Amena Brown:
Hey everybody. Today, we are going behind the poetry. I wish I had a physical something for that. It feels like it's behind the veil, it's behind a stage curtain, I don't know. But we are going there behind the poetry. For today's poem, we are talking about For Margaret. The cool thing about this recording that you're about to hear is that you are hearing my younger voice around the time that I was actually writing this piece. So this is a recording of For Margaret from my album Live at Java Monkey that was released in 2006. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
Everything I needed to know about being a woman, I learned from Judy Blume and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I was 12 years old when I met Margaret, me with the tortoise shell glasses and pink sponge roller bangs. And she was just like me. Well, okay, she was Jewish. So she was quite a bit lighter and her hair was quite a straighter, but we both felt alone in the world trying to figure out what breasts and hips would make us become. And speaking of breasts, I really wanted some. I wanted to fill a training bra to capacity, not that Jockey sports bra that my mom got from me. But Margaret, she encouraged me that enough reps of we must, we must, we must increase our bust could fulfill my C cup fantasies. And well, we see what happened with that.
Amena Brown:
So while Margaret prayed to God to make her a woman, I played MASH ended up living in a shack with Tevin Campbell while we tried to raise our four kids on a beekeeper salary just so we can keep up the payments on our new Ferrari. I mean, I was a pretty girl. Disguised as a nerd who never quite made it to being a hottie, and I'm still looking for Ken hoping I'll look just like Barbie. Forgive me for being a grown woman with the same fears I had at 13 because I don't want all the boys in my class to be shorter than me. Peering behind my glasses hopefully wishing Adonis in the back of my pre algebra class would notice me. If I could lose insecurities the way some people lose pounds, then I hope I'm the next Star Jones.
Amena Brown:
But it's never that easy. Digging the skin you're in, it takes work. It takes wading through hurts, digging through dirt, reminding yourself how much you're worth. And Tyra's only got so many photos in her hand, and I may never be America's next top model. But all I'm really trying to be is my own best me. And that was the one thing that Margaret couldn't teach me. See, I had to learn to smile without my hand over my mouth like Celie, learn to embrace my blemishes as beauty. And if I have to learn the lesson of loving and perfection for the rest of my life, then let that be my journey because there's this teenage girl who needs me to tell her that one day she's going to share that old insecurity regarding her cocoon and fly.
Amena Brown:
Okay, we have so much to talk about regarding this poem. So what made me write this poem is my sister. I have a younger sister named Keda. I actually am the oldest of five siblings, but my sister Keda and I were actually raised in the house together. My other three siblings, we were not all raised in the same house. I have a sister in California, and I have two brothers in Nebraska. But my sister Keda and I grew up in the same house, but we are almost 11 years apart. So around the time that I was writing this poem, my sister was probably, maybe she was 14 or 15 around the time of some of the conversations we had that really led me to write this piece. And my sister is, how can I describe her y'all? I guess if I placed the two of us next to each other, I'm classic oldest kid, very play it safe. Took me a lot of years and maturity and therapy to get to where I would really say a lot of what I actually feel and think.
Amena Brown:
And my sister is the opposite of me in that part. If she has it on her mind to say, she will say it. Not in a way that she just wants to be mean to you, but if there needs to be some direct communication, she will tell it to you. If we're at the mall shopping and I pick up a shirt and she thinks it's ugly, she will say it's ugly. If she were to pick out a shirt, which this would never happen because she's super fashionable. But if she were to pick out a shirt that I thought was ugly, I would find 17 different ways to get around there and try to communicate to her that. So even as a teenager, my sister was very direct with me and sharing with me what it was like for her in her school.
Amena Brown:
And this was around the age where she was starting to have crushes and starting to even notice, not even just her own feelings or attractions, but also having that outside look on how that was going for other kids in school or other kids she was friends with. And there were a lot of things we talked about as far as what it meant to have a crush on someone and what it meant to be a girl and all those different things. And as she's sharing that with me in her early teenage years, I'm almost 11 years older than her but actually not feeling like our experiences are that different. I'm listening to her going like, "yeah, I feel like that at work," or, "I feel like that when I go to an event and I have to be around people that I find attractive.
