The power of a picture.

When I was down in Indiana volunteering on Election Day and going door-to-door hanging door hangers saying 'VOTE OBAMA TODAY', what really struck me was the picture on the door hanger:



If Hillary had been the nominee and there was a picture of her and some white guy VP together, I would have had a framework to process the image, that of the domineering wife. With Obama and Biden, however, it's a black man in charge with a white man playing sidekick, and there's really nothing else like it in our culture.

2 more election night memories.

1) My neighbor who I'd been volunteering with in Indiana - at home eating dinner after a long day of volunteering in Indiana, and all of a sudden there's all these cars honking on the street outside her window. Pennsylvania had been called for Obama, so she gulps down her meal and rushes to the bar to watch the rest of the results since she didn't want to miss anything else.

2) Joan Baez - hanging out with her band in a jungle-themed hotel room in Alexandria, Virginia, and they're all in bathrobes with zebra prints leopard skin etc. The elction is called and they go down to the street and are like "yea!", but no one's there, the street is empty, they just hear a "yea!" from like a mile down the road somewhere, so they catch a cab to the White House and there ends up being like 4000 people there, happily.

Ring / Concert.

Yesterday in the library, the quietness was interrupted by this white girl undergrad's cell phone, and the ringtone was the catchy sax line from Enur's "Calabria".

I went to go see Joan Baez in concert yesterday. She half-assed it, and has no stage presence, and the always-too-seriousness of her folk songs just drains the life from everything, there's no life at all, Judy Collins kicks her ass in that regard...

The difference between them is kind of like this -- Joan Baez had an Amnesty International table in the concert hall foyer, and Judy Collins did too, but Judy Collins also had three tables where you could buy boxwine in plastic cups.

I think my favorite part of the concert was two -

Waiting in the foyer for my friend while people streamed in, and half-reading Helen Keller's "My Religion" and kind of seeing people out of the corner of my eye looking suspiciously at me and my book, which had this mid-1960s cover with a big hot pink and white spiral while in black caps it said "HELEN KELLER" and "MY RELIGION".

Waiting in the foyer for my friend while people streamed in, and seeing this old short and fat white woman in a big puffy turquoise coat and dangly earrings going around with a "NEED 2 TICKETS" sign... I said there might be some left at the box office, I didn't think the concert sold out, and she was like, "Oh, I just do this sometimes, someone always has a ticket to give away."

ADDENDUM - Yet Even More Obama.

At one point, my one (black) friend was like, "I just wish he was darker."

Then, she was like, "Thank God for his wife."

Am reading a Jim Jones bio.

One of his congregants was this huge black ex-con who he had weaned off herion, and who he used to stand in front of juvenile delinquents so he could tell them prison life and keep them on the straight-and-narrow.

"It's either blood on your knife or shit on your dick," is all the ex-con would say.

Yet even more Obama.

My mom was telling her boss at the library about Kwaneesha's mother taking so many pictures on her way to vote and at the voting sited down in Indiana where I was volunteering on Election Day, and the librarian said it gave her chills, to think that it meant so much to people.

Last night I was talking to my one (black) older lady friend who works the library guard desk on Sunday nights, and she was saying that it seemed like just yesterday that her grandmother would call her in the room and be like "Come here, come here!" every time a black person was on television, and she added that it's always stuck with her, how much Ed Sullivan did for Gladys Knight.

"Did he have the Pips on too?", I was like.

"Yes," she said, and gave me a look and enunciated with restrained sassiness, "They are a package."

"Oh," I was like, pretending to be stupid.

She also was saying that she's always said that black people would never be equal till there was a black president, and now she doesn't now what she's going to do.

"Well," I was like, "How about quit your bitching, for one?", and she laughed and mock-acted and stared straight-ahead and deadpanned, "Yes sir, we are equal now, don't have nothing to complain about, yes sir."

Towards the end of talking after saying she was tired like she always said -- I asked why, like I always do, and it was since she was out till 5am the previous night at the casinos, like she is a lot -- she also got up a bit and pointed to her chair cushion; she had put a plastic bag over it, since she said the old guy who worked before her smelled too bad.

"Oh," I was like, "I thought it was out of consideration, in case you farted, or in case you farted and some shit came out, that way you wouldn't stain the seat."

She then waved her hand at me, and was like, "Please!", and I told her that that had actually happened to me once, this summer I was with some friends and I was standing outside an ATM booth waiting for a friend to get some money and I let out a really wet fart like I had been letting out all day, but that one felt a bit different, and as soon as I started walking, I felt a little little squish between my ass-cheeks, so I tried to keep them together and I had to go a the closest bathroom and wipe it out.

"Please!", she was like again, "That is too much information, what makes you think you can go telling me that?", though you could tell she was laughing, she has a toilet sense of humor too.

"Well," I was like, "since Obama's been elected, we're all family, that's why," and she laughed, and I went into the library to go work on my presentation for today.

When I left the library a few hours later, she was like, "Bye, cuz!"

Yet more Obama.

Today after grocery shopping I stopped into the African goods shop where I had been getting buttons in the campaign, and the short African (? - she might be Caribbean) lady who runs it jumped up and gave me two high fives and was like, "Yes, we did it!" She then was telling me that she had been at an Italian restaurant near her house to watch results - she had gotten tickets for the rally, but she decided not to go because of the crowds - and that the restaurant had bottles of champagne ready, and popped them and gave a glass to everyone in the house once it was declared Obama was president.

She's also started stocking neon-green t-shirts with a picture of the Obama family on them, and the words "America's First Family". A (black) middle-aged lady in the store who was in when I was in asked her if they had them in 2XL, and said that the day after the election the owner of a local cafeteria had given out free "Breakfast on Obama" to everyone until noon, and that Obama himself had stopped by, though she hadn't since it was too busy, with lines stretching around the block.

On another note, a (white) friend of mine from North Carolina who is laconic and thoughtful said that this election cycle has made him change his "best qualified person for the job" thinking, since he's realized how much good has come about just by the symbolic value of a black man holding the nation's highest office. He said he's lucky this election, since he thinks Obama is the most qualified person, and there's these added benefits, but now he'll be thinking differently about diversity in the future.