I've been tagged!

Well, Miss Nerd Girl tagged me (thanks Girl for including me!), so it's my turn to participate in this meme-thing. I'm not sure if I've even done this correctly, but here goes, 7 random mango mama tidbits...

1. When I was in 5th grade, Roots was broadcast for the first time. I was the only little Black kid in Sr. Stevens class and I was pretty feeling good about myself and enjoying all the attention Roots was getting. Hey, it was back in the day and there still weren’t a lot of options featuring Black folks in all of our glory! Anyhoo, one day Sr. Stevens came into class and started calling me Kizzy. I couldn’t believe it. When she first did it, I looked around the class, because I just knew she wasn’t talking to me, but sure enough she was looking right at me and I was mortified. Why was this crazy nun referring to me as Kizzy? Well, she did this for the rest of the day and I went right home and told my parents. They were as confused as I was and contacted the teacher the next day. Sr. Stevens gave some convoluted explanation that Kizzy was played by Leslie Uggams, and Miss Uggams was Sr. Stevens’ favorite colored actress and since I’m Sr. Stevens’ favorite colored student, it just made sense that her pet name for me should be Kizzy. Go figure? My mom and dad explained in no uncertain terms that referring to me as Kizzy, a young slave character on Roots, was unacceptable and if she kept it up, a lawsuit would soon come.

2. Although I’m a ferocious reader now, this wasn’t always the case. In kindergarten, I was diagnosed with dyslexia and thus began four years of intense tutoring to develop skills to cope with it. This was news to my parents, because they thought I was practically reading when I went into kindergarten, but what they learned is that I had become an expert at memorizing everything by repetition and sound, so I wasn’t really reading the little board books, but I was just repeating what they’d been reading to me. This was a really painful time, because each day I was separated from my class to go the “special” teacher and I hated reading aloud in the class. Something clicked when I was in the 5th grade and all of the skills I’d learned, especially the one which taught me to mentally flip each of the letters, really kicked in and I began reading with a vengeance. I sometimes still have dyslexic episodes, like when I was in college, if I stayed up too late studying, I’d start seeing everything backwards and couldn’t retain any of the information. It was better for me simply to go to sleep and get up extra early to get my studying on.

3. I met Loverman at the Cannes Film Festival back in 1998 and told him just hours after we met that he would be my husband one day. Fortunately, he believed me and we’ve been together since that day. I knew when I left for this trip to Cannes that something life changing was about to happen, in fact, I even broke up with the joker I was dating for the few months leading up to my trip to France. I just knew I needed to clear the way for the blessings about to come.

4. I dated Jesse Jackson, Jr. when I was in my late teens and through some of my college years. Sorry, I won’t be offering any more details on this one☺

5. With each of my two pregnancies I didn’t have very many food cravings, but I did suffer horribly with olfactory cravings. I had the strongest urges to sniff fabric softener sheets (Bounce was my preferred brand) and cedar shavings for the bottom of hamster and gerbil cages. My poor husband was so concerned he actually called and checked with our midwife to see if this would harm the baby in any way. I alternated sniffing these two things through both of the births and the cravings ceased hours after the births.

6. I love listening and singing along with Frank Sinatra—don’t ask.

7. My maternal grandmother’s family, the Bascoms, is one for the first seven freed Black families of Philadelphia and if you saw how fair this particular lineage was, you’d understand why!

Now, I'd like to pass along this meme chain onto:

Melissa the Mouth
The Crones' Kitchen
Hatha Mama
Incoming
Tag, you're it!