Amena Brown:
So I think it brought up for me this idea that there's a lot of the girlhood and womanhood experiences that are very circular, that they're not linear experiences. That there are things that you experienced at 15 that you may experience in a very similar way when you're 38 or when you're 27 or whatever that is. And so I thought that idea was really interesting, and I wanted to really think about that. So that was a part of what inspired me to write this poem. And I think the other thing, which is why Tyra Banks and America's Next Top Model are getting a nod in the middle of this poem is because also around the time that my sister and I are having all these conversations and she's being very blunt with me about how things are at school, what it's like being a teenager, I had an opportunity to audition for America's Next Top Model.
Amena Brown:
At that time, the cutoff age for America's Next Top Model was 27, and I was 26 getting ready to turn 27 probably in three or four months after this audition if I'm remembering right. And a friend of mine knew someone that was working in casting when America's Next Top Model came to Atlanta. And so he said, "Hey, I know somebody who's casting. They're looking for girls who are tall and beautiful. Would you be into it? And if so, I can connect the two of you." So he did. And this was a season of my life where, it was around this age between 25 and 27 that I really started feeling this hankering that I needed to get married. And not because there was someone to marry at that time because there wasn't, but it just started to feel like ... When I was in high school, I always thought I would have been married by the time I was 23 or something. I don't know why I thought those things, but I did.
Amena Brown:
Well, that's not true. I probably thought those things because I was in love with a boy in high school and we were falling in love when we were probably 14 or 15. I knew my mom wouldn't be with it if I were to get married out of high school. So I think my plan was we can stay together all this massive amount of years. We'll stay together through high school and college, and then we'll get engaged when it's graduation time. And then after I've been out of college a year, we'll get married. And of course, none of that worked out that way at all. But I think by the time I was reaching that 25, 26, approaching 27, I was starting to feel this just itch really about the fact that I didn't seem close to marriage and that I felt like ... I just kept looking at my body and thinking about myself and just thinking, "This is amazing, somebody should come along and be a part of this."
Amena Brown:
And knowing that there wasn't much I could do about getting married, I think the other thought that was coming to my mind was, okay, well, maybe I'm not going to get married, but I need to think about what are the other things I dream to do. And because I've always been for most of my life, I've been tall almost all of my life. And for a long time, I was just tall, rail thin, not a lot of curves. And whenever you have a body type like that, a lot of times people associate that with the one of two things, either they think that you're going to be a basketball player or they want to know, have you ever considered modeling? And I always laughed because, first of all, I was not a great athlete. So the whole basketball thing wasn't going to work out because I just don't like to sweat.
Amena Brown:
At that time, I liked to keep my nails real long. So I was like, none of that's going to work out for basketball. And with modeling, it really took me until I was right there in my mid 20s before I realized that I was cute. So when I get this invitation to at least attend this casting, I'm like, "Yeah, I got to figure this out because I just need to see, could I have had any kind of future being a model?" So the woman who was working on the casting, there were actually two separate castings for the show at that time. One of the castings was just the general everybody that lines up outside and spends the night so they can be the first person in line, kind of if you watch shows like American Idol and you see that kind of mania around it. That was one casting.
Amena Brown:
And then there was something I didn't know existed at the time, which was a precasting. And the precasting meant that the people who were casting the show picked girls and women that they felt fit the motif of model. So I was in a room with about 60 other girls ranging from 19 all the way up to 27. And we were all 5'8" and above and most modelesque bodies. I would say they were probably four or five ... And when I say modelesque, I mean not what should really be considered modelesque. And of course, thinking about this now, this was almost 15 years ago. Let's take that in. So at that time in this part of the industry to be considered modelesque meant you are a size zero, you are a size two.
