ISBN: 9780446509244
Circle of Women Stamp Project
By: Lisa Alvarado,
on 7/23/2009
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Sandra Posadas is a second generation Puerto Rican woman born and bred in Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois. She is a teacher, published artist/illustrator, actress; cast member of the Vida Bella Ensemble, artisan; creator of Coqueta Creations by PiXie- a jewelry line for women. Sandra has been a Bilingual educator within the Chicago Public Schools for 12 years and was recently nominated for the Illinois Golden Apple Award. Sandra is also an educator of teachers, and has presented her progressive early childhood approach to curriculum development and implementation at a variety of teacher conferences throughout Chicago. Sandra successfully co-wrote her first production, "Brown Girls Singing" which was successfully staged at University of Chicago and Jane Addams' Hull House.
Sandra performs her poetry at various Chicago venues and has presented her art work at various local venues including the University of Illinois @ Chicago Symposium for Women of Color in 2008. She holds a B.A. from Roosevelt University and is currently a working on her M.A. in Bilingual/ Bicultural Education at DePaul University. Sandra believes strongly in that art can educate. Through her poetry, canvasses, and performances She believes in using art as knowledge and transformation so that all participants and spectators examine themselves in relation to their place in society. Through different modalities that she uses, whether visual, interactive, or the performing arts, the audience can explore, reflect, analyze and transform the reality in which they are living.
Written & directed by Yolanda Nieves, executive producer Mike Oquendo
Vida Bella Ensemble is thrilled to announce its upcoming performance of The Brown Girls' Chronicles: Puerto Rican Women and Resilience was SOLD OUT. Written and directed by author/playwright Yolanda Nieves, “The Brown Girls' Chronicles” are the stories of second generation Chicago Puerto Rican women who in their daily lives embody the struggle for independence of mind, soul, heart and body. The three-night run of “The Brown Girls’ Chronicles” will took place at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. The production will be mounted again, in Fall 2009. Check the group's myspace page for more info.
Following audience acclaim and a previous sold-out run in March, the May performances mark the second sold-out run of The Brown Girls’ Chronicles: Puerto Rican Women and Resilience. “I stand in awe of the support…” shares director Yolanda Nieves, “This play is a testament to the intelligence, beauty and resilience of who Latinas are.” The May performances took place May 28-30, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. in the 140-seat West Town Studio Theater at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, 777 N. Green Street in Chicago.
# # #
About Vida Bella Ensemble: Vida Bella Ensemble is an all Latin, all-female Chicago-based collective of inter-generational artists committed to communicating the stories of the trials and triumphs of the urban woman. In collaborative partnership the stories of such experiences are told through the performance of poetry, dialogue, monologue, song and movement. For more information about Vida Bella Ensemble visit www.myspace.com/browngirlschronicles or email [email protected].
About Director Yolanda Nieves: Award winning Chicago poet, author and playwright Yolanda Nieves uses the power of verse and the written word to teach and inspire. An accomplished writer, her work has been extensively published by college/university and independent presses and journals around the country. Her newest book, “Dove Over Clouds” (Plainview Press, 2007) has again garnered her acclaim for the themes revolving around the issues of race, gender, class and colonialism as it relates to the Puerto Rican/Afro-Puerto Rican Diaspora. Her work captures the spirit of hope, shaped by her Puerto Rican heritage, growing up in Chicago’s Humboldt Park and by the direct impact of women impressed upon her. Performing her poetry and plays in Chicago and all over the world, her performances have received great acclaim in England, Puerto Rico and Mexico.
She’s the founder and artistic creator of Vida Bella Ensemble performance troupe. Her collection of artistic work gives audiences the clarity of the experiences of women, mothers and immigrants. Full of passion and candor, she inspires audiences to expand their understanding of their own lives and the inspiration for them to tell their own stories. Yolanda resides in Chicago’s Humboldt Park and teaches at Wilbur Wright Community College.
About Executive Producer Mike Oquendo: Mike Oquendo combines his love of live arts and his production experience to produce over 70 shows a year in both the Chicagoland area and throughout the country. Creator of the "Mikey O Comedy Show,” Mike is a prominent force in independent productions. His shows and events have been featured on local TV, radio and print media including coverage by Telemundo, WGN-TV, People en Español, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Reader and Metromix.
