Tag Archives: Essays

Mi Gente! Welcome to our Spring Interview Series! Super excited to share with you my conversations with Creatives and Entrepreneurs I admire and been blessed and privilege to work with. Today, I have the absolute honor to share my conversation with Elmaz Abinader,  author and performer, Co-founder and former Program Director of VONA (Voices of Our Nations and Arts Foundation), ... Read More »

You sound white! You speak so well. You’re very articulate. As I was coming up in the world,  a brown-skinned Bronx born Boricua at a time when my appearance and the sounds coming out of my mouth didn’t compute for many people. I’ll never truly know what they expected to hear, but I remember what it felt like to receive ... Read More »

My entire life, I got sick very easily. Always something wrong with my stomach, complaining of nausea constantly. As a kid, tests were run, though my mother made sure we all had a healthy diet, doctors thought I had one illness or another. At around 11 years old, my mother called me into her bedroom. Before I was blindfolded with ... Read More »

Remember in high school when you would break up with someone and still have to see them every day? same class, same parties, work together on projects?. Crying in the playground about a relationship that will never be. Remember in the beginning how dreadful that was? … well, that’s me at 35 years old. It’s all the same, just now ... Read More »

You’re made of so much beauty, But it seems that you forgot, When you decided that you were defined, By all the things you’re not.                             ~e.h I have been brewing this idea of photographing my body for a long time. A few weeks shy of my 42nd birthday, I arranged for a “boudoir” photo-shoot, truly an empowering experience to ... Read More »

  It was an unspoken vow. It just sort of happened. I got pregnant, then married, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and then we divorced. She was just a toddler. That’s when I married my three-year-old little girl. One of the vows that I made to her when she left my womb was that I would always put ... Read More »

In her 1985 one-woman show, Whoopi Goldberg morphed into a child and draped a shirt over her head to stand-in for long, blond hair. That piece of her show was real for me. My sister, Fox, and I used cardigans. Heavier than a blouse, a cardigan stayed in place without fussy re-adjusting, the neck- band shaped itself around our heads, ... Read More »

I love a cold Jamaican Red Stripe beer or if I am in the mood for a drink, I will order a rum and coke with ice.  I love the art of communication. I enjoy talking to my fellow human beings but I have not mastered the art of articulating my inner emotions. I rely heavily on my favorite vocabulary ... Read More »

First time I heard the question, y porqué el? Not just romantic wonderment, but a trial. Why he, a string of accusations tucked into two words. Why an immigrant? Why someone with an accent? Why not an American like you?  And from the first person to the last person to ever ask, one thing became clear; they felt an immigrant was ... Read More »

I will always remember one of our first family vacations in the late 1990’s with our son, Jordan when he was about a year old. My wife, Norma Jean and I, were thrilled about our planned winter trip to Aruba with our baby boy. Norma and I were domestic partners then, as same-sex marriage wasn’t legal yet in New York. ... Read More »