Amena Brown:
So of 60 of us, I would guesstimate that there were only five to seven people who were not a size zero or a size two. So I'm air quotes when I say modelesque, because we know that everybody or any body should be able to be modelesque or be a model. So anyway, I'm there in the room, and it's just a weird mix of feelings being in a room like that. I think a part of it brings out some insecurities because you're in a room with all of these women who are gorgeous and tall and beautiful. So I definitely felt like, "Oh gosh, I don't know how I fare against the other women here." At that time, I was probably a size six. So at a size six, just so you all have an idea of what was going on in the room, at a size six, I was in those five to seven of us that really didn't quite fit the sizing of air-quotes modelesque.
Amena Brown:
So I just remembered that experience also and how that was another moment that I thought about some of the things my sister and I were talking about that she was experiencing as a teenage girl, those insecure feelings you have in your body as your body is going through all this and what it means to love yourself, accept yourself. And here I am a grown woman 10 years older than her, and I'm standing there in this room feeling all the same insecurities that I felt walking around the halls of my high school. And so I definitely think that experience of the audition played a role in this piece getting written. To give you the end of the America's Next Top Model story, did I make it on this show? No. Did I make it past even the group of 60 to where you actually get to meet Tyra or meet the judges of the show? No.
Amena Brown:
But I did the audition, I didn't make it any further past that round because they were taking us through quite a few rounds. Maybe I made it past one more round of cuts. And then that second round of cuts, I think I was cut with another group of girls. So do I regret that I didn't make the show? Not necessarily. I think for me it was more so about just having tried it and having attended the casting and not talked myself out of it. And that that's not something that I ever have to look back on and have these regrets that I didn't do it. And when I was performing on stage, I would always tell this story that I've always imagined myself having a daughter because I came from a family full of women. It was always my grandmother, my mother, me, my sister. And so I always imagined if I have a daughter, man, I don't want to be the mother that's braiding my little girl's hair at night, and I'm like, "Your mama could have been somebody." I didn't want to be that mom.
Amena Brown:
I wanted to be able to say to my daughter, for some reason, in my mind at that point in my life, to my daughter in particular I wanted to be able to say, "Here are the things that mommy did when mommy was a young woman. These are the things that I experienced or accomplished, things I got to do that were really fun. And then I met your dad, and these are the things your dad and I went and we did, and we accomplished and we experienced and we had fun. And then we had you." That was more of the narrative I wanted. And so I felt like even though the audition didn't go anywhere, it was a win for me because it was something that I tried. And I had this phrase I would say to myself at that season of my life, I would say, "I don't want to leave any of my dreams unturned. And so there was my little model dream, and so I tried it.
Amena Brown:
And I was like, "Okay, I got that out of my system, I can say I did it. If I don't make it, it's not because I didn't put my hat in the ring for it." So in this poem, I am taking you back to 12-year-old me that is reading a very quintessential book, Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. And I have been wearing glasses since I was eight years old. And in particular in this era of time when I was like a pre-teen going into my early teens, it was the early 90s. So my mom claims that these big glasses were the style then. And I don't know, the jury is still in deliberation regarding if this is a truth. But either way, I had glasses that were just taking up most of my face. This was before I got responsible enough to wear contacts.
Amena Brown:
And even when I did get old enough as a teenager, this was before there were really the types of disposable lenses you have today where you can wear them for two weeks or whatever and throw them out. You would get that one pair a year just like you got the one pair of glasses. And then if you lost one down the drain, bless your heart. So this is 12-year-old me reading Judy Blume's book. And what's interesting to me now is trying to describe to someone much younger than me that at this time of life when you're going through puberty and you're in the body I was in, I'm experiencing the hairs under the armpits and the breasts either growing or not growing.
Amena Brown:
All of this stuff that was going on in the body, there wasn't any Google to go to and be like, "How big do my breasts have to be before I can wear a training bra?." Or, "when will I know if my period's starting," or, "why do my underarm stink?" There was no website at that time to go to and search these things. And so Judy Blume's book for a couple of generations of us really was the place where you went. You went to her book to be like, "Okay, she's going to tell us." And if you're not familiar with this book, the central character in this book is around this preteen age Margaret. And it's actually a fascinating book because Margaret is going through puberty and those changes as a character, but she's also on this religious journey because one of her parents is Christian and one of her parents is Jewish. And she's trying to figure that out.
