The Mexican

Multi-ethnic families have a wide range of humor that's either entertainment or weaponry, and like any other family, we use it as both. An old family joke snapped sharply into focus for me through, of all things, an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, starring an actor I didn't know named Adam Beach. On the show, he was newly transferred to the unit and partnered with Ice-T's character, who naturally assumes he's Hispanic. "Yeah, just the other day some guy asked me if I was Mexican!" No way! Haha!

Growing up, we called my cousin Michael "The Mexican" for growing a cheesy, pencil-thin 'stache that practically begged us to mock it. If attention was what he wanted, he got it. Everywhere he went, we yelled out a chorus of bad Cheech and Chong accents. "Eeyyy, greengo! Whatchoo doin'?" had us rolling around, crying tears of laughter. "Essaayyy! How's it hangin', hombre?" Me and my bro thought it was a funny game, but in their tough Brooklyn neighborhood, a gentle taunt could become a barroom brawl later on, after a lot of beer was consumed. 

His older brother would sneer "Spick" at him constantly, once he figured out that his younger brother could actually pass as Hispanic in some heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods, which chafed him raw because in his family, he was the outcast for passing as white. It was shocking at times, too, especially during his first growth spurt. He'd go for the annual family Christmas portrait to be asked how long he was in town visiting his own family, like a down-on-his-luck relation come to spend time in the big city after his parents divorced. 

"You know 'Ree (my childhood nickname), I know I come off as some big 'tough guy', but sometimes it really hurts my feelings", and I could totally see why. He'd arrange to meet his family at the local pizza parlor for dinner, only to be asked by the hostess where he wanted to be seated, with his family waving him over from the table they sat at, right in front of the waiter's face. It always felt like a put-down to him; like an unwanted interloper in his own childhood home. 

The Sears family portrait in their living room showed four small, dark people with a giant-sized "white dude" standing behind them almost cropped out of frame, towering thinly above them all. It wasn't a wonder to me, as much as it took me aback, that he'd chosen to identify as Irish-American as an adult by changing his name and marrying a very Irish girl from Staten Island. It was the only place, among all of New York's ethnic groups, that he felt he could fit into, especially in the context of an inherited alcoholism that killed his parents. It felt easier for him to pass as just another Irish drunk.

But when our family got together, or if it was just him and his brother around, there was no question that, like Adam Beach, we weren't Hispanic at all. European....yeah, maybe....and then there was something else that was less available to us on surveys, questionnaires, and medical forms at the doctor's office. That "something" was a someone: his mother who'd left the reservation a long time ago to marry his Jewish father after they met at a corner bar in Brookyln, running from an upstate New York tribe of just 67 people, led by her abusive chief of a father, according to her often slurred telling. No one knew who we were. Not really. 

So, for today: here's to all the "hybrids", "mixed bloods", "mutts", and "half breeds" of the world, plus all the other ethnic blends we have that testify to a legacy of love and marriage in this country that is so distinctly American. This one's for you, cuz. Ironically, after so much separation in their lives, the brothers are the only family they have left, and they remain the ONLY Celtic Jewish Indians from New York I've ever met. Thanks for being Metis like me, before we even knew there was a name for it. And thanks to all the brave actors like Adam Beach for representing a history that so often gets taken away by someone of European descent. I really appreciated seeing our funny ethnic reference on a major network TV show, my brother. It was a first.

Here's to all the other "firsts" out there in the world like me, representing a genuinely original, distinctly American ethnic minority. This time is ours.

Maus

Prizes used to be the winning domain of very few people in the world, not toys for savvy publicists and marketing agents to play with that guaranteed franchise success through lucrative licensing deals. The Pulitzer Prize, for instance, meant a lot to me as a young reader, because its status conferred an honorific upon the writer that was like a Michelin star of literary greatness. It meant that an expert panel had agreed upon, and recognized, the strength of the work. This, amongst a group of people that counted rigorous, heated debate as an intrinsic part of the narrative artform.

