April 25, 2023 • 50 mins
In honor of the release of the documentary Judy Blume Forever and the release of the film, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I’m taking you behind the poetry of “Margaret, a poem I wrote inspired by Judy Blume’s book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Listen in as I share my experience performing this poem for Judy Blume!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Hey, everybody, Today we are going behind the poetry. I
wish I had like a physical something for that. I'm like,
it feels like it's behind the veil, it's behind a
stage curtain. I don't know, but we are going to
there behind the poetry. For today's poem we are talking
about for Margaret. The cool thing about this recording that
(00:47):
you're about to hear is that you are hearing my
younger voice around the time that I was actually writing
this piece. So this is a recording of for Margaret
from my album Live at Java Monk that was released
in two thousand and six. Check it out. Everything I
needed to know about being a woman I learned from
Judy Bloom and are you there, God, it's me Margaret.
(01:11):
I was twelve years old when I met Margaret, me
with the tortoiseshell glasses and pink sponge roller bangs, and
she was just like me. Well, okay, she was Jewish,
so she was quite a bit lighter and her hair
was quite a fustrated. But we both felt alone in
the world trying to figure out what breast and hips
would make us become. And speaking of breasts, I really
wanted some. I mean I wanted to fill a training
(01:35):
brought to capacity. Not that jockey sports sprat that my
mom got for me, but Margaret. She encouraged me that
enough reps of we must, we must, we must increase
our bust could fulfill my seacup fantasies. And well we
(01:56):
see what happened with that. So while Margaret prayed to
God to make her a woman, I played mash ended
up living in a shack with Tevin Campbell while we
try to raise our four kids on a beekeeper salary,
just so we can keep up the pavements on our
new Ferrari. I mean, I was a pretty girl disguise
(02:16):
is a nerd who never quite made it to be
in a hottie, and I'm still looking for Ken, hoping
I'll look just like Barbie. Forgive me for being a
grown woman with the same fear as I had at thirteen,
because I don't want all the boys in my class
to be shorter than me, peering behind my glasses, hopefully
wishing a Donis in the back of my free algebra
class would notice me. If I could lose insecurities the
(02:38):
way some people lose pounds, then I hope I'm the
next star Jones. But it's never that easy digging the
skin you're in. It takes work. It takes wading through hurt,
digging through dirt, reminding yourself how much you're worth in
Tyris only got so many photos in her hand. And
(02:58):
I may never be America's next top model, But all
I'm really trying to be is my own best me.
And that was the one thing that Margaret couldn't teach me. See,
I had to learn to smile without my hand over
my mouth like Sealy, learn to embrace my blemishes as beauty.
And if I have to learn the lesson of loving
(03:19):
and perfection for the rest of my life, then let
that be my journey. Because there's this teenage girl who
needs me to tell her that one day she's going
to shed that old insecurity for God, her cocoon and fly.
(03:39):
Oh okay, we have so much to talk about regarding
this poem. So what made me write this poem is
my sister. I have a younger sister named Kita. I
actually am the oldest of five siblings, but my sister,
Kita and I were actually raised in the house together
my other three sols. We were not all raised in
(04:02):
the same house. I have a sister in California, and
I have two brothers in Nebraska. But my sister, Keita
and I grew up in the same house. But we
are almost eleven years apart. So around the time that
I was writing this poem, my sister was probably maybe
she was fourteen or fifteen, around the time of some
(04:23):
of the conversations we had that really led me to
write this piece. And my sister is how can I
describe her? Y'all? Okay, I guess if I placed the
two of us next to each other, I'm, you know,
classic oldest kid, very play it safe. Took me a
(04:44):
lot of years and maturity and therapy to get to
where I would really say a lot of what I
actually feel and think. And my sister is the opposite
of me in that part. If she has it on
her mind to say like, she will say it, not
in a way that she just wants to be mean
to you, but if there needs to be some direct communication, like,
(05:06):
she will tell it to you. Like if we're at
the mall shopping and I pick up a shirt and
she thinks it's ugly, she will say it's ugly. If
she were to pick out a shirt, which this would
never happen because she's super fashionable, but if she were
to pick out a shirt that I thought was ugly,
I would find seventeen different ways to sort of get
around there and try to communicate to her that. You know, So,
(05:28):
even as a teenager, my sister was very direct with
me and sharing with me what it was like for
her in her school. And this was around the age
where she was starting to have crushes and starting to
even notice not even just you know, her own feelings
or attractions, but also you know, sort of having that
(05:49):
outside look on how that was going for other kids
in school or other kids she was friends with. And
there were a lot of things that we talked about
as far as, you know, what it meant to have
a crush on someone, and what it meant to be
a girl and all those different things. And as she's
sharing that with me in her early teenage years, I'm
(06:15):
almost eleven years older than her, but actually not feeling
like our experiences are that different, you know, Like I'm
listening to her going like, yeah, I feel like that
at work, or I feel like that when I go
to an event and I have to be around people
that I find attractive, you know, And so I think
it brought up for me this idea that there's a
(06:36):
lot of the girlhood and womanhood experiences that are very circular, right,
that they're not linear experiences. That there are things that
you experience at fifteen that you may experience in a
very similar way when you're thirty eight, you know, or
when you're twenty seven or whatever that is. And so
(06:57):
I thought that idea was really interesting and I wanted
to you really think about that. So that was a
part of what inspired me to write this poem. And
I think the other thing, which is why Tyra Banks
and America's Next Top Model are getting a nod in
the middle of this poem is because also around the
(07:17):
time that my sister and I are having all these
conversations and she's being very blunt with me about how
things are at school, what it's like being a teenager, right,
I had an opportunity to audition for America's Next Top Model.
At that time, the cutoff age for America's Next Top
Model was twenty seven, and I was twenty six getting
ready to turn twenty seven, probably in three or four
(07:39):
months after this audition. If I'm remembering right, And a
friend of mine knew someone that was working and casting
when America's Next Top Model came to Atlanta, and so
he said, hey, I know somebody who's casting. They're looking
for girls who are tall and beautiful, like, would you
be into it? And if so, I can connect the
(08:00):
two of you. So he did, and this was a
season of my life where you know, it was around
this age, between twenty five and twenty seven that I
really started feeling this hankering that I needed to get married,
you know, and not not because there was someone to
marry at that time, because there wasn't, but it just
(08:22):
started to feel like, you know, when I was in
high school, I always thought I would have been married
by the time I was twenty three or something. I
don't know why I thought those things, but I did. Well,
that's not true. I probably thought those things because I
was in love with a boy in high school and
we were falling in love when we were probably fourteen
(08:42):
or fifteen, and so, you know, I knew my mom
wouldn't be with it if I were to get married
out of high school. So I think my plan was, like,
you know, we can stay together. You know, all this
massive amount of years. You know, we'll stay together through
high school and college, and then we'll get engaged when
it's graduation time, and then after I've been out of
(09:03):
college a year, we'll get married. And of course none
of that worked out that way at all, right, But
I think by the time I was reaching that sort
of twenty five, twenty six, approaching twenty seven, I was
starting to feel this just it really about the fact
that I didn't seem close to marriage and that I
felt like I just kept like looking at my body
(09:25):
and thinking about myself and just thinking like, this is amazing.
I mean, somebody should come along and be a part
of this, you know. And knowing that there wasn't much
I could do about getting married, I think the other
thought that was coming to my mind was, Okay, well
maybe I'm not gonna get married, but I need to
(09:46):
think about what are the other things, you know, I
dreamed to do. And because I've always been for most
of my life, I've been I mean, I've been tall
almost all of my life, and for a long time
I was just tall, all rail thin, not a lot
of curves, and whenever you have a body type like that,
(10:06):
a lot of times people associate that with one of
two things. Either they think that you're going to be
a basketball player, or they want to know, have you
ever considered modeling? And I always laugh because, first of all,
I was not a great athlete, so the whole basketball
thing wasn't going to work out because I just don't
like to sweat, and at that time, I liked to
keep my nails roll long. So I was like, none
(10:29):
of that's going to work out for basketball, you know.
And with modeling, it really took me until I was
right there in my mid twenties before I realized that
I was cute. So when I get this invitation to
at least attend this casting, I'm like, yeah, I got
(10:49):
to figure this out because I just need to see
could I have had any kind of future being a model?
And so the woman who was working on the cast
there were actually two separate castings for the show at
that time. One of the castings was just like the
general you know, everybody that like lines up outside and
(11:12):
spends the night so they can be the first person
in line. Kind if you watch shows like American Idol
and you see sort of that kind of like mania
around it, like that was one casting, and then there
was something I didn't know existed at the time, which
was a pre casting. And the pre casting meant that
the people who were casting the show picked girls and
(11:33):
women that they felt fit sort of the motif of
model Right. So I was in a room with about
sixty other girls, ranging from nineteen all the way up
to twenty seven, and we were all five eight and above,
and most modelesque bodies I would say they were probably
(11:55):
four or five. When I say modelesque, I mean I
mean not what should really be considered modeleesque. Right, And
of course, thinking about this, now, this was almost fifteen
years ago, let's take that in So at that time
in this part of the industry, to be considered modelesque
meant that you were like a size zero, you were
(12:16):
a size two, right, So of sixty of us, I
would guesstimate that there were only five to seven people
who were not a size zero or a size two.
