My coffee today is courtesy of We the People. I greeted two City of Palo Alto leaders* and in our conversation, the senior of the two offered me a cup of coffee— my normal cappuccino even — and I accepted. This rarely happens. It gives me pause — not to bust her, if this is not kosher. A kosher perk. Perk in two ways: perquisite meaning a gift; and perk like perky, meaning full of energy. Wasn’t there a fictional shop on “Friends” called City Perks or something? I almost wrote “We The Perkle” but my friend Amy Perkel from Dartmouth might think this song is about her.

The new employees are Melissa McDonough who works towards building homes that house the homeless, I think she said. She is from Cleveland and has been here about a year. She was orientating Kojo Pierce who said he is…give me a sec…DIE or DEI…Diversity…Equity…Inclusion. I spotted him because he was here just yesterday with The Chief. 

And he has nice hair. Now, I am learning that apparently it is bad form or perhaps illegal to comment on someone’s personal appearance, even if my intentions are good. And he has good hair. And I once produced with Venus Opal Reese a Stanford MFA or PhD in the arts her monologue or one-woman or one-person or one-perker about how women especially in U.S., Africa and France can bond over their hair even if hair is their only mutual language, so to speak. 

Kojo to my eye has braids or dreads piled or styled into a ball or shape facing forward. Not sure what you call that, but it’s pretty cool. And says “Black” or “Africa” in some ways — this would not look as good on a white person. Like, I sometimes say that Adam Duritz of Counting Crows is one of my favorite rock contemporaries — I’m a music promoter — and perhaps emblematic or epitome of my generation of activist and non-conformists and he used to wear dreads but I also am pretty sure he switched to a weave fairly early on. Not to digress, but when I dated Anthea Charles my Gunn classmate and the daughter of Susan Charles the school principal she said that while they were at UC Berkeley together he would ask her about her hair. And I also say – and it still happens apparently, I have not learned — that Anthea scolded me once for mis-remembering or mis-stating that someone we had just met had braids not dreads. I lump them together so to speak but others do not. Duly noted.

I think noting our mistakes is a step towards fixing them, but maybe not.

Kojo said he is from Ghana originally but has a degree from San Jose State. And I said that my mother and my wife both have or had degrees from there. Terry (Terry Acebo Davis) has a BFA which she got mid-career and an MFA and was, I said, on the Palo Alto Public Art Commission. She was actually the chair of such when We The People built the new library complex the Mitch so we know like the back of your hands that the three art elements Percent for Art are by Bruce Beasley, Brad Oldham and Roger Stoller (the arch, the owls, the tree). 

I think I succeeded in not triggering his animus by pulling from my bag a copy of a book about Nelson Mandela I know this to be true Chronicle Books Nelson Mandela Foundation which I bought from Gwen Gasque at Letter Perfect. (Not to be confused with Nelson Mandela Education foundation of Cape Town which is run by my Gunn and Dartmouth schoolmate Kim Porteus who came to my Tuck & Patti show and may or may not accept my invite to hear and see Abdullah Ibrahim next week at SFJazz).

I recounted for Kojo and Melissa that at Dartmouth in the 1980s the anti-apartheid pro-divestment activists would yell AMANDLA AWEYTHU which means “power to the people”. And I also sometimes say FIST UP — and I demonstrated, in fact I sort of shouted and sang AMANDLA AWEYTHU here in The Coup, a coup of a sorts, methinks.

And I also name-checked Tommy Smith and John Carlos and Kojo said “We have a statue” which foreshadowed his mention of SJSU per se.

All good omens for Palo Alto being a better place for We the People. 

Fist up. 

Tanks for the perk. (Cue Tank and the Banghas): nice things!

*We the People thru our leaders attempt to self-govern. Our leaders are elected Council members, appointed commissioners and paid staff including Melissa and Kojo but also Chief Andrew Binder and city. manager Ed Shikada. I think of myself as dissent in that I ran three times and applied 10 times but mostly just speak out and observe very little result. Or, things would be worse but for my occasional utterance like AMANDLA and FIST UP or this. Good luck and thank you in advance for your service Melissa and Kojo.

and1: somewhere in there I name checked Brandynn Williams aka Kopa and Antonio Pierce, both coaches — which are leaders and sometimes educators. But I forgot to say Rigo who made this monument and artwork:

andand: shout out to, here since February shambayati Alice in the City Clerk’s office — its counter to the thrust of this article to complain that it took me six tries to reach someone at 250 to fact-check the name of Ms. McDonough. 

andandand but not Anand Patwardhan: history repeats every two hours or rinse and repeat: I met Austin O’Such the real estate developer and son of my LAH Little League nemesis David O’Such and he bought me my second cup of coffee. Not that I need it. I tried to recount for O’Such that his dad in a recent phone catch-up mentioned three men who died too soon: Paul Hanley(2016), Don DeGrasse(2019) and Jerry Dowd, age 19, who died with his father and three others in March of 1984. Actually and now I’m really on a tangent, I met Paul Hanley’s roommate at the ASU-Stanford game and we drank a beer in his memory and now I sound like Blanche DuBois who was over-reliant on the kindness of strangers, according to Tennessee Williams who was, like Tarriona Tank Ball from New Orleans of which we should inport some but not all of its attempts to self-govern and just deal with being human. Bon Temps roulette, AI suggests, semi-ironically. I set an alarm to stop this after 45 minutes but went a full 90, to the chagrin of Young Dubliners, Anat Cohen and Ben Goldberg/Ben Davis  4 – I’m supposed to be selling 700 tickets to upcoming shows!!!!! (So meta note to self: now I’ve checked “Platos republic” meaning government and “filthy lucre” meaning money)

Oy: speaking of modest, MMcD mentioned Cleveland but not her two degrees from Mills — or that she worked at Cody’s perhaps while I was at Green Apple, though I’m likely before her time. Which reminds me that my initial impetus and primary directive today was to read a story by Elmore Leonard in an anthology I found at the same aforesaid library. I was toting both the Mandela book and another spine on Western writing.

And there are 15 revisions of this screed. A good number of these posts are uni-drafts or less.  Word count 1,150, name count: 36 which means “life”.