Lydia Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: the election

“You may need to grieve or scream”

My daughter texted me around 11:00 PM the evening of the election (November 5th) and asked me many questions about how the electoral process works regarding voter estimates. She wondered what would happen, and I said I had no clue. It was true, very true. The next morning around 6:30, she called on the landline, and she was upset. I was asleep, but her mother talked to her and made her feel better.

I know that she recognizes that some of her friends were feeling even worse than she was. They believe, not without cause, that the election results endangered their lives.

But her whole generation feels in peril because it seemed at the time, and even more so now, that the incoming administration will not be terribly responsive to climate change issues; a bit of an understatement, I suppose.

I’m unsure I found the right words for her because I’m still trying to find the correct words for myself. I muddle through, though it feels like walking through pea soup.

Rebecca Solnit

If I get a do-over, I will probably share these words with Rebecca Solnit. “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything, and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.

“You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

“The Wobblies used to say, ‘Don’t mourn, organize,’ but you can do both at once, and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots, call someone who’s upset, and check your equipment for going onward.

“A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.”

Yeah, I probably should have said something like that. Or what Kellie Carter Jackson wrote to her kids: “I prepared my children for a Harris win. I did not prepare them for her loss.”

Lydster: absentee ballot

The daughter called home earlier this month to ask about her absentee ballot, which she received at college after I gave her advice on securing it; she had to contact the county board of elections website.

She wanted to know why certain candidates are on more than one political party line. For instance, the Democratic candidate is also often listed on the Working Families line. This is likewise true of the Republican and Conservative lines.

It’s because, as the political science major knows, New York State allows candidates to be endorsed by more than one party or cross-endorsement. She wondered whether it made any difference in terms of the vote counting; I said no. So she asked what the significance was, and I said it had to do with ballot position and whether the minor parties remain official parties.

I only suggested one specific candidate. For reasons I mentioned here, I recommended Jaime Czajka over Jasper Mills in the family court judge race. Curiously, when we get political mail, and we got a lot during primary season, one piece has my wife’s name, and another, my daughter’s and mine.

My daughter was watching a television program recently that mentioned George W. Bush and how he was perceived; I’m a history person. Also, she knew I was the expert on games. She asked me about Monopoly for a project she was working on. I taught her how to play poker, Sorry, and much more. While I know little about current popular culture, I muddle through.

Her mom

On the other hand, she talks with her mother about paying for college, clothes, recipes, driving, medical issues, and banking—you know, the more concrete tasks. Interestingly, my daughter aided her mother in the summer with her workout at the YMCA.

I am involved with a few of these aspects. My daughter’s credit card is a spinoff of mine. Her health insurance comes from my former employer. I went with her when she applied for her passport.

Our daughter knows which specialist to ask when she has a query: the teacher or the librarian.

Lydster: Ten Candles

our 25th anniversary present

This past spring semester, the daughter’s final project for her sculpture, mold-making, and casting class involved ten candles. Although the project had to include making molds and casting, it was otherwise open-ended, so one could use whatever material they wanted. It didn’t have to have a theme, but it should be a cohesive project, not random.

She decided on the topic for this project: her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. In each piece was a bit of wax from our wedding candle. the project took about 30 hours.

Candle #1: a wedding cake to represent the marriage in 1999. The scent was vanilla, sugar cane, and almond.

Candle #2 represents my wife’s and my honeymoon in Barbados in 1999. The scent was rum cake. Why? Because our daughter asked us to give her specifics. Rum cake was one of the most tangible objects we remember from that period; it was delicious, and we brought some back home.

Candle #3 is a standard house because we bought our home together in 2000. (My wife had purchased a house earlier, and we lived there for a year, but it wasn’t OURS.) The scent was coconut, citrus, and amber.

Candle #4 is the steeple from our current church, which we started attending in 2000. The scent is golden apple and Honey Drizzle.

Candle #5 is three candles tied together, representing the three of us. The candles are three different shades of green in honor of our surname. The scent is vanilla, buttercream, and marshmallow, which she feels smells like a newborn.

Candle #6 is an adenoid. The daughter had an adenoidectomy at the age of two and a half, which was very traumatic for her parents. That candle is unscented because the procedure involved her nose.

Felines

Candle #7 is the cat Midnight, who we got in 2013. The scent was sandalwood and clove, which smelled like fresh kitty litter. At this point in his life, Midnight was always covered in kitty litter, so she thought it was very fitting for him.

Candle #8 is the cat Stormy, who we got later in 2013. The scent is called Warm and Welcome. Both cat candles use the same mold by casting them with different colored crayon waxes. Neither of them came out exactly how she envisioned. Midnight was too gray, and Stormy needed stripes, so she painted them, giving each more texture.

Candle #9 is the daughter graduating from high school and attending college. The scent is warm spring sunshine. The wick from our wedding candle was used as the tassel.

Candle #10 commemorates my wife and my 25th-anniversary trip to Chautauqua Institution. This is the CHQ tower; she made it before we went. The scent is sparkling sugared berries.

Unfortunately, the box of candles was lost when she moved back home at the end of the semester. Nevertheless, it was a wonderfully inventive effort. I LOVE these SO much.

