I met Dael Orlandersmith at the 100 poet reading at St Mark’s Church on the Lower Eastside of New York. Steve Cannon of Tribes introduced us. I’m assuming that was done to get me away from him, though that was a nice way to do it.
“Dael, here’s Browne, you guys should talk,” Steve Cannon running away.
So Dael is famous for writing Yellowman an award winning play and I was like “Oh wow!!” And things, but then she said she preferred San Francisco to LA and I found that a bit problematic.
LA is way closer to New York than San Francisco. Yeah maybe San Francisco looks like New York, but inside LA is way more New York, at least how New York was in the 1980s.
New York presently though, even the Lower Eastside is pretty upscale.
Maybe New York always wanted to be San Francisco…scary thought, but I won’t think about that too much.
I told her that the people of San Francisco were like Gap commercials. When I say Gap commercial I mean that while there maybe different races of people they are all the same, so what does it matter if you have “diversity” if your diversity just refers to the color of the car and not a variety of vehicles to get from point a to point b.
LA is much more diverse than San Francisco and even New York. The only minorities I see in New York are the people working in the subways or working security or someones date.
Yeah lots of upper middle class black chicks with their white boyfriends giving me the evil eye.
"Why is she staring at you?" white dude fiance.
"Highlander syndrome, lets just ignore it or I'll have to cure her," me trying to be nice.
While I'm fabulous now, my roots are working class and I wanted to punch quite a few people, but I was with my white boyfriend and didn't want him to have to go through the whole running from the cops thing.
I'll give all of you the rundown on the there can only be one Highlander Syndrome among socialite type women of color, but that's another post.
Anyways I told her. “I hate San Francisco people; every time I go there I want to punch people.” And she was like, “What? You want to punch them?” and I said “Yeah.”
She looked at me kind of like, “Oh you’re crazy, let me move away from you.” Though since she is a New Yorker and I’m a LA girl I could have totally been misinterpreting that, but I didn’t care. Not really. She said the reason she didn’t like LA was because of the way we talk with the whole ‘like’ thing and Valley girl thing.
I know that people who aren’t from LA always think that I’m a Valley girl.
"Are you one of those Valley girls, you sound like it," a person who I feel is a bit judgmental.
Owing to me already being pegged as a LA ditz I felt there was no point in me trying to not just be my fucked up self, since she probably found me annoying anyway. I according to some overuse the word ‘like’ and have somehow acquired through my Nigerian, Honduran, and Canadian background a LA Valley girl accent that pretty much makes every conversation sound like a sing-song question.
“Like I was in New York?”
“And I like took the subway?”
“It wasn’t that cold there though, you know?”
I don’t have a problem with how I talk though, because if I had to talk like a New Yorker I would kill myself. Many New Yorkers sound as if like they grew up in a very loud dive bar. They draw their vowels out to an excruciating length and they always sound like they are yelling at you.
“HoooooooooooooW aaaarrrre yoooooooouuuuuuuuuu doooooooinnnnnnnG????!!!!!!!!”
“I was like totally fine when you first started asking the question, but now that you’ve like spit your Lower Eastside vowel juice on me, I’m not so good, ” Browne
Yeah, so that was my New Year’s Day in New York.
By Browne Molyneux
PS BusTard got a picture of me and Patti together. I won’t publish it though, because that’s just way too egomaniacal and I'm way too bitchin' to be like egomaniacal.
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