So I'm air quotes when I say modelesque, right, because
we know that everybody or any body should be able
to be modelesque or be a model right. So anyway,
(12:38):
I'm there in the room and it's just a weird
mix of feelings being in a room like that. You know,
I think a part of it brings out some insecurities
because you know, you're in a room with all of
these women who are gorgeous and tall and beautiful, you know.
So I definitely felt like, oh gosh, you know, I
(13:00):
don't know how I fare against the other women here.
At that time, I was probably a size six. So
at a size six, just so you all have an
idea of what was going on in the room. At
a size six, I was in those five to seven
of us that really didn't quite fit the sizing of
(13:26):
air quotes modelesque, right. So I just remembered that experience also,
and how that was another moment, you know that I
thought about some of the things my sister and I
were talking about that she was experiencing as a teenage girl,
those insecure feelings you have and your body as your
body is going through all this, and what it means
to love yourself except yourself. And here I am a
(13:49):
grown woman, you know, ten years older than her, and
I'm standing there in this room feeling all the same
insecurities that I felt walking around the halls of my
high school. And so I definitely think that experience of
the audition played a role in this piece getting written
to give you the end of the America's Next Top
Model story. Did I make it on the show? No?
(14:11):
Did I make it past even the group of sixty
to where you get to where you actually get to
meet Tyra or meet the judges of the show. No,
but I did the audition. I didn't make it any
further past that round because they were taking us through
quite a few rounds. So I think maybe I made
it past one more round of cuts, and then that
(14:34):
second round of cuts, I think I was cut with
another group of girls. So do I regret that I
didn't make the show? Not necessarily. I think for me
it was more so about just having tried it and
having attended the casting and not talked myself out of it,
and that that's not something that I ever have to
look back on and have these regrets that I didn't
(14:56):
do it. You know, And when I was performing on stage,
I would always tell this story that, you know, I've
always imagined myself having a daughter, because I came from
a family full of women, you know, so it was
always like my grandmother, my mother, me, my sister, right,
And so I always imagined you know, if I have
a daughter, man like, I don't want to be the
(15:16):
mother that's like, you know, braiding my little girl's hair
at night, and I'm like, yo, mama could up in somebody,
you know, Like I didn't want to be that mom.
I wanted to be able to say to my daughter,
and for some reason in my mind at that point
of my life, to my daughter in particular, I wanted
to be able to say, here are the things that
(15:37):
mommy did, you know, when mommy was a young woman.
These are the things that I experienced or accomplished, things
I got to do that were really fun, you know.
And then I met your dad, and these are the
things your dad and I went and we did and
we accomplished, and we experienced and we had fun, and
then we had you. You know. That was more of
(15:58):
like the narrative I wanted. And so I felt like,
even though the audition didn't go anywhere, it was a
win for me because it was something that I tried,
and I had this phrase I would say to myself
at that season of my life. I would say, you know,
I don't want to leave any of my dreams unturned.
And so there was my little model dream and so
I tried it, and I was like, Okay, I got
that out of my system. I can say I did it.
(16:19):
You know, if I don't make it, it's not because
I didn't put my hat in the ring for it. Right.
So in this poem, I am taking you back to
twelve year old me that is reading a very quintessential book,
Judy Blooms. Are you there, God, it's me Margaret. And
I have been wearing glasses since I was eight years old,
(16:41):
and in particular in this era of time. You know,
when I was like a preteen going into my early teens,
it was the early nineties. So my mom claims that
these big glasses were the style then, and I don't know.
The jury is still in deliberation regarding if this is
a truth, but either way, I had glasses that were
(17:02):
just taking up most of my face. This was before
I got responsible enough to wear contacts, and even when
I did get old enough as a teenager, I still
this was before there were like really the types of
disposable lenses you have today where you can wear them
for two weeks or whatever and throw them out like
you would get that one pair a year, just like
(17:22):
you got the one pair of glasses and then if
you lost one down the drain, bless your heart. You know.
So this is twelve year old me reading Judy Bloom's book,
and what's interesting to me now is trying to describe
to someone much younger than me that at this time
of life when you know you're going through puberty and
(17:43):
like you're in the body I was in, I'm experiencing
like you know, the hairs under the armpits and the
breast either growing or not growing right, like all this
stuff that was going on in the body. Well, you know,
there wasn't any Google to go to and be like
how big do my breast have to be before I
can wear a training bra? Or you know, when will
I know if my periods starting? Or why do my
(18:05):
under arms stink? Like? There was no website at that
time to go to and search these things, and so
Judy Bloom's book for a couple of generations of us
really was the place where you went. You know, you
went to her book to be like, okay, she's going
to tell us. And if you're not familiar with this book,
the central character in this book is around this preteen
(18:27):
age Margaret, and it's actually very a fascinating book because
Margaret is going through puberty and those changes as a character,
but she's also on this like religious journey because one
of her parents is Christian and one of her parents
is Jewish and she's trying to figure that out. So
it's actually actually reread the book as an adult and
I was like, Yo, this is like even deeper than
(18:47):
I remember. And honestly, when I was a kid, I
don't know that we were reading through the book itself.
We were sort of like sneaking into the librarian, you know,
a couple of us in a corner, really going to
the pages where she was talking about the things we
wanted to know about, which is what was going to
happen to our bodies. Right. Also, Judy Bloom's character here, Margaret,
(19:10):
that she created for this book, really was talking about
a thing that I really wanted to know about. I
was fascinated with getting breasts, and of course, because I
was fascinated with it, I did not have any breasts.
They did not come to me until much later in
my life. But I really wanted to have some breasts,
and I actually was praying and asking God to give
(19:31):
me a sea cup because I felt that that was
like an average ask you know, I'm like a classic
oldest kid, you know, I'm not asking for too much.
I'm trying to find like a middle ground of things
to ask for, and so the sea cup felt like
a thing. Now, my grandmother is very well endowed in
the chest area, okay, and has been since she was
(19:53):
like a preteen. So she always told us girls in
the family that she basically prayed that no one in
the family would have breasts the size of hers. So
when I heard her say that, I felt some type
of way because I was like, I feel like her
prayers is kind of like canceling out my prayers, and
I feel like, give God gonna choose between us, like
(20:15):
he gonna choose my grandma just based on seniority, just
based on like, you know, she's been with the company longer,
you know. So all this conversation around breast was like
really fascinating to me. And now I laugh when I
read the original wording of this poem because I really
never made it to a cea cup. At the time
(20:35):
of this writing, I was like, in a B cup.
But then let me tell you something, I don't know
if this happens to everybody. I think in some ways
it might, but the body parts may be different. But
when I turned thirty, it was like I experienced this
like hormonal change that I really felt like was like
a secondary element of puberty, and my breast got bigger
(21:00):
in my early thirties. I remember when I was getting
married to my now husband, but he was then my fiance, right,
and I went to Victoria's Secret to get measured for
my lingerie before my bridal shower, and I remember I
remember the woman measuring me, like calling out what my
(21:22):
cup size was, and I was like, no, it's not
and she was like it is, like she was trying
to show me like on the tape it is. This
is the band, this is your cup size. And I
was like it's not. And I walked out mad, went
over to Macy's, made them measure me all over again,
and the woman was like, that's you. The woman in
(21:42):
Macy's was like, yeah, well she told you that's you.
This is all you now. So I went from being
a be cup for a very long time to arriving
into the d's in my thirties, y'all. And I don't
know if it's like my prayers just got answered really late.
I don't know. I don't know, y'all. But it's wild
(22:03):
every time I say this poem, because when I first
was performing this piece, and I would get to this
line where I would do the you know, we must,
we must, we must increase our bust, and then I
would say, you know, so I could fill my sea
cup fantasies, and then there's like a pause, Well, we
see what happened with that. After a while. The longer
(22:24):
I've done this poem, the less of a laugh that
line would get because people would be looking at my chest, like,
I don't know, I think your prayer's got answer. So
in later versions of this piece you will hear that
the sea cup isn't there anymore. I normally just say
big chest, because I'm not going to keep upgrading the
letters in case my breast decided to keep getting larger.
(22:45):
I'm just telling you this next of this poem, where
I get into mash is one of my favorite things.
You don't hear this in the original recording, but the
(23:08):
iteration of how this poem has changed since I've started
doing it on stage over the years is if I'm
at an event, that's all women. Sometimes I step out
there and I open my set with this piece, no story,
no introduction, I just start with it. And when I
get right there, while Margaret prayed to God to make
her a woman, I played MASH, I stop right there.
(23:30):
And I always say, what does MASH stand for? And
I call out the letters mash right, mansion, apartment, shack house,
And I mean when you're at an event and you
can hear the women in there, like say in the
words with you, and I'm like, okay, and let's review.
Mash was a game that had these different categories, and
you played on notebook paper, right, and you had like
(23:51):
a category for like who you wanted to marry and
how many kids you wanted to have, and what you
wanted to be when you grew up, in the kind
of car you wanted to drive, And then you did
this like circle squiggly thing until your friend says stop,
and then you counted the lines and the squiggly thing,
and then you did process of elimination that was supposed
to like, you know, predict your future. Right. And as
I go through that memory, being in a crowd of women,
(24:15):
being like in an arena or in like a big
ballroom or whatever venue I was in. Like being in
that space and hearing the energy of other women that
also did this growing up was everything that to me,
was also a way of evening the listening field, if
you will, for the audience, because a lot of the
(24:36):
women's events that I would do, they were multi generational,
and so there would sometimes be grandmothers there as well
as their great granddaughters who were teenagers, you know, So
getting to explain mash because there were some people in
there were like, I don't know what this is. I
never played this growing up type thing. But there were
also women in there that were even older than me
that remembered reading this book initially when it had come out.
