I APOLOGIZE

While I was being berated and screamed at for being a LIAR...  LIAR... LIAR... At the last Steering Committee Meeting of the NWU.  I traveled through my mind reviewing over and over again the paths of many conversations I have had with people I met, members of the NWU, and total strangers.  I have searched the dusty corners of my mind, the crevices of the infested areas I rarely wander in my head to try and come up with what I ever said that made me a LIAR...  LIAR... LIAR...

The following is my apology for what I have said about the NWU!  Over the last 4-5 years I have met and talked with thousands of people at book fairs, conferences, meetings at the headquarters in New York, in my Blogs, on subways, buses and in my documented training material, and elsewhere, and in those conversations I may have made the following statements, and I'm sorry if I misquoted people, exaggerated things I felt were true, or misinformed people of what I thought to be true, but evidently is not.

I APOLOGIZE from the bottom of my heart!
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1. I said "The NWU is a wonderful organization..." I APOLOGIZE with all my heart!
2. I said "The NWU protects the writer from so many copyright infringements... " I APOLOGIZE with all my heart! 
3. I said, "It helps the writer move forward with their career..." I’m so SORRY!
4. I said "You will find camaraderie in the NWU..." I truly APOLOGIZE with all my heart!
5. I said "Everyone is there to help you develop your skills to move your career forward as a writer..." I APOLOGIZE for this blatant lie!
6. I said "You will meet so many other writers while attending meetings..." I am SO SORRY I said this!
7. I said, "Everyone is there to help you..." I APOLOGIZE with all my heart!
8. You should "Join the NWU, you’ll love it!..." I am SO SORRY I should never have said this!
9. I said "You won’t be SORRY you joined..."  But I certainly am SO SORRY I said this!
10. I told you how much I loved being a member of the NWU...  That was before I was called a LIAR... LIAR... LIAR...  I’m SORRY!

I do not keep track of every word I say.  I always thought that people who kept track of what they said were not always telling the truth and needed to keep track of their spoken word.

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I usually don't need my personal feelings and opinions with my love of Poetry, Writing, and Art, but when I have had enough... I've had enough and my cats will no longer listen to me complain, choosing to nap through my rants, I write a blog announcing what I feel.
I read an article this morning about a sports pub that canceled their subscription to NFL Package and will no longer be hosting NFL games on their many TV screens in their pub come football season.  I send them many thanks for taking this step and the courage it took to say goodbye to the financial income they will probably lose.  Goody-goody For The Stand They Took!

And, this is what I have to say!

Those players who use their status as a team player to forsake the country should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Why don’t they protest on their own dime, or should I say millions. They take one of America’s favorite sports and time to demonstrate against the country that gives them the right of freedom to play a fantastic sport, make millions of dollars, become a beloved player and they pay their country back by “taking a knee”. They are disgraceful, dishonorable, and unworthy to be an American.  It is not that I disagree with their intention, it is the way in which they have protested -- at the expense of their audience.  Holding the fans captive for their personal views.  There is a time and place for everything, but showing lack of respect for our Anthem, Flag, and Military that protects us 24/7, is crossing over the line.

If they want to protest, why don’t they use their own money and organize a protest, rent a football stadium and use their popularity and energy to bring people together and focus on the issues they feel are being mishandled or they disagree with; but not use the paying public time and money to pay for their own personal ambitions and protests.

They are lucky they live in America, and they should take their protests to the voting booths, not the stadiums or the homes of the public who pay their salaries with their subscriptions and entrance fees.

