Month: September 2011

Labor Lessons From A Disney Musical, Part 2: Make Your Own Media

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Part 1

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As with most mainstream tales of the oppressed fighting back (see, most recently, The Help), in Newsies our young working-class heroes enlist the aid of a White Savior: New York Sun reporter Bryan Denton. Now, obviously, most of the newsies are white themselves, so the importance of the White Savior doesn’t lie in a racial differential in this case. But it matters, all the same, because Denton’s whiteness positions him to represent at least a modicum of institutional power. When he takes a sympathetic interest in the newsies’ organizing, he cinches their place in the mainstream media, otherwise impenetrable because Pulitzer has ordered a blackout on the newsies strike story among all the other local papers. Denton’s coverage not only keeps the pressure on Pulitzer and Hearst, but also gives the formerly nameless, faceless newsboys, accustomed to being treated like the scum of the earth, a nice little ego boost — and a set-up for one of the film’s most delightful musical numbers.

Lyrics here

But the euphoria of fame and fan-twirling soon evaporate and, in a brilliant and illuminating twist, the newsies discover that the White Savior won’t actually save them. When Pulitzer bribes the owner of the Sun into dropping the story, Denton is reassigned — back to his previous role as the Sun‘s “ace war correspondent.” Feeling betrayed and furious, the newsies try to convince Denton to shrug off his orders, but he explains (accurately): “I’m a newspaper man. I have to have a paper to write for. I’d be blacklisted from every major newspaper in the country . . . you know, sometimes they don’t fire you.”

In other words: as a full-time professional activist, you’re only as radical as your indispensable funders. An apt lesson for today’s non-profit economy, no?

Which brings us to . . .

Lesson Two: Make Your Own Media

In order to win, the newsies need to generalize their strike, to include all the child laborers of New York. And to do that, they need a paper of their own.

Transcript here.

Remember when I said that Newsies is a love story of solidarity? These lyrics say it all:

This is for kids shinin’ shoes in the street
With no shoes on their feet every day
This is for guys sweatin’ blood in the shops
While the bosses and cops look away
This is to even the score
This ain’t just newsies no more
This ain’t just kids with some pie in the sky
This is do it or die
This is war!

Once and for all
We’ll be there to defend one another
Once and for all
Every kid is our friend
Every friend a brother

Five thousand fists in the sky
Five thousand reasons to try
We’re goin’ over the wall
Better to die than to crawl
Either we stand or we fall
For once
Once and for all

Part of the mechanism for building widespread radical solidarity has to be independent control of our own literature and media. Because although mainstream media can come in handy as a short-term tool, there’s no way we can consistently rely on it to advance our program for systemic change at the root of capitalism, racism, patriarchy and political economy.

Clearly, there are a million examples of important stories of progressive struggles that don’t make the mainstream headlines. To focus on just one, let’s take the ongoing Occupy Wall Street thing.

Honestly I’m not totally certain, but it seems like the mainstream media was a little slow to pick up on this story. Broadcasts and documentation came to me, personally, through Facebook connections with people who were there, participating, from day one. Eventually, after some police brutality, big news centers started to cover it. And then we got this gorgeous aberration:

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But as Newsies teaches us, don’t hitch your wagon to the Major Journalist’s star. As lovely and impassioned as O’Donnell’s piece is, the truth is he’s employed by MSNBC, and the minute they tell him to cut the shit, he will. (Or get canned.)

But that’s no reason to despair. After all, half of that segment consists of on-the-ground media made by people who are not journalists. Even before YouTube, radicals were scrounging for printing presses, strategically taking over community college media organs, and cultivating discourses locally and internationally. And these days, alternative media justice collectives are popping up left and right — while radical collectives continue to blog their hearts out.

Even better than a White-Savior journalist? Media for the movement, by the movement.

Labor Lessons from a Disney Musical, Part 1: Dealing With Scabs

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Lyrics here.

How many of you have seen Newsies?  Easily the best Disney film ever made.  Probably the best Disney film even conceivable.  (How — how? — did this get greenlighted?)   Based on the true events of the 1899 Newsboys’ Strike, it introduces the newsies as a “ragged army” of poor, plucky orphans and runaways who survive by slanging newspapers in the streets of New York.  When journalism capitalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst collude to expand profits by charging more money to the “distribution apparatus” (a.k.a. these teenage laborers), the newsies, outraged, take inspiration from locally organized trolley workers and decide to go on strike.

