Sarah Vaughan's Birthday Is Today

The extraordinary jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), known as "The Divine One," was born on this day. Vaughan, a native of Newark, New Jersey, where there is a street named for her, would have celebrated her 101st birthday.

A Hatemongering Pastor Runs For NYC Mayor

James David Manning, the pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church in Harlem, has recently announced that he is running for mayor of New York, declaring that as mayor he would (unilaterally) eliminate local sales tax and raise the minimum wage to $27.

Over the years, the church's outdoor message board has posted numerous homophobic, racist, and false statements like the one that said, "YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA AND HE TURNED YOUR SONS GAY, TURNED HARLEM WHITE, EMPTIED CHURCHES, FILLED SHELTERS WITH WOMEN & CHILDREN."

Such wild and misleading statements have prompted others in the community to tie handwritten signs to the church's fence that said, " Hate Is Not A Community Value" and "Hate Breeds Violence," and to organize a picket line whose participants represented the city's diversity.

It's hard to see anyone taking Pastor Manning's run for mayor seriously. It's also hard to believe anyone who calls themselves a true Christian being a member of this hatemongering church.

Black Brotherly Love

"I think it is absolutely necessary that black men regroup as black men; until they can talk to each other, cry with each other, hug and kiss each other, they will never know how to do those things with me. I know whole black men exist, and I want to see and enjoy them."--Alice Walker, "What That Day Was Like for Me: The Million Man March October 16, 1995," from her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (Random House, 1997).

The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!

The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.

It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"

He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity."  But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.

 Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.

The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."

Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Do You Have An Artist In The Family?

"Today, no American family can be secure against the danger that one of its children may decide to become an artist." --Garrison Keillor (born 1942), host of A Prairie Home Companion on public radio. (Quoted in The Theatre Quotation Book: A Treasury of Insights and Insults, collected and edited by Russell Vandenbroucke, Limelight Editions, 2001.)

Linguistic Pet Peeves

Everyone has words, phrases, or expressions that can be called pet peeves. I have two of them. The first pet peeve is one you often see printed in newspaper obituaries: "So-and-so died surrounded by family and friends." It irks me because, one, it probably isn't true, and two, it makes those who knew the person sound like a bunch of vultures eagerly waiting for death to come so they can begin the reading of the will or to grab as many family heirlooms as they can. Plus, how would they know the exact moment of death? Was a doctor or undertaker present at the bedside beforehand?

The second pet peeve is "So-and-so is 95 years young." If you're 95, you're not young. Saying someone is 95 years young, instead of 95 years old, stigmatizes old age and is another example of ageism.

Printing Mishaps

In my many years as a freelance journalist I have experienced several printing errors that have appeared in articles I've written for newspapers.

Aside from the occasional misspelled word or factual error, or God forbid, the complete rewriting of an article by an imperious editor, I have experienced such mishaps as a mangled or missing byline, jumbled paragraphs (something that happened in a syndicated article I wrote about Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie), and the use of my words about the famed Cotton Club in someone else's article without attribution (otherwise known as plagiarism). The latter mishap would  have been hard for me to prove since the offending party would probably claim that the lack of attribution and quotation marks was a printer's error and not a deliberate theft from my article syndicated by the Los Angeles Times.

But the one thing that has not happened to me, and I pray it never does, is something I saw while going through an old issue of one of New York's daily newspapers. The whole bottom half of the page was so ink smeared, it was impossible to read what was printed. I felt sorry for the writers to whom this happened. I can only hope that the paper corrected the problem in later editions.