After I had studied "The Art of the Book" at its chosen institute for Higher Learning, the newest iteration of illustrated narration, the graphic novel, won our discipline's greatest honor. It was no surprise to me as a young apprentice that the first real Art Director I ever worked with had designed the cover for Art Spiegelman's Maus, which I only discovered after he asked me whether or not it should be included in his "book": the portfolio of cover designs that we show prospective clients. I was taken aback for a moment. Are you kidding me? It's so famous, and it's such a great book! What's the question, here? Keep it in there! I didn't see the point of asking.

"Yeah....", he mused to me slowly, in a way I'd learn to find as normal for a mentor leading junior talent through a question, "but, is it still fresh? I designed it sooo many years ago." It was a telling statement about the shortness of memory publishing had recently acquired, as an industry that capitalizes on the new and trendy like a viciously starved dog. But, my former mentor was supposed to be different than the rest of the pack. He'd won many prestigious book awards as the creative lead of a selective literary imprint. This was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel! Their gold seal meant more than Oprah's Book Club seal-of-approval! This was an award judged by our peers. It meant something. Right?

"Well...", he went on to explain its limited recognition to the university press he was meeting with, that served the needs of younger minds with much less reference material to work with. Why would NYU care about a trade book cover, no matter how famous it was? They were looking for someone who could design for their current curriculum. He got the freelance gig to design their catalog, but he lost respect with me. There was no question in my mind what the better job was, but with his conditions, he was at the office until 10-11 pm anyway, after making a noontime appearance that only the very best divas were afforded for their prize-winning productivity. In his OCD/ADHD-manic world, it was all about NEW! NOW! NEXT! Not old, dead Jews.

Just like the movies that depend so much on our creative output for their industriousness, his idea of freshness was based on a series of serious medical diagnoses that we only had euphemisms for in the public world of 90s America, as we struggled with the sickness of other people's madness behind closed, locked doors. The way he shut out his own storied past became an apt metaphor for the same climate that produced the modern worlds' most horrifying genocide, done with the same efficient penstrokes of so many office workers "just doing their job(s)." It was a perfect example about the banality of evil my father had so often warned me about that lurked in the corporate world, perpetrated daily in office cubicles by a dully unfeeling people frightened only by the threat of a paycheck to pay for their next escapist entertainment.

Maus remains the best true life account I have ever read about the horrors of the Holocaust, told through the fabled cat-and-mouse of Art Spieglman's family history in so many pen strokes, and it is not to be missed. Add this book series to your college curriculum. 
I dare you.

Son of a preacher, man.

I'd been single for about ten years in 2012, and after the Internet dating bubble burst, I went back to good ole' fashioned, face-to-face contact with the same limited results. Based on the sound reasoning that I'd made a female friend of sorts at an alumni function quickly after my return from out west, I invited a Korean friend (also somewhat lukewarm) from my dojo to an alumni function downtown that served as an equidistant meeting point between our respective subway commutes from Brooklyn and Queens.

My fair-weather friend agreed to the get-together, which was somewhat surprising to me after she rebuffed other fun invitations, but summer in the city makes even the most winter-shocked South Korean eager to be outside. The theme was a disco dance party, which made my older friend happy at the prospect of enjoying. Something was in the air that night, because soon after she showed up, we started doing shots, and then time seemed to speed up. The music got louder, the bar got more crowded, and after an older man hit on me early on, the younger office guys started showing up from their pre-game bar hops further uptown that led them to our downtown soiree.

It got blurry after that, but I remember a spinning disco ball with lots of flashing lights, and dancing in a group with a cute, dark-haired guy. We took breaks from the dance floor to talk to him on the sidewalk outside, and then we were too drunk to go on. I didn't remember getting home that night, which scared my middle-aged self a lot more than the younger version of me. The city was rapidly changing with this latest wave of gentrification, and a lot of the newcomers didn't know the rules, which made it even more dangerous than it'd been before, in direct proportion to their out-of-towner paranoia. You could see the tension in their eyes walking around.

