Stone soup is culture commentary, from the folk tale by the same name.
In honor of the combination of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day week, I’m running a “Black Valentine” series to profile several of the most vibrant Black couples I’ve met in St. Louis. I met Carlos and Sylvia Jenkins at the Missouri History Museum evening featuring Ron Himes. Carlos and Sylvia run CJS Vision 500,…
In honor of the combination of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day week, I’m running a “Black Valentine” series to profile several of the most vibrant Black couples I’ve met in St. Louis. We begin with Howard and Vickie Denson, the force behind the St. Louis Black Pages. Howard is an art collecting maven of…
You know the slogan, “coloring inside the lines”? What if, you colored outside the lines? Or, drew the lines for coloring? Or, colored without lines? How would your life change? How would your art change? How would society change? Have you ever considered how you fit into conformist America?
Photo from www.1920s-fashions.co.uk/reddress.htm I mention the racial demographics of these three events to point out the segregated nature (still!) of St. Louis life, especially social life. ORCHIDS AT THE MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN.Friday night at the Missouri Botanical Garden Orchid Show, member night…through March 15, 2009. “Henry’s Garden” features 800 orchids from one of the world’s…
“If you’re happy and you know it…clap your hands. If you’re happy and you know it…stamp your feet.” And so forth, goes my favorite kindergarten song. Janet Muirhead Hill tagged me for this “Happy Meme”. As she says, “It’s simple. I only have to list six things that make me happy. Well, maybe not so…
Between December 6th to January 7, Riehlife goes on holiday as Janet travels to Ghana, a place she lived and worked for several years in the 1970s. This trip will be far more simple than her August trip to Southern Africa. Because I’ll only be staying in two locations, I’ll be taking a few more…
It seems that humans, in order to deal with the mass of humanity they encounter, need to organize the masses by reverting to labeling people through identity. I don’t know if this is genetic or a learned behavior (clearly the details are very much learned), but it is the root of much of the problems…
As we got closer to Grant Park, a friend from Oregon called and said she just wanted me to hold my phone up when Barack spoke so she could hear him. The lines of people snaked up Michigan Avenue; by now it was 9:45 p.m. and my daughter was sure we were too late. About…
Rod McLaren, a native Canadian whose formal title in Ghana is Nana Akwasi Amoako Agyeman, Edubiase Nkosuohene. Which means he is a Development Chief of Edubiase. He owns the African Rainbow Resort in Busua Beach where I’ll be staying 2 weeks when I visit Ghana for the month of December. I connected to him through…
In his 1959 poem, Langston Huges asked: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Although Langston did not live to see the first fulfillment of that dream as last night the nation elected its first black man to the presidency by a landslide of electoral votes, one cannot help that imagine that somewhere up there in…