New MRH-HS Commons

Anne and I went to the 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, corn bread and pie, this is a menu that may not be totally good for you, but it is certainly tastes good.

Before we could even go into the cafeteria, for the supper, I had to checkout the high school’s new commons. The first photograph with this post, attempts to capture an overview of the commons area. When Dan and Dave went to this school, this area was a squalid little parking lot. With the second photo, I had some fun with a couple of the lawn artworks. Blue is short for the Blue Devils, the name for the high school’s teams. Retiring superintendent, Dr. Linda Henke‘s administration has never been very comfortable about devil worship. 😉

Blue

The Soul Food Supper seemed at times like a revival meeting. After the MRH Jazz Band finished their intro set, the evening’s program proper commenced. Leading off was Curtis Finch, an American Idol contestant. He had made it into the top sixty of that contest. He sang the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. We all stood for his song. Calyn Brantley McNeal made a presentation about her father, a Major with the Tuskegee airmen, of WW II fame, the so-called Red Tails. Things really got moving, when the Word of God Christian Mass Choir took the stage. Finally, the audience rose again and we all sang together, “We Shall Overcome”.

Politics was part of the supper’s interstitial conversation. Missouri is losing a US Representative and this has cast redistricting into chaos. Drawing the new map is now in the hands of the courts. The paper that morning, announced that our representative, who is slated to lose his seat, had filed for the only other safely Democratic seat in the Saint Louis area. He would run against the other Democratic congressman in the Saint Louis area. At the supper, our longtime friend, Gina Mitten, announced that she had filed for State Representative. She filed for the neighboring district to ours, but since none of this gerrymandering is as yet cast in stone, you never know how things will end up.

Storms passed through the other night, almost a year to the day of our own storm damage. Here is a link to last years storm photos. This year, the deadly and damaging winds passed to the south of us. Unfortunately, like flowers blooming and birds singing these horrible storms are also harbingers of spring.