Dysfunctional Diva Diatribe

Saturday Freestylin' and Profilin'

Just checking in and making good on my commitment to write for three weeks straight. Since Monday, I’ve been posting here and on my other blog Crossing Sunset. For the mathematically challenged, I’m on day — or should I say night — number six. I have much love for those writers who have the discipline to sit at their computer and blog every day. It's challenging for a sista! I feel like I'm cheating because I usually labor over a laptop for hours on issues that I find meaningful, or at least humorous. But today I'm freestylin'.

This post is going to be quick and dirty because I'm on my way out to dinner, Zagat guide in tow. I'm in an exploratory mood, which began earlier in the day. I stopped by the California African American Museum in South Los Angeles and became a member. Saw "A Woman's Journey: The Life and Work of Artis Lane," a beautiful exhibit on transcendence and transformation that I'll be examining in depth tomorrow on Crossing Sunset. In the ten years that I've lived in Los Angeles, I'm ashamed to say I've only visited CAAM twice: once to attend a reception for the legendary photographer Gordon Parks, and then for a Brown vs. the Board of Education screening.

I feel like I inhabit two L.A.'s, or rather, I'm acutely aware of the duality of being a black woman in a predominantly white and Latino city. There's the flip-flop rocking, mall-hopping, organic mart shopping Valley Girl, and then there's the south of Wilshire sojourner desperately in need of negroes and culture. There are no ethnic (land)markers on my side of the canyon — no beauty salons boasting "100 percent human hair," no $1 soul food restaurants, no swap meets ... no African-American museums.

I'm torn because I want to finish this post, but my stomach calls, and so does my friend, wondering why I'm late — again.

Time to go profilin'. Signing off ... for now.