You're jealous.

Since working in theatre I have learned how to make the following things:

1. fake hardwood floors
2. a wood dinosaur body
3. a bed that turns into a bookshelf
4. a life-sized corpse

Useful info, no?

Back to our roots...

Sean and I recorded a Woodie Guthrie song together last week late at night. We got a little Texas in there so I thought you might enjoy. Here it is:

White Gold is White Gold

Milk consumption fell 14 percent between 1981-2006 and as a result, the California Milk Processor Board (GOT MILK? people) recently launched a new ad campaign featuring sexy rockstar beast, White Gold. He is officially my husband.





The aim is to get more adolescents to drink milk instead of less nutritious options like juice and soda. I'm not sure how effective this ad campaign will be, but it's hilarious and at least it'll make more people want to play a milk guitar, which is fantastic.

A lie is a lie!

A very outspoken, Catholic acquaintance of mine forwarded me an email the other day entitled "Planned Parenthood Racism." The body of the email said:

You've got to see this and talk to your friends about it!!!


The video features a number of people speaking in Washington, D.C. at some sort of rally about defunding Planned Parenthood. If you don't feel like watching it, here's an extremely short summary:

1. The video begins with Kristan Hawkins (Students for Life of America), who talks about an incident in which an actor pretending to be racist called the Planned Parenthood Director of Development in Idaho, offered to contribute to the organization and said (among other things), “The less black kids, the better” (implying that he wanted his money to go towards black abortions). The director responded, “Understandable, understandable.”

Hawkins describes a similar conversation between an actor and an administrative assistant at a Planned Parenthood in Ohio, in which the employee responded, “For whatever reason, we will accept the money.”

2. Hawkins goes on to say that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, stated in 1939, “We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” (Whoa!)

The next clip shows Rev. Clenard Childress demanding the firing of these Planned Parenthood employees. (Right on, these people SHOULD be fired).

3. Dr. Lillie Epps wraps up the video with her “Angry Black Woman” diatribe that I personally find pointless. She starts off by saying that she got an abortion at age 26 in the Planned Parenthood directly behind the podium where she stands. She goes on to say that she got her second abortion in the same location. Halfway into her speech she describes a conversation during which a Planned Parenthood employee said, “We’re going to take care of that problem for you and after today, you won’t have to worry about that problem anymore.”
She concludes with, “A lie is a lie! I don’t care how you dress it up! There have been lies told here across America in millions of Planned Parenthoods. If we don’t stop abortion in the African American community, we will not have a generation to come.”

Here are a few things that bother me about this video and this entire argument (the numbers match the sections above – oh how organized I am!):

1. As an employee of a nonprofit, I have a pretty good understanding of the obstacles that these organizations face in terms of funding. What I know is that more than half of what you do as an employee of a nonprofit is fundraise. Trust me, you shouldn’t work for a nonprofit if you want to live comfortably. They are always struggling for financial support, whether they’ve been around for 1 year or 100 years. Duh, they are not-for-profit. To call a nonprofit and offer to donate a large sum of money as a trick is just cruel. They’re going to take it whether you’re loony or not, because you know what? They need it! AND, they can pretty much do whatever they want with that money. So when a guy calls up, talking nonsense about donating money in order to have less black kids, I would HOPE that they would take that asshole’s money. We don’t want a racist guy like that running around with thousands of dollars to spare, who knows what he would do with it! The Planned Parenthood employees that Hawkins mentions should have put that “racist” in his place, but I don’t think they were wrong to accept the money…just wrong for holding their tongues.
2. Important Side Note - I have concluded that Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder) is immensely messed up and I am glad she is dead. Upon further investigation, I uncovered a lot about this crazy lady. Namely, that she was a lunatic eugenicist who, according to a study by the Life Research Institute, wrote a book called The Pivot Civilization in which she called for the elimination of human weeds: "for the cessation of charity, for the segregation of morons, misfits, and maladjusted," and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races." So I learned something today. The founder of Planned Parenthood was ridiculously racist and it is very likely that she created Planned Parenthood with the goal of eliminating a number of minority groups. My questions is: Does Margaret Sanger’s eugenicist agenda define Planned Parenthood today, 70 years later? I honestly don’t know, but I hope not. This might call for another blog when I have the energy…
3. Dr. Lillie Epps’ speech got me fired up. This woman chose to have an abortion…TWICE. Even after feeling the emotional effects of the first abortion, she went and got another one. She tries to say that Planned Parenthood guaranteed that all her problems would go away, but didn’t she find out this wasn’t true after her first go-around? The fact that she is black has nothing to do with her decision to abort two fetuses. She is an adult and she should act like one. On another note, I agree with what I think Epps is trying to say (though she doesn't quite articulate it) in the sense that I think Planned Parenthood should make a concerted effort to educate young women about the devastating emotional effects of abortion. Ultimately though Epps, you got pregnant, you got an abortion, you deal with the effects.
4. To tag on to the last point, what really angers me is that this video is quite obviously an anti-abortion rant fest that latched on to a weak argument against Planned Parenthood. I am hesitant to conclude that Planned Parenthood is racist because 3 ignorant people responded poorly to prank calls and the founder was a flat-out psycho. Maybe it’s true (I sincerely hope not), but their arguments have so many holes, it just seems like they’re fishing for a way to say what they really mean, which is: I don’t like abortion (though, I might get one or two now and then).

I’ll end by saying that I am pro-choice (in case you’re wondering). If I were to get pregnant today, however, I would not get an abortion. That’s how I roll. It has to do with my own preferences and my basic understanding of the emotional effects of the procedure. Many of my friends and family are pro-life so I understand the arguments and I even agree with a number of the key points. That said, I value the right for a woman to choose what she does with her body too much to be swayed to the other side. Ultimately, it was an interesting email that provided for a pleasant night in a coffee shop.

Thoughts?