It must have scared off my friend, too, because other summer alumni party invites got turned down right away with no hesitation. We even emailed each other over the contacts we made that night, with both of us given the same info for the guy we'd been dancing with. She declined the idea of dating him while we were at the beach in Coney Island, silenced by my bodysurfing in the same way a Filipino friend from another dojo would be during my first, successful bodyboarding attempt using his board. He also never accepted an invite from me again, and they'd both been afraid of the murky Atlantic Ocean.

So, my new alumni friend and I struck up an easy correspondence at the same time I'd met another younger guy at a second alumni party that summer. Ryan was in his 20s, though, so we didn't get as far as my other paramour in his 30s did, but I was working a freelance gig midtown that made lunch dates and after-work excursions easy to arrange. He was good company, too, of a sort that I'd been accustomed to for a long time: an intelligent, educated Nuyorican making good after leaving the 'hood. I was proud to see other hardcore city kids get through "The Ivy League" system a lot easier than I did. 

That didn't make life problem-free, though, on account of us being natives. The manager at his landscape design firm was a real bitch who kept hitting on him, years before this recent spate of sexual harassment suits y'all are thriving in began. Every time she knew he was heading out the door, she'd drop work on his desk due immediately, like she'd done for our lunch date he was late for, and now this dinner date he thought she was weirdly trying to sabotage. 

She was a much older, extremely aggressive, non-native blond lady having fun jerking the chain of a young brother on the rise, in a classic RISD "pas-de-deux" of sexual tension marred by intense career competition. Poor kid couldn't tell if he was attracted by all the attention or if he was afraid for his life, when I asked him about it over pre-dinner drinks, which worried me even more. She was a seasoned cougar accustomed to muddying the work-waters with her shirts unbuttoned just the right amount, so that whenever she leaned over his desk, she showed her thickly tanned "creasage" to the newest kid on the block, confused and stressed out as he was by making it to "The Big League" firms of Manhattan.

Based on that disclosure alone, plus the rapturous detail he supplied to me about the technical qualities of the soil in the street planters we passed as we headed toward our destination, I knew he was "hands-off" dating material for me, but I liked the warmth of a humid summer night on the water. We were going to see a Muay Thai fight at the Hudson River piers later on, so even if our dinner date didn't go as planned, I'd still see some action that night. We were finally seated in a really loud restaurant that seemed to immediately perk him up with its Hispanic-flavored appetizers. We got more drinks and with our entrees, I leaned in to ask him some serious questions, as the Mojitos started to give me a fuzzy "halo effect" I could see reflected on his now more-amorous face.

Alright. Let's get down to it: food, family, faith....all the really good stuff. Here, he faltered a bit as the evenings' sheen wore away, like I suspected. Just talking about his hardened single mom from Puerto Rico brought about a dampening effect, as we dived down into the reality of our respective situations. I'd come from a broken family that did time in the projects coming up, too. I knew that without a very solid foundation, and if our careers suddenly "went south", we didn't have anything or anyone to rely on besides the stuff that got us to this point in time, and I needed him to feel that pressure a little bit, because I was way past the age of random hook-ups. He started responding to it, opening up beyond the bland office demeanor we used to pass through midtown offices, but I could see his confidence was fading.

By the time we got around to religion, he was almost done talking to me. I spoke haltingly about my traditional Catholic upbringing, and I could tell from the chill falling over him that "The Ivory Tower" we attended was still unreceptive to people of faith. Oh, well. I stopped talking so I could listen to him describe his mothers' descent into the extremes of Evangelical Christianity brought on by the stress of single motherhood, including demonic possession and public displays in the churchs' aisles while writhing on the ground speaking in tongues. Huh. I did not have that kind of upbringing. Candles, yes. Stained glass, yes. Beauty and discipline, si. This shit you sayin' to me? Uh, hell, no.