(25:00):
So this is one of my most fun things. And
I love when I'm writing pieces to throw easter eggs
in there, and even this Tevin Campbell mentioned to me
was an easter egg because I just I love I'll
tell you I love especially putting easter eggs in poems
for black girls. And I can't tell you that I
always do it intentionally that when I'm writing, I'm like,
(25:23):
i'll put this. I'm just writing from what my experience was,
because I really did have a crush on Tevin Campbell.
He totally would have been in my Mash game. And
the way Mash got played, you could end up living
in a shack with Tevin Campbell trying to raise four
kids on a beekeeper salary and with a new Ferrari.
That's like the thing that could happen on your Mash thing.
But I love saying the name Tevin Campbell and knowing
(25:44):
how many young black girls were like me and are
now grown women and are at some of these events
and are like, oh, Tevin, yes, you know. So I
love doing those things. And I think, when you get
into the meat of this piece, when I hit this moment,
you know, forgive me for being a grown woman with
the same fear as I had at thirteen. That's part
of what I feel like. I was learning from those
(26:04):
conversations with my sister and thinking about all the insecure
moments that made me feel I don't know, like I
wasn't beautiful, made me feel that way when I was
a teenager, and that those moments are still there and
we have lots of reasons as girls and women that
we don't feel beautiful or that we don't value who
(26:27):
we are or how we are And so I loved
digging into this piece right here, the nod to talking
about Tyra there and just talking about how this is
really about you knowing how much you're worth. I loved
dropping the easter egg of the character of Seely from
Alice Walker's The Color Purple there. That's another fun one
(26:49):
for me that whenever I'm in a crowd and I
know black women are there, that when I get to that,
I had to learn to smile without my hand over
my mouth like Seely, that I know that phrasing is
going to mean the world to them like it does
to me. Right, So I think this poem closing with
hearkening back to this teenage girl you know who really,
(27:12):
in certain ways to me, is inside each of us
as women. There is the teenage version of us that
is still there. But also one of the things that
I had started to say whenever I would do this
poem in front of an audience of teenage girls, because
I have to do another episode about it. But there
(27:32):
was a time in my career that I actually talked,
maybe I have to do a that time I about this.
But there was a time in my career it was
short lived, But there was a time that I did
talks for teenage girls in church settings and we would
talk about sex. A lot of it was about talking
about abstinence and celibacy. I'm gonna be honest with y'all,
(27:54):
and it got uncomfortable for me because I didn't feel
like I didn't feel like it was giving the young
women the best information that they could have, and so
I stopped doing that. Towards the end, I just started
realizing there are so many other important things to talk
to girls about besides talking to them about abstinence. That
we needed to talk about consent, and we needed to
(28:16):
talk about ownership of your own body and boundaries and
what it means to honor the body you have. And
we needed to also not walk into a setting like
that in church where you're talking to teenage girls and
assume that all of the girls there are straight. And
so those are reasons why I stopped being the person
(28:39):
that did that talk, because I realized there'd be a
lot of church settings that wouldn't welcome what I really
wanted that talk to be about, and I really wanted
to focus less on all the things that girls shouldn't
be doing and more on what you should do to
love yourself and what you should do to honor your
body and to make wise sexual choices, and that that
(29:04):
is a lesson for teenage girls, and it's a lesson
for grown women too, you know. So anyways, that's for
a whole other time. But whenever I would do this
piece and I was in front of an audience of
teen girls, I would always say to them something that
I really do believe is true. Then I would say
to them, you know, I know that it's hard, you know,
(29:26):
being in high school, going through your teenage years, it's
not an easy time. But I would say to them,
almost every feeling that you feel, grown women like the
grown women in here. Because I would typically be in
a space where there would be a lot of teenage
girls attending like a conference or something, but there would
be moms or different like chaperones or youth leaders in
(29:50):
the room too, And I would say, almost every feeling
you feel as a teenage girl, there are grown women
who are adults and they feel those similar feelings to you.
That womanhood is not a linear journey. It's actually a
very circular experience, and that is something beautiful about it
that it's a thing we get a chance to go
(30:13):
through together, and hoping that even though I know some
of them were super weird a out, you know, to
think that their moms want to make out, or that
their moms ever made out or ever had sex or anything.
You know, it's weird. I know that's weird for teenage
girls to think about, But I just want them to
feel like womanhood doesn't have to be a lonely thing,
(30:34):
that womanhood is a communal experience too, you know. So
what was it like performing this poem for the first time.
I'm almost certain that one of the first times I
performed this poem memorized was actually at a slam And
I know you're probably gonna hear me say that a
thousand times in these behind the Poetry episodes, But a
lot of my like show pieces, A lot of the
(30:55):
pieces I do that make it into my poetry set,
many of them started from me not necessarily even writing
to slam, but because I was doing slam poetry at
the time. And if you're listening and you're not familiar
with slam, slam poetry is it's the competitive side of
spoken word. It's the Olympics of spoken word. Poetry if
(31:16):
you will, and so it can go from local competitions
all the way to like national and international competitions. And
so I was writing a lot at the time, but
I was also writing because I did want to win
some slams, and I was understanding more what the form
of a slam poem was and you had to really
like punch with a message and bring it home in
(31:38):
less than three minutes. And so I'm pretty sure the
first time ever did this poem was at a slam competition.
And this poem did really well in slams because it
has so many dynamics to it. I also want to
say that this was the first funny poem that I
ever wrote. And slam is interesting because when you're in
(31:59):
a competition, it's very organized as far as you know.
If you're in a in a bout, which is what
this one small component of the competition would be called,
your bout would be you and maybe three other slam
teams if you were doing a team slam, and so
there would be all this like numerical things that went
(32:21):
on as to the order in which each team competed.
And sometimes you know, your team might send up a
group piece, but sometimes you might have a dope enough
poem if they'd send you up to do your poem
by yourself. And I noticed when I would do slam
competitions locally that a lot of times, a lot of
(32:42):
the poems were heavy, because a heavy poem could win
a slam if it was well written and well performed
and really hit home to the judges, you know. But
you almost needed funny poems as a palate cleanser in
a way. And there were times that a funny poem
(33:02):
would score even better going after a poem that was
really heavy, because the audience just enjoyed having that sort
of like relief of being able to laugh. And so
I didn't intend this poem to be funny. I really
just was approaching it to write the story. But in
(33:23):
slam I discovered the poem had a lot of power
because it did have this comedic element. It opened people
up to laugh and to reminisce. And then by the
time you really get to the point of like, well,
what is all this about? Why are we talking about
training Bras and Judy Bloom and Tyra Banks, Why are
we talking about all that? When you get to that
(33:44):
end of sort of if the poem is its own cyclone,
you know, and it starts off with like the wider
part at the top and then goes down down down
into the bottom. As it gets the tube of it
gets smaller and smaller. I think that then you're getting
into like the meat of what the piece is about,
and that it's not just about training bras. It's actually
about saying, whoever you are and whatever your insecurities are, like,
(34:09):
you can spread your wings and fly whatever that looks
like to you. You can embrace the imperfections of your
own beauty. That's the center of the piece. But it
was fun that I got to talk about training bras
and breasts and mash and all these things leading up
to that. I will say one of my favorite ways
(34:29):
I've ever performed this poem is when I did compete
nationally for one of Atlanta's slam teams. Another poet and
I and her name is Gypso. Shout out to Gypso
if you're listening. Another poet and I did this poem
as a duet, so it was still with the same
writing that I'd written, but instead of it just being me,
she and I performed it together and we had this
(34:50):
like choreography where our arms linked. And I hate to
this day that I cannot find the footage of us
having done that piece together. So that was what it
was like performing this piece for the first few times.
And after I got done with Slam and when I
began to learn how to build poetry sets right, and
(35:11):
poetry sets are where it's not just the poet coming
up and doing one poem at a time, but it's
where the poet can do sort of like how a
comedian can do like a ten minute set could do
a thirty minute set, could do an hour set or
ninety minute set. And so when I started learning how
to build sets, at that time, I was still performing
at a lot of women's events. And when I figured
(35:33):
out how to build a poetry set with the stories
and the poems to go together, that's when I really
knew the power of this piece. That I could walk
out on stage and open with it. I could put
it in the middle of a set and tell my
America's Next Top Model story, and I could stop in
the middle of the poem and talk about Mash. I
could tell these stories about my Grandma, like sort of
(35:56):
praying against my own prayers about my breast, there was
all this other stuff to do with it on stage.
And I think that's interesting because when I started out
my professional career as a poet. You know, many of
you have been listening to this, or if you're familiar
with my work, you know this part already, but if
you're new here, when I started out professionally, I started
(36:18):
out in Christian spaces, in very conservative Christian spaces, white
Evangelical spaces, and so at that time, the only place
where spoken word poetry could go was in these very
prescribed moments, you know, like it had to go between
this song and that song, or it had to go
inside this song in this certain kind of music. And
(36:40):
so I performed like that for a long time. And then,
you know, when I started kind of going through some
changes with church and different things, I returned back to
the poetry scene and then went into slam. Well, in slam,
you're on a time crunch, so you can't walk up
and like introduce your piece, because as soon as you
start talking, the timer is going, so you got to
(37:01):
hurry up and say whatever you're going to say. And
when I finally got into building my own sets, that
was the first time I could really take my time
and say a poem and figure out not just how
you perform the piece itself, but how you tell the
story that leads into the poem, and how you tell
the story that leads out of that poem into the
next thing. And that I really feel is where my
(37:24):
strong suit is as a performer. But it's also where
the fun and the passion is for me. That's the
part I love, not just you know this moment with
the Hayes machine, you know, and the guitar and you
there do your poem. Like my favorite thing is when
I get that thirty minutes or I get that hour.