Two notable accomplishments include sitting on the Board of Governors for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences which produced the first Latin Grammy's in 2001, and being a concept contributor on three HBO Latino specials in 2006. Mike was a production consultant for the Adler Planetarium’s "Luna Cabana Series" and the International Latino Film Festival, positions he held for 6 years respectively. Mike is particularly proud of continually raising funds for non-profit organizations that provide services and programs to Latino and non-Latino communities.
By: msedano,
on 6/30/2009
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Cristina Henríquez. The World In Half. NY: Riverhead Books, 2009.
ISBN 9781594488559
Michael Sedano
Cristina Henríquez’ The World In Half is a deceptively complex, deeply romantic novel that should be next on your summer reading list, and an ideal choice for book groups who enjoy a rich discussion that balances decisions looked back on from middle age against possibilities open only to youth. 
Deceptive because on its surface it recounts a naïve young woman’s search for an absent father whose identity has been a closely guarded secret by a steely, abrasive mother. Complex because the still-young mother’s mind has begun to fail under the merciless attack of Alzheimer’s Disease. As mother’s memory fades, the daughter fears what her own future health may bring, the total loss of her mother, and along with that, all connection to the mystery of her father.
Miraflores Reid, “Mira,” a University of Chicago scholarship student majoring in Geology, knows only that her mother lived in Panama with her husband, a Marine stationed in the Zone, where she conceived the child with an unnamed local. The pregnant woman returned to New York to live with her family near West Point, where Catherine Reid’s father taught. Mira wonders how difficult the pregnancy and birth must have been in that small-minded military town. Catherine is white. Was Gatún black? Danilo has “brown” skin, and Mira may “look” Puerto Rican, or like a local of whom Panameño travelers ask directions.
Escaping that life, Catherine takes her child to Chicago where she works a series of survival jobs as waitress, pizza delivery, receptionist. Mother keeps a wall between herself and the social world, treating others abruptly and welcoming little humor or flirtation into her privacy. Mira carries herself similarly, but this may simply reflect her nerdly scientific bent.
Much of the mother’s personality emerges over the course of the story. Early in the novel, as Mira is organizing her mother’s property, she comes across a box of letters her father mailed to the woman who abandoned him. Mira’s mother led the daughter to believe the man had no interest in either of them. The letters open Mira to a poetic and broken heart whose longing for a daughter and fugitive lover cries off the pages.
The letters provide two vital clues to help Mira unravel the mystery. A name, Gatún Gallardo, and an address in Panama. With these, the desperate young woman launches herself on an ill-planned, desperate quest to recover the facts of her own birth and reconnect with the heart-broken man. Fortunately for Miraflores, her mother has enrolled the child in Spanish language classes and, as a Spanish minor, she has superb bilingual skills.
Arriving in Panamá--note the diacritic, an authorial denotation that the English-language narrative is taking place in the local idiom—Mira makes friends with Hernán, a hotel bellman, and his nephew Danilo, an ambulante flower seller. Hernán invites Mira to move into their home while Danilo helps Mira track down the clues leading to her father. Danilo warms to the task of tour guide and intercultural informant.
Mira is a guileless virgin and would be easy prey for a womanizing school dropout like Danilo. But he wants to be her friend. In fact, the most serious crisis in their relationship occurs when, nearing the end of her stay, a drunk Mira caresses her host in a late-night conversation. He bolts and she spends the next day tracking him down instead of tracking down clues to her still-unreachable father.
Danilo looks into Mira’s heart and fears, and draws them out in conversation. On the surface, they talk of her fears that Alzheimer’s will strike Mira young, as it has her mother. On a different level is the parallel of Catherine coming to Panama to find a man, and here is the daughter, come to Panama and finding a man. The mother, nineteen years earlier, had returned home pregnant. Now here is the fruitless frustration Mira experiences of not finding any trace of her mother’s lover, even as Danilo unwittingly draws Mira’s affection toward himself.
