by Andrew Padula

Etta James, you go girl! You may have dissed me and probably just about everyone else to ever come within one hundred yards of you. You display no couth and little class. But, if you throw down and beat the crap out of Beyonce, you do so with my blessing.
About a dozen years ago, I played the St Louis Blues Festival and this was a biggun’. Artists performing included the likes of Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Rufus Thomas, etc. etc… and Etta James. The …

So it’s the night before the inauguration and Carmen is taking me to the Netroots Bash outside of Washington D.C. Everyone around me is in a state of paralytic bliss except me… I’m depressed as hell. Oh, thats right, I’m a Republican, all these people hate me, and they were enjoying the opportunity to let me know as much. My subway ride was a sobering and surreal affair. Chanting and clapping in cadence, the hordes of revelers were an unimaginable cult-like mass of humanity, the …

In conversations with friends, I’ve been saying that the moment President Barack Obama took the Oath of Office last Tuesday, everything changed. I mean it in the sense that a new optimism and sense of pride now has a chance to take hold. I am hoping that President Obama makes it "cool" to excel in the classroom. I am hoping young people teased for "talking white" will find strength in our new President’s skilled oratory and understand that mastering standard American English is the thing to do. So many barriers …

The day after is here. It’s time for the hard work to begin. Our President has confirmed what I am sure most of us already knew; to turn around the USS America, it’s going to take all hands on deck and that means you and I are going to have to look out for our neighbor a little more carefully than maybe we have in the past.

But yesterday, Inauguration Day was really something. I watched with my mom, at her home in Washington DC as Barack Hussein Obama, our …

I’m very emotional, still processing it all.
Will write soon.

Perhaps because I am still grappling with the last stages of a brutal flu, I was slow to get excited about my trip to DC. I’m not a fan of big crowds and usually prefer the eagle’s eye vantage point I get from watching the biggest spectacles on television. Still, as a native Washingtonian with a mom who grew up in segregation and took part in the Civil Rights protests, I knew I had to get here to soak in the energy of our nation’s renewed hope.
I arrived at LAX …