Then I just feel like the audience and I have time,
(37:44):
you know, to breathe and get to know each other,
and I can tell some stories. I can do a
poem I didn't plan to do, And this poem, Margaret,
is a pretty strong fixture in my poetry sets, and
especially when I'm performing for an audience of women. Okay,
here is a very interesting follow up story because normally
(38:05):
I close these episodes by telling you all how I
feel about the poem. Now, so let me tell you
a wild thing that happened in twenty twenty right before
the pandemic tipped, So right before the pandemic tip to
my January through middle of March twenty twenty was wild times.
It was so busy. I had a lot of events
(38:27):
on my plate. And I was then and I still
am right now working with Pattern Beauty, Tracy ellis Ross's
natural haircare brand. So I'm the poetic partner for Pattern Beauty.
So I flew into la in February in part to
be with my folks from the Together Live tour. If
(38:48):
you've been listening to this for a while, to my podcast,
you probably heard me talk about Together Live and so
Together Life had happened in the fall, and then Together
Live was invited to open up Make, which is a
global summit for women, and I was very excited to
be invited to Makers. And a small crew of us
(39:08):
from Together Live were opening the Maker's event with sort
of like a micro version right of what the tour
was like. And I realized that Judy Bloom was scheduled
to appear at Makers. And it's wild to think of y'all,
because Judy Bloom, as far as I know, I think
(39:33):
at that time she was in her late seventies, but
I think she's turned eighty now, So when I think
about this, I'm like, you know, I had an opportunity
to see her in person, but I only had one
poem that I could do on stage. But I knew
that Judy Bloom was going to be at the event,
but I couldn't see from stage if she was actually
(39:55):
sitting there in the audience. So instead of doing Margaret,
I performed Piece for the Women, which is another one
of my favorite poems to do, and I left. I
guess after we all finished our time on stage, I
somehow found out that Judy Bloom had been sitting there
in the audience the whole time, and y'all, I went
(40:15):
back to my hotel room and I'm just gonna tell
y'all something else. Getting booked to speak at an event
like Makers, which was just a big honor for me,
and getting to be with our crew from Together Live
was also dope. I'm gonna tell y'all one thing I
missed in the pandemic because I have not traveled like
that since March is a really nice hotel and we
(40:36):
were staying at a very very nice hotel, like big
old tub, big old shower, big old bed, and then
you had like a little living area out in the front.
You could just see the whole skyline of la out there.
I mean, it was a very very nice room. So
I was pitifully soaking myself in this amazing five star tub,
(41:00):
just all of the terrible feelings watching over me that
I missed my opportunity to perform Margaret for freaking Judy
Bloom herself. Are you serious? And I'm just like, man,
I meana, you didn't you know, I'm trying to give
myself to talk. You know, you did the best you
could with what you knew. You didn't know she was
(41:21):
going to be, I mean, all the things. So I
get dressed to go back to Makers the next day.
I don't have any more stage responsibilities, but I just
want to go and hang out and learn and hear
everyone talk. And I walk into the green room and Dylan,
who is the leader of Makers. Dylan walks up to
(41:43):
me and says, oh, my gosh, why didn't you perform
Margaret yesterday? And I almost like cried in her arms
because I was like, I know, and I mean too,
and then I didn't And she was like, did you
even get to meet Judy Bloom? And I was like,
I didn't. She was like, come meet her now, and
let me tell you any performing artist worth their salt.
(42:04):
And I would particularly say for poets who are performers,
and for singers this is especially true. You never know
when you're going to be in a moment where somebody's
gonna be like, sing right now, do your poem right now.
And sometimes people do that and it's not it's not
worth a moment. It's not worth a moment of you
(42:28):
doing that live. You know, my grandmother's at the grocery
store with a stranger and she's like, do some poems, baby,
do some poems for her. I told her, you do
poems like that feels like, oh girlma, come on. You know,
but every now and then you're gonna have this moment
where you're going to be called upon and that's your time.
(42:48):
I mean, you know, I think there are a lot
of singers that sort of have stories to tell where
you know, that was Quincy Jones, or that was you
know whoever insert record executive name here, you know, and
so there are times that you got to be like
a poet worth your assault right there? And am I
going to go over here and give Judy Bloom this
poem as if I did it on a stage for
(43:10):
fifty thousand people. Oh, absolutely, I'm gonna do it. So
Dylan takes me over. She's like, I've got to run,
but I'm just going to like introduce the two of you.
So in the green room at makers be Hot, Like,
there's like a partition, right, So like the first part
where you walk in is where all the food drink stuff.
But when you go behind the partition, there are makeup
artists and here are artists back there. So Judy Bloom
(43:31):
is getting her makeup done, y'all, and Dylan walks me over,
introduces us, tells her like, Amina has this poem. I
thought she was gonna do it yesterday she didn't, and
I really wanted to see if it will be okay
if she could do it for you. So I'm like, so,
Judy Bloom is finishing up getting her makeup done. We're
doing a little chit chat, and then she says, well,
(43:54):
how long is the poem? And I said, oh, it's
less than three minutes, and she was like, oh, I
can do that. So the makeup artist finished her makeup
and turned her makeup chair to face me, and one
of the other makeup artists filmed this while this is happening,
and y'all, if I didn't get the opportunity for an
(44:15):
audience of Judy Bloom and the makeup artist and hair
artists who were back there to say Margaret to Judy Bloom,
It's just one of those things that you're like, that's
only going to happen to you maybe once, maybe twice
in your life, that you write something inspired by someone
(44:37):
else's work and you actually get to look them in
the eyes and say it to them. So I perform
the piece for her. She's laughing and gasping in all
the places I hope someone laughs and gasps. She's terierry
and so am I because I can't believe I'm getting
this opportunity. She hugs me. I mean, I could just
(45:01):
cry telling y'all that I had that opportunity to hug
Judy Bloom, because even if I were to see her again,
who knows how long it would be before I would
be able to hug her, right, And just having this
wonderful moment with her and getting to say, in my
own way to her, here is how much that book
you wrote meant to me. So it turned out that
(45:23):
that was twenty twenty was fifty years since Judy blooms
Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret was published. So
that's my story about Margaret, y'all. It started with my
sister inspired me to write this poem, and the current
amazing thing about this poem is that I got a
chance to actually perform that for a Judy Bloom, Oh
(45:46):
what is Life? I had so much fun talking to
y'all about that. I hope y'all had fun too. If
you are a person with breasts, I hope that you
just enjoy whatever size that you have. Okay, whatever it is,
I'll help you enjoy it, take advantage of it. Okay.
(46:09):
You can also listen to Margaret and some of my
other poems by checking out my album Live at Java
Monkey wherever you stream music, and you'll probably go there
and find Live at Java Monkey, and you'll discover that
I have a bunch of other albums that I hardly
ever talk about, but they are there too, so you
are welcome to peruse those on your favorite streaming app.
(46:31):
You should also check out Judy Bloom's book Are You There, God,
It's Me Margaret? If you haven't go to your favorite
bookseller and do this and check out other works of
Judy Blooms. She is amazing and such a pioneer for
us and having brought some of these girl and woman
conversations to the forefront in her book. We love to
(46:51):
see it. And if you want to actually watch me
perform Margaret for Judy Bloom, you can actually check that
out on my mid IGTV. The footage is posted there
for this week's Here for a Crown. I want to
shout out doctor Maya Angelo. I was trying to think
about other writers that really influenced me during that same
(47:16):
time that I was reading Judy Blooms. Are you there, God,
it's me. Margaret and Maya Angelo came to my mind,
and I hope you know this name because she has
many many crowns, I'm sure, but I am happy to
bestow upon her one more. I remember starting my journey
with doctor Maya Angelo's work by reading I Know Why
(47:39):
the Caged Bird Sings, which is written from the perspective
of a young black girl not too far in age
from the age I was when I first started reading
Judy Bloom's work, when I first started really discovering what
all this was going to mean becoming a young girl,
transitioning into whatever young womanhood would look like. I never
(48:01):
got to hear doctor Angelo speak in person, but her words,
her career, and her life left a serious mark on me.
Just the boom and timbre of her voice. Right, any
of you that I've listened to her work probably feel
the same way. I remember watching her perform her poem
(48:21):
at President Bill Clinton's inauguration. How so many of us,
the generation of us, were memorizing that poem and performing
it at church or at speech competitions. And how amazing
it was for me this year to be watching the
inauguration of President Biden and watching poet Amanda Gorman, who
(48:44):
is phenomenal. I actually originally got to meet Amanda Amen
together live tour in twenty nineteen, and she killed it,
and it just made me think watching her perform that
here she is continuing on Doctor Angelo's legacy while also
(49:04):
building this amazing legacy for herself. How many young black
girls just like me will look at Amanda and know
that they can be poets to Doctor Angelo, many of
us are writers and poets because of you. You aren't
physically here with us, but you left your presence and
(49:25):
your legacy. May we make you proud by being ourselves
and taking up our space, just as you taught us,
Doctor Maya Angelo, give her a crown. Her with Amina
(49:52):
Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Solgrafeity Productions as
a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership
with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't forget
to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Hey, everybody, Today we are going behind the poetry. I
wish I had like a physical something for that. I'm like,
it feels like it's behind the veil, it's behind a
stage curtain. I don't know, but we are going to
there behind the poetry. For today's poem we are talking
about for Margaret. The cool thing about this recording that
(00:47):
you're about to hear is that you are hearing my
younger voice around the time that I was actually writing
this piece. So this is a recording of for Margaret
from my album Live at Java Monk that was released
in two thousand and six. Check it out. Everything I
needed to know about being a woman I learned from
Judy Bloom and are you there, God, it's me Margaret.