I for one am through with athletes who enter the homes and public places to broadcast their opinion and consume the public with their personal views. They appear to be oversized children throwing a temper tantrum because they didn’t get their way. Go to your room and stay there until you can behave like an American who thank their country for the opportunities they have been given at the expense of the lives of our protectors, the brave soldiers of the United States of America. So go to your room and stay there until you can behave like a thankful American.
Amen!
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​Talent that tells a story with every stroke of his art is Ansel Pitcairn.  Ansel is an artist, not just in the word, but an artist from the heart.  The creativity he expresses in his art exudes emotion, feeling, and character.  The characters he creates are expressive of the moment, showing emotion words could not describe.
Ansel’s work was recently included in the exhibit of 300 artists depicting the African-American experience through a child’s lense. The visuals grab your emotions and widen your view of possibilities

I am so proud to say I know this brilliant copyright Calvin Alexander Ramsey, also a member of the National Writers Union - New York Chapter.  His talent has inspired so many writers, and his dedication to accuracy of the history behind the historical events he recreates is remarkable.  He instills in his followers the path to freedom included love and forgiveness along with courage and steadfast belief in freedom for everyone. 

Ramsey has his creative genius coming to life in New York's Manhattan theaters, the Carolina States, Pennsylvania, and the list continues.  If any Ramsey's plays come to your town, they are definitely worth an evening of real entertainment.  I might add that the theater tickets are very reasonably priced, even in New York.  The review below was written by the Chicago Jewish News after the journalist viewed the play and interviewed Calvin A. Ramsey.       --- Lee Christine Brownlee

Chicago Jewish News, Theater Feature
The Green Book at Chicago Dramatists Through April 1, 2018 on Thursdays - Sundays
By Hugh Iglarsh
Chicago Dramatists Theatre Building, 1105 W. Chicago Avenue www.pegasustheatrechicago.org
The original Green Book, the subject of Calvin Ramsey’s play now on stage (through April 1) at Chicago Dramatists, was a basic, cheaply bound guidebook for African American drivers in the middle years of the twentieth century, listing places where they could refuel, sleep and eat without undue risk to their safety or dignity. But the book was more than a black people’s Baedeker. It was community-driven, collective survival tool at a time when Jim Crow was the norm everywhere, not just the South. The network of listed families who agreed to open their doors to strangers was a lifeline for blacks during the Great Migration northward, and it was built on a solid foundation of generosity, historical awareness and social connection. 

​Much the same could be said of the playwright’s artistic process and purpose.  We spoke in a café in Evanston, near where the New York-based writer was staying as he oversaw the mounting of his newly revised work by Pegasus Theatre and ShPIeL, Chicago’s Jewish theater company. The play – which involves among other things the 1950s-era crosscountry journey of a Holocaust survivor to visit a dying black man who took some of the first photographs of the concentration camps – is a recollection of a time of black and Jewish unity on the issue of civil rights, as well as an attempt to reconnect and regroup in the face of today’s social and political challenges and struggles.

“Growing up in the 1950s, I didn’t know about the Green Book,” says Ramsey, who was born in Baltimore and raised partly on his grandfather’s farm in North Carolina. “The two places were only four hours apart, so we packed food and went in the woods. I thought everyone did that. But that’s how my parents tried to protect us.” 

He didn’t find out about the Green Book – named after Victor Green, the Harlem-based letter carrier who, with his wife Alma, published the book for three decades – until 2001, when an acquaintance told him about it in Atlanta, where he was then living. Ramsey was at that time on the Library Board at Emory University and had access to the school’s rare books collection, which included valuable editions of the Green Book. Holding a copy of the guidebook, Ramsey sensed the wealth of stories it contained. The moment rekindled his old ambition of being a writer – a dream deferred for 25 years, during which time he had supported his family by selling insurance, but never abandoned. 

A literary person himself, Ramsey focused on a man from an earlier generation who produced a humble book that would aid and influence many thousands of his fellow African-Americans. While Victor Hugo Green is not a character in the play, his and his wife’s presence animates it. Equipped only with an eighth-grade education, a good idea and an amazing web of contacts, Green created a publishing phenomenon and a public service, one that deserves to be remembered.
“With black letter carriers mainly delivering to black neighborhoods, because you couldn’t go to a white person’s front door, Victor’s fellow postal workers were in a position to screen people,” says Ramsey. “That’s how the guide grew after it started in 1936.”

