Anne and I went to the 12th annual Soul Food Supper on Tuesday night at the Maplewood-Richmond Heights High School. This is the school district’s regular celebratory dinner party for Black History Month. The menu consisted of fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes and corn bread. A menu that may not be totally good for you, but it certainly tasted good. Pictures are of the Blue Devil Jazz Band that in addition to the choir performed musical numbers through dinner. After dinner they had Rockin’ Jake, not to be confused with Shaky Jake. Rockin’ Jake is a New Orleans harmonica player and is still very much alive. In addition to the supper the high school also had two basketball games going on, so the event was a bit of a three-ring circus flavor, what with band and choir members coming and going all of the time.
Since the Soul Food Supper is a Black History Month celebration, you might be asking yourself, why are there no black people in any of my pictures. There was a black vocalist that sang with the jazz band and she was quite good, but the jazz band was loud, too loud for me. At my insistence, we backed up. I was too far away and too satiated to work my way up close again when the quite diverse high school choir performed. I apologize for my mistake. I won’t apologize for how well they played. They sounded good.
Dan called on Monday night. He needed some help filling out his FASFA financial aid paper work. He is applying to two nine-week summer residency programs for emerging visual artists. He hopes to be able to attend one of them this summer. One is at Oxbow, Michigan (near Holland) and the other is at Skowhegan, Maine. Personally, I hope that he gets the one in Michigan, that way we will be able to see him this summer.
Dave is flying to West Lafayette, Indiana on Thursday. He is interviewing at Purdue for graduate school. I hope that he is able to dodge all the blizzards that have been regularly rolling through the Midwest this winter.
The final photograph with this post is from Chris. It shows the bell tower of the old Spanish mission in Carmel, California, officially known as San Carlos Borroméo del río Carmelo. The Carmel Mission is one of the oldest missions in northern California. It is the only one to still have its original bell tower dome. Originally located in nearby Monterey, it was soon moved to Carmel to put some distance between the mission’s neophytes and the powerful military government at the Presidio of Monterey. Was this the beginning of the separation of church and state in California?
