The Iwante Diamond Show

Kimberly M. Moore and Melissa A. Brown stop by the studio to discuss their new business venture Bold Beauties.  Iwante Diamond and I dish about celebrities and pop culture.

Smokeout!

She was very cheerful, and I knew this was going to be a positive experience. She said she knew what I was going through because she too had been a smoker for years and had to also go through quitting.  She knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, and she would be there for me every step of the way.

I was at the Smoking Cessation Clinic in St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital, and she was the nurse who was going to change my life.

She gave me some brief counseling and then introduced me to the nicotine patch.  She was going to start me off on a moderate dosage and then change it as we went along, according to my needs.  She asked me when I wanted to start.  From some faraway place I seemed to hear my voice say, “Today!”

What? No. That can’t be right.  That couldn’t be me saying that. I needed my cigarettes.  These were stressful times.  What was I going to do without them? We needed to take a more gradual approach to this situation.

This nurse was too gleeful as she showed me how to apply the patch.  Suddenly, I didn’t like this woman. If I put on that tiny white patch, there was no going back. Everyone knows it’s deadly if you make the mistake of smoking a cigarette while wearing one of those things.  I didn’t want my heart to explode or to turn into ash or any of those other urban legends.  She assured me nothing like that would happen if I slipped up and smoked one cigarette while wearing the patch, but I didn’t fully trust her.  Hadn’t she also been the one to tell me she was there to help? Now she was taking away my precious.

Ironically, I had one cigarette left in my pack. I ran from the hospital, and found a serene place to smoke it. I inhaled slowly, knowing this love affair was at an end.  Ah, precious. I had been smoking for fifteen years.  How did I think I was going to be able to stop?

I was able to get through the rest of the day but it was difficult.  Late that night, I broke.  I tore off the patch and ran from my apartment to the store downstairs.  There, I threw myself on the counter, and I purchased my favorite brand of cigarettes.

Back at home, I put on some soft music, and I lit up.  I inhaled deeply as the theme song to Titanic swelled.  It was heavenly, but I had vowed to stop smoking.  Disgusted with myself, I grabbed the pack and held it to the sky.  “Why can’t I quit you?” I said in my best Jack Twist voice.  I fell on the bed and cried like a thirteen year old girl who just found out the truth about Clay Aiken. 

Okay, so it probably didn’t go down quite as grandly as all that. I tend to have a pretty dramatic memory. 

The next day, I did recommit to quitting. I kept what was left of that pack after my chain-smoking session the night before.  I said it was for emergencies, but it turned out I never lit another one of them. I was getting all the nicotine I needed from my trusty old patch, but I found that the physical act of smoking was just as hard to quit as the inhale itself. I needed that hand to mouth motion. I needed to suck on a filter. So, I walked around with unlit cigarettes dangling from my lips until I no longer needed them.

I was horrified as I began to realize how often a day I used to light up. I reached for my cigarettes first thing in the morning.  I lit up after every meal. When shopping, I wanted to smoke after every store and I smoked en route to every single destination.  I was an addict, but people used to look at me and say, “I didn’t peg you for a smoker.” Well, I had been.  Now, I was proudly joining the ranks on non-smoker.

After a while, I started forgetting to put on the patch.  When I’d realize, I’d panic and run to retrieve one.  Eventually, I forgot to put on the patch, and I forgot to panic.  I had successfully quit smoking.  As time passed it became a challenge to me, a personal contest, to accrue as much non-smoking time as possible.  I’ve heard that it’s harder to quick cigarettes than heroine.  I’d done it, and I’m not the person with the strongest resolve.

When I pass by a smoker and it’s either intoxicating and tempting, or the most disgusting thing in the world to me.  Go figure.  My senses of taste and smell have returned and my smile is white again.  When I stand next to a heavy smoker I think, Oh my God! Did I used to smell like that?  Yes.  Yes, I did.

The American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout was a few days ago.  For two years in a row, I didn’t have to feel guilty about not quitting. 

The craving never completely goes away.  It will rise up out of nowhere and for no apparent reason.  It turns out I will never be a non-smoker again.  What I am is a successful former smoker, and that’s far better than a pack a day habit at $13 a pack.

I guess they’re not so precious after all.

Ms. Irene

The television at Galaxy Diner was left on. I’m guessing that no one had ever been assigned the duty of turning it off, since Galaxy never closes.  It’s the 24 hour go to spot for a late night, after hours nosh.  But, it was closed.  In fact, up and down 9^th Avenue, restaurants and shops had shuttered up and taped their windows in preparation for Hurricane Irene.

“Oh law!  I heard Irene is about to whup up on New York.  Do you have a place to go?” My friend JL was texting me from the Carolinas.

“Yes,” I answered, “my favorite bar.”

“Be careful,” he warned.