Because there were few black-owned hotels or restaurants at the time, the guide listed mainly so-called “tourist homes,” the private residences of ordinary folks. They were the forerunners of today’s Airbnb, with one key difference: the owners would charge little or nothing for their hospitality. 

“It was something the black community needed,” notes Ramsey. “There weren’t even phone numbers – people would just show up.” (This travel experience is also portrayed in Ramsey’s children’s book Ruth and the Green Book, a spinoff of his playwriting effort, which made a splash when it came out in 2010). 

Green got the idea from a similar-but-different guidebook for Jews listing both kosher eateries and non-restricted hotels, a pressing concern in an era when many hostelries and other settings were closed to Jews.“Green’s dream was to one day stop publishing his book, because it was no longer needed,” says Ramsey. But it outlived Green, who died in 1960. It continued for a few years under Alma’s editorship, fading away only after passage of the federal antisegregation Civil Rights Act of 1964. For many of those years, according to Ramsey, the Green Book was produced by a Jewish printer named Gleaner, who took the job after other printers refused it. The guidebook was distributed through churches, Masonic lodges, unions and (surprisingly) Esso service stations – because, Ramsey speculates in one of many anecdotal grace notes sprinkled through our conversation – Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller’s wife Laura Spelman Rockefeller came from an abolitionist family.

As blacks and Jews converged in the making of the actual Green Book, so do they in the play. The character of Jacob Levinsky, the victim of Nazi ideology, sees the analogy between Old World fascism and New World racism, and so refuses to stay at any lodging place that practices discrimination. His sojourn with the Davis family in Missouri, whose home is listed in the Green Book, creates tension with a black Green Book salesman, who sees any mingling of the races – even on the part of liberal whites patronizing blackowned businesses – as the beginning of the end of his livelihood and world. Although the Green Book is gone, the spiky and complex issues and questions raised by its legacy are not. 
“People ask me why I have a Jewish character in a black play,” says Ramsey. “Growing up
partly in Baltimore, Jews were always part of my life. My job as a child – one of eight – was to go to the grocery store and pick up food for the family. There were four Jewish-owned shops near us, one on each corner. The merchants were always so nice to me, and I’ve never forgotten it. I wanted to honor them.”

Since it was conceived in 2001, the play has undergone readings and performances in places ranging from Valdez, Alaska to Atlanta to Yale University to Washington, D.C. (where Julian Bond read a part). But the Jacob character remained a problem, according to Ramsey: “I was stepping out of my comfort zone – not being Jewish myself, there are certain beats I don’t know.” It was his collaboration with David Chack, ShPIeL’s artistic director and the play’s co-producer, that helped Ramsey, in his words, bring feeling to the character.

“[Chack] has been remarkable,” Ramsey says, “not only in terms of his great knowledge of theater and history, but also in bringing the people together to make this special production happen.” Those people include director Ilesa Duncan (also the producing artistic director at Pegasus) and script dramaturg Joan Mazzonelli of ShPIel.

“I’m impressed with the cast, and I’m honored that Chicago Dramatists and Pegasus and Joan and the others took on my play,” says Ramsey. “After the rewrite, it feels brand new. The earlier readings and stagings were successful, but we’ve taken the play to a new level.”

With the production of The Green Book, Ramsey’s life has come full circle. As a young man, he moved to Los Angeles, joining the army of wannabe screenwriters. “Back then, I wasn’t writing from the heart,” he says ruefully. “I was trying to sell what was selling. But it’s not a good idea – you sell yourself short.”

It was right after 9/11, with its intimations of fate and mortality, that Ramsey decided to give writing another try. This time, his work – which include a range of plays and books on the twentieth-century black experience – come very much from the heart. 

“I wanted to show the history of the black and Jewish communities working together. If it weren’t for the Jewish community, the civil rights movement would not have had the success it did – but young people today know little of this history. I want to get them to see, hear and feel what it’s like for people to work together in all kinds of ways that aren’t necessarily well publicized.”

