We Had the Best Time!

Thank you to our readers/performers– Ashley Byler & Laurel Atwell, Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Phillip Lopate– for an incredible night of art and some FPP-style togetherness.  The night began with a tour through some of Stacy Parker Le Melle’s photographs of Harlem, full of rich color and striking angles.  Ashley Byler then presented her dance composition, “Accumulation: Variation No. 1 (a re-imagining of Trisha Brown’s 1971 work with Beyoncé Knowles as prescriber of pedestrian movement),” a deadpan mash-up of modernist repetition, sequined hot pants, and “Run the World (Girls).”  Jacqueline Jones LaMon read a series of poems, some from her collection, Last Seen, a haunting portrayal of long-term missing African-American children in the US.  We were particularly moved by her poems written this summer about the Rockaways and Coney Island, places now missing or wounded themselves.  Marie Myung-Ok Lee read a comic excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Firstborn Son, which details the vociferous protests a Korean-American doctor receives from his friends when he announces his plans to return to North Korea with Doctors Without Borders.  And Phillip Lopate treated us to razor-sharp political poems leading to a wry personal essay about his youthful ventures into politics and one particularly hilarious, (unintentionally) all-white Black Panthers Rally.  We also collected $238.27  in our Occupy Sandy collection box and donated here: http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/.  Thanks for your generosity!  And thanks to performers and audience, alike, for giving us a memorable night!