(01:11):
I was twelve years old when I met Margaret, me
with the tortoiseshell glasses and pink sponge roller bangs, and
she was just like me. Well, okay, she was Jewish,
so she was quite a bit lighter and her hair
was quite a fustrated. But we both felt alone in
the world trying to figure out what breast and hips
would make us become. And speaking of breasts, I really
wanted some. I mean I wanted to fill a training
(01:35):
brought to capacity. Not that jockey sports sprat that my
mom got for me, but Margaret. She encouraged me that
enough reps of we must, we must, we must increase
our bust could fulfill my seacup fantasies. And well we
(01:56):
see what happened with that. So while Margaret prayed to
God to make her a woman, I played mash ended
up living in a shack with Tevin Campbell while we
try to raise our four kids on a beekeeper salary,
just so we can keep up the pavements on our
new Ferrari. I mean, I was a pretty girl disguise
(02:16):
is a nerd who never quite made it to be
in a hottie, and I'm still looking for Ken, hoping
I'll look just like Barbie. Forgive me for being a
grown woman with the same fear as I had at thirteen,
because I don't want all the boys in my class
to be shorter than me, peering behind my glasses, hopefully
wishing a Donis in the back of my free algebra
class would notice me. If I could lose insecurities the
(02:38):
way some people lose pounds, then I hope I'm the
next star Jones. But it's never that easy digging the
skin you're in. It takes work. It takes wading through hurt,
digging through dirt, reminding yourself how much you're worth in
Tyris only got so many photos in her hand. And
(02:58):
I may never be America's next top model, But all
I'm really trying to be is my own best me.
And that was the one thing that Margaret couldn't teach me. See,
I had to learn to smile without my hand over
my mouth like Sealy, learn to embrace my blemishes as beauty.
And if I have to learn the lesson of loving
(03:19):
and perfection for the rest of my life, then let
that be my journey. Because there's this teenage girl who
needs me to tell her that one day she's going
to shed that old insecurity for God, her cocoon and fly.
(03:39):
Oh okay, we have so much to talk about regarding
this poem. So what made me write this poem is
my sister. I have a younger sister named Kita. I
actually am the oldest of five siblings, but my sister,
Kita and I were actually raised in the house together
my other three sols. We were not all raised in
(04:02):
the same house. I have a sister in California, and
I have two brothers in Nebraska. But my sister, Keita
and I grew up in the same house. But we
are almost eleven years apart. So around the time that
I was writing this poem, my sister was probably maybe
she was fourteen or fifteen, around the time of some
(04:23):
of the conversations we had that really led me to
write this piece. And my sister is how can I
describe her? Y'all? Okay, I guess if I placed the
two of us next to each other, I'm, you know,
classic oldest kid, very play it safe. Took me a
(04:44):
lot of years and maturity and therapy to get to
where I would really say a lot of what I
actually feel and think. And my sister is the opposite
of me in that part. If she has it on
her mind to say like, she will say it, not
in a way that she just wants to be mean
to you, but if there needs to be some direct communication, like,
(05:06):
she will tell it to you. Like if we're at
the mall shopping and I pick up a shirt and
she thinks it's ugly, she will say it's ugly. If
she were to pick out a shirt, which this would
never happen because she's super fashionable, but if she were
to pick out a shirt that I thought was ugly,
I would find seventeen different ways to sort of get
around there and try to communicate to her that. You know, So,
(05:28):
even as a teenager, my sister was very direct with
me and sharing with me what it was like for
her in her school. And this was around the age
where she was starting to have crushes and starting to
even notice not even just you know, her own feelings
or attractions, but also you know, sort of having that
(05:49):
outside look on how that was going for other kids
in school or other kids she was friends with. And
there were a lot of things that we talked about
as far as, you know, what it meant to have
a crush on someone, and what it meant to be
a girl and all those different things. And as she's
sharing that with me in her early teenage years, I'm
(06:15):
almost eleven years older than her, but actually not feeling
like our experiences are that different, you know, Like I'm
listening to her going like, yeah, I feel like that
at work, or I feel like that when I go
to an event and I have to be around people
that I find attractive, you know, And so I think
it brought up for me this idea that there's a
(06:36):
lot of the girlhood and womanhood experiences that are very circular, right,
that they're not linear experiences. That there are things that
you experience at fifteen that you may experience in a
very similar way when you're thirty eight, you know, or
when you're twenty seven or whatever that is. And so
(06:57):
I thought that idea was really interesting and I wanted
to you really think about that. So that was a
part of what inspired me to write this poem. And
I think the other thing, which is why Tyra Banks
and America's Next Top Model are getting a nod in
the middle of this poem is because also around the
(07:17):
time that my sister and I are having all these
conversations and she's being very blunt with me about how
things are at school, what it's like being a teenager, right,
I had an opportunity to audition for America's Next Top Model.
At that time, the cutoff age for America's Next Top
Model was twenty seven, and I was twenty six getting
ready to turn twenty seven, probably in three or four
(07:39):
months after this audition. If I'm remembering right, And a
friend of mine knew someone that was working and casting
when America's Next Top Model came to Atlanta, and so
he said, hey, I know somebody who's casting. They're looking
for girls who are tall and beautiful, like, would you
be into it? And if so, I can connect the
(08:00):
two of you. So he did, and this was a
season of my life where you know, it was around
this age, between twenty five and twenty seven that I
really started feeling this hankering that I needed to get married,
you know, and not not because there was someone to
marry at that time, because there wasn't, but it just
(08:22):
started to feel like, you know, when I was in
high school, I always thought I would have been married
by the time I was twenty three or something. I
don't know why I thought those things, but I did. Well,
that's not true. I probably thought those things because I
was in love with a boy in high school and
we were falling in love when we were probably fourteen
(08:42):
or fifteen, and so, you know, I knew my mom
wouldn't be with it if I were to get married
out of high school. So I think my plan was, like,
you know, we can stay together. You know, all this
massive amount of years. You know, we'll stay together through
high school and college, and then we'll get engaged when
it's graduation time, and then after I've been out of
(09:03):
college a year, we'll get married. And of course none
of that worked out that way at all, right, But
I think by the time I was reaching that sort
of twenty five, twenty six, approaching twenty seven, I was
starting to feel this just it really about the fact
that I didn't seem close to marriage and that I
felt like I just kept like looking at my body
(09:25):
and thinking about myself and just thinking like, this is amazing.
I mean, somebody should come along and be a part
of this, you know. And knowing that there wasn't much
I could do about getting married, I think the other
thought that was coming to my mind was, Okay, well
maybe I'm not gonna get married, but I need to
(09:46):
think about what are the other things, you know, I
dreamed to do. And because I've always been for most
of my life, I've been I mean, I've been tall
almost all of my life, and for a long time
I was just tall, all rail thin, not a lot
of curves, and whenever you have a body type like that,
(10:06):
a lot of times people associate that with one of
two things. Either they think that you're going to be
a basketball player, or they want to know, have you
ever considered modeling? And I always laugh because, first of all,
I was not a great athlete, so the whole basketball
thing wasn't going to work out because I just don't
like to sweat, and at that time, I liked to
keep my nails roll long. So I was like, none
(10:29):
of that's going to work out for basketball, you know.
And with modeling, it really took me until I was
right there in my mid twenties before I realized that
I was cute. So when I get this invitation to
at least attend this casting, I'm like, yeah, I got
(10:49):
to figure this out because I just need to see
could I have had any kind of future being a model?
And so the woman who was working on the cast
there were actually two separate castings for the show at
that time. One of the castings was just like the
general you know, everybody that like lines up outside and
(11:12):
spends the night so they can be the first person
in line. Kind if you watch shows like American Idol
and you see sort of that kind of like mania
around it, like that was one casting, and then there
was something I didn't know existed at the time, which
was a pre casting. And the pre casting meant that
the people who were casting the show picked girls and
(11:33):
women that they felt fit sort of the motif of
model Right. So I was in a room with about
sixty other girls, ranging from nineteen all the way up
to twenty seven, and we were all five eight and above,
and most modelesque bodies I would say they were probably
(11:55):
four or five. When I say modelesque, I mean I
mean not what should really be considered modeleesque. Right, And
of course, thinking about this, now, this was almost fifteen
years ago, let's take that in So at that time
in this part of the industry, to be considered modelesque
meant that you were like a size zero, you were
(12:16):
a size two, right, So of sixty of us, I
would guesstimate that there were only five to seven people
who were not a size zero or a size two.
So I'm air quotes when I say modelesque, right, because
we know that everybody or any body should be able
to be modelesque or be a model right. So anyway,
(12:38):
I'm there in the room and it's just a weird
mix of feelings being in a room like that. You know,
I think a part of it brings out some insecurities
because you know, you're in a room with all of
these women who are gorgeous and tall and beautiful, you know.
