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Overheard in the Subway: Ethnic Pride Tonight after watching and running 7 hours of auditions, then discussing them and going to dinner with the producing artistic director, as I stood on the uptown 'A' platform waiting for a train (as usual), I observed the following exchange between two young, fairly attractive Hispanic women. Woman Eating Cheesecake to Woman Eating Chocolate: "If you stop sucking, your life won't suck." I was walking past them as I heard them, so they did not hear my giggles. It was priceless. When the train finally arrived, I found myself sitting directly next to them. The more talkative one (Cheesecake), after an interesting exchange with her friend (Chocolate) regarding turning off the sound on the games on her cell phone, said something in Spanish, which her friend said she didn't understand. Cheesecake to Chocolate: "You're Hispanic, and you don't speak Spanish? That's a shame." She made me realise something. As much as I rail about people living in the United States learning to speak English (including the whitest of the white, who still can't speak or write properly), and as un-fond of the sound of Spanish as I usually am, hearing her speak made me want to learn the language (I can read Latin and understand Italian when it's spoken to me; Spanish would be a breeze, especially since I studied the language in grammar school), because she spoke it with such pride and such class. It made me sad, too, because those of us who get lumped into the "White" category HAVE, in fact, lost touch with our roots. In college, I once found myself discussing the role of "Ethnic Counselors," which existed for freshmen, in addition to their regular Freshman Counselors. I mused at why there wasn't an Irish or a Southern Ethnic Counselor for people such as me, and I was told that I wasn't ethnic. I believe my immediate knee-jerk response (This WAS in the days of me with dyed-black shoulder-length hair, black clothes, eye-liner, eyebrow-pencil, lipstick, nail polish, boots, white face powder and lots of weird silver jewelry, so a more appropriate rejoinder to my musing might've been, "YOU need a counselor of an entirely different sort!") was, "Fuck you; I'm as ethnic as you or anybody else." I may have restrained myself from saying that, but I don't think I did. The point was made, though, and from that point onward, I began to delve more seriously into my ethnic origins, and I've come to believe that it is a tragedy that time has so separated some of us from our forebears. Irish Gaelic isn't even spoken in most of Ireland, now, and certainly those of us in the United States who claim Irish backgrounds don't know a word of it, to say nothing of composing even the most rudimentary sentences. This is shameful to me, that we can have forgotten those who came before us so completely. So while I respected this woman for her connection to her heritage, and while she inspired me to an interest in her language, I wish that this missive might serve as a call to arms, a battle-cry for those of us who have forgotten ourselves to remember who we are, to celebrate OUR stories in art, in literature, in song -- to re-discover the component parts of our culture, not the degenerate stereotypes, but the virtues and glories of our past, our present, and our future, from which we have been separated for entirely too long. r
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