They also dance and sing, fabulously.

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In a dazzling display of preternaturally sophisticated taste (or as part of a steady diet of musicals my mother supplied me at a young age), I became obsessed with this movie following its release in 1992, when I was six or seven years old.  I remember sliding in the VHS (I think my parents had taped it from TV) and sitting on the carpet below the screen, transfixed by Jack Kelley (a young Christian Bale), Spot Collins (the dreamy dangerous one from Brooklyn), and the rest of the balletic, rough-and-tumble weyr.  To this day, I can belt out any of its numbers and recite large swaths of dialogue.

But I am hardly alone in this devotion.  Recent example: a few weeks ago at an outdoor beer garden, a friend of Ryan’s, visiting from Oregon, joined us in the opening bars of “Seize The Day” so tenderly and sparklingly that we drew astonished compliments from a nearby table.  “What was that?” the woman marveled.  “It was beautiful!”

Indeed, the enduring cultish popularity of Newsies has now inspired an adaptation for theater.  Academy-Award-winning composer Alan Menken is teaming up with Harvey Fierstein to translate the turn-of-the-century David-and-Goliath tale from screen to stage.  Unfortunately, however, it appears that the new version is doomed to be bled of much of its political nuance, in favor of (you guessed it) the romance angle.  Fierstein explains:

“In a musical, there’s an old rule: You must follow the love story. It gives the audience somewhere to go and someplace to rest their hearts.”

This slated snoozeifying shift is tragic, not because its motivations are wrong, but because they are right.  You do need a love story.  Thing is, Newsies already has one.  But rather than the typical hetero-sapfest, it is chiefly a love story of solidarity: of workers learning to trust, defend, celebrate and enjoy one another.

I’ll admit, at six years old I came at Newsies heart-first.  The head came later.  But it did come.  And this film affords ample room to grow into, intellectually.

So, in honor of one of my favorite movies of all time, here goes a series of posts: on the real-life lessons we can draw from Newsies.

Lesson One: You’ll Have To Deal with the Scabs.

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See that song up at the top?

Hear that part (around 0:50) where Boots asks Jack (the leader):

—”What’s to stop someone else from sellin’ our papers?”

—”Well we’ll talk wit’ em.”

—”Some of ’em don’t hear so good.”

—”So we’ll soak ’em!”

“Soaking” is newsie speak for “rolling up on,” or “beating up.”  David immediately chimes in with the typical liberal nonviolent objection: No, we can’t be violent!  It’ll give us a bad name!

How this violence vs. nonviolence conflict resolves itself through the film testifies to the realism that elevates the movie beyond fun to fascinating.  Spoiler: They do use violence.  Why?  Because they have to, in order to maintain a hard picket line.  And this bears out in the history of labor unions in the United States.

In Sylvia Woods’ testimony “You Have To Fight for Freedom,” featured in the collection Rank and File: Personal Histories By Working Class Organizers (edited by Alice and Staughton Lynd), she writes of her upbringing in the 1910’s:

[My father] was a union man.  There was a dual union— one for whites and one for blacks.  He said we should have one big union but a white and a black is better than none.  He was making big money—eight dollars a day.  I used to brag that “My father makes eight dollars a day.”  But he taught me that “you got to belong to the union, even if it’s a black union.  If I wasn’t in the union I wouldn’t make eight dollars a day.”

New Orleans is a trade union town.  My father had seen the longshoremen organize and they made a lot of money.  Unions were not new to this city.  And I mean they had unions!  When they came out on strike, there were no scabs.  You know why there were no scabs?  Because you carried your gun.  The pickets had guns and they would blow your brains out.

Real talk.  And even though Newsies‘ slightly sanitized brawls depict fists, slingshots, and rotten fruit (the opposing side, with hired Pinkerton types, is armed with much more deadly weapons — chains, bats, and brass knuckles — and backed by police), not to mention the conspicuous absence of racial tensions among the workers, nonetheless, the movie does show them defending their strike from scabs through use of force.  Not only shows, but cheers it.

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Nowadays, though?  Fighting scabs appears to be taboo: at least in mainstream media.  Take the recent and relevant example of the ILWU strike up in Washington.