The Green Book was a pragmatic, low-key, seemingly unheroic response to a bad situation. But as Ramsey observes, it was also about “people having love for each other and taking care of their own. The Green Book is the story of a man with an eighth-grade education who reached out to people he’d never met to help them. There are more acts of kindness like this on a daily basis than killings. We need to shine more of a light on that.”  (Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Avenue, www.pegasustheatrechicago.org)  

You have had a little time to think about how you want to be viewed by the public, publishers, universities, businesses, suppliers, etc.

You have probably tossed about a couple of nom de plumes or company names you would like to be identified by.  Oh, there is nothing wrong with using your own name.  I for one, as a writer, wanted to separate my personal life from my writing so I chose a pen name. Many people prefer to use their given name as their identification. Whatever you decide to do, it is your business and yours only. 

Whoever thought DICK’S Sporting Goods would turnout to be the world’s largest sporting goods supplier ever. Or, take Boeing, United, Disney Land, and millions of other businesses that all started out small and grew more extensive than anyone could have dreamed.  The money that is spent in re-branding is much more than was spent on the original branding.              

Of course, you want to consider a logo, symbol, or other identification that will follow you and point out your identity.  So now you have the name, identifying lettering or symbol, and now you want to choose the font to be used to print your name.  This is often a difficult choice, feminine, masculine, textbook style, big and bold, decorative or curly.  Whatever your choice, take you time, get some feedback from friends of Facebook followers.  Test the final view of your identity branding and ensure you are happy, then establish release.  Go to press with your branding in business cards, website home page, blog page, and any place else you want your branding to appear. If you are a writer, print bookmarks, any handouts you plan on giving out as promotional items, etc.
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If you are starting a business that requires stationery, envelopes, and other printed materials, follow-through with your branding and BRAND yourself for success.

I plan on writing several articles on Personal Branding.  Over the next couple of weeks, the articles will give you specific ideas on branding yourself, what you need to consider when designing the “new” you, and how to go about it in a professional manner.

Have you thought about your personal branding, your image, your persona, and the impression you leave with people you meet?  If you performed a survey on your Facebook followers and asked them what their image, persona, or impression of you was 6-months ago versus today, what would they say.

How do people remember you?  Do they remember you for your creativity, the “brand” you have established of yourself or your product?  Or do they remember you at all?

Creating a public image is the same as outlining your goals and creating a business image.

• You want to be recognized for your product.  You, your writing, your literature, books, topics of expertise, knowledge, and business smarts.
• Design your purpose.  What is the purpose of your branding? Will your purpose tell your audience/followers you are a good writer, interesting read, flexible, futuristic.
• Or will your purpose tell your followers you are a one-time hit with very little to share?
• You want people to recognize your ID, your persona, your branding and recall that you are someone they enjoyed and want to follow and continue to read the material you publish, whether it be books, blogs, articles or interesting facts about anything.

After you have identified your purpose, let your followers know your purpose and your image/identification.  Sell yourself by using your image on everything you do.  Your image should be on your emails, in a phrase identifying “YOU.”  Identified on your website, business cards, letterhead, postcards.  Followed through on your materials you sell, share for free, and promotional items. 

How do you think the Gerber Baby has made it to the ripe old age of 90!  Happy Birthday Gerber Baby!!!  Branding, that’s how.  When you hear the word Gerber you immediately think of baby food, good for the baby, a company that cares, and quality.

This is the intent when you brand yourself.  You do not have to be a product that sits on a shelf, but a product people can trust, recognize, and purchase materials and items you produce.  It is like Levi jeans, Campbell Soup, James Patterson the writer, Microsoft software products, etc.  Branding yourself is creating a household product from the image you project. In the late 80’s people were just beginning to hear the word Microsoft and were wowed over the first series of software that hit the market with the first personal computers. Look at this software company today, a mere 30+ years later.  The company expanded and grew in productive applications that are now owned and used in every household, office and school worldwide.

