I watched the Upright Citizen Brigade Comedy video: Fucking Tea

Never Done: I watched an Upright Citizen Brigade Comedy video Fucking Tea

Remember when I went to the Upright Citizen's Brigade and it wasn't funny? In fact it was offensive? Well, the people at UCBC have redeemed themselves by making fun of one of my favorite things in the world: tea (and those of us who love tea.) I didn't even know they made videos, but I sure do love tea. I love brewing tea. I love smelling the fragrance of tea. I love drinking tea. I love tea cups. I love tea pots. I love tea strainers. I love putting milk in tea. I love mixing teas. I love making iced tea. I love making hot tea. I love making sun tea. Most of all, I love telling people how much I love tea, and how much they should love tea. Especially the teas I love. Tea is better than coffee. It's better for you. People who drink it are superior. Especially people -- like me -- who drink herbal tea. (Which are more properly called tisanes or herbal infusions.) Because peppermint is not actually a tea; it's an herb. Tea is a specific plant species: Camellia Sinensis. Oh, you find this obnoxious? Am I maybe just a little too holier than thou about this whole caffeine thing? (At least if you drink coffee, I hope it's organic.) Oops, sorry. I did it again. Well I guess it's a good thing you people at UCBC made this video. Fucking tea.

I took Zofran

Never Done: I took Zofran

I got seasick on the ferry to Provincetown. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't good. I'm pretty prone to motion sickness, and I've never successfully found a remedy. Normally I'm pretty safe on ferries, because they tend to be big and stable, but the Provincetown ferry we took is smallish and goes really fast and randomly swerves, as if avoiding a dead skunk on the road. I spent a little bit of the weekend worrying about the ride home, and then I remembered that I should practice Patience: Do not aggravate a situation with wasted grief, which is to say that worrying about getting seasick wouldn't actually alleviate my seasickness, but it sure would put a damper on my weekend.

But before I got that clarity, I mentioned to Mich that I was worrying about it, and she -- nurse practitioner that she is -- said, "Oh don't worry about it. We'll get you some Zofran." And once again I realized that it's not actually wasted grief if you are telling someone who can actually help you DO something about whatever you are worrying about. But patterns are persistent. I started worrying that the Zofran wouldn't work for me. Or that it wouldn't work on motion sickness, because it's really made for chemo. So I decided to tell Mich I was worrying about THAT now, and she explained that it blocks the nausea receptors in the brain and that it would in fact work. So this time, I stopped worrying for real, and just took the pills when the time came.

And guess what? It worked. I rode all the way back on the return ferry and had no problems. And the sun shone, and the people were happy, and it was good. Omeyn.

I went to a gay tea dance

Never Done: I went to a gay tea dance

Earlier this summer I was invited to volunteer at a Hampton Tea Dance, which was a gala fundraiser for the Empire State Pride Agenda. I really wanted to make a fascinator for it, wear long white gloves, and serve drinks to well-dressed gay men. I pictured it sort of like to royal wedding, but for gay people in the Hamptons. Fancy. Stately. Mint juleps on the lawn.

In the end, I couldn't go, and I thought that was the end of my hopes to go to a tea dance this summer. But no! There is a tea dance every day from 4-7 in Provincetown, and it's free from 6:45 to 7, so Mich likes to go and dance like crazy for fifteen minutes. Wait, dance like crazy? At the royal wedding? Well, it turns out that the Provincetown tea dance is far from formal. It's a techno-blaring, chest baring sweat-it-out-on-the-dance-floor mob scene. (Plus one slow-dancing lesbian couple.) We pushed in to the center as far as we could, which wasn't very far at all, and danced as much as we could, which wasn't very much at all, and I remembered that just because I've never done something before, or just because I'm with a category of people I tend to like, doesn't mean I'll suddenly enjoy something I've never enjoyed before -- like being trapped in the middle of a rowdy crowd of intoxicated people -- and so we pushed our way back out of the crowd and went to dinner.

Ethical lesson: be open to trying new things but stay true to yourself.

