Last week, I attended a fine art show featuring a curated group of talented Black artists. One of the event’s speakers, Kevin John Goff, was the nephew of famed actress Hattie McDaniel, the first Black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. As a long-time student of...
A frequent reader of this blog wrote to me in response to my post titled, “Does Art Need a Purpose?” “Just as beauty is its own excuse for being,” she said, “so is art.” I found the full quote about beauty online. It’s from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson called “The Rhodora.” It reads:...
My husband laughed last night when I said, “It’s so much work just being alive.” I was describing my day, in which I’d awakened with a list in my head of all the things I was going to get done, and by the end of the day, only half of them were completed. In the...
When I first started writing for a living, I worked for several local newspapers and small magazines. I wrote mostly feature articles, often history related. It was not uncommon for me to spend 8 hours on an article for which I was paid $25-50. $75 if I was lucky. At the time, I knew the...
I read an interesting article recently about how men talk to women entrepreneurs about their new projects or businesses. They tend to issue warnings about pitfalls and to caution the women, as if they’re not aware of the challenges and don’t know what they’re doing. Women, on the other hand, tend to give the speaker...
Are we seriously going down this road again? Are we seriously discussing again getting rid of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and The National Endowment for the Humanities? And do we seriously have to argue again for the value of supporting creativity and culture? Do we really need to...
As a teen, I was such a good babysitter that I got regular calls from nine different families! I thought it was because I was always available, played well with the kids, and cleaned up the messes. Now, I think it was also because I was the bargain of the century. At a dollar an...