Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata

R.I.P. Mama Africa

EFFECTS OF PMS

Chubby grocery list:

- Ritters Sport chocolate covered biscuit x 2
- Tampons
- Extra Strength Motrin
- Fruity Pebbeles cereal
- Strawberry milk
- Frozen chicken BBQ pizza
- Cinnamon Rolls

YOU CAN..

To the woman in the next bathroom stall, making snide remarks about the odor coming from my stall-You're doing the same thing, yet your nostrils have drawn the conclusion that your shit don't stink.

Then you exit your stall, put lipstick on and don't bother to wash your hands?

...KICK ROCKS, BEE-YATCH.

RUMMAGE SALE

I spent Saturday afternoon assisting my parents with their garage sale. My retired father decided to clean out the storage shed-A tactic to distract him from partaking in one of his DUI binges (he's going on 1.5 years sober). I rolled up late, due to last nights romp and found that he already strategically placed items on small tables in the driveway. After surveying the scattered items, I found some of my old X-mas gifts and placed them in my car trunk.

Here's what I salvaged:

$5: I was so pissed when I opened the box and saw this thing. I can still hear my mother's thick British accent telling me it was the perfect gift because I brought home the third place ribbon in my classroom spelling bee contest and I should've been first. My twin brother got Speak n Math. When we got the hang of them, we were hooked. My parents would find them clinched in our arms when they woke us up in the mornings. I snuck it to school and got caught. My father had to leave work early to retrieve it from my teacher. Got a whooping for it but didn't care, because he gave it back to me when he was done. When I got bored with it, I would press the games menu button repeatedly to make a song from the computer voice.

$20: Cabbage Patch Kids were selling out at every Toy's R Us and Consumers Retail store in the Bay Area. They were limiting sales to one per person. News covered the craze and showed folks fighting over the dolls. I made myself write 100 lines and presented the pages to my parents to show how determined I was at being a good girl.

I will not suck my thumb.
I will not suck my thumb.

I will not suck my thumb.

I will not suck my thumb.

When I left the room, I heard them snickering.

We would all go on weekend treks to various stores in search of the rare Black CPK doll. When we couldn't find one, my parents would call doll stores in the yellow pages. They had become more obsessed than me. One night during the week, my mother picked us up from after school day care and headed straight to a Consumer's store in San Leandro. The deviation from our weekday norm felt like we were on an adventure. There were three dolls left. I was so desperate to have one that I tried to convince my mother that one of them was mixed. "She's just light-skin-ded, muh-mah..." She was not having it. They finally found one, two days before X-mas at a small doll collectors boutique in San Ramon (all white and racist town back in the 80s). I clearly recall the owner telling my parents that his distributors sent him a Black CPK by mistake, so he tossed it in the back of his store and forgot about it. He sold it to my parents for twice the retail price. That was the first X-mas, my mother didn't bother wrapping my gift. The name on her birth certificate was Aubrey Skipper. I sent in the form to have her name changed to Dominique.

$15: Winter of 1984, I won two piano recital awards. Herbie Hancock's, Rock It had won a Grammy and was in heavy rotation on the radio. All I wanted that year was a Casio sampling keyboard. My parents thought it would deter me from traditional piano, so they were against it. When my mother made her monthly trip to Sears, I'd volunteer to push the cart. This was my strategy to steer her towards the electronic section to play on the display keyboards. I would play a rendition of Silent Night that included cymbals, dogs barking with a reggae beat. I would hope to draw a crowd, but no one paid me any mind, except my mother. That X-mas, when I opened the box, I knew I was the luckiest person alive.

In December 1986, my parents moved us out of East Oakland to Hercules. I was in suburban hell. The only two Black girls at my new school didn't know how to turn double dutch ropes and everyone was obsessed with some weird ass game called, tether ball. My father explained to us that we woudn't receive any X-mas gifts that year and the fact that my brother and I no longer shared a room was gift enough. We had no furniture or television in the house, so my brother and I would ball up a piece of paper and play hand tennis with an imaginary line in the family room. When I woke up that X-mas, I found a rainbow colored pen on my new room floor. It had some car dealership info on it. I knew it was from my father. I found the pen at the bottom of a junk box marked, "FREE".