the slaves, because they didn’t want it.”

For a moment, I was mute. Pondering the deepness of this history, I reflected on its meaning before finally determining that it was too late for me to turn back; blunted on surreality, I reasoned that rejection of chitlins would a denial of my southern heritage and family roots.

“Well, they taste good to me,” I said, much to Gary’s chagrin. Indeed, it was my intention, as my favorite southern female performer Gladys Knight once sang, “To keep on keeping on.”

Ten years after that discussion with Gary, grandma moved to Baltimore to live with my mother; a few years after that, she got stomach cancer. Scared by the fact that my grandmother wouldn’t be around for very long, I kept postponing my trip to Baltimore. Everyday I’d tell my ma, “I’ll be there tomorrow. I promise.”

Finally, tired of my triflingness, mom called me on a Thursday morning and tensely said, “When are you coming down here?”

“I don’t know ma, I got something to do today and…”

Cutting me off, she screamed, “My mother is dying, and instead of lying down, she’s standing over the sink cleaning chitlins for you.” In my mind, I clearly saw grandma’s frail frame as she held tightly to the black handled knife and carefully cleaned filth from the swine.

That same afternoon, as the Greyhound bus zoomed down Route 40 towards downtown Baltimore, I thought about my grandma’s hands and the steaming pot of chitlins simmering on the stove.

Michael A. Gonzales writes for Vibe, Stop Smiling and New York magazine, and blogs at uptownlife.net. A Harlem native with a southern sensibility, he lives in Brooklyn.

EAT: GRANDMA'S GRITS by Michael A. Gonzales

Being raised by both my mother and grandmother had its advantages. Thinking back to life uptown during my 1970s wonder years, one of the first thoughts that come to mind is the food that was constantly cooking on our old stove.

Dark as mahogany, grandma came from Harrisonburg, Virginia; born into a family of country chefs who dwelled in the Negro neighborhood known as New Town (her own grandmother’s fresh biscuits and jelly were legendary), she seemed to think it was a sin if something wasn’t frying, broiling, simmering, boiling, baking or in the process of cooling off.

“Grandma cooks and mommy heats up,” I once told one of my mother’s friends. Yet, since grandma worked in a factory in New Jersey and was out of the flat before I awoke, Sunday mornings was the only time she made a full breakfast. Returning home from nine o’clock mass at St. Catherine of Genoa, where I was an altar-boy, the hearty smell of eggs, bacon, sausages and grits met me at the front door.

Though I’m not sure what was on my mind, I always said I didn’t want any grits. Maybe it was the way they looked or the way grits hardened in the pot when they were cold, but I wasn’t feeling them. “Boy don’t know what he missing, Mary,” grandma’s boyfriend Joe said and laughed. Staring at his plate, a yellow river of yolk from his over-easy eggs pooled into the grits.

“Well, if he don’t want’em, I can’t force him,” she replied. Although I could hear in her voice that my rejection of the grits was a slight betrayal to her, I refused to relent. In the same way that I (at the time) detested chicken and dumplings and pig feet, I spent my entire childhood gritless. A few years later, when I was fourteen, me, mom and baby brother moved to Baltimore. I stayed in the City of Poe graduating from high school. Then, in the August of ’81, I returned to Harlem and to my grandma’s soulful kitchen.

Although it was just the two of us living there, grandma still cooked as though an army was coming. Yet, as a freshman at Long Island University in Brooklyn, I became poplar because I often brought home hungry friends for Sunday dinner. “Now make sure you get enough,” she’ll say sweetly, her dark hands holding the spoon tightly as she put more food on our plates.

Afterwards, grandma wrapped-up the food in heavy aluminum foil and insisted my friend took some grub back to the dorm. I recall once asking if she had her recipes written down, but she just laughed. “I don’t need any recipes,” she said proudly, pointing to her temple. “I got them all up here.”

To this day, I can’t quite explain what got me eating grits; perhaps, as an adult, they became less gross or I just got more curious about what was such the big deal. I had put a little salt, butter and cheese on them, and shoved them in the mouth.

Expecting the worse, I was blown away by the taste. I thought about Joe, who had died years before, teasing me at Sunday breakfast. It was at that moment that my tongue began to do the happy dance. “Not you eating grits,” grandma blurted proudly that summer Sunday morning as we sat at the faux-wood kitchen table.

Fourteen years after grandma’s death on March 8, 1994, I still eat grits on Sunday mornings whenever possible; and with each massive forkful, I think about grandma. (end)

Michael A. Gonzales writes for Vibe, Stop Smiling and New York magazine, and blogs at uptownlife.net. A Harlem native with a southern sensibility, he lives in Brooklyn.

STAGE: Southern Promises

When the master of the plantation dies, he wills his slaves to be freed, but his wife doesn't think that good property should be squandered. Pandemonium ensues. The play is inspired by the true story of Henry Box Brown who escaped to the north by mailing himself in a box. Southern Promises provides a unique portrait of the old south. (Source: P.S. 122)

Southern Promises (90 min., no intermission)

PS122 (150 First Avenue)

Tickets (212-352-3101): $18.00

Performances (through 9/27): Mon. @ 7 Wed.-Sat @ 8:30