The canal across the isthmus cut the world in half. That is what the laborers who dug the waterway used to say. Alzheimer’s is cutting Catherine and Mira’s world in half, as their personalities do in their social world. Mira stands astride both halves, her parental history on the one side, her own future on the other. How much will history repeat itself, will Mira make the same errors her mother has, abandoning love in Panama to a bitter life of denial in Chicago? Adding complexity to themes of choice and circumstance, Danilo’s story echoes Mira’s. He’s been abandoned by his parents, a difference being he has their address and phone number but they never call. That story lurks in the background as we work through Mira’s story.
Henríquez draws a parallel between mother and daughter when Mira meets her father’s sister in a rich part of town. A box of letters Gatún Gallardo never mailed to Catherine fills in blanks missing from the letters Catherine closeted. Mira gets unreasonably angry that Hernán and Danilo knew and didn’t help until her stay was near its end. Unlike her mother, however, Mira lets it out, confronting Danilo angrily. He convinces her that friendship and love were the motive for what Hernán and Danilo suspected, only suspected. They believed it would be preferable to keep hope alive in Mira’s heart, rather than break it with a hard truth.
The World in Half tells a complex story that a casual summary can only hint at. Cristina Henríquez rewards her readers with compelling narrative and touching personal portraits of the city and residents. Much of the enjoyment of the romantic nature of the novel comes as the story unfolds, and to disclose details will spoil the pleasure of seeing it firsthand with your own eyes. One indication of this comes in the names. Both Miraflores and Gatún are names of locks on the canal. It’s not just that a lock allows the uniting of both halves of the world, but that Catherine, despite closing off her daughter’s life from her father’s, gave her daughter a name like her fathers, one that foretells her quest to bring both worlds together.
As the novel ends, Catherine’s illness grows increasingly severe and dictates much of what must come next. But beyond a daughter’s responsibilities lie the choices Miraflores can make, but that Henríquez leaves open to delicious speculation. Your book group will enjoy discussing and accounting for what happened in Catherine’s life, more so the undefined what ifs that lie ahead for a young woman like Mira and a young man like Danilo.
By: msedano,
on 6/23/2009
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Mayra Lazara Dole. Down to the Bone. NY: Harper Teen, 2008.
Michael Sedano
Down to the bone is among the more challenging YA novels I’ve had the pleasure to read.The challenge is less to the reader than to the author, Mayra Lazara Dole. Not only must Dole work her coming of age plot to a happy ending, the author tasks herself to address gay sexuality in an ambiente of Miami’s Cubano cultura. The specific geography provides background for a work that should have widespread appeal for kids everywhere. Dole, or her editor, recognizes the language gap between Spanish-literate readers and those less endowed. There’s a Spanish-English glossary that clarifies the majority of italicized expressions, even to obvious cognates like música and gringo, and the conjunction y. I looked for a description of a tortilla de platano, but it was omitted. As a certified senior citizen who digs YA and chica lit and is hip to a certain amount of patois, I would have appreciated glossaried help with such English expressions as “hooking up” and the title. Given the popularity of the phrase—a movie and a band share the name--“down to the bone,” I suspect that means something beyond the novel’s final line, “This is where I belong, loved and understood right down to the bone.” In my vocabulary, “hooking up” seems a clearly metaphorical allusion to forming a social alliance, but in Laura’s world, the phrase seems restricted to sexual union.
Scrunchy, née Laura Sofia, has already hooked up with Marlena, or maybe tonight's the night. For sure, they've shared passionate kisses. Laura and Marlena are eleventh graders and deeply in love. Back in the day, this might have been called “puppy love” by adults who remember the first time is not necessarily lasting. But that’s not Laura’s world view. Por vida, that’s what Laura feels. And that’s what Marlena says, too, in a love note Laura’s reading on the last day of school as the novel opens. Daydreaming, the vivacious teen doesn’t hear Fart Face, Sister Asunción, ask a question. That daydream leads to a world of hurt.
Adults in Laura’s world fit one of two types. There are the horrorshow assholes, like the nun and Laura’s mother, or there are the totally cool, like Viva, the mother of Laura’s best friend, Soli. Mostly it’s a world of the former, until Laura discovers Miami’s gay society. Laura’s classmates fit into the former tipos, too. “Muff diver!” they shout, after Sister seizes and reads Marlena’s note to the entire classroom.