So I definitely felt like, oh gosh, you know, I
(13:00):
don't know how I fare against the other women here.
At that time, I was probably a size six. So
at a size six, just so you all have an
idea of what was going on in the room. At
a size six, I was in those five to seven
of us that really didn't quite fit the sizing of
(13:26):
air quotes modelesque, right. So I just remembered that experience also,
and how that was another moment, you know that I
thought about some of the things my sister and I
were talking about that she was experiencing as a teenage girl,
those insecure feelings you have and your body as your
body is going through all this, and what it means
to love yourself except yourself. And here I am a
(13:49):
grown woman, you know, ten years older than her, and
I'm standing there in this room feeling all the same
insecurities that I felt walking around the halls of my
high school. And so I definitely think that experience of
the audition played a role in this piece getting written
to give you the end of the America's Next Top
Model story. Did I make it on the show? No?
(14:11):
Did I make it past even the group of sixty
to where you get to where you actually get to
meet Tyra or meet the judges of the show. No,
but I did the audition. I didn't make it any
further past that round because they were taking us through
quite a few rounds. So I think maybe I made
it past one more round of cuts, and then that
(14:34):
second round of cuts, I think I was cut with
another group of girls. So do I regret that I
didn't make the show? Not necessarily. I think for me
it was more so about just having tried it and
having attended the casting and not talked myself out of it,
and that that's not something that I ever have to
look back on and have these regrets that I didn't
(14:56):
do it. You know, And when I was performing on stage,
I would always tell this story that, you know, I've
always imagined myself having a daughter, because I came from
a family full of women, you know, so it was
always like my grandmother, my mother, me, my sister, right,
And so I always imagined you know, if I have
a daughter, man like, I don't want to be the
(15:16):
mother that's like, you know, braiding my little girl's hair
at night, and I'm like, yo, mama could up in somebody,
you know, Like I didn't want to be that mom.
I wanted to be able to say to my daughter,
and for some reason in my mind at that point
of my life, to my daughter in particular, I wanted
to be able to say, here are the things that
(15:37):
mommy did, you know, when mommy was a young woman.
These are the things that I experienced or accomplished, things
I got to do that were really fun, you know.
And then I met your dad, and these are the
things your dad and I went and we did and
we accomplished, and we experienced and we had fun, and
then we had you. You know. That was more of
(15:58):
like the narrative I wanted. And so I felt like,
even though the audition didn't go anywhere, it was a
win for me because it was something that I tried,
and I had this phrase I would say to myself
at that season of my life. I would say, you know,
I don't want to leave any of my dreams unturned.
And so there was my little model dream and so
I tried it, and I was like, Okay, I got
that out of my system. I can say I did it.
(16:19):
You know, if I don't make it, it's not because
I didn't put my hat in the ring for it. Right.
So in this poem, I am taking you back to
twelve year old me that is reading a very quintessential book,
Judy Blooms. Are you there, God, it's me Margaret. And
I have been wearing glasses since I was eight years old,
(16:41):
and in particular in this era of time. You know,
when I was like a preteen going into my early teens,
it was the early nineties. So my mom claims that
these big glasses were the style then, and I don't know.
The jury is still in deliberation regarding if this is
a truth, but either way, I had glasses that were
(17:02):
just taking up most of my face. This was before
I got responsible enough to wear contacts, and even when
I did get old enough as a teenager, I still
this was before there were like really the types of
disposable lenses you have today where you can wear them
for two weeks or whatever and throw them out like
you would get that one pair a year, just like
(17:22):
you got the one pair of glasses and then if
you lost one down the drain, bless your heart. You know.
So this is twelve year old me reading Judy Bloom's book,
and what's interesting to me now is trying to describe
to someone much younger than me that at this time
of life when you know you're going through puberty and
(17:43):
like you're in the body I was in, I'm experiencing
like you know, the hairs under the armpits and the
breast either growing or not growing right, like all this
stuff that was going on in the body. Well, you know,
there wasn't any Google to go to and be like
how big do my breast have to be before I
can wear a training bra? Or you know, when will
I know if my periods starting? Or why do my
(18:05):
under arms stink? Like? There was no website at that
time to go to and search these things, and so
Judy Bloom's book for a couple of generations of us
really was the place where you went. You know, you
went to her book to be like, okay, she's going
to tell us. And if you're not familiar with this book,
the central character in this book is around this preteen
(18:27):
age Margaret, and it's actually very a fascinating book because
Margaret is going through puberty and those changes as a character,
but she's also on this like religious journey because one
of her parents is Christian and one of her parents
is Jewish and she's trying to figure that out. So
it's actually actually reread the book as an adult and
I was like, Yo, this is like even deeper than
(18:47):
I remember. And honestly, when I was a kid, I
don't know that we were reading through the book itself.
We were sort of like sneaking into the librarian, you know,
a couple of us in a corner, really going to
the pages where she was talking about the things we
wanted to know about, which is what was going to
happen to our bodies. Right. Also, Judy Bloom's character here, Margaret,
(19:10):
that she created for this book, really was talking about
a thing that I really wanted to know about. I
was fascinated with getting breasts, and of course, because I
was fascinated with it, I did not have any breasts.
They did not come to me until much later in
my life. But I really wanted to have some breasts,
and I actually was praying and asking God to give
(19:31):
me a sea cup because I felt that that was
like an average ask you know, I'm like a classic
oldest kid, you know, I'm not asking for too much.
I'm trying to find like a middle ground of things
to ask for, and so the sea cup felt like
a thing. Now, my grandmother is very well endowed in
the chest area, okay, and has been since she was
(19:53):
like a preteen. So she always told us girls in
the family that she basically prayed that no one in
the family would have breasts the size of hers. So
when I heard her say that, I felt some type
of way because I was like, I feel like her
prayers is kind of like canceling out my prayers, and
I feel like, give God gonna choose between us, like
(20:15):
he gonna choose my grandma just based on seniority, just
based on like, you know, she's been with the company longer,
you know. So all this conversation around breast was like
really fascinating to me. And now I laugh when I
read the original wording of this poem because I really
never made it to a cea cup. At the time
(20:35):
of this writing, I was like, in a B cup.
But then let me tell you something, I don't know
if this happens to everybody. I think in some ways
it might, but the body parts may be different. But
when I turned thirty, it was like I experienced this
like hormonal change that I really felt like was like
a secondary element of puberty, and my breast got bigger
(21:00):
in my early thirties. I remember when I was getting
married to my now husband, but he was then my fiance, right,
and I went to Victoria's Secret to get measured for
my lingerie before my bridal shower, and I remember I
remember the woman measuring me, like calling out what my
(21:22):
cup size was, and I was like, no, it's not
and she was like it is, like she was trying
to show me like on the tape it is. This
is the band, this is your cup size. And I
was like it's not. And I walked out mad, went
over to Macy's, made them measure me all over again,
and the woman was like, that's you. The woman in
(21:42):
Macy's was like, yeah, well she told you that's you.
This is all you now. So I went from being
a be cup for a very long time to arriving
into the d's in my thirties, y'all. And I don't
know if it's like my prayers just got answered really late.
I don't know. I don't know, y'all. But it's wild
(22:03):
every time I say this poem, because when I first
was performing this piece, and I would get to this
line where I would do the you know, we must,
we must, we must increase our bust, and then I
would say, you know, so I could fill my sea
cup fantasies, and then there's like a pause, Well, we
see what happened with that. After a while. The longer
(22:24):
I've done this poem, the less of a laugh that
line would get because people would be looking at my chest, like,
I don't know, I think your prayer's got answer. So
in later versions of this piece you will hear that
the sea cup isn't there anymore. I normally just say
big chest, because I'm not going to keep upgrading the
letters in case my breast decided to keep getting larger.
(22:45):
I'm just telling you this next of this poem, where
I get into mash is one of my favorite things.
You don't hear this in the original recording, but the
(23:08):
iteration of how this poem has changed since I've started
doing it on stage over the years is if I'm
at an event, that's all women. Sometimes I step out
there and I open my set with this piece, no story,
no introduction, I just start with it. And when I
get right there, while Margaret prayed to God to make
her a woman, I played MASH, I stop right there.
(23:30):
And I always say, what does MASH stand for? And
I call out the letters mash right, mansion, apartment, shack house,
And I mean when you're at an event and you
can hear the women in there, like say in the
words with you, and I'm like, okay, and let's review.
Mash was a game that had these different categories, and
you played on notebook paper, right, and you had like
(23:51):
a category for like who you wanted to marry and
how many kids you wanted to have, and what you
wanted to be when you grew up, in the kind
of car you wanted to drive, And then you did
this like circle squiggly thing until your friend says stop,
and then you counted the lines and the squiggly thing,
and then you did process of elimination that was supposed
to like, you know, predict your future. Right. And as
I go through that memory, being in a crowd of women,
(24:15):
being like in an arena or in like a big
ballroom or whatever venue I was in. Like being in
that space and hearing the energy of other women that
also did this growing up was everything that to me,
was also a way of evening the listening field, if
you will, for the audience, because a lot of the
(24:36):
women's events that I would do, they were multi generational,
and so there would sometimes be grandmothers there as well
as their great granddaughters who were teenagers, you know, So
getting to explain mash because there were some people in
there were like, I don't know what this is. I
never played this growing up type thing. But there were
also women in there that were even older than me
that remembered reading this book initially when it had come out.