And then after dinner, if you are lucky, you will get to hang out with Urvashi Vaid and Kate Clinton, and you get to realize that you got to do that because you were at the tea dance when you were, and you left when you left, and you ate where you ate, and you finished when you finished, and it's not exactly that everything happens for a reason, but that if you practice Equanimity, and go with the flow, sometimes the flow ushers you somewhere wonderful and unexpected.

I saw an exhibition of artwork of John Lennon

Never Done: I saw an exhibition of artwork of John Lennon
Never Done: I walked through the Provincetown dunes

When I went for a run in the morning, I noticed a street banner advertising a show called Imagine: Yoko Ono presents the art of John Lennon. I kept going, knowing that I would be coming back that way to look for the address, and locate the gallery. There is something about being up early in a vacation town -- sharing the morning with delivery truck drivers and people with dogs -- that let's you see the actual bones of a place. Town Hall is massive and stunning, as is the library; tide is low; Commercial Street stops being commercial after the Provincetown Antique Market.

Also, I love going out on a discovery mission and bringing back a find -- and what better find than a John Lennon show? It turned out to be 3 days only, in the Unitarian church hall -- a benefit for the church. I told Abigail and Mich about it, and they were both excited to go. We weren't sure if Yoko Ono would be there ("Yoko Ono presents") (which, I have discovered, would be completely possible because people like to come here) (she wasn't.) But we were there. The show was not originals -- it was prints from his drawings and paintings. Much of his work is incredibly moving and personal -- his line drawings that captured whimsy, personality, and sometimes entire socio-political theories. Abigail noticed, having spent significant time working in a print shop, that something that was missing from the show was the presence of the people who worked in the print shop. As soon as she said it I realized she was right; the wasn't a wall panel that explained that these were notebook sketches -- originally quite small -- that had been enlarged and reproduced with incredible care by xxx, xxx, xxx, xxx, and xxx. one. Of the things I love about going to an art show with an artist is exactly this -- the artist's knowledgable perspective. I think it's the first time I got the artist's knowledgeable ethical perspective.

Later in the day we hiked out through the dunes. A gorgeous hike through bog cranberries and juniper, past a couple beach shacks -- barefoot in deep dune sand, all the way to the ocean. When we got there, the water was rough and the waves were breaking so close to the shore that the surf was full of sand and seaweed. Mich had prepared a gorgeous picnic -- curried tuna salad, sesame cabbage slaw, fresh corn salad, two kinds of iced tea -- and we spread it out on a towel, made kiddush, and spent the afternoon eating and talking like we always used to, til we got too cold to stay longer, and we hiked back across the dunes, back to the town where it would not be odd to see Yoko Ono, even though we didn't -- we saw Boy George instead.

I was featured in an online radio interview (and then took the ferry to Provincetown)

Never Done: I was featured in an online radio interview (and then took the ferry to Provincetown)

My BK Buzz interview, called A Year of Trying New Things, posted online. I already said so much in the interview -- and Shannon did such a good job of editing and framing it -- that I will let the BK Buzz be my words for today.

I can't actually. I would be leaving out a big piece of Never Done information if I didn't also tell you that I took the ferry to Provincetown for the first time, with Abigail, to visit Mich, and once here I saw a couple songs in a set by a great show: Scream Along with Billy. I don't think I've been in P-town since 1982. Also, I have only ever been here in the off-season. In a car, because I get seasick, and also because I came from central Massachusetts, not Boston, so taking a ferry wouldn't have made any sense. But more important than travel talk -- we have many Never Done adventures planned for the weekend. Stay tuned!

I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem

Never Done: I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem

I am planning something at work that has to do with civil rights, and I've been looking around for interesting art/performance projects that relate. I noticed that there was an exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem of the Spiral Collective -- a New York–based collective of African-American artists that came together in the 1960s to discuss their relationship to the civil rights movement and the shifting landscape of American art, culture and politics. The show is up until October, and I knew I wanted to get up to see it.