Being kicked out of Catholic school is not punishment enough. Laura’s mother demands to know the identity of Laura’s degenerate friend, and, failing that, kicks Laura out of her home until Laura identifies the lover and accepts heterosexuality. Find a man, get married.
Viva and Soli love Laura unconditionally, mirror images of the horrid mother whose love is conditioned on the teenaged girl complying with the mother’s every demand. As much love as Laura feels in her cramped temporary abode, still the daughter wants to go back home to her mother’s love, and to remain in her little brother’s life. I worry about that kid, given that mother.
Laura meets a boi—another term some readers will learn—who befriends the emotionally devasted Laura. Tazer, a rich woman virtually abandoned by her father to a luxurious pad, prefers to present himself as a male. Tazer wants to start a love affair with Laura, but he is not what Laura wants. It’s an interesting view of gay choices. Dole makes the point that gay gente don’t hook up with promiscuous abandon. Like all people, Laura and the gay world she enters are concerned with choices and motivated by emotional attraction. The one who flits from lover to lover is la Soli, a confirmed heterosexual. (Who will come around in the end to a decent but spurned lover).
The worst choice a person can make is to conform to outside pressures, especially when these are inimical to one's self. Laura denies her desires and starts dating a hot-to-trot man. Hoping she’ll fall in love with him, she falls into his arms and into his bed, but doesn’t “hook up” with the conquest-minded hottie. Marlena, on the other hand, is whisked away by her family to Puerto Rico, to be brainwashed by a fundamentalist church. Laura finally gets a “dear Jill” letter from the about-to-be married Marlena, who washes her hands of their love, wishing for Laura to reject herself and become a betrayer like Marlena.
I’ve summarized only a few key plot lines in this engaging novel. Dole’s depiction of Laura’s peers takes the novel into a similar direction as the adultcentric line. There are STD, clubbing, dancing, blind hatred, krypto personae; all adding rich texture to the teenage scene. Sadly, Dole doesn’t dwell on the tragedy of Laura quitting school to work full time to support herself, nor look forward to what happens in three or five years. Will Laura graduate? Get her landscape architect degree? A contractor’s license? Such unexplored possibilities are sorely lacking in an otherwise edifying story that likely mirrors what’s happening for countless teens facing amor prohibido, whether parents like it or not.
Irrespective of sexual identity or activity, teenagers and adults will take serious thought from the novel. Laura and Soli are healthy, happy children. As such—children—they control only some elements of their environment, and expose themselves too much to risky behaviors, e.g. a speeding cab runs down Laura on her bicycle in a late-night accident. Adults might find difficulty allowing a child the kind of freedom Laura takes, but only because her awful mother is such a narrow-minded person. Viva, perhaps, allows her daughter and live-in friend too much liberty, but because the girls make good choices, little harm comes of going overboard in this direction. Obviously the restrictive nuns and birth mother’s rules produce dysfunctional results. Dole’s lesson is a good one: trust the kids to make good decisions. Despite the poor raising Laura got from her mother, she makes those decisions because that’s the right thing to do. Trust the kid to know her heart and take the proper course.
Still, there’s nothing like reasoned adult upbringing to help a kid grow into the kind of adult I hope Laura, Soli, Tazer and the rest will. Adults would profit from YA work like this, if only to know what, or whom, is influencing the next generation's views of their inheritance. As my dad liked to say, pa'lla va la sombra. Let's see what kids can do that we didn't. In Dole's world, there's a montón of intractable caca that won't take care of itself.
That's June's penultimate Tuesday. A Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except you are here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga. Please invite your friends to stop by, read, leave comments--las huellas de sus pasos.
By: msedano,
on 6/9/2009
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Maria walks into the central city crowd, homeless, destitute, the rest of her life in front of her. And that’s that. Bluhm chases her, losing ground until suddenly she is not there.