(25:00):
So this is one of my most fun things. And
I love when I'm writing pieces to throw easter eggs
in there, and even this Tevin Campbell mentioned to me
was an easter egg because I just I love I'll
tell you I love especially putting easter eggs in poems
for black girls. And I can't tell you that I
always do it intentionally that when I'm writing, I'm like,
(25:23):
i'll put this. I'm just writing from what my experience was,
because I really did have a crush on Tevin Campbell.
He totally would have been in my Mash game. And
the way Mash got played, you could end up living
in a shack with Tevin Campbell trying to raise four
kids on a beekeeper salary and with a new Ferrari.
That's like the thing that could happen on your Mash thing.
But I love saying the name Tevin Campbell and knowing
(25:44):
how many young black girls were like me and are
now grown women and are at some of these events
and are like, oh, Tevin, yes, you know. So I
love doing those things. And I think, when you get
into the meat of this piece, when I hit this moment,
you know, forgive me for being a grown woman with
the same fear as I had at thirteen. That's part
of what I feel like. I was learning from those
(26:04):
conversations with my sister and thinking about all the insecure
moments that made me feel I don't know, like I
wasn't beautiful, made me feel that way when I was
a teenager, and that those moments are still there and
we have lots of reasons as girls and women that
we don't feel beautiful or that we don't value who
(26:27):
we are or how we are And so I loved
digging into this piece right here, the nod to talking
about Tyra there and just talking about how this is
really about you knowing how much you're worth. I loved
dropping the easter egg of the character of Seely from
Alice Walker's The Color Purple there. That's another fun one
(26:49):
for me that whenever I'm in a crowd and I
know black women are there, that when I get to that,
I had to learn to smile without my hand over
my mouth like Seely, that I know that phrasing is
going to mean the world to them like it does
to me. Right, So I think this poem closing with
hearkening back to this teenage girl you know who really,
(27:12):
in certain ways to me, is inside each of us
as women. There is the teenage version of us that
is still there. But also one of the things that
I had started to say whenever I would do this
poem in front of an audience of teenage girls, because
I have to do another episode about it. But there
(27:32):
was a time in my career that I actually talked,
maybe I have to do a that time I about this.
But there was a time in my career it was
short lived, But there was a time that I did
talks for teenage girls in church settings and we would
talk about sex. A lot of it was about talking
about abstinence and celibacy. I'm gonna be honest with y'all,
(27:54):
and it got uncomfortable for me because I didn't feel
like I didn't feel like it was giving the young
women the best information that they could have, and so
I stopped doing that. Towards the end, I just started
realizing there are so many other important things to talk
to girls about besides talking to them about abstinence. That
we needed to talk about consent, and we needed to
(28:16):
talk about ownership of your own body and boundaries and
what it means to honor the body you have. And
we needed to also not walk into a setting like
that in church where you're talking to teenage girls and
assume that all of the girls there are straight. And
so those are reasons why I stopped being the person
(28:39):
that did that talk, because I realized there'd be a
lot of church settings that wouldn't welcome what I really
wanted that talk to be about, and I really wanted
to focus less on all the things that girls shouldn't
be doing and more on what you should do to
love yourself and what you should do to honor your
body and to make wise sexual choices, and that that
(29:04):
is a lesson for teenage girls, and it's a lesson
for grown women too, you know. So anyways, that's for
a whole other time. But whenever I would do this
piece and I was in front of an audience of
teen girls, I would always say to them something that
I really do believe is true. Then I would say
to them, you know, I know that it's hard, you know,
(29:26):
being in high school, going through your teenage years, it's
not an easy time. But I would say to them,
almost every feeling that you feel, grown women like the
grown women in here. Because I would typically be in
a space where there would be a lot of teenage
girls attending like a conference or something, but there would
be moms or different like chaperones or youth leaders in
(29:50):
the room too, And I would say, almost every feeling
you feel as a teenage girl, there are grown women
who are adults and they feel those similar feelings to you.
That womanhood is not a linear journey. It's actually a
very circular experience, and that is something beautiful about it
that it's a thing we get a chance to go
(30:13):
through together, and hoping that even though I know some
of them were super weird a out, you know, to
think that their moms want to make out, or that
their moms ever made out or ever had sex or anything.
You know, it's weird. I know that's weird for teenage
girls to think about, But I just want them to
feel like womanhood doesn't have to be a lonely thing,
(30:34):
that womanhood is a communal experience too, you know. So
what was it like performing this poem for the first time.
I'm almost certain that one of the first times I
performed this poem memorized was actually at a slam And
I know you're probably gonna hear me say that a
thousand times in these behind the Poetry episodes, But a
lot of my like show pieces, A lot of the
(30:55):
pieces I do that make it into my poetry set,
many of them started from me not necessarily even writing
to slam, but because I was doing slam poetry at
the time. And if you're listening and you're not familiar
with slam, slam poetry is it's the competitive side of
spoken word. It's the Olympics of spoken word. Poetry if
(31:16):
you will, and so it can go from local competitions
all the way to like national and international competitions. And
so I was writing a lot at the time, but
I was also writing because I did want to win
some slams, and I was understanding more what the form
of a slam poem was and you had to really
like punch with a message and bring it home in
(31:38):
less than three minutes. And so I'm pretty sure the
first time ever did this poem was at a slam competition.
And this poem did really well in slams because it
has so many dynamics to it. I also want to
say that this was the first funny poem that I
ever wrote. And slam is interesting because when you're in
(31:59):
a competition, it's very organized as far as you know.
If you're in a in a bout, which is what
this one small component of the competition would be called,
your bout would be you and maybe three other slam
teams if you were doing a team slam, and so
there would be all this like numerical things that went
(32:21):
on as to the order in which each team competed.
And sometimes you know, your team might send up a
group piece, but sometimes you might have a dope enough
poem if they'd send you up to do your poem
by yourself. And I noticed when I would do slam
competitions locally that a lot of times, a lot of
(32:42):
the poems were heavy, because a heavy poem could win
a slam if it was well written and well performed
and really hit home to the judges, you know. But
you almost needed funny poems as a palate cleanser in
a way. And there were times that a funny poem
(33:02):
would score even better going after a poem that was
really heavy, because the audience just enjoyed having that sort
of like relief of being able to laugh. And so
I didn't intend this poem to be funny. I really
just was approaching it to write the story. But in
(33:23):
slam I discovered the poem had a lot of power
because it did have this comedic element. It opened people
up to laugh and to reminisce. And then by the
time you really get to the point of like, well,
what is all this about? Why are we talking about
training Bras and Judy Bloom and Tyra Banks, Why are
we talking about all that? When you get to that
(33:44):
end of sort of if the poem is its own cyclone,
you know, and it starts off with like the wider
part at the top and then goes down down down
into the bottom. As it gets the tube of it
gets smaller and smaller. I think that then you're getting
into like the meat of what the piece is about,
and that it's not just about training bras. It's actually
about saying, whoever you are and whatever your insecurities are, like,
(34:09):
you can spread your wings and fly whatever that looks
like to you. You can embrace the imperfections of your
own beauty. That's the center of the piece. But it
was fun that I got to talk about training bras
and breasts and mash and all these things leading up
to that. I will say one of my favorite ways
(34:29):
I've ever performed this poem is when I did compete
nationally for one of Atlanta's slam teams. Another poet and
I and her name is Gypso. Shout out to Gypso
if you're listening. Another poet and I did this poem
as a duet, so it was still with the same
writing that I'd written, but instead of it just being me,
she and I performed it together and we had this
(34:50):
like choreography where our arms linked. And I hate to
this day that I cannot find the footage of us
having done that piece together. So that was what it
was like performing this piece for the first few times.
And after I got done with Slam and when I
began to learn how to build poetry sets right, and
(35:11):
poetry sets are where it's not just the poet coming
up and doing one poem at a time, but it's
where the poet can do sort of like how a
comedian can do like a ten minute set could do
a thirty minute set, could do an hour set or
ninety minute set. And so when I started learning how
to build sets, at that time, I was still performing
at a lot of women's events. And when I figured
(35:33):
out how to build a poetry set with the stories
and the poems to go together, that's when I really
knew the power of this piece. That I could walk
out on stage and open with it. I could put
it in the middle of a set and tell my
America's Next Top Model story, and I could stop in
the middle of the poem and talk about Mash. I
could tell these stories about my Grandma, like sort of
(35:56):
praying against my own prayers about my breast, there was
all this other stuff to do with it on stage.
And I think that's interesting because when I started out
my professional career as a poet. You know, many of
you have been listening to this, or if you're familiar
with my work, you know this part already, but if
you're new here, when I started out professionally, I started
(36:18):
out in Christian spaces, in very conservative Christian spaces, white
Evangelical spaces, and so at that time, the only place
where spoken word poetry could go was in these very
prescribed moments, you know, like it had to go between
this song and that song, or it had to go
inside this song in this certain kind of music. And
(36:40):
so I performed like that for a long time. And then,
you know, when I started kind of going through some
changes with church and different things, I returned back to
the poetry scene and then went into slam. Well, in slam,
you're on a time crunch, so you can't walk up
and like introduce your piece, because as soon as you
start talking, the timer is going, so you got to
(37:01):
hurry up and say whatever you're going to say. And
when I finally got into building my own sets, that
was the first time I could really take my time
and say a poem and figure out not just how
you perform the piece itself, but how you tell the
story that leads into the poem, and how you tell
the story that leads out of that poem into the
next thing. And that I really feel is where my
(37:24):
strong suit is as a performer. But it's also where
the fun and the passion is for me. That's the
part I love, not just you know this moment with
the Hayes machine, you know, and the guitar and you
there do your poem. Like my favorite thing is when
I get that thirty minutes or I get that hour.