Lydster: driver’s permit

wisdom teeth

It was an interesting summer for our daughter. For one thing, she got her driver’s permit and decided to learn how to operate a car. She enlisted her mother in the teaching experience. I don’t think this was something that my wife was particularly looking forward to doing, but our daughter has skills in this area.

She won’t have time to get her license over the summer, as she still has to take a five-hour course, but she’s a quick learner. I’m getting this from my wife and daughter because, to date, I have not ridden in the car with my daughter operating the vehicle.

The daughter has a great deal of spatial recognition. This became obvious when we went to Alexandria, VA, in July. She instantly recognized that there couldn’t be a second bathroom in our place because there would not have been sufficient space. This was her third trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, though her parents’ first. We also went to the Jefferson Memorial and passed the Capitol. More about that trip soon.

She’s been going through a lot of her stuff as part of the family purging, whittling through stuff we may not need anymore.

Jock

She’s also been exercising a lot at the local Albany YMCA and is very good at learning how to use some of the equipment, so much so that she’s been teaching her mother how to do so.

This has been interrupted by the need to get her four wisdom teeth removed on August 14. They weren’t hurting yet, but removal was highly recommended based on the dentist and the specialist’s assessment. Annoyingly, because of a scheduling snafu, my wife had to drive her to Queensbury, about an hour away, rather than the closer Latham office. The day after, she had a lot of mango juice, mac and cheese, and chocolate pudding.

She goes back to college soon. It was nice having her around.

Lydster: Dancing Many Drums

Kykunkor

My daughter worked on two papers about people portrayed in the book Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz.

The first was about Kyundor, or the Witch Woman: An African Opera in America, 1934. Maureen Needham writes: “Versatile, multitalented as an opera and concert singer, dancer and choreographer, and teacher of African culture, the great but virtually forgotten Asadata Dafora made a huge contribution to the birth of African dance and musical drama in the United States.”

John Perpener wrote several dance biographies for Jacob’s Pillow. Of Dafora, he notes the performer was born in Sierra Leone in 1890 and moved to NYC in 1929.

His breakthrough was Kykunkor or the Witch Woman, “which opened in May 1934… Sparked by a positive review by John Martin of the New York Times, impressive audiences began to attend the dance-opera at the Unity Theater, a small performance space on East Twenty-Third Street in New York City. Martin effusively described Kykunkor as ‘“one of the most exciting dance performances of the season’ Not only did his critical imprimatur stimulate interest in Dafora’s work, it also forwarded the artist’s objective—to prove that the art and culture of Africa was equal in importance to that of the world’s other cultures.”

On YouTube, you can find videos of others honoring Dafora’s works, such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater showing the dance of Awassa Astrige or the Ostrich, Dafora’s 1932 work.

Check out the Wikipedia page for this innovator who died in 1965. I was unaware of this man.

KCH

My daughter’s other topic was Katherine Dunham (1909-2006). From the Institute for Dunham Technique Certification page: she “was a world-famous dancer, choreographer, author, anthropologist, social activist, and humanitarian.

“She translated her vision of dance in the African diaspora, including the United States, into vivid works of choreography that show a people’s culture. During her ‘World Tours’ period (1938-1965), her company was one of the few major internationally recognized American dance companies that toured six continents. The success of the dance company was also due to her artistic collaboration with her brilliant designer husband, Canadian John Pratt, who was the costume and set designer for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.

“However, during this period in her own country, she also encountered many instances of racial discrimination, both in accommodations for her company and in segregated theaters where blacks were either relegated to the back row balcony or not allowed in at all. Dunham always fought against this racial discrimination, bringing several lawsuits and using her celebrity to bring attention to the African American plight. During this period, she created a repertoire of over 100 ballets for concert, Broadway, nightclubs and opera.”

The book features a chapter by Constance Valis Hill: Katherine Durham’s Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression. Read about this production in the LOC and Dance Magazine. The piece was performed in 1951 abroad, but not in the United States until 2012.

Check out a page in the LOC page, which shows videos of her work, as well as Wikipedia and the IBDb. I knew about her from the 1983 Kennedy Center Honors she received.

Vaudeville

Nadine A. George wrote about “Dance and Identity Politics in American Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters, 1900-1935.” She’s also written the book The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville. She’s quoted here that “these four Black women manipulated their race, gender, and class to resist hegemonic forces while achieving success. By maintaining a high-class image, they were able to challenge the fictions of racial and gender identity.”

The LOC notes that the sisters, ” Mabel Whitman (1880-1942), Essie Whitman (1882-1903), Alberta Whitman (ca. 1887-1963) and ‘Baby’ Alice Whitman (ca. 1900-1969), comprise the family of black female entertainers who owned and produced their own performing company, which traveled across the United States.. to play in all the major cities, becoming the longest running and highest-paid act on the T.O.B.A. circuit and a crucible of dance talent in black vaudeville.”

Besides Wikipedia, there’s a lot about these siblings here. Here’s a brief audio essay.

While my daughter did not write about them, they were fascinating performers and entrepreneurs who influenced many. I did not know of them.