Amena Brown:
I actually re-read the book as an adult, and I was like, "Yo, this is even deeper than I remember." And honestly, when I was a kid, I don't know that we were reading through the book itself. We were sort of sneaking into the library and, a couple of us in a corner really going to the pages where she was talking about the things we wanted to know about, which is what was going to happen to our bodies. Also, Judy Blume's character here, Margaret, that she created for this book really was talking about a thing that I really wanted to know about. I was fascinated with getting breasts. And of course, because I was fascinated with it, I did not have any breasts. They did not come to me until much later in my life, but I really wanted to have some breasts.
Amena Brown:
I actually was praying and asking God to give me a C cup because I felt that that was an average ask. I'm a classic oldest kid, I'm not asking for too much, I'm trying to find a middle ground of things to ask for. And so the C cup felt like a thing. Now, my grandmother is very well endowed in the chest area and has been since she was a preteen. So she always told us girls in the family that she basically prayed that no one in the family would have breasts the size of hers. So when I heard her say that, I felt some type of way because I was like, "I feel like her prayer is canceling out my prayers. And I feel like if God going to choose between us, he's going to choose my grandma just based on a seniority, just based on she's been with the company longer."
Amena Brown:
So all this conversation around breasts was really fascinating to me. And now I laugh when I read the original wording of this poem because I really never made it to a C cup. At the time of this writing, I was like in a B cup. But then let me tell you something, I don't know if this happens to everybody, I think in some ways it might, but the body parts may be different. But when I turned 30, it was like I experienced this hormonal change that I really felt like was a secondary element of puberty. And my breasts got bigger in my early 30s. I remember when I was getting married to my now husband, but he was then my fiance, and I went to Victoria's Secret to get measured for my lingerie before my bridal shower.
Amena Brown:
I remember the woman measuring me calling out what my cup size was. And I was like, "No, it's not." And she was like, "It is," she was trying to show me on the tape it is, this is the band, this is your cup size. And I was like, "It's not." And I walked out mad, went over to Macy's, made them measure me all over again. And the woman was like, "That's you." The woman at Macy's was like, "Yeah. What she told you, that's you, this is all you now." So I went from being a B cup for a very long time to arriving into the Ds in my 30s y'all. And I don't know if it's my prayers just got answered really late, I don't know. I don't know y'all. It's wild every time I say this poem because when I first was performing this piece and I would get to this line where I would do the we must, we must, we must increase our bust. And then I would say so I could feel my C cup fantasies, and then there's a pause. Well, we see what happened with that.
Amena Brown:
After a while, the longer I've done this poem, the less of a laugh that line would get because people would be looking at my chest like, I don't know, I think your prayers got answered. So in later versions of this piece, you will hear that the C cup isn't there anymore. I normally just say big chest because I'm not going to keep upgrading the letters in case my breast decided to keep getting larger. I'm just telling you.
Amena Brown:
This next section of this poem where I get into MASH is one of my favorite things. You don't hear this in the original recording. But the iteration of how this poem has changed since I've started doing it on stage over the years is if I'm at an event that's all women, sometimes I step out there and I open my set with this piece. No story, no introduction, I just start with it. And when I get right there, while Margaret prayed to God to make her a woman, I played MASH. I stop right there and I always say, "What does MASH stand for?" And I call out the letters, M-A-S-H, Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. When you're at an event and you can hear the women in there saying the words with you, I'm like okay.
Amena Brown:
And let's review, MASH was a game that had these different categories and you played on notebook paper. And you had a category for who you wanted to marry and how many kids you wanted to have and what you wanted to be when you grew up and the kind of car you wanted to drive. And then you did this circle squiggly thing until your friend says stop. And then you counted the lines in the squiggly thing and then you did process of elimination. That was supposed to predict your future. And as I go through that memory, being in a crowd of women, being in an arena or in a big ballroom or whatever venue I was in, being in that space and hearing the energy of other women that also did this growing up was everything. That to me was also a way of evening the listening field, if you will, for the audience because a lot of the women's events that I would do, they were multi-generational.