After twenty years with Maria, before that life with a wife, his mother, two kids, a maid, Carlos Bluhm stares into the brownness of the city numb with pain, oblivious to the crowd’s resentment of his gringoness on their streets. In the distance, Bluhm’s German-Peruvian pals call his name to bring him back into their protective embrace. So ends Marie Arana’s Lima Nights. It’s a novel whose pages you keep turning not because the characters are endearing—quite the opposite—but to see if there’s a point to Carlos Bluhm’s loser of a life.Maria has never been there throughout the novel, despite her pivotal role in the mess that is Bluhm’s life. He first spots her at a taxi dance bar, Lima Nights, where women keep men buying liquor, then after hours making whatever deals they can turn. An experienced woman counsels Maria to capture a man’s attention by slipping her datos into the guy’s coat pocket. Make a good choice and a woman earns long-term security and a taste of the good life that comes of being a man’s mistress.
Maria chooses Carlos, a forty-something man out on the town with his three pals. Not that Maria’s been on the job all that long, or other work for that matter. She’s fifteen years old, a couple weeks from turning legal. Maria desperately wants out of a life in Lima’s worst slum, her mother an alcoholic who takes in men and laundry to support Maria and her two brothers. Talk about highly motivated to do whatever it takes to shake free of that futureless history, that’s Maria. If something good has come of Maria’s years with Carlos it’s the slim chance that her future will not be to return to that slum and her mother’s footsteps.
But Lima Nights is not Maria’s story. And it’s not Carlos Bluhm’s, despite his central role. Lima Nights is a political novel. Marriage politics looms above all, defining the tragedy that comes to familia Bluhm. Arana casts a cold, subjective eye on men’s philandering and women’s tolerance. Except for Oscar the shrink, the cohort are scions of rich families down on their luck. With their grandfathers’ economic empires dismantled, the men live in Lima’s elegant houses but work regular jobs like camera salesman, appliance store entrepreneur, hotel manager. Bluhm struggles to make ends meet; to pay for his pleasures he begins dismantling his heritage, selling family silver and pre-hispanic artifacts.
Maria never gives a conscious thought to what she’s done to Bluhm’s family, other than one uncomfortable moment staring into the eyes of Bluhm’s younger son, who is older than Maria and who finds Maria beautiful. The women’s attitudes range from bitter resentment of the men covering for each other to zero tolerance only when confronted by hard proof. That’s Bluhm’s wife. Only when confronted with firm evidence of Bluhm’s tryst with the Indian girl, does the wife move out, taking Bluhm’s mother with her, and the maid. Maria moves into the empty house the first night. It is an empty dream but she takes full advantage of it, investing the next twenty years of escape in making the nest a comfortable home.
Bluhm’s friends cannot understand his actions. Not that the girl is not alluring, nor that she’s only fifteen. Only the psychiatrist is troubled by the child’s age. For his part, Bluhm anxiously waits until her birthday to make his first physical move on her. Maria’s main fault is being a chola--brown-skinned India. Indians like her, according to Bluhm’s buddies, are good for a one-night stand but not someone to settle down with. It’s an attitude Maria feels too, thinking herself disposable to men like Bluhm.
This vicious prejudice permeates Bluhm’s light-skinned society. It is the immovable force against the irresistible force of Peru’s indigenous and mestizo masses. This ugly undercurrent of hatred converts Lima Nights from a sadness-infused battle of the sexes fable to a frustrating metaphor for Peru’s decaying colonialism. The intractable divide between cholas like Maria and white-skinned Europeans like the Bluhm’s German-Peruvian social circle offers no escape to either side. There is hope. Bluhm’s sons wash their hands of their father’s past—neither of them wants nor needs the old place, they’ve carved out their own fortunes by dint of their own labor. Just as there’s hope that Maria’s future will not be like her past, if she can parlay into a job what she’s learned as a chola living a middle-class gringo life. If not, there’s always the slum, or the Shining Path, or something less.
A ver, Maria. Suerte. Carlos, you did it to yourself and whatever happens next, you have it coming. Readers have it coming to them to enjoy Arana's Lima Nights.
By: Lisa Alvarado,
on 7/3/2008
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JacketFlap tags: Chicago, images, teatro, women and performance, chicana literature, images of women, chicanarte, Teatro Vista, Add a tag
A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays
By Laura E. Garcia, Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez
Foreword by Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez
"This collection of testimonials of early Xicanistas and their work in teatro is an important contribution to the preservation of the spirit and energy that made the Chicano Movement."