I realized that my out of state friends were concerned about what they were seeing on the news, so I put aside the jovial remarks to assure them that the storm would probably do the most damage on the other side of town, and in low laying areas that were already being evacuated. 

JL was relieved.

“Oh no!  Don’t mess with Ms. Irene,” he texted, “she was one of our neighbors in the projects.  Nobody walked in her yard or bothered her after she had her gin. She chewed tobacco too. She wasn’t like my great grandmother or the other ladies who chewed snuff.”

Point taken.  Ms. Irene was on her way, and she was in a mood.

One by one, the businesses had begun to close, to allow employees to get home to their families before the weather worsened.  The owner of one local store was offering the services of his own car to get his workers home. The MTA had stopped running at noon that day. New York City was shutting down.

Well, almost. Being the city that never sleeps, there was the deli on the corner of 9^th and 46^th that remained open, and bars and restaurants that kept regular hours.  Hurricane parties sprung up around the neighborhood where, of course, they were serving Hurricane cocktails.

We ended up at House of Brews on 46^th Street, a regular hang out. There was a group of us from the neighborhood.  Most of us lived there, while the rest worked in the neighborhood, but had no easy way to get home.  They would be staying with friends in the area, or at the hotel across the street.  We drank, we danced and we sang, as the rain began to run from the sky and the water gathered on the sidewalk.

I was the first to leave the festivities.  I was tired, and I was hungry.  I wasn’t in the mood to prepare anything myself.  So, I decided to walk to Galaxy Diner, where I found no one but the tiny people in the television that had been left on.  Undaunted, I walked on.  This was 9^th Avenue.  Surely someone was serving something, somewhere.

Smiler’s 24 hour Deli was also closing. I didn’t even know Smiler’s had a gate. Although my beloved Galaxy was out of commission, Westway Diner was a trouper. I quickly texted my compadres back at the bar that they had a food option, before ordering up some comfort food –Cheeseburger and fries.  Vacations and natural disasters cancel diets every time.  Once again, I put my head down, and shoulder to the rain and made it home with my treasure.  In such a downpour, an umbrella was sometimes a mere gesture.  I popped in a DVD and settled in for the night.  In the morning, I awakened to a very wet city, but one that was, for the most part, still intact.



9th Avenue NYC after the storm

I sent JL a message, “Although I had much fun at the hurricane party, this side of town didn’t get much hurricane.”

“Ms. Irene was drunk!” He answered. “She got lost.”

I took a walk around the quiet neighborhood.   The usual Sunday Brunchers were missing.  Today, businesses were still closed and only a few stragglers, like me, roamed the empty streets.  Most New Yorkers depended on the MTA, which would not be up and running until the next day, following inspection of the rails and equipment.  This meant that workers living in the outer boroughs would find transportation difficult.

Plans for urban search and rescue were put into play. According to early field reports, some areas indeed suffered extreme flooding and wash outs.  Travel was impossible in some places. 

Although Ms. Irene had downgraded to a tropical storm by the time she hit New York City, she’d still left some major damage to the tri state area.  Ms. Irene had transitioned into what the New Jersey mayor called a “major flooding incident.”

By the time the water dried, there would be over 45 estimated casualties, and about 9 million people left in the dark. Damages reached an estimated $1 billion in the state of New York alone. Irene was declared a federal disaster.

Citizens debated about the amount of precaution the city had taken.  Some said it was too much.  To most of us, we were better off being safe, than sorry.

Cheers,

-Ceddy

9th Avenue NYC the morning after

The Pow Wow

The sun beat down like the tum-tum of the nearby drum, and as incessant, earnest and ancient.  “It’s amazing how something millions of miles away can do something like this,” Marc later said of Kim’s resultant sunburn. 

It’s amazing to me how an indigenous people can, for thousands of years, hold on to the traditions, culture and values of their ancient civilization, despite the blistering trials, changing landscape and brutal exploitation that threatened to rip it from their grasp.

The singers and drummers

I am referring to the more than forty Native American tribes who gathered this past weekend for the 33^rd Annual Thunderbird American Indian Mid-Summer Pow Wow to celebrate and share what they have preserved for generations. 

It was Sunday, the culmination of a three day intertribal festival, which included both traditional and modern food, vendor booths filled with artifacts, crafts and traditional garb, and dance competitions.  Marc, Kim and I took a scenic bus ride that led us away from the urban maze of Manhattan to the lush green of the Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park where, in a clearing, we watched as representatives from the different tribes dance the traditional powwow dances of their people.

For the past three decades, the Thunderbird Native American Dancers has hosted the event which boasts representation from such tribes as the Cherokee, Aztec, Hopi, Navajo, and many more, arriving from all over the nation and as far away as the Caribbean. It has become New York’s largest, and longest running. The organization is well known in the New York area for offering ongoing services, such as monthly pow wows, craft and language workshops, and the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers Scholarship, to which proceeds from this event are contributed. 