Then I just feel like the audience and I have time,
(37:44):
you know, to breathe and get to know each other,
and I can tell some stories. I can do a
poem I didn't plan to do, And this poem, Margaret,
is a pretty strong fixture in my poetry sets, and
especially when I'm performing for an audience of women. Okay,
here is a very interesting follow up story because normally
(38:05):
I close these episodes by telling you all how I
feel about the poem. Now, so let me tell you
a wild thing that happened in twenty twenty right before
the pandemic tipped, So right before the pandemic tip to
my January through middle of March twenty twenty was wild times.
It was so busy. I had a lot of events
(38:27):
on my plate. And I was then and I still
am right now working with Pattern Beauty, Tracy ellis Ross's
natural haircare brand. So I'm the poetic partner for Pattern Beauty.
So I flew into la in February in part to
be with my folks from the Together Live tour. If
(38:48):
you've been listening to this for a while, to my podcast,
you probably heard me talk about Together Live and so
Together Life had happened in the fall, and then Together
Live was invited to open up Make, which is a
global summit for women, and I was very excited to
be invited to Makers. And a small crew of us
(39:08):
from Together Live were opening the Maker's event with sort
of like a micro version right of what the tour
was like. And I realized that Judy Bloom was scheduled
to appear at Makers. And it's wild to think of y'all,
because Judy Bloom, as far as I know, I think
(39:33):
at that time she was in her late seventies, but
I think she's turned eighty now, So when I think
about this, I'm like, you know, I had an opportunity
to see her in person, but I only had one
poem that I could do on stage. But I knew
that Judy Bloom was going to be at the event,
but I couldn't see from stage if she was actually
(39:55):
sitting there in the audience. So instead of doing Margaret,
I performed Piece for the Women, which is another one
of my favorite poems to do, and I left. I
guess after we all finished our time on stage, I
somehow found out that Judy Bloom had been sitting there
in the audience the whole time, and y'all, I went
(40:15):
back to my hotel room and I'm just gonna tell
y'all something else. Getting booked to speak at an event
like Makers, which was just a big honor for me,
and getting to be with our crew from Together Live
was also dope. I'm gonna tell y'all one thing I
missed in the pandemic because I have not traveled like
that since March is a really nice hotel and we
(40:36):
were staying at a very very nice hotel, like big
old tub, big old shower, big old bed, and then
you had like a little living area out in the front.
You could just see the whole skyline of la out there.
I mean, it was a very very nice room. So
I was pitifully soaking myself in this amazing five star tub,
(41:00):
just all of the terrible feelings watching over me that
I missed my opportunity to perform Margaret for freaking Judy
Bloom herself. Are you serious? And I'm just like, man,
I meana, you didn't you know, I'm trying to give
myself to talk. You know, you did the best you
could with what you knew. You didn't know she was
(41:21):
going to be, I mean, all the things. So I
get dressed to go back to Makers the next day.
I don't have any more stage responsibilities, but I just
want to go and hang out and learn and hear
everyone talk. And I walk into the green room and Dylan,
who is the leader of Makers. Dylan walks up to
(41:43):
me and says, oh, my gosh, why didn't you perform
Margaret yesterday? And I almost like cried in her arms
because I was like, I know, and I mean too,
and then I didn't And she was like, did you
even get to meet Judy Bloom? And I was like,
I didn't. She was like, come meet her now, and
let me tell you any performing artist worth their salt.
(42:04):
And I would particularly say for poets who are performers,
and for singers this is especially true. You never know
when you're going to be in a moment where somebody's
gonna be like, sing right now, do your poem right now.
And sometimes people do that and it's not it's not
worth a moment. It's not worth a moment of you
(42:28):
doing that live. You know, my grandmother's at the grocery
store with a stranger and she's like, do some poems, baby,
do some poems for her. I told her, you do
poems like that feels like, oh girlma, come on. You know,
but every now and then you're gonna have this moment
where you're going to be called upon and that's your time.
(42:48):
I mean, you know, I think there are a lot
of singers that sort of have stories to tell where
you know, that was Quincy Jones, or that was you
know whoever insert record executive name here, you know, and
so there are times that you got to be like
a poet worth your assault right there? And am I
going to go over here and give Judy Bloom this
poem as if I did it on a stage for
(43:10):
fifty thousand people. Oh, absolutely, I'm gonna do it. So
Dylan takes me over. She's like, I've got to run,
but I'm just going to like introduce the two of you.
So in the green room at makers be Hot, Like,
there's like a partition, right, So like the first part
where you walk in is where all the food drink stuff.
But when you go behind the partition, there are makeup
artists and here are artists back there. So Judy Bloom
(43:31):
is getting her makeup done, y'all, and Dylan walks me over,
introduces us, tells her like, Amina has this poem. I
thought she was gonna do it yesterday she didn't, and
I really wanted to see if it will be okay
if she could do it for you. So I'm like, so,
Judy Bloom is finishing up getting her makeup done. We're
doing a little chit chat, and then she says, well,
(43:54):
how long is the poem? And I said, oh, it's
less than three minutes, and she was like, oh, I
can do that. So the makeup artist finished her makeup
and turned her makeup chair to face me, and one
of the other makeup artists filmed this while this is happening,
and y'all, if I didn't get the opportunity for an
(44:15):
audience of Judy Bloom and the makeup artist and hair
artists who were back there to say Margaret to Judy Bloom,
It's just one of those things that you're like, that's
only going to happen to you maybe once, maybe twice
in your life, that you write something inspired by someone
(44:37):
else's work and you actually get to look them in
the eyes and say it to them. So I perform
the piece for her. She's laughing and gasping in all
the places I hope someone laughs and gasps. She's terierry
and so am I because I can't believe I'm getting
this opportunity. She hugs me. I mean, I could just
(45:01):
cry telling y'all that I had that opportunity to hug
Judy Bloom, because even if I were to see her again,
who knows how long it would be before I would
be able to hug her, right, And just having this
wonderful moment with her and getting to say, in my
own way to her, here is how much that book
you wrote meant to me. So it turned out that
(45:23):
that was twenty twenty was fifty years since Judy blooms
Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret was published. So
that's my story about Margaret, y'all. It started with my
sister inspired me to write this poem, and the current
amazing thing about this poem is that I got a
chance to actually perform that for a Judy Bloom, Oh
(45:46):
what is Life? I had so much fun talking to
y'all about that. I hope y'all had fun too. If
you are a person with breasts, I hope that you
just enjoy whatever size that you have. Okay, whatever it is,
I'll help you enjoy it, take advantage of it. Okay.
(46:09):
You can also listen to Margaret and some of my
other poems by checking out my album Live at Java
Monkey wherever you stream music, and you'll probably go there
and find Live at Java Monkey, and you'll discover that
I have a bunch of other albums that I hardly
ever talk about, but they are there too, so you
are welcome to peruse those on your favorite streaming app.
(46:31):
You should also check out Judy Bloom's book Are You There, God,
It's Me Margaret? If you haven't go to your favorite
bookseller and do this and check out other works of
Judy Blooms. She is amazing and such a pioneer for
us and having brought some of these girl and woman
conversations to the forefront in her book. We love to
(46:51):
see it. And if you want to actually watch me
perform Margaret for Judy Bloom, you can actually check that
out on my mid IGTV. The footage is posted there
for this week's Here for a Crown. I want to
shout out doctor Maya Angelo. I was trying to think
about other writers that really influenced me during that same
(47:16):
time that I was reading Judy Blooms. Are you there, God,
it's me. Margaret and Maya Angelo came to my mind,
and I hope you know this name because she has
many many crowns, I'm sure, but I am happy to
bestow upon her one more. I remember starting my journey
with doctor Maya Angelo's work by reading I Know Why
(47:39):
the Caged Bird Sings, which is written from the perspective
of a young black girl not too far in age
from the age I was when I first started reading
Judy Bloom's work, when I first started really discovering what
all this was going to mean becoming a young girl,
transitioning into whatever young womanhood would look like. I never
(48:01):
got to hear doctor Angelo speak in person, but her words,
her career, and her life left a serious mark on me.
Just the boom and timbre of her voice. Right, any
of you that I've listened to her work probably feel
the same way. I remember watching her perform her poem
(48:21):
at President Bill Clinton's inauguration. How so many of us,
the generation of us, were memorizing that poem and performing
it at church or at speech competitions. And how amazing
it was for me this year to be watching the
inauguration of President Biden and watching poet Amanda Gorman, who
(48:44):
is phenomenal. I actually originally got to meet Amanda Amen
together live tour in twenty nineteen, and she killed it,
and it just made me think watching her perform that
here she is continuing on Doctor Angelo's legacy while also
(49:04):
building this amazing legacy for herself. How many young black
girls just like me will look at Amanda and know
that they can be poets to Doctor Angelo, many of
us are writers and poets because of you. You aren't
physically here with us, but you left your presence and
(49:25):
your legacy. May we make you proud by being ourselves
and taking up our space, just as you taught us,
Doctor Maya Angelo, give her a crown. Her with Amina
(49:52):
Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Solgrafeity Productions as
a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership
with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't forget
to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
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