Saturday, I had the honor of performing at Bryn Mawr College; for those who don’t know, that’s Katherine Hepburn’s alma mater. But raw I’ma give it to ya, with no trivia. (Can you tell I’m excited for the new Wu-Tang album? Even though Ghostface says it’s “bullshit.”) Let’s move on to the meat.

Got to kick it with old only-meet-up-once-a-year friend Sham-e-Ali and her son little homie Husayn before the show started, and that’s when he told me there was an invisible Harry Potter sitting behind me, who kept tapping me on the shoulder. I swear it was H doing the tapping, but I guess I have to take his word for it. It was really good to see familiar faces in the boonies, so I’m ever grateful that they battled sickness to come out.

But it was also good to meet new people, and meet I did. The crowd was surprisingly live for such a small school, and I met a ton of folks throughout the evening, and that always makes me happy. I get homesick pretty easily when I travel, but seeing so many folks actually responding to my work was very rewarding and helped make it easier. Actually the crowd, and especially the organizers, were extremely hospitable and went out of their way to make sure I was never at want for something. So big thanks to Kelly, Sandra, Helen, Jeanette, and all the event organizers and board members for looking out for me.

It’s been a while since I did a show in which I wasn’t the only act, or one of two or three. This time, my feature closed the show, but there were many students who went on before me, and yes they definitely did their thing. Not only did several Bryn Mawr folks get up on stage, but folks came out from other schools too, specifically Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Penn in…well you know where Penn is.

I feel like there were too many performers for me to list them out…but I’m gonna try. First, I have to give props to a student named Melani who sang love songs in Tagalog and had to finish her last joint a cappella because the laptop screensaver came on and interrupted her backup music. Grace under fire there. Sunyoung and Young (spelling? sorry!) did a spoken piece entitled “Senior Rant” which was a reminder to all about to graduate that their heads should not be up their asses. It was sweet that they warned the crowd that there was some adult language in the piece, but it all needed to be heard.

Hopkins Lion Dance were live for real. Husayn was real into the lion dance when they were on stage, but when they started walking down the aisle, that enthusiasm turned to mild terror. It reminded me of my childhood, when the lion dances on the street in Chinatown would scare me half to shitpants, then the firecrackers would do the rest.

Korean a cappella crew PennSori were a lot of fun, and really killed it too. I’m not necessarily the biggest a cappella fan, but they sang in Korean! That made it ten times hotter! Plus, the first song they did out the gate – I have no idea what it was called – sounded like one of those songs you hear from roomfuls of drunk Koreans at the no rae bang at 3 in the morning after they’ve worked all their aggressions out, where everyone is singing at the top of their lungs with their arms sloppily draped around each other. For all I know, the song was about Ren and Stimpy, but the vibe was definitely something I’ve encountered before.

Two students also did a Korean Sword Dance, and I didn’t really know what to expect, I thought it was going to be like a choreographed fight, but it was exactly what the title indicated, which means, I guess, I am an idiot. It was a dance set to music which incorporated swords as props, and was pretty bad ass. For an artform that I’ve never seen before, I was really impressed with how familiar the movement felt. Other dances of the night were Bryn Mawr student Collette (did I get that right?) doing two vastly different and equally dope hula dances (with a quick change in between), which you like never get to see out on the East Coast like that, and a group of five Bryn Mawr students ripping floor to a Hyori Lee joint, including Nancy from Boston, who later on in the night had to sit through my overly long explanation of why men benefit so much from marriage. She also inadvertently (?) dissed me when I asked if I might have known her older siblings from Boston and she said, “no, they wouldn’t have hung out with…you.”

To end the night, Helen ran out to scoop up a dinner order for me, which turned out to be surprisingly good sushi from a local place, which was actually enough for two people, but since overeating is like a hobby of mine, I killed it pretty easily while watching College Football Gameday on ESPN in my room. Flying out the next morning, I was witness to the 610′s first snowfall of the winter, which nicely coincided with my last show of 2007.

Recaps are done for a couple months. Like Parrish Smith said, peace I’m outta here, catch me chillin’ on my next tour.

Thanks to Jenn for sending me photos!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 2:51 PM and is filed under show recaps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.