New Year's Eve.

So, I did end up going to the African New Year's Eve party. Sister Rose had rented out the rec room of an apartment complex a number of blocks north than me, and though the room would have been ideal for 50-60 people and only like 30 people showed up, it was a great time.

The room was big and long with tables and chair around the edges, and thin green ribbons and plastic yellow flowers taped to the walls and hanging from the ceiling. On one end this Tanzanian dude had a computer set up and hooked up to speakers and shit, and on one side near a kitchen there tables set up with different African and other foods -- jollof rice, goat meat on backbones, cubed lamb cooked with peppers, some kind of Asian noodles, falafels, fruit salad, Tanzanian fried bread - and then a liquor table with wine and beer and a little hard liquor to boot...

And, like three older African ladies with full garb on were tending the tables, though I didn't talk to them much, though one of them laughed when she saw me getting food and bobbing my butt along to the African music the Tanzanian DJ was playing.

(That happened to me several times when I was in Ghana and Benin a couple summers ago, where women would get a huge kick out of catching me unconsciously moving to the local music... It was the only real way that I endeared myself to most Africans I met.)

The people I ended up talking to the most were some local African-American customers who were good friends with Sister Rose. One of them was a self-described (black) (female) 'old radical' from a neighborhood experiencing black-on-black gentrification -- she was in a huge kind of tie-dyed purple kente cloth kind of thing, with African embroidery on the front -- and when I was asking her about development there, she said that the new people moving in didn't participate as much in the community.

"That's because all the buppies are probably too busy sitting in their rehabbed condos and watching their flat screens," I was like, and she loved that.

Later, she was also confessing to me and my one (white) friend from Mississippi, who I went with, how much she likes Star Trek.

One of the other highlights of people talking to was this really tall older (black) lady with close-shaved bleached blonde hair, who wore a very short black mini-skirt over her gigantic legs (she wasn't fat, but her legs were solid and *thick*) and tall leather boots. She also had a lot of these big futuristic silver rings all over her fingers, and it turns out that she was a jewelry maker who knew Sister Rose from craft shows.

She didn't talk much, and seemed really skeptical looking whenever I talked, but every once in a while I would get her laughing...

And, when I went up to the table to go get another beer and asked her if she wanted one, she said no, she only drank champagne.

"Now why is that?", I was like.

"Becaue of the way it makes me feel inside," she said, waving her fingers somewhere out in front of her breast, "All bubbly."

Though, she was curious about this beer I had, and I poured her a little bit into her cup later after she finished off that glass of her champagne (she had brought a bottle with her so she'd be sure to have something to drink, something she does at every party).

Later, we were talking about the Millennium, and she said she went to Jamaica, since if the world was going to end, she wanted to be in someplace she liked.

"And so what did you do for the Millennium?", I was like.

"Sat on a beach in Jamaica and drank champagne," she was like.

Then, she said it turned out that her hotel she was staying in was a brothel.

Later, too, we danced a bit and she tried dancing close, and she hinted that she wanted to see me perform at krunk karaoke.

(I had told her I had sung "Boogie Oogie Oogie" and she had laughed spontaneously, and then was like, "I bet you would be good.")

"You seem more performative than your friend, " she was like, and then I had to explain to her that the first time we went and he sang some blues song about throwing a woman on the floor because he wanted her so bad, that he had quite a fan club of women at the bar, and I don't get that so much.

"Really?", she was like, and she looked curously over at my friend...

The other great person I talked to was this 23-year old Zimbabwyean (sp.?) dude who was like a year out of college and was in the exports business. He told me that Sister Rose is so much more than someone who likes to party -- she came a little late to her party, and entered dancing around giving everyone high-fives -- and even so much more than like a mother to any young African she meets -- he says that that happens a lot, that Africans band together despite cultural differences, because those differences are dwarfed by being in the U.S. -- but that also she immediately has the respect of any Zimbabwyean she meets, since way back when, she used her position as a businesswoman to spy on the Rhodesian government and then feed the info back to the native revolutionary troops, and she would even feed the troops at her home, despite the risk of death to herself.

"And that's not even her country," he was like, "But she did that. And that was all before I was born, too," he was like. "There's so much you don't know about a person, any person you meet."