I truly did not know what to say back to him. He told me as his mom worked her way up the small, storefront church hierarchy, she'd egged him on to make up phony scenarios that would promote them even higher within the parish, by babbling gibberish and making a false conversion. "I lied about it", as he laughed uncomfortably in the face of my genuine experience. Yeah, I hesitated, but your moms...."Oh, I know!" He said it too loud and too quick, which meant he wasn't over anything. "She's totally nuts!" Right, but, that doesn't mean your spiritual life is over, I gently advised him. You're Hispanic. Catholics can always come home. And I meant it. He was my Brother-in-Christ. He was more insistent on putting all religions in the same category as UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. This brush-up with sincerity? He disliked that even more. It had happened to me more than once at RISD, so I knew the deal: the door was officially closing.

When he saw the stage version of my real-life warrior act down at the pier, I knew we'd reached the end of our destination. Now it was his turn to be silent over post-fight beers at a makeshift cabana by the water. "So, that's what you trained in, huh?" Yeah, my man. As the sun set over the river on a romance that was never-to-be, he suddenly seemed to want the evening to go on, with another round of beers and a renewed sense of energy, in pursuit of a feeling that left quickly with so many fighter men milling around the bar, dressed in tight t-shirts emblazoned on the back with a trendy design motif: two big, graphic angel wings with the feathers articulated in a highly realistic, line-art style. And just like that, it was time for us both to go home. Alone.

Happy Feast Day to Our Most Blessed Mother, The Holy Virgin, 
Our Lady of Guadalupe. Forever She Reigns as Queen of Heaven.

Black Robe

Thanksgiving had been co-opted by the party good suppliers, greeting card manufacturers, and mail-order catalogs of the world, and as young intellectuals, we were afraid we'd never get it back. Our generation saw holiday seasons twisted into nightmarish marathons of brutish endurance that wasted our time and money, becoming unruly scenes that would take an army of Dr. Phil's to undo in their individual dysfunctions. 

We watched in horror as people gorged themselves on shopping and bad food, through dystopian scenes shown on our parent's evening news programs that seemed lifted from a scifi movie about the Apocalypse. People were trampled to death during buying frenzies in pursuit of the latest toy craze, like a Cabbage Patch doll. Imagine dying over THAT. Giving thanks in a meaningful way had become supplanted by something advertisers called "Black Friday", as a prelude to a Christmas that was the complete opposite of good cheer.

As we deconstructed the painful pasts of our history books, we talked about how it all went wrong, beginning with an overly romanticized version of the Pilgrims meeting the Indians for the first time, in a goofy portrayal of Northern Europeans as naive waifs somehow caught in a wintertime they'd never met, utterly dependent on the suckling teat of the local, pipe-smoking natives scantily clad in a hippie fantasy of leather headbands and groovy feathers.

It was as preposterously out-of-date as our textbooks, especially to us French Canadian kids who knew better. Their Jamestown was not our Quebecois settlement or Acadian mixed marriage, right off the boat. It was one story about one tribe meeting one group of puritanical Englanders famed for their firebrand of religious extremism that got them kicked out of Merry Old Englande. My ship-faring ancestors came here to trade and mate, hopefully at the same time. Knowing the men in my family, that sounds about right.

By contrast, in college we learned about the First Nations and their territories through the geography of who did what where, at which time. It wasn't as simple as "white man=bad, Indian=good", just a lot more honest, and why not? We were there to learn. After me and my boyfriend made fun of the wacky anachronisms in "Dances with Wolves", we'd tell them to check out a film that's been called one of the most realistic depictions of indigenous life from colonization times that's ever been made into a movie, through the eyes of a French missionary and his Huron allies. Let's just say this: the Mohegans live up to their name.

For Americans lucky enough to have First Contact stories, why not share that over the usual turkey talk this year? Instead of finding an enemy sitting across the table from you separated by a wall you built, you might find family, like we did. Blessings to you.

WUTR: Utica/Rome

Me and my best friend had way more than altitude to adjust to, deep in the remote mountains of upstate New York. Before the Internet and cell phones, we had a pay phone on the first floor that we shared with an entire dorm and a television in the common room, also on the first floor. We'd already broken a lot of rules in the dorm and around campus, the least of which was having a hot plate in our room for heating up cans of soup or making box mac and cheese, in direct violation of the dorm's fire code. There were no microwave dinners, no cable TVs, no personal computers, and no anxious "helicopter parents" circling overhead. We were free.