As Darrin Hoop reports for the Socialist Worker:

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Longshore workers have shut down ports in the Pacific Northwest as they confront a scab grain terminal operation, block trains, dump grain shipments and stand up to a police attack on their picket lines.

Just two days ago, workers (including the local longshore president) and supporters (mostly women) blocked another train from entering the EGT grain terminal.  Police responded with mass arrests and liberal application of pepper spray.

Bill Wagner / The Daily News. Law enforcement personnel wrestle ILWU Local 21 longshoreman Kelly Muller to the ground as they arrest protesters and try to clear the tracks so a Burlington Northern-Santa Fe grain train can pull into the EGT grain terminal at the Port of Longview on Wednesday morning.

For mounting these defenses, these workers are pilloried as “thugs” and “goons.”  A CNN reporters openly laughed at them.  Other reporters deny that the ILWU is fighting true scabs at all, claiming that this all boils down to pig-headed union-vs.-union beef.  (David Macaray debunks that argument handily.)

Courts, meanwhile, find the ILWU in contempt: which happens in Newsies, too.  In fact, one of the film’s greatest political strengths, in my mind, is how it shows the institutional and corporate-backed violence not only matching but outstripping the workers’ use of physical force.  Put in this context of severe power imbalance and active repression, the viewer naturally sympathizes with the newsies’ self defense, even if it is technically “criminal.”

But we’ll save the legality subject for the next post in the series.

For now, I am curious, especially from the Buddhist/spiritual folks who live in commitment to nonviolence: how do you propose dealing with scabs?  When workers organize to halt production and the company predictably pushes back, what levels of strategic property destruction and physical force, if any, do you find legitimate?  Have you ever been in such a situation?  (For the record: I haven’t.)

Share your thoughts, and take care.  See you next week with more Disney labor lessons!

Three “Humor” Videos

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via Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

via Chimaobi Amutah

via Sierra Pickett

Three humor videos with fearsome subtexts: about “throwing away” our old material (and perceptions of self — hello Buddhism); economic violence and growing up poor and Black in a food desert in the U.S.; and . . . well, while there’s nothing inherently sad or scary about being hard of hearing / deaf / Deaf / fluent in sign language, but watching it pushes me to consider how, for every hearing person who enjoys and appreciates it, there are countless events that remain stubbornly inaccessible to non-hearing folks.

Case in point: the other two videos in this post.

If I’m being honest, I feel like I don’t have time to make transcripts for the other videos. If I’m being really honest, I mostly just don’t feel like doing it.

[Fast-forward an hour of wandering the internet aimlessly, feeling background-guilty about not writing transcripts, and noticing a stream of thoughts that justify why I don’t have to do it.]

[Now starting to write transcripts. Hey, this ain’t so bad. Kinda fun, actually.  Helps that these two ppl are talented.]

Selected and /or outlined transcripts below the jump. Imperfect.

Continue reading →

Relationship Dhamma

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Concluding this spontaneous miniseries on companionship (or maybe not concluding it — who knows? — it’s spontaneous), we arrive at Ryan. You know, my partner, the guy from kale vs. flowers and Bad Good Romance.  The other day, I read a passage from James Agee’s Southern novel A Death In the Family that reminded me of our household dynamic.  Specifically, the ways that we negotiate gendered roles, try to both anticipate and discuss each others’ needs, and occasionally discover “dhamma,” or insights about the nature of things, right in the (dis)comfort of our own home.

In this scene from the book, Jay has just jolted awake in the dead of night thanks to a call from his brother Ralph, who drunkenly warns that their father may soon die from long-battled heart problems. Jay has decided to take the train up to his parents’ town, and he and his wife Mary, also awakened by the phone call, are getting him ready to leave.

“It may all be a false alarm. I know Ralph goes off his trolley easy. But we just can’t afford to take that chance.”

“Of course not, Jay.” There was a loud stirring as she got from bed.

“What you up to?”

“Why, your breakfast,” she said, switching on the light. “Sakes alive,” she said, seeing the clock.

“Oh, Mary. Get on back to bed. I can pick up something downtown.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, hurrying into her bathrobe.

“Honest, it would be just as easy,” he said. He liked night lunchrooms, and had not been in one since Rufus was born. He was very faintly disappointed. But still more, he was warmed by the simplicity with which she got up for him, thoroughly awake.