—Ana Castillo, author of The Guardians and So Far from God
"These memoirs are the personal, honest, and riveting testimonials of seventeen Chicanas who performed Chicana theater during the 1970s. These carnalas empowered themselves and thousands during the tumultuous years of the Movimiento by performing plays for working-class communities. From college campuses to the fields where campesinos toiled, estas mujeres had the courage to fight gender inequality. We need their courage today. And we need their stories for a new generation of Chicanas and for working women everywhere."
—Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima and Curse of the ChupaCabra
"'Órale, ya era tiempo.' Stories of 'the Movement' too often emphasize men's roles, ignoring the vital participation of women or relegating them to the sidelines. In Teatro Chicana, women are central to the ideas, emotions, strategies, writing, art, and music of the 1960s and 1970s when this country—and much of the world—rocked with revolutionary imagination and fervor. The Chicano Movement, like most social movements, also had many women warrior/leaders—this struggle was shaped and ignited by women, fed and nurtured by women, with many men at their sides. I was part of this—I knew first hand how feminine spirit, energy, and love embraced and impelled us. Seeing it again through the voices of the elder-teachers in this book, I'm reminded—no movement is complete without la mujer."
—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times
The 1970s and 1980s saw the awakening of social awareness and political activism in Mexican-American communities. In San Diego, a group of Chicana women participated in a political theatre group whose plays addressed social, gender, and political issues of the working class and the Chicano Movement. In this collective memoir, seventeen women who were a part of Teatro de las Chicanas (later known as Teatro Laboral and Teatro Raíces) come together to share why they joined the theatre and how it transformed their lives. Teatro Chicana tells the story of this troupe through chapters featuring the history and present-day story of each of the main actors and writers, as well as excerpts from the group's materials and seven of their original short scripts.
Call 800-691-6888
C/O TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO
PO Box 3524
Chicago, IL 60654
http://speakersforanewamerica.com
Edited by:
Laura E. Garcia is the editor of the Tribuno del Pueblo newspaper, a bilingual publication that gives voice to the poor and to those fighting unjust laws, such as those that make the undocumented immigrant an animal of prey. She lives in Chicago.
Sandra M. Gutierrez is a lifelong community activist who has advocated for immigrant rights, unionization, youth counseling, and cultural diversity. She lives in Pasadena, California.
Felicitas Nuñez was a co-founder of the Teatro de las Chicanas and continues to be a driving force behind the organization. She lives in Bermuda Dunes, California.
Mozart Park
2036 N. Avers St.
Chicago, IL
Fred is 78 years old and a recent widower falls in love with his neighbor Elsa who claims to be younger. They fall in love, scandalizing their children and even their grandchildren. She is bound and determined to change Fred. She makes him laugh though, something he has not done for many years.
Adapted by Lynne Alvarez
Directed by Henry Godinez
July 12 – August 10, 2008
Part of the Goodman Theatre Latino Theatre Festival
Goodman Theatre in the Owen, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Chicago, IL
Save $5 at any Friday performance! Use promo code "5off" to save $5 per ticket at any Friday performance July 12 through August 10. (Discount subject to availability. No exchanges or substitutions. Limit: 8 tickets per order.)
Call (312) 443-3800 or Groups of 10 or more call 877.4.GRP.TIX
Suggested for everyone age 8 and older
Esperanza Rising is the story of a wealthy Mexican girl whose privileged existence is shattered when tragedy strikes, and she and her mother must flee to California. Forced to work in a migrant labor camp, Esperanza must learn to rise above her difficult circumstances and discover what she's truly made of. Set in the turbulent 1930's, and based on the popular book by Pam Muñoz Ryan, Esperanza Rising is a poetic tale of a young girl's triumph over adversity.
Henry Godinez
Director Henry Godinez, a Chicago Children's Theatre Artistic Associate, directed our Inaugural Production of A Year With Frog and Toad. Henry is the Resident Artistic Associate at the Goodman Theatre, where curates their biennial Latino Theatre Festival and directed six seasons of A Christmas Carol. He serves as Artistic Director of Northwestern University's Theatre and Interpretation Center, and is the co-founder and former Artistic Director of Teatro Vista.
POLINESIA: mujer policía que no entiende razones.
CAMARON: aparato enorme que saca fotos.