Our relative isolation from the rest of the world created a bubble for young minds to thrive, especially in exploration of the past through our art history and history textbooks. It didn't really matter what day or time it was, because we lived through our studies, anyway. The allure of being out of touch in a cool way has trapped many a hippie perpetually in college towns, like the demon from the movie 'Krampus' captures souls stuck in so many snow globes sitting on its shelf. There was something eerily dead about going to the same bar forever, dating the same tie-dyed wearing sophomore over and over again.

We'd shudder in the frigid evenings over the possibility of a similar fate, which propelled us past incredible odds to our respective educational careers: Karen from urban-based Yonkers, and me from the projects in Queens. Sometimes we wondered like 'The Talking Heads', "....how did we get here?", only to be brutally reminded of our commitment to our ideals by a six-hour bus ride through the frozen tundra of a nearly deserted landscape. In the overheated dorm rooms of our engaged minds, we always left a window open to catch the coldness of the crisp, clear mountain air.

After a night of Old Milwaukee and weak pot, we slunk down to the first floor to watch TV on the sly, with our reputations preceding us. It was late, so we'd escaped the voracious Long Island crowd that were more supported in their daily habits by their similarly enabled parents. Used to the abuse that comes with shared family spaces, we sank into the old, sunken couch with a sigh of relief, in a mostly dark room that was empty of other kids. Finally! We had the TV to ourselves, without the petty power plays or bitchy stand-offs that happened among the factions of hardcore viewers in the dorm with time and madness on their sides. Kids would plot TV "takeovers" in the cafeteria with their dorm-mates by shouting down anyone who objected to their "Must See TV" during coveted time slots.

But, like two weary, single moms at the end of yet another tough day, we just wanted to put up our feet and relax without making a highly charged political statement about how spoiled and compulsive we weren't. We'd had enough of that growing up. So, one late night found us turning the dial on the TV unmolested by cries of outrage, to catch Letterman or maybe a "Honeymooners" rerun. Didn't really matter. New York City channels usually showed black-and-white classics or freaky monster movies for the overnight crowd working the night shift at the precinct or in the ER; great, working-class stuff.

We'd gotten to the right point of mellow before bedtime when catastrophe struck. We'd lost the signal! Some old movie started playing, then cut out to a screen full of static. What the...? We were left to spend the rest of the night in wondering paranoia. Had the Russians attacked? Was it nuclear war? A media blackout based on alien invasion? What? WHAT? WHAT?! What the fuck just happened? We'd adjusted the rabbit ears, unplugged and replugged the set, banged on the side of it until horizontal lines shimmied across the tube; no such luck. Our electronic babysitter was dead. It was humbling to our superior senses of self, as well-adjusted freshmen.

The next morning in the cafeteria, we immediately told our friends the bad news. Someone had to approach the Residence Hall Director with the creepy molester 'stache about buying a new TV ("dude, we should totally draw straws to see who does it"), because the old one had just cut out. Huh? What are you guys talking about? Our friend from Buffalo was a blue collar girl used to working the early morning shift at the local convenient store, so she'd already been up to catch "her programs" at six a.m., and the set was working just fine. What'd you two do?

Nothing! We protested. We did absolutely nothing but turn the thing on and sit down. Must've been a signal drop, because we were watching some old movie and then the fuzz came on. Wait a minute...our friend from Syracuse asked us around what time. Oh, we didn't know. It was late. Letterman had been on, then some war movie started with this big flag flying and the National Anthem playing...no, wait, dude! Probably a baseball movie, hence the music....yeah, that was it. Totally.

Our upstate friends erupted into hysterical shrieks of laughter, crying at the cafeteria table, clutching themselves and each other. Me and Karen just looked at each other. Now what? <shoulder shrugs> We were called "Abbott and Costello" behind our backs by some of the kids, because she's a big girl and I was a beanpole. Sometimes, we were funny without even trying. Okay...mind letting us in on the joke? Finally, good ole Tracey told us the truth, and it was so much weirder than The Cold War or the end of the world. "No, you guys." Hahaahaa! "Lemme tell 'em!" What? WHAT?