“Why, Jay, that is out of the question!” she said, knotting the bathrobe girdle. She got into her slippers and shuffled quickly to the door. She looked back and said, in a stage whisper, “Bring your shoes — to the kitchen.”

He watched her disappear, wondering what in the hell she meant by that, and was suddenly taken with a snort of silent amusement. She had looked so deadly serious, about the shoes. God, the ten thousand little things every day that a woman kept thinking of, on account of children. Hardly even thinking, he thought to himself as he pulled on his other sock. Practically automatic. Like breathing.

And most of the time, he thought, as he stripped, they’re dead right. Course they’re so much in the habit of it (he stepped into his drawers) that sometimes they overdo it. But most of the time if you think even for a second before you get annoyed (he buttoned his undershirt), there is good common sense behind it.

Ryan tells this funny joke sometimes about one method, half-conscious at most, by which person X tries to evade domestic work and pile it on a partner. “But you’re so good at [cooking, doing laundry, calming a fretful child]. If I do it, I’ll just fuck it up.”  A passive-aggressive compliment-trap, which leaves the other person feeling obligated to do the thing they’re so much better at doing.

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Obviously, this is one of the big problems with the naturalization of gender roles in heteronormative family requirements. Men are raised to believe that they don’t have to learn how to cook/clean/mend/mind children because women are so naturally good at it. Jay appears to have no clue that his wife was brought up to learn how to be a “good woman,” which means acquiring certain social and reproductive skills, including staying attuned to the needs of her socially-sanctioned husband and children. She might enjoy learning those skills; she might not. The point is, the skills aren’t endemic to her based on her gender. For a whole host of reasons that I won’t get into here, she’s not really free to self-determine her own gender identity and presentation, fertility, or (as a working-class person) the circumstances of her productive and reproductive labor.

So this is the background against which Ryan and I operate.  Furthermore, Ryan works.  I “work” from home on grad school (viz. this blog, or planning for EastBaySol). I spend more time at home so its levels of (un)tidiness affect me more, which makes me more inclined to change/correct them myself.  Also, I like to cook more than he does.  So he takes pains to counteract the assumption that just because I know how to cook, and even enjoy it, that this means it’s effortless for me, and that he’s entitled to its products, as though he were plucking a ripe plum from a backyard tree. And those times when I do wind up cooking more than 50%, he makes sure to do the bulk of the cleanup. Last week when I started washing dishes out of turn after lunch, he straight-up chased me out of the kitchen. Another morning as I slept he made breakfast and green tea, then came back to bed to cuddle me awake.

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Maintaining mindfulness around housework distribution doesn’t have to be robotic or transactional. It’s actually a pretty emotional and tender process for us, and I think for a lot of people. The other day I was talking to a woman who lives with her girlfriend, and was telling me that even though her partner works longer hours than she does, they cook dinner together every night and split the remaining housework evenly. “I just knew I would be unhappy otherwise,” she said. I love that this negotiation takes the feeling of work into account, and not just some supposedly objective measurement of household labor — in joules, or whatever.

Jay and Mary’s middle-of-the-night crisis management takes a turn for the tender, too.  I see many of my relationship dynamics reflected between them.

He sat on the bed and reached for one shoe.

Oh.

Yup.

He took his shoes, a tie, a collar and collar buttons, and started from the room.  He saw the rumpled bed.  Well, he thought, I can do something for her. He put his things on the floor, smoothed the sheets, and punched the pillows.  The sheets were still warm on her side.  He drew the covers up to keep the warmth, then laid them open a few inches, so it would look inviting to get into.  She’ll be glad of that, he thought, very well pleased with the looks of it.  He gathered up his shoes, collar, tie and buttons, and made for the [bathroom], taking special care when he passed the children’s door, which was slightly ajar.

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bfp at Feministe, Indigenous Land Defense at Home

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The owner of this business, which desecrated a 3,500-year-old Ohlone shellmound in order to construct its offices, now wants to build a vacation home on other sacred indigenous land: this time on Rattlesnake Island in Lake County, CA.

Don’t have much time to chat today, friends, but those of you who’ve been following Kloncke for a while will know just how jazzed I am that brownfemipower (a.k.a. bfp) is guest-blogging at Feministe.  She’s taking an in-depth material look at her home state of Michigan, or, in her words:

While I’m here, I’ll be working to contextualize all the big words: “post-industrialization,” “nationalism,” “white supremacist heteropatriarchy,” “decay porn,” “borders,” “distribution systems,” etc within a framework that centers Detroit, Michigan, and the US Midwest.

