The music had ceased, and the platform guests were gone, but the audience remained in their seats, slightly stunned at what had just transpired. I stood in the door of the backstage area, still wearing my headset, chuckling at the crowd’s reaction. The featured day of this annual conference (whose…
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, kick!” At the time, I didn’t know her name, but track star Sandra Farmer-Patrick appeared in one of my favorite commercials in the early 1990s. In this commercial for running shoes, while a montage of Farmer-Patrick…
The massive natatorium buzzed with the chatter of children in their swim classes. As a mom of two of those kids in two separate classes, I sat on the bleachers with a good book while my two oldest children, ages 5 and 8, sat on the side of the pool,…
“What?” the woman exclaimed a little too loudly. Her proximity to me made the shrillness of her voice even more unappealing. I shrugged and smiled as I braced myself for what I knew would come next. The massive barbecue was in full swing, and after several minutes of being in…
There we were, down to the last few turns of one of the most intense games I’d ever played. My formidable opponent? My unbeatable mother. I’d spent years trying to win against her, but there I was, mere points away from doing something I never thought I could do: beat…
It was billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle.” The heavyweight champion of the world, George Foreman, would face off with Muhammad Ali. During the press conferences leading up to the historic boxing match, held in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1974, Ali, known for…
“Then you know who we have to call,” a character might ominously say while surveying the preliminary damage. “Who?” another nameless character may ask. The first character will then stare just off-screen as we cut to our protagonist, cluelessly milling around in their regular life seconds before their phone rings.
“What are you doing?” I heard my mother yell through the screen of the kitchen window. Busted! At 8 years old, I was attempting the greatest heist of my life. But unfortunately, I wasn’t five minutes in before I got caught red-handed. “Is that the kite I told you not…
“A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter,” she repeated as she skipped down the street. The animated little girl journeyed down the sidewalk to the corner bodega, repeating that phrase in a catchy cadence after her mother sent her on an errand. When she…
Although I’d prepared for the worst-case scenario, I stared at the ceiling, baffled that I was living what I’d anticipated would happen. Curtain for my play was in four hours, and I was less than 24 hours postpartum after giving birth to our twins. In 2010, after a church in…
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