"That wasn't a movie. That was the station signing off for the night." Crickets. I looked at my friend again and shook my head. I had nothing. We turned back to them. What do you mean? They, in turn, looked just as baffled. A sign-off! The station "signed off" for the night! What are you talking about?! Finally, Lisa from Rome kicked in, "Guys! GUYS! That means no more TV!" No. More. TV. What is this strange Bizarro universe? "That's it! The TV goes off the air until morning." Holy....what frigid level of hell is this?! We struggled to assimilate a place with no late night take-out, or Ralph Kramden banter with Alice. 

Suddenly, two hip girls from the 'burbs realized how far from home they were, and then our real education began. "Humbled" wasn't exactly the word for how we felt. We were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we were alone in it. After that, we had a new nickname around campus. 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' had officially arrived, and it was massive in its scope. Like, totally, dude. And dudettes! It was the start of a whole new era.

Lift

My Brooklyn boyfriend from Bay Ridge has always been scared of the country, though he was loathe to admit it to me when we dated, fearing a lesser stature than myself in just about everything. It was nonsensically competitive, and therefore, doomed to fail. He'd complain about the crickets being too loud for him to sleep well at my mother's house in upstate New York, which made traveling with him exceptionally laborious, as our round-trip flight on "McAir" bore out.

How would he fare out west? A family holiday found my father springing for a ski trip to New Mexico while we were in college, in accommodation of our tastes that were more sophisticated than West Bumblef-ck, Texas could provide. The people were so incredibly rude to us where they lived that we couldn't find any reasons to visit an extremely remote place that took pleasure in being a barren wasteland depressingly littered with broken farm equipment. Not even with free tickets and airfare provided.

So, one lucky Thanksgiving saw us flying pleasantly non-stop from New York with no small plane change-overs to beautiful New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, and what a gorgeous drive it was. The mountains were dusted with snow like a classic Christmas fable, and I thought we'd finally have the happy ending to a holiday story that had eluded us as a family since my parents bitter divorce.

The weather was perfect, too: plenty of light, powdery snow and bright southwestern sun. Until the last day of skiing. We had been doing surprisingly well for non-skiers, mastering the bunny slopes with its lower lifts that surrounded the lodge, which led us to greater heights on the very last day of our trip. Back then, lifts were small, open-air seats with one metal bar to hold onto, and the snow beneath us was strewn with poles, gloves, and hats stuck in the frozen no-man's land of the rising slope.

We'd stood at the bottom of a lift that disappeared into thick, heavy, snow clouds, wondering if it was worth it. I hated the height and the wildly careening seats blown about in the stiff winds, but we reasoned that we were here to experience this, so we might as well do it. Sure enough, my instincts proved correct once we reached the top: a deep squall of fiercely blowing drifts immediately froze our goggles, but we had to make a decision about quickly turning left or right, because the lift was swiftly moving with people skiing off.

We veered left, trying to see a sign half-covered in ice and snow, but as we started our descent, it was already too late. We were on a Black Diamond, expert-level trail covered in compacted blue ice that was impassable, and we were next to a cliff's edge.  We couldn't even skate across it with the edge of our ski blades, so we took the skis off and walked down the mountainside until we reached another lift with another lodge, and then the lights went out and the lift turned off.

Okay....now what? We went inside the abandoned lodge to think. What to do? I guess we could cross-country ski back to the main lodge and our hotel using the service road. Right? The lift operator finally told us the truth: we were seven miles outside of town, and the sun was quickly setting. Well, we thought, it might be okay....he was Mestizo and obviously unused to talking with tourists, but we were teenagers, so he offered us a ride in his old pickup truck instead. Thanks! I was psyched. This trip was over and I was done with skiing, quite possibly forever. Done. 