Or I may just wind up posting pretty pictures. Who knows. :D

In her first post offering background on the region, bfp begins with a brief overview of the indigenous peoples from whom the land was stolen.

It’s important to know about Michigan’s history of colonization because indigenous peoples in Michigan are still still struggling with the vestiges of colonization. They are also leaders in the fight against corporate violence against the land and the people. There is often a false idea that the violences of industrialization play out almost exclusively in urban areas. But those serene lakes and beautiful mountains we all like going to for our week vacation are the same places that keep the urban factories up and running.

Yep, primitive accumulation, and capitalists’ access to natural resources, has everything to do with imperialism, colonization, genocide, enslavement, and misogyny and heteropatriarchy.  Advance the Struggle had a good post a while back touching on this link between pro-communist struggle and indigenous land defense, using as an illustrative example the recently successful defense of Sogorea Te / Glen Cove, up in Vallejo (photos of the encampment at the end of that post) — in which Ryan, I, and other East Bay Solidarity friends played a very small supportive role.

Now it looks like we and EastBaySol may have another opportunity to support the defense of indigenous sacred land from bourgeois development.  (The aggressor’s business, Nady Electronics, has offices in Emeryville, about a mile away from Ryan’s and my apartment, located right on top of an Ohlone sacred shellmound.  The guy just won’t let up, apparently.)  I received this press release in my email today.  The money quote:

Supervisor Comstock, the Lake County Board Supervisor who cast the deciding vote, commented, “I’m a huge proponent of private property rights.” He added, “My family’s been living in Lake County for 150 years- you can’t get more native than that”.

Yet another example of institutional white supremacy and heteropatriarchy supporting the accumulation of capital & resources to the (historically white, patriarchal) ruling class.  Time to remind this dude, through direct action and defense, that yes, you can get more native than that.  Entire press release after the jump.

Continue reading →

Introducing Eloise (with video)

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Day 1: napping on my lap, arm bandage from blood test
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Continuing in the vein of plants, pets, and partnership — or the ways in which companions both reflect the quality of our treatment, and express their own nature independent of us — in the past 20 hours since we brought her home, our newly adopted kitten Eloise has proven both delightfully surprising and shockingly predictable.

At the city shelter where we adopted her, the staff warned us that Eloise would probably be extremely shy. She and two siblings were found in a car (not sure whether this makes them stray or semi-feral), terrified of the long human arms reaching down to nab them. Within the cat pound’s contained visiting space, surrounded by cages, she seemed calm enough on our betoweled laps, but didn’t purr or rub her head against us like some of the older cats did. One of the women on staff wore a foreboding face when she advised us to handle the kitten as much as possible once we got her home, so that hopefully she would grow comfortable with humans. Sobered but optimistic, we left her over the weekend to be spayed Monday morning. Following that surgical ordeal, we anticipated a drugged bundle of quasi-hostility retreating to the remotest corners of our bathroom for the first days or weeks.

Sure enough, the minute we lifted her from the vet-issued cardboard carrying case and set her on our bathroom tiles, she fled to the farthest (and dirtiest) corner (straight past the cat bed I so lovingly fashioned for her out of a cardboard box and an accidentally-shrunken cashmere sweater). There she remained, cowering behind the dusty toilet.

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Ten Year Anniversary of the War

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via Lydia Pelot-Hobbs.

On the morning ten years ago when we in Sacramento heard the news, I remember my dad driving me to school. Us listening to the radio. I didn’t really understand what was happening (then again, who did?), but I remember starting to cry when I realized that people in other parts of the world live in fear of bombings every day.

What does it mean to hope and pray for a better society, free from imperialist wars, patriarchy, racism, and class, without rejecting or wishing away the current reality?

To me, it means: now (the present) is the best and only time we have in which to try our hardest. To keep building toward the freedoms we wish for all beings.

We may not live to see it, but we can help create it.

New Plants, New Kitten, (Re)New(ed) Partnership

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I hear that in Narcotics Anonymous, they advise people starting or re-starting recovery to avoid taking a lover. Human relationships are complicated and fraught. First, start with a plant. If you can keep a plant alive and healthy, then you might be ready to adopt an animal. If you can care for the animal for a good while, then you might open to the possibility of a romantic partner.