DECIMAL: pronunciar equivocadamente.
BECERRO: observar una loma o colina.
BERMUDAS: observa a las que no hablan..
TELEPATIA: aparato de TV para la hermana de mi mamá.
ANOMALO: hemorroides.
BENCENO: lo que los bebés miran con los ojos cuando toman leche.
CHINCHILLA: auchenchia de un lugar para chentarche.
DIADEMAS: veintinueve de febrero.
DILEMAS: hablale más.
DIOGENES: la embarazó.
ELECCION:
lo que expelimenta un oliental al vel una película polno.
ENDOSCOPIO: me preparo para todos los exámenes excepto por dos.
MANIFIESTA: juerga de cacahuates.
MEOLLO:
me escucho.
ONDEANDO: sinónimo de ondestoy.
TALENTO:
no está tan rápido.
NITRATO: frustración superada.
REPARTO: trillizos.
REPUBLICA: mujerzuela sumamente conocida..
SILLON: respuesta afirmativa de Yoko Ono a Lennon..
SORPRENDIDA: monja corrupta y muy dispuesta...
ZARAGOZA : bien por Sarita!!!!!!
Lisa Alvarado
By: msedano,
on 4/15/2008
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: iraq war literature, National Poetry Month, images of women, Add a tag
Michael Sedano
Last week I had the pleasure of reviewing Benjamin Alire Sáenz' Names on a Map. I noted that gente who'd gone through the Draft would form a personal connection with Sáenz' plot involving a community's response to war, and a twin boy's awareness that he'd soon open the mailbox to find his Draft notice waiting. I thought most young readers wouldn't immediately understand those feelings but should read the novel to get a sense of them. All our soldiers today are volunteers. Which doesn't make their shipping out any easier.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/333915.html
THE NEWS TRIBUNE. Published: April 13th, 2008 01:00 AM.
Kathy Fendelman tries to comfort her twins, Samantha and Benjamin, 9, on Saturday after saying goodbye to their father, 1st Sgt. Barton Fendelman. He was leaving Philadelphia for eventual deployment to Iraq. The soldier is a member of the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade. It will be his second tour of duty in Iraq.
---------------------------
I look at this photo and what I see is how strong that wife is. And my heart goes out to her. The kids, twins, are completely overcome at the grief of parting. Their dad, a First Sergeant--a really high position in the Army, there are only two ranks higher for EM (non-officers)--is shipping out for Iraq. Look at that woman's face. She's holding it in as much as she can, but you know she's giving in to her worst fears. What happens to a guy who's going into the invasion zone? Death isn't the fear--everyone dies. It's being blown to bits by a roadside bomb; it's thoughts of disability--how many people does she know who went off to that country only to come home without a mind, without a pair of legs, missing an arm or an eye? Maybe Top--that's what all First Sergeants are called, "Top"--will come home confined to a wheelchair, or bounce in and out of mental institutions for the rest of their "til death do us part" lives. But she has to be strong.
Then my thoughts shoot back to Fall, 1968.
My wife Barbara and I were married in August 1968. We were incredibly happy. Still are--this August it will be 40 years. But at that time, she didn't understand what I understood. Only a matter of time and I'd be heading off to some uncertain future, like the one captured in that news photo.
One day Barbara and I were on our way to a fun day at the Santa Barbara arbortetum, a lovely peaceful place. And it was free, all the more attractive because we were stone cold poor. Graduate students. From the front porch I see the mail has arrived. Barbara says "leave it 'til we get back." Something told me it was the day. I had to open that mailbox.
October 1968. I open the mailbox and see that brown manila envelope I knew would come. Richard Nixon has ordered me to report before Thanksgiving day. This is why, every Thanksgiving, I play Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" the whole day. We played that song that November 1968 and filled the room with laughter. She laughing bitterly about Arlo's beating the draft singing that silly song, me laughing hysterically at the irony. I couldn't beat it. I was on my way and there wasn't a god-damned thing I could do about it. I was gone. Punto final. What a wretched Thanksgiving Day that was, but our friends the Greelis' shared it with us and we all put on happy faces and enjoyed one another's company.
