I’m risking $3,600 in seed money for a work derivative of Echo Brown’s one woman show, “Black Virgins Are Not For Hipsters” which debuted at The Marsh in San Francisco eight years ago.

It would be a postmodern work — Pomo for Echo — or an echo of her actual work. Brown died this fall at age 39; her obituary was in The New York Times.

I gave $500 to The Marsh in her memory. Stephanie Weisman wrote me back and suggested that I was a good friend of the author. In reality, I never met her. She left me tickets to the show but I never used them. I gave a small amount to her GoFundMe but didn’t imagine that she would succumb. 

These words give life to thee, as Shakespeare said.

My project, for starters, would involve finding 10 contributors or respondents would would give us 10 hours of their time. That’s 100 hours, at $36 per hour (in comparison, I pay ushers and loaders at my events $20 per hour, paid $75 to composers and performers for a bubble Bandcamp project during COVID, and my scale for headliners is $400 per service).

The last 10 people I’ve worked with or met who are Black or female and or under 39 I will target for these micro-grants. 

On November 3, meanwhile — or its possible this essay Monday at 9 am until 9:30 when I am meeting my trainer James Ward a former marine embassy guard is as far as this gets — I am hosting Dr. JoVia Armstrong cd release party for her Eunoia Society (think paranoia but good); she has a PhD in music from UC Irvine where she worked with Dr. Bridget Crooks who created The Black Index, a visual arts project that was at Palo Alto Art Center and two other museums or galleries, plus there’s a book or catalog. JoVia did the soundtrack that accompanied the show, although in Palo Alto it was low in the mix. JoVia teaches at University of Virginia —where her colleagues include Nicole Mitchell the musicians and bandleader (and leader of AACM of Chicago) and PhD candidate Corey Harris a Bates grad and country blues artist who already won a MacArthur Genius grant for his research and practice studying and embodying the course of music from West Africa to Jamaica to New Olreans to Mississippi and Chicago. I am hoping to add a subplot to JoVia’s show to be to advance this Echo Brown echo initiative.

Aleta Hayes senior lecturer in dance but also sings or sang with William Parker may appear November 3 with an accompanist on piano is slated to be the opening act and I will try to draw on her as a resource for this show.

The show would combine music, acting and spoken word. It would include passages written for the show, passages from the obituary, potentially tributes to Echo and the show written for our work and improv.

It might start with me pointing my smart phone at people and having them repeat the words: Black Virgins are Not for hipsters. 

Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”

And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”

When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.

“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”

Wow. (Excuse the digression: when my mother Barbara Hayms Weiss and I saw Carey Perloff’s Israeli show “Higher” we were seated near Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker; I met Tracy in line for cookies during intermission and spoke to her about “Passing Strange” by my former clients Mark Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, and also recall that we split Alice and Tracy shuffling out of the theatre such that Alice seemed perturbed waiting for her friend — or she was reconciling her distrust of Israel with the concepts churned by Perloff’s work — there are nuances to all these words, gestures and actions — weird prologue I admit. Surpassing strange, sister) (Richard Sandomir, NYT)

edit two adds: one, I am donating $3,600 to Dartmouth in her memory, had a conversation with Amber Wylie about this; too, I almost forgot that Roberta Lea dedicated “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers to Echo Brown at Johnson Park Tuesday Oct 10, 2023 so I will offer one of those grants to Roberta to continue on that tack.