Amena Brown:
And so there would sometimes be grandmothers there as well as their great-granddaughters who were teenagers. So getting to explain MASH because there were some people in there who were like, "I don't know what this is, I never played this growing up," type thing. But there were also women in there that were even older than me that remembered reading this book initially when it had come out. So this is one of my most fun things. And I love when I'm writing pieces to throw Easter eggs in there. And even this Tevin Campbell mentioned to me was an Easter egg because, I'll tell you, I love especially putting Easter eggs in poems for Black girls. And I can't tell you that I always do it intentionally that when I'm writing, I'm like, "I'll put this." I'm just writing from what my experience was because I really did have a crush on Tevin Campbell. He totally would have been in my MASH game.
Amena Brown:
And the way MASH got played, you could end up living in a shack with Tevin Campbell trying to raise four kids on a beekeeper salary and with a new Ferrari, that's like a thing that could happen on your MASH thing. But I love saying the name Tevin Campbell and knowing how many young Black girls were like me and are now grown women and are at some of these events and are like, "Oh, Tevin, yes." So I love doing those things. And I think when you get into the meat of this piece, when I hit this moment, forgive me for being a grown woman with the same fears I had at 13. That's part of what I feel like I was learning from those conversations with my sister and thinking about all the insecure moments that made me feel, I don't know, like I wasn't beautiful. Made me feel that way when I was a teenager, and that those moments are still there.
Amena Brown:
And we have lots of reasons as girls and women that we don't feel beautiful or that we don't value who we are or how we are. And so I loved digging into this piece right here, the nod to talking about Tyra there and just talking about how this is really about you knowing how much you're worth. I loved dropping the Easter egg of the character of Celie from Alice Walker's The Color Purple there. That's another fun one for me that whenever I'm in a crowd and I know black women are there, that when I get to that, I had to learn to smile without my hand over my mouth like Celie, that I know that phrasing is going to mean the world to them like it does to me. So I think this poem closing with hearkening back to this teenage girl who really in certain ways to me is inside each of us as women, there is the teenage version of us that is still there.
Amena Brown:
One of the things that I had started to say whenever I would do this poem in front of an audience of teenage girls because ... I'll have to do another episode about it. There was a time in my career that I actually talked, maybe I have to do at that time I about this. But there was a time in my career, it was short-lived, but there was a time that I did talks for teenage girls in church settings, and we would talk about sex. A lot of it was about talking about abstinence and celibacy, I'm going to be honest with y'all. And it got uncomfortable for me because I didn't feel like it was giving the young women the best information that they could have, and so I stopped doing that. Towards the end, I just started realizing there are so many other important things to talk to girls about besides talking to them about abstinence. That we needed to talk about consent, and we needed to talk about ownership of your own body and boundaries and what it means to honor the body you have.
Amena Brown:
And we needed to also not walk into a setting like that in church where you're talking to teenage girls and assume that all of the girls there are straight. Those are reasons why I stopped being the person that did that talk because I realized there'd be a lot of church settings that wouldn't welcome what I really wanted that talk to be about. And I really wanted it to focus less on all the things that girls shouldn't be doing and more on what you should do to love yourself and what you should do to honor your body and to make wise sexual choices. And that that is a lesson for teenage girls, and it's a lesson for grown women too. So anyways, that's for a whole other time.
Amena Brown:
But whenever I would do this piece and I was in front of an audience of teen girls, I would always say to them something that I really do believe is true. And I would say to them, I know that it's hard being in high school going through your teenage years, it's not an easy time. But I would say to them almost every feeling that you feel, grown women like the grown women in here because I would typically in a space where there would be a lot of teenage girls attending a conference or something, but there would be moms or different chaperones or youth leaders in the room too. And I would say, almost every feeling you feel as a teenage girl, there are grown women who are adults and they feel those similar feelings to you. That womanhood is not a linear journey, it's actually a very circular experience. And that is something beautiful about it. That it's a thing we get a chance to go through together.