I managed to delay induction until January 1969. The morning Barbara took me to the Santa Barbara Greyhound Bus station--really just a parking lot in the middle of town--she dressed in her best outfit, wore her brave smile and kept her head high as she drove me into town from Isla Vista.
It was one of those grey, drizzly Santa Barbara January mornings. (I tell everyone you can still see my heelprints etched into the sidewalk where they had to drag me onto the bus, but that's a fanciful tale. I went willingly.) A whole bunch of people like us had gathered to board the bus, to bid farewell to their soon-to-be-soldiers. Who knew what would happen to us in the next few years?
I waited until the final call to present my papers, lined up and boarded the bus. I found a seat and leaned toward the window where Barbara's anxious eyes finally spotted me through the darkly tinted glass. She smiled and waved. I smiled and waved. Her lips moved, "I Love you." My lips moved, "I love you." She held her head high. The driver gunned the engine. In the instant the bus lurched toward the street, Barbara buried her face in her hands. That's how she was standing when I lost sight of her, the Greyhound turning right onto the road that would take us to the Induction Center on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. We were on our way.
Please join me in wishing that family in the photo all the best. Parting is not a sweet sorrow. My heart goes out to that woman because I can only imagine what it must have been like for Barbara back on January 15, 1969.
In under two hours, the bus is in LA. Poke. Prod. Test. Move. No "Group W" bench, no singing that silly song. Pledge allegiance and swear to defend. Another bus ride. We pass through Santa Barbara in the dead of night and keep going, putting distance between ourselves and home. Ft. Ord in the pre-dawn stillness, following orders: "Stand on your number and shut the fuck up."
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Poetry Reading in Chicago by Chicana Chicano Poets Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto Gonzalez
Lisa Alvarado gave a heads-up on this event recently. Tempus has fugit-ted and it's time to carpe the diem for this Palabra Pura in the city of the big shoulders.
LORNA DEE CERVANTES and RIGOBERTO GONZALEZ
Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, Chicago
Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Reading begins at 7:00 p.m.
Free admission. Books for sale. Authors will be available for signing.
In honor of National Poetry Month, two internationally renowned poets -- Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto González -- will read for Palabra Para at the Center on Halsted.
A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes has been a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, and she has been the recipient of many honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for her book DRIVE: The First Quartet. She lives and teaches in San Francisco, California.
Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes a book column for the El Paso Times of Texas. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.
And here we are, April's third Tuesday in 2008. Still stuck with memory of that awful time waiting for the mail and that brown envelope. Sheesh. It's the Ides of April--tax day-- maybe the cruellest day of the cruellest month. No lilacs in my dooryard blooming, plethoras of sad thoughts looking at that photo, that woman, remembering. Thinking what Nixon's successor is doing with our tax money. See you next week. I'm gonna go find something happy to read.
mvs
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By: Destiny Mae,
on 10/7/2007
Blog: Destiny's Book Reviews (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: book review, goosebumps, r l stine, r l stine, night of the living dummy, night of the living dummy, Add a tag
Lindy and Kris are twin sisters and they look the same on the outside but are true opposites on the outside,that's what it's like for most twins,Lindy and Kris like to bicker a LOT,well,they don't LIKE to bicker they just do.They don't bicker all the time though they also like to tell secrets with each other and they like to do things together and they like to be ventriloquist's,well they weren't ventriloquist's at first until Lindy found Slappy then that's when the trouble started.It was one day when they were going to go look at the house next door construction workers were working on and in the dumpster their was what looked like a child at first that's really what Lindy and Kris thought it was,but when they went closer they saw it was a dummy and they didn't need to worry,but when they found the dummy of course Lindy had to have it,Kris got jealous.Then she asked her father for a dummy too.Her father said it was to much money but then a few days later she got a dummy from her father.She called him Mr.Wood,she loved him and practiced and practiced,until one day the dummy slapped her and started saying bad things...
What I like about the book is the cover looks creepy,VERY creepy,and this book is like Chucky and another movie with a dummy but I don't know the name of it.This book is also like the series of Valley Kids with two twins except this book is horror.
Thank you for taking the time to read and review my book! I'm honored to be featured on La Bloga!
thanks for this post...women everywhere need to be proud of all we do...and I just love chica lit...
ADELANTE!!!
Zulmara