Of course, my passive-aggressive city boyfriend grumbled that we could have made it back on our own. "This isn't so bad! Look at how level the road is! Oh, Marie. This would've been easy!" The guide shot him a sharp look. "You don't realize how fast the temperature drops at night here." That was true, but I could already see my boyfriend stirring restlessly in his seat. He loved to argue. Yeah, but it wasn't that far....the guide began shaking his head. "You don't get it, son. Cold isn't the only thing that'll get you out here."

He lowered his window just as an orange disk of sun set behind the mountains through a silhouette of dense pines. "The wolves are telling each other we're here." As he said it, we could hear the thin, loud howl of the alpha male. "They're already tracking us, because we're in their territory. They know it's only the three of us." If you've never heard the rough barking of a pack as it runs, I don't know how to describe it to you. It was like nothing we'd ever heard before. Bart turned white, and shut up for the rest of the ride back. The lift operator continued talking with his window down, so we could hear them. "They're following us." And it was true. We heard them signalling to each other with the same speed that the truck drove on the snowy road, speeding across the mountaintops in pursuit, all the way back to the hotel.

Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers.
Happy All Saints Day.

War Braids

A couple of weeks ago, two well-known American football players had an uncomfortable public exchange on social media about the (mis)appropriation of what one player considered the sole cultural property of his particular ethnic heritage. Crazy as it may seem, two exceptionally elite individuals performing at the highest level of their game had a tensely bitchy discussion about....world politics, gun control, healthcare, or was it famine? No, it was hair. That's right: a hairstyle. It brought me back to a scene from Chris Rock's movie "Good Hair" when he actually asked Maya Angelou what she thought about the issue, to which she famously replied "It's just hair!" Right! It grows on your head. Or not.

I get it, because I also have what's called "difficult hair" that I've written about before on this site (also known as "curly hair"), and for many years, the world didn't let me forget that my hair was a sign of poor genetics, or as my father calls it, "mongrel DNA". It's his defense mechanism for having what was once known as "the taint" of Indian blood in his familial line. You know that old squabble about all the "bad" stuff that comes from the other side of the family. For me, salvation was finally found in the pages of a book written by a similarly-afflicted Briton who also suffered from the genetic legacy of "poor hair" that was to be covered up for being too "wild", because it was seen as overtly sexual.

After that, my life changed. I bought products for my hair type, switched up my cleansing routine/styling techniques and....voila! Better hair. It seemed so simple that it almost felt criminally easy, until my heightened awareness made shopping for products in stores a lesson about the blatant racism that drives marketing stances used to sell products to whichever group can be victimized with their profitable shaming techniques. So, I guess it was progress to read men feeling the sting over appearances now aimed their way through corporate endorsements, as an inevitable outgrowth of civil rights with "hair shaming" for men.

But, I still didn't quite get it. I understood that an African-American man felt he could stand up for dreadlocks to be his hairstyle specifically, given the context of an American history that has brutally taken away too much from his ethnic group, except for this: all mixed martial artists wear "war braids" in the sport of fighting while in the arena, because we all want our hair off our faces during a fight. It's too messy and distracting, otherwise. And then there's this: my hair's also a fine voluminous blend of textured curls that can dread freakishly easily. Scarily so, as my friend noted at the Jersey Shore. She can quickly run a pick through her wet hair and be done with it, while the Medusa-like snakes on my head changed every minute or so from straight, wet hair to a snarled mess that needs a long list of products, tools, and accessories to be somewhat manageable. She admitted to me that it was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

So, I thought to myself: well, maybe the other guy wearing a helmet wants that same kind of ease with his hair, Asiatic as it is. I know a dude whose Cuban Chinese fro is so thick that he can also stand a pick up in it without any intervention. And then it occurred to me that maybe people just don't know about the range of human hair historically, or how other tribes and clans of the world can also feel the struggle deeply and personally, like I do. Just like one picture can cover a thousand words, here are two infamous warriors from the past wearing dreads from other cultures, as legitimate to them as any on the planet. Meet the Kouroi of ancient Greece and "The Dying Gaul" during his last, beautiful moments before death. Welcome to the world.