Making Sonoma Safe for Greasepaint

Anyone who’s read Peyton Place knows that beneath even the most bucolic town lurk dark and seamy secrets. Alas, my beloved Sonoma is no exception. If I hadn’t realized that from the building events of the last month, last week’s dust-up made it too painfully obvious. Yes, peaceful, friendly, Liberal Sonoma is, apparently, a hotbed of Clownism. The signs should have...

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

One of my measures for a great writer, speaker and human is how well their words stand up to rereading over years and decades. Do you find something new every time you revisit them? Do they stand up in meaning as times change? By this measure, Martin Luther King Jr. keeps becoming greater and greater as the decades pass. My first encounter with his words was in 1968 in my Southern...

A Second Look at the Man in the Mirror

So I was planning to resist this whole Michael Jackson sobfest. And here I am putting up my second MJ post in two days. I still have deeply ambivalent feelings about him. Sure, his songs played through my childhood and young adulthood, although I wasn’t a super fan. I even went so far yesterday as to reclaim him from Generation X to his rightful place with those of us sandwiched...

Big Bill Broonzy at the Inauguration

Photo is copyright Terry Cryer. See more of his photos here: http://terrycryer.com Like millions of other viewers, I was charmed by that old Civil Rights lion Reverend Joseph Lowery and his benediction at the Inauguration. Starting with a reference to a spiritual, he ended with this rhyme: “We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when...

Voting Lessons from Black Church Ladies

 On the eve of a national election, I was shocked to learn that an otherwise educated and aware acquaintance never votes. He had some convoluted argument about how Henry David Thoreau was against voting on the theory that “it only encourages them” and, “no matter who won, it wouldn’t make any difference.” I could have started the quote game with him. I...