Like the sun, these are a resilient and steadfast people. Their beauty and majesty brought to mind the vague memories of my great-grandmother, who was Cherokee. It made me wonder of my own heritage, as our time together had been brief.  This festival made me wish I’d had a stronger connection.  I admired the joy and enthusiasm of the young people who paraded and danced before me.  I was humbled by the pride and the determination of their guardians who teach generation after generation what had been taught to them by their guardians, and their guardians before, thus making it possible for us to share in these traditions today.

While the festivities had begun with the raising of the American flag, and a song honoring our veterans and soldiers, we were left with the profound words of the Director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and the MC, Louis Mofsie (aka Green Rainbow of Hope Tribe of Arizona, and the Winnebago Tribe of Wisconsin):

“We’ve had the chance to go down to Chinatown and to see the parade and all the Chinese people in their traditional dress and the dragons and the lines … we got to go to the German festival and see them in their traditional German dress…Well, this is our festival.  This is where we get together to sing our traditional songs and to wear our traditional garb.  The only difference is we didn’t come here from another country.  This is our country, and we’ve been here for thousands of year.”

As far as I can tell, we’ll be here thousands more.

Cheers,

-Ceddy

This is how to keep a heritage alive!

Heritage of Pride: March of the Misfits!

This past week was Gay Pride Week in New York City and many other cities across the nation. It's history stretches back to that fateful night in June 1969 when a group of gays, lesbians, drag queens, and other so-called “misfits” had enough of social injustice and police brutality and decided to stand up for themselves at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street.

From there, has grown an annual march, and a week of education and celebration that has spread to every major city in the country, and to the world.  But, I knew nothing of the Stonewall, or of equality when I was a little boy in my small, traditional Southern town. I only knew that I was a misfit, and that misfits were easy targets.

It is not easy for a child to endure the confusing metamorphosis that is puberty. It is made even more difficult by the taunting and bullying that may accompany it. I was teased as a child. I was teased a lot. I was called “the slickster” because my hair wasn’t cool enough, and “sophisticated lady” because I was quiet and effeminate, and a slew of other derogatory terms (sissy, queer, faggot, among others) designed to tear down my self esteem and keep me in my misfit place. I was shoved, threatened, and even beaten up once or twice. There were times when it became so cruel and personal, it seemed unbearable.

I wasn’t alone. It was happening in schools all across the nation, just like mine, to children just like me.

I thought about this as I stood on Sunday, across the street from the legendary Stonewall Inn, watching the Gay Pride Parade. There was an extra electric charge in the air because just a couple of days before, New York had just become the sixth state to allow gay marriage. Couples marched with signs declaring their engagements and people dressed as brides and grooms, danced in the street and posed for photographs.It was magical.

Heritage of Pride 2011

But, what resonates with me most at these events are organizations such as Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) who march with their signs declaring, “I Love My Gay Son/Daughter,” and the organizations who promise to look after and protect the young people, such as the It Gets Better Project and The Trevor Project.  These organizations exist because our society still has much to learn, even after all these decades.  This year, I was especially thrilled to see a group of proud children wearing t-shirts with slogans such as “Turkey Baster Baby,” marching with their misfit moms and dads.

These are the images and messages that give hope to those who are still living a life they believe will never be anything but oppressed. I love knowing that most of the people watching and marching proudly have once felt the sting of being an outsider or a misfit. There is solidarity in coming together, and in there is pride in that solidarity.

Not only are they delivering the statement that they are proud. They are sending a message to those watching that it is okay to be proud. Be proud of what makes you different, because all of us are different in some way.  Be proud of the people who have come before you, paving the way to a time that is now more accepting than their own had been. Be proud of where you’ve been, so that you may be proud of where you’re going.

Part of my personal pride lies in reality that I was able to survive that frightening period of childhood that I thought would last forever. One day, I looked in the mirror and realized that I am all the things they said I was.  My hair is slick sometimes. I am sophisticated. Sometimes, like in the show I just finished, I am a lady. So what? As I watched the colorful revelry of the Heritage of Pride parade, I thought how fortunate I am to belong to such a dynamic, versatile and resilient population. We are misfits, and we are proud.  Today, if a bully walks up to me, I’ll spit in his eye. Well, perhaps I won’t spit. That’s a bit unrefined. But, I will hit back.

Manila Luzon of Rupaul's Drag Race at Heritage of Pride 2011

Still, it saddens me that not all of the misfits are able to share in a Pride celebration. You see, there are many children who do not get to make the journey to adulthood to find that it does get better. They become victims of  our bigoted society, often at the hands of other children, like themselves. Being a certain type of person still has such a stigma in some areas that individuals are forced to either live in silence, or suffer the cruel treatment that is born of ignorance.