In some ways, companions are mirrors for our own behavior. Can we water a plant faithfully? Can we walk a dog consistently, and clean out a cat litter box regularly? Can we respond reliably to the needs of another being?

And in other ways, companions remain true to their own nature. For instance, if a cactus plant needs to be constantly avalanched with sunlight, it might just go ahead and die in our small dark Seattle apartment. No matter how tender our plantly serenades, or how perfectly calibrated our soil-dampening schedule, this thing needs sun, and sun we ain’t got.

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Last week I brought home three Haworthia plants, of a genus native to Southern Africa. I’m not sure how well they’ll do in our house: one on the kitchen windowsill, one on the dining table, and one in our bedroom, brightening our meditation space (which I’ve temporarily surrendered to a small but persistent faction of the invasive Argentine ant supercolony that has overtaken the West Coast).

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On Thursday, Ryan and I went to the Berkeley city animal shelter with our friends Kate and Rane, and after hours of tough deliberation (so many cats to love = virtually impossible to select just one), signed the paperwork for a semi-feral black kitten, two months old. She’ll be spayed Monday morning and then come home with us, sequestered in the bathroom until she gets comfortable enough with us, her bed, litter box, etc., to finally roam the apartment. I hope she likes it here.

So yeah, co-adopting an animal. How adult-like. It’s nearly two years that Ryan and I have been together, including nine months in this apartment. He’s lived with a partner before. First time for me. I watch myself adjusting to coupledom.

[To be continued . . .]

Quick Snapshot of Today’s Action

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Polaroid by Anastasia. More than 20 people came out to flyer under hot Oakland sun.

In a crucial step for Mel’s fight to win back his job and improve conditions at the site where he had been working as a security guard, over 20 people from the still-fledgling East Bay Solidarity Network staged an all-day fact-finding and outreaching session at the entrance to the offices of ABC Security: Mel’s former (and hopefully future) employer. Today was payday, and workers were coming to get their checks. As they entered and exited the long driveway leading to the private-property offices, we distributed our flyers explaining Mel’s fight. In a few hurried words, we tried to agitate* ABC guards by asking them how they felt about their job (most: from so-so to shitty) and what ever happened to that raise they’d been promised (three years and no sign of it). Some of the guards were hella down for what we’re doing (quote: “Yeah, the company doesn’t care if people die”), and their ire toward ABC’s owner only increased when we showed them photos of her mansion in the Oakland hills.

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Most importantly, though, the workers aided us by providing names of sites that employ ABC guards. Now that we’ve collected this client list (ranging from apartment complexes to warehouses and a golf course), we can use it to apply economic pressure to the company, escalating the fight to serious levels.

One of the highlights of the day, for me, was seeing Mel stand up to the supervisor who got him fired, with ten of us standing there to support him. Bolsters my hope that our group is helping shift the balance of power further toward the lowest-paid workers, and away from managers and millionaire CEOs.

Waiting for workers to pass through the driveway afforded us time to connect with each other, too. These are some lovely, vibrant people with great visions of building solidarity in the East Bay and beyond. (Earlier morning conversations focused around movements in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, and how we might ally with / extend them here in Oakland.)

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted if/when we post an official account on the EastBaySol blog, but just wanted to share some of the joy of the day! Hope you’re well, friends.

Not Gonna Lie: I’m Proud Of Our Banner

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Spent today shopping for an East Bay Solidarity Network sign-making party, agonizing for an embarrassingly long time over what color (and heft) of banner fabric to get, and what color felt for the letters, and later (with William) what font to use. But now it’s finished — grommets and all — and looks F%*@IN’ SICK, if I do say so myself. :)

Between printing the letters, cutting them out, tracing them onto the white felt, and then cutting out the felt and gluing the letters onto the banner, our core organizers also called all the people on our phone tree to mobilize for the next action, coming up on Wednesday. Cooperating on mini-projects over weeks and months is cultivating a beautiful ease among us. We crack each other up; we respect each others’ opinions. We brew each other tea. (Louise, if you’re reading this: we will miss you!)

Next week, after the action, I’ll share photos of the fight-specific signs we made. Right now it’s time to sleep the deep, delicious sleep of the DIY-satisfied.

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