Amena Brown:
And hoping that even though I know some of them were super weirded out to think that their moms want to make out or that their moms ever made out or ever had sex or anything, it's weird. I know that's weird for teenage girls to think about. But I just wanted them to feel like womanhood doesn't have to be a lonely thing, that womanhood is a communal experience to. What was it like performing this poem for the first time? I'm almost certain that one of the first times I performed this poem memorized was actually at a slam. And I know you're probably going to hear me say that a thousand times in these behind the poetry episodes. But a lot of my show pieces, a lot of the pieces I do that make it into my poetry set, many of them started from me not necessarily even writing to slam but because I was doing slam poetry at the time.
Amena Brown:
And if you're listening and you're not familiar with slam, slam poetry, it's the competitive side of spoken word, it's the Olympics of spoken word poetry, if you will. And so it can go from local competitions all the way to national and international competitions. And so I was writing a lot at the time, but I was also writing because I did want to win some slams, and I was understanding more what the form of a slam poem was. And you had to really punch with a message and bring it home in less than three minutes. I'm pretty sure the first time I ever did this poem was at a slam competition. And this poem did really well in slams because it has so many dynamics to it. I also want to say that this was the first funny poem that I ever wrote. And slam is interesting because when you're in a competition, it's very organized as far as you're in a bout, which is what this one small component of the competition would be called. Your bout would be you and maybe three other slam teams if you were doing a team slam.
Amena Brown:
There would be all this numerical things that went on as to the order in which each team competed. And sometimes your team might send up a group piece, but sometimes you might have a dope enough poem and they'd send you up to do your poem by yourself. And I noticed when I would do slam competitions locally that a lot of times a lot of the poems were heavy because a heavy poem could win a slam if it was well-written and well performed and really hit home to the judges. But you almost needed funny poems as a palette cleanser in a way. And there were times that a funny poem would score even better going after a poem that was really heavy because the audience just enjoyed having that relief of being able to laugh.
Amena Brown:
And so I didn't intend this poem to be funny, I really just was approaching it to write the story. But in slam, I discovered the poem had a lot of power because it did have this comedic element, it opened people up to laugh and to reminisce. And then by the time you really get to the point of like, what is all this about? Why are we talking about training bras and Judy Blume and Tyra Banks? Why are we talking about all that? When you get to that end ... If the poem is its own cyclone and it starts off with the wider part at the top and then goes down, down, down into the bottom as the tube of it gets smaller and smaller. I think that then you're getting into the meat of what the piece is about and that it's not just about training bras, it's actually about saying whoever you are and whatever your insecurities are, you can spread your wings and fly, whatever that looks like to you. You can embrace the imperfections of your own beauty.
Amena Brown:
That's the center of the piece. But it was fun that I got to talk about training bras and breasts and MASH and all these things leading up to that. I will say one of my favorite ways I've ever performed this poem is when I did compete nationally for one of Atlanta's slam teams. Another poet and I, and her name is Gypsy O. Shout out to Gypsy O if you're listening. Another poet and I did this poem as a duet. So it was still with the same writing that I'd written, but instead of it just being me, she and I performed it together. And we had this choreography where our arms linked. And I hate to this day that I cannot find the footage of us having done that piece together.
Amena Brown:
That was what it was like performing this piece for the first few times. And after I got done with slam and when I began to learn how to build poetry sets. And poetry sets are a where it's not just the poet coming up and doing one poem at a time, but it's where the poet can do, sort of like how a comedian can do a 10-minute set, could do a 30-minute set, could do an hour set or 90-minute set. And so when I started learning how to build sets, at that time, I was still performing at a lot of women's events. And when I figured out how to build a poetry set with the stories and the poems to go together, that's when I really knew the power of this piece. That I could walk out on stage and open with it, I could put it in the middle of a set and tell my America's Next Top Model story. I could stop in the middle of the poem and talk about MASH, I could tell the stories about my grandma praying against my own prayers about my breasts.