We should be proud of our accomplishments both socially and politically. But, we should not forget that there are still many miles to go, and so many of us to save along the way. So, whether you’re in combat boots, or running shoes, ballerina slippers or six inch sequined high heels, march on brave misfits, march on.

 Officer Livingston (NYPD) was there to serve and protect, but quickly became a crowd favorite.

Do...Re...Mi

America’s got glee, talent, idols and a special “X” factor. Everybody loves or wants to be a singing sensation. Why not? It’s fun. There seems to be an onslaught of reality contests, shows and movies geared toward music.  That’s because we’re interested again.

In the last decade, the shift in supply and demand for musical entertainment is evidenced by the popularity of such shows as Glee and American Idol.  Even those who scorn pop music have an outlet in television shows like Rock Star, and country fans can root for or aspire to become a Nashville Star.

While the popularity of karaoke declined in previous years, the recent resurgence suggests that people once again have something to sing about. Those who prefer to rock out in anonymity have the option of becoming a Guitar Hero in the privacy of their very own home arenas.

All this singing and dancing is good for us.  Scientists are studying the effect music has on mental health and immunity (http://www.sciencedaily.com/), while we are searching for ways to satisfy our inner Gleeks.  I’m not suggesting that you break into a musical number in the steam room at your gym or at the elevator at work (oh, golly gee but that would be swell), but wasn’t it a kinder, gentler world that clamored for new cinematic releases filled with stars singing and dancing through story lines?  Yes, the movie musical is also making a not so stealthy comeback with hearty receptions for films like Chicago, Rent and Hairspray.  This year, movie makers made a pointe of appealing to dance enthusiasts with Black Swan.

As we spill out of the sheet music closet and into the streets, it becomes contagious.  Groups actually do break into song in unexpected places around New York City like museums, shopping centers and even Time Square (http://www.breakintosong.com/). Maybe that steam room number isn’t such a bad idea after all.

(Promo shot for Plan 9 From Outer Space by Frank Cwiklik www.dm-theatrics.com)

When I was a little boy, I dreamed of being on Star Search.  Alas, that dream never came true.  But I still have a song in my heart and a spring in my step because I know I can be a rock star at a neighborhood karaoke bar any day of the week. I hope I see you there.

Cheers,

Ceddy



The Bright, Optimistic Young Man

There was once a bright, optimistic young man who lived a life of excitement in a grand metropolis. One morning, he stood on the vibrant platform of a subway station, awaiting the train that would speed him onward to the adventures of the day. Suddenly, as the speeding train approached, he felt himself heave forward, onto the perilous rails of the train track. He reached desperately for the friend that had been standing beside him on the platform, but to no avail.  He simply could not reach.

At the last possible moment he hoisted himself onto the platform.  “This is a dangerous situation,” he thought to himself. “I’m going to have to leave this city if I want to survive.” And he did.

One afternoon, the bright, optimistic young man was enjoying a walk through a quiet village town.  He came upon a bridge built above a rapidly rolling river. Crossing the bridge, he enjoyed the sound of the surging water. Suddenly, he lost his balance and sailed over the railing of the bridge into the water below.  As he fought against being swallowed by the waves, he reached for his friend, who still stood on the bridge above, but to no avail.  He simply could not reach.

Finally, he grabbed on to a nearby branch and pulled himself to the safety of the shore. As he struggled to regain his breath, he thought, “This situation is as dangerous as the last.  I’m going to have to leave this village if I want to survive.” And he did.

Determined to survive, the bright, optimistic young man climbed high into the serene mountains. Early in the evening, he stood on the edge of a cliff to take in the awesome view that spread before him. As suddenly as before, he lost his footing and slipped from the edge of the cliff.  He caught himself before falling to the jagged rocks below. As he hung helplessly, high above the world, he reached for the friend who had been standing on the cliff beside him, but to no avail. He simply could not reach. 

“Why doesn’t my friend reach out to me?” He thought to himself desperately.  He remembered that each time he had fallen he had pulled himself to safety while his friend stood idly by. The dazzling city, the bucolic village and the majestic mountains had not betrayed him.  They had been constant and true to their natures…but the friend had not. He realized that, each time he had fallen, he had been pushed.

You see, not all relationships and situations are beneficial to our well being. Some are destructive. We must be able to recognize when we are being taken advantage of and when we are being abused. Too often we allow this behavior to happen because we are blinded by friendship and love. We try to justify the other person’s behavior because, in our hearts, we truly believe the situation will change. In our minds, however, we know that it will not. We all have the ability to accept, to love and to forgive. We forget that we also have the ability to walk away.

Finally, the bright, optimistic young man mustered enough strength to pull himself back onto the cliff.  He dusted himself off and he walked away, leaving his friend behind. 

“I’m going to have to find some new friends if I want to survive,” he thought to himself. And he did.

Cheers,

Ceddy