You want to carefully plan the image you want to project and do not waiver from your goal.  Living up to that image is not okay on a part-time basis but represents you 24/7.  This is why many people use a pen name, or nom de plume for a separate identity.  If you are a blogger, creating your image is choosing a likable blogging topic.  Politics is not one that is comfortable to hitch your wagon to in this time-period, unless you want confrontational responses to your writing. 

I am only saying that you need to outline your design for your image, list the qualifications you expecting to meet, stress how you plan to do this, and the expected outcome of any promotional launch of the “new you” being released.
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Lee Christine Brownlee

Dr. Marion Sims, His Statue In New York City, and Dr. Marion Sims Medical Practice
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If there were ever a statue erected that should be taken down in the City of New York, removed, and decerebrated, it would be Dr. Marion Sims’ statue.

Through the physician’s diary and notes, written in his handwriting, he kept meticulous records on the surgeries he performed on black women under the guise of medical procedures.  Gynecological Experimental Surgeries, and in particular, patients  Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy. 

The following taken from Dr. Sims notebooks and history recaptured. “Today, we know three of the names of the female fistula patients from Sims’s owns records—Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. The first one he operated on was 18-year-old Lucy, who had given birth a few months prior and hadn’t been able to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were completely naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward onto their elbows, so their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain, as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became extremely ill due to his controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led her to contract blood poisoning. “I thought she was going to die…it took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation,” he wrote.

<a>http://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves</a>

Dr. Sims performed the surgeries on the black slave women without anesthesia, during surgery or medication for the pain after surgery.  This cruel, unethical, and murderous treatment of women has left a pain in my heart as I cannot remove the nightmarish screams I hear in my dreams as my mind replays each surgery over-and-over again with no relief from the pain. I reread the snippets hoping it will change the results of their surgeries, but the outcome remains the same.

Calvin Alexander Ramsey, a Playwright, and Author, known for many plays on stage today where Ramsey has brought back to life and script, history never before exposed to the stage that enlightens our sensitivities to unjust treatment passed over today of mishaps and unfair happenings of yesterday.

Damaged Virtues – The story of Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy, three slave women under the knife of Dr. J. Marion Sims over and over again.  Dr. Marion Sims, better known as the “Father of Modern Gynecology.”  This new play, written by Calvin Ramsey, will be on stage in New York City, at the National Black Theatre on November 28, 2018.  The theatre is located at 2031 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10035.   This play is a must on your list of November Events.  DON’T MISS!
CALL FOR TICKETS:  212-722-3800
 
Other Calvin Alexander Ramsey Genius:

The ‘Green Book’ Legacy, a Beacon for Black Travelers.  (Black America’s Underground Guide to Escaping the Jim Crow South,) Book and Stage Play.
 
Belle, the Last Mule at Gee’s Bend (Book, beautifully illustrated.
 
Canada Lee, a play about an African-American actor who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, forming a friendship with a Jewish actor John Garfield.
 
Sister Soldier, Challenges, and hardships that faced African American people during World War II while in the Army.
 
Enlightenment, A correlation between Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Tupac Shakur.
 
Somewhere in My Lifetime, a beautiful, romantic musical stage play.
 
Bricktop,  This musical entails three friendships, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Mabel Mercer.  The play covers Chicago, Paris, New York City, Mexico City and Rome.  Co-Author – Tom Jones
 
Many more delightful plays in his repertoire.


Please go to the website: 
 
<a>https://www.change.org/p/removal-of-the-dr-marion-sims-statue-in-new-york-ny?</a>

Sign the PETITION TO HAVE DR. MARION SIMS STATUE REMOVED FROM THE CITY OF NEW YORK!



See the play "Damaged Virtues" November 28, 2017, in New York at the Black Theatre, on 5th Avenue in Harlem.