I've been to Harlem many times, but I had never been to this museum. It's right on 125th Street, a couple blocks from the train -- super accessible. I must have walked past it before and just not noticed it -- which is hard to imagine, because it has a lovely street presence. But that has very little to do with my experience inside. I went with my coworker, who curates visual arts. It's a beautiful small museum. The man who worked the front desk was warm and welcoming. The galleries are behind a closed door that I got to open -- which felt a little Greek, like somehow I was Orpheus or something, and about to enter a cave. Only it wasn't a cave -- it was a sanctuary. A gallery. A broad room with art on the walls (duh) and a staircase up to an open loft second floor. There are two additional separate spaces -- one is a room to the left of the main gallery space, and the other is a smaller open gallery down a flight.

But why am I talking about the space? Let me jump right to the point. I GOT TO SEE TWO ORIGINAL ROMARE BEARDON COLLAGES. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that Romare Beardon is my favorite visual artist of all time. I love his work so much. It is complex, with huge vision and simultaneous attention to detail. It has startling depth -- and by that I don't mean intellectual or creative depth (it also has that but I don't find that startling) but actual visual canvas depth. Like you can look at a work and see deeper and deeper and deeper into it. Plunge in, even. Once I was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the annual Spring show called Art in Bloom, in which garden clubs from across the state get to design works of art in floral arrangements, and display the floral arrangement near the work of art. The arrangements were, for the most part, beautiful and creative. But there was one of a Romare Beardon collage, and it was literally transcendent. One of my favorite books is called I Live In Music (you can click to look inside the book) which is a poem by Ntozake Shange, who might be my favorite poet of all times, illustrated by Beardon collages. (I have spent hours plunging into that book.)

So I got to see my favorite artist's work, and I got to see a bunch of other work by other artists I didn't know as well -- some of it was arresting, and all of it was important. You know what I mean by that? This collective was vitally important. I would like there to be a collective of visual artists as engaged in discussion about the artist's role in response to the contemporary civil rights movement. The art work is communicative. It was meant to generate discussion. It was completely linked to its time and place. Maybe I didn't love the actual work of art, but I loved the conversation it was meant to start.

When we had taken it all in we almost left, but then we thought -- wait, we are here -- why don't we step upstairs to see the work of the artists in residence? And as soon as we neared the top of the stairs, I saw that one of the artists is my friend Simone Leigh. Really? Just like that? The truth is, I'd seen her posts about her recent shows, but it hadn't sunk in to me when we headed up that this was where her show was. What's the lesson here? I should have paid closer attention to her invitations? Made a specific effort to get up there? Maybe yes, and maybe no. I do think that would have been valuable. But also, I think it's of some value that I got to happen onto her work (which is stunning by the way -- she creates sculptures out of ceramic -- not busts and bowls, but giant cowrie shells and hanging missiles that are really breasts but are really bullets) and take it in in relation to the work of the Spiral Collective, hung just below.

I think another lesson has to do with going off one's beaten path, and taking small adventures, going on small quests. Not long ago I got some Tibetan dumplings in Jackson Heights. It's not like it's hard to go to Jackson Heights. It's not like I don't ever go to Jackson Heights. It's just that I don't normally go to Jackson Heights -- but we live in a city where pretty much the point of living here is that there's so much here. So I am saying that ten years in this city, and never once going to the Studio Museum of Harlem (or the Guggenheim for that matter, which I also visited this year for the first time) is too long. And I am saying that with all that's behind doors around this city, it's good to push them open every now and then, and take little epic journeys.

I sent money to the Department of Homeland Security

Never Done: I sent money to the Department of Homeland Security

Let me start by saying that sending money to Homeland Security is not the end goal here; it was a means to an end. -- the end being getting a visa for a wonderful Zimbabwean musician to come from Canada to do a program at the JCC. But this is not the beginning of the story; it's just a stop along the way. Maybe the beginning of the story was that in 1986 when I first started spending time in the Pacific Northwest, Dumi Maraire was teaching in the ethnomusicology department at the University of Washington. Dumi was a master Zimbabwean mbira (thumb piano) player who, while he lived in Seattle, spawned Zimbabean marimba bands up and down the Pacific coast. I knew some people in one band, and loved the music, and when I moved to Portland in 1990, I started taking marimba lessons from a tall skinny white American guy named Kite. I must have been a good student because before long I was invited to try out to play in Portland's marimba band: Boka Marimba, and before long I was in the band. I felt more connected to this music than I had ever been before to any other music. Maybe it was in part the physicality of the experience of playing the marimba and hosho (gourd shakers.) Maybe it was the time in my life. And maybe it was that I really loved the music.

But here's the tragedy. The longer I played it, the more I became aware of the ways that I didn't understand it well enough to be playing it in public. I was fine. I was a great performer. But I had a hard time grasping the cutting rhythms that were essential to the music, and the more I played, the more I heard them, and the more I heard them, the less I was able to play them. In the end, this made me stop playing. I think if this was happening now, I would understand that I was in a deep and confusing place of growth, and to somehow stick with it. But instead, I did something else that turned out to be wonderful and formative: I decided to learn "my own" music -- Yiddish music.

OK, flash forward 20 years. I am in Toronto with Josh, at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival with the film Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today. Josh edited the restoration of the film, and I did bits and pieces of work on it. The festival treated the film gorgeously. In between screenings, Josh and I took a walk around Toronto. We were heading back toward the theater when I heard the sound of mbira. Not just any mbira -- Zimbabwean mbira. And not just any mbira playing. Good mbira playing. I felt drawn to it -- like in a folk tale or a psychedelic trip. I tracked it down a couple of blocks until I found two young men playing on a street corner. I listened for a while, and then I introduced myself, and they introduced themselves: Pasi and Mutamba. We got to talking. We told them why we were there. Mutamba was interested in the film. We got him a ticket. He came and brought a friend. We spent some more time talking.

Every now and then you meet someone who shines. They don't have to shine every minute -- it's not a pressure kind of thing -- but they have a presence in the world that just reaches for humanity. Mutamba has that. We started talking about some projects we might work on together. I had an idea for a short film about a shared culture in the Zimbabwean and Jewish cultures about temporary structures. Jews build sukes (sukkahs) -- temporary shelters -- to remember the fragile shelters Jews lived in during the 40 years of wandering in the desert. In the Zimbabwean folk music repertoire, the song Nhemamusasa, which means Gathering Branches for a Temporary Shelter, is about the structures that people lived in during wartime.

We shared ideas about it. We stayed in touch. We became Facebook friends. We tracked each others' lives from afar. I donated to a fundraiser he had to raise money for a project for AIDS orphans. I want to try to describe this: we barely know each other, but we found a level at which to stay in touch which is both respectful of the fact that we really are not close friends, but at the same time acknowledges that we saw something important in each other.

Fast forward again. I got the job at the JCC, and I was in a meeting about programming a sukes (sukkot) event, when it dawned on me: this is it. This is the moment. I could bring Mutamba to come do a program, on sukes, in the suke, that ties together our traditions of temporary shelters. I pitched the idea. People loved it. I emailed Mutamba. He was up for it. We set up a phone call. When I reached him, he was working in his community garden. Oh, did I mention that he's a gardener, and also a social worker? He's such a complete person.

And for all of these reason, I was willing to give a significant sum of money to the Department of Homeland Security to get Mutamba an I-129 Visa and a P-3 classification as a Culturally Unique Artist or Entertainer, to come to New York to do an intercultural musical exploration of temporary shelter. (October 14. Mark your calendar. It will be on the roof of the JCC, which should be magical.) The mide (middah) of Frugality: Be careful with your money encourages us to be thoughtful about the ways we use our resources, and to consider the impact of our spending (and non-spending) on others. I found this perspective super helpful as I put the check in the FedEx envelope this afternoon, knowing that the impact of spending this money would be widespread and transformative.