Amena Brown:
There was all this other stuff to do with it on stage. And I think that's interesting because when I started out my professional career as a poet, many of you who've been listening to this or if you're familiar with my work, you know this part already. But if you're new here, when I started out professionally, I started out in Christian spaces, in very conservative Christian spaces, white evangelical spaces. And so at that time, the only place where spoken word poetry could go within these very prescribed moments, like it had to go between this song and that song or it had to go inside this song in this certain kind of music. So I performed like that for a long time.
Amena Brown:
And then when I started going through some changes with church and different things, I returned back to the poetry scene and then went into slam. Well, in slam you're on a time crunch, so you can't walk up and introduce your piece because as soon as you start talking, the timer is going. So you got to hurry up and say whatever you're going to say. And when I finally got into building my own sets, that was the first time I could really take my time and say a poem and figure out not just how you perform the piece itself, but how you tell the story that leads into the poem and how you tell the story that leads out of that poem into the next thing. And that I really feel is where my strong suit is as a performer, but it's also where the fun and the passion is for me.
Amena Brown:
That's the part I love, not just this moment with the haze machine and the guitar, and you there do your poem. My favorite thing is when I get that 30 minutes or I get that hour, then I just feel like the audience and I have time to breathe and get to know each other. And I can tell some stories, I can do a poem I didn't plan to do. And this poem, Margaret is a pretty strong fixture in my poetry sets and especially when I'm performing for an audience of women. Here is a very interesting follow-up story because normally I close these episodes by telling you all how I feel about the poem now. So let me tell you a wild thing that happened in 2020 right before the pandemic tipped.
Amena Brown:
So right before the pandemic tipped, my January through middle of March 2020 was wild times. It was so busy, I had a lot of events on my plate. I still then and I still am right now working with Pattern Beauty, Tracee Ellis Ross's natural hair care brand. So I am the poetic partner for Pattern Beauty. I flew into LA in February in part to be with my folks from the Together Live tour. If you've been listening to this for a while, to my podcast, you probably heard me talk about Together Live. And so Together Live had happened in the fall. And then Together Live was invited to open up MAKERS, which is a global summit for women. And I was very excited to be invited to MAKERS. And a small crew of us from Together Live were opening the MAKERS event with a micro version of what the tour was like.
Amena Brown:
And I realized that Judy Blume was scheduled to appear at MAKERS. And it's wild to think of, y'all, because Judy Blume, as far as I know, I think at that time she was in her late 70s, but I think she's turned 80 now. So when I think about this, I'm like I had an opportunity to see her in person, but I only had one poem that I could do on stage. But I knew that Judy Blume was going to be at the event, but I couldn't see from stage if she was actually sitting there in the audience. So instead of doing Margaret, I performed my piece For The Women, which is another one of my favorite poems to do, and I left. I guess after we all finished our time on stage, I somehow found out that Judy Blume had been sitting there in the audience the whole time.
Amena Brown:
And y'all, I went back to my hotel room, and I'm just going to tell y'all something else. Getting booked to speak at an event like MAKERS was just a big honor for me, and getting to be with our crew from Together Live was also dope. I'm going to tell y'all one thing I missed in the pandemic because I have not traveled like that since March is a really nice hotel. And we were staying at a very, very nice hotel, big old tub, big old shower, big old bed. And then you had a little living area out in the front, you could just see the whole skyline of LA out there. I mean, it was a very, very nice room. So I was pitifully soaking myself in this amazing five-star tub just all of the terrible feelings washing over me that I missed my opportunity to perform Margaret for freaking Judy Blume herself. Are you serious?
Amena Brown:
And I'm just like, "Man, Amena," I'm trying to give myself the talk, "you did the best you could with what you knew, you didn't know she was going to be ... I mean, all the things. So I get dressed to go back to MAKERS the next day. I don't have any more stage responsibilities, but I just want to go and hang out and learn and hear everyone talk. And I walk into the green room and Dyllan who is the leader of MAKERS, Dyllan walks up to me and says, "Oh my gosh, why didn't you perform Margaret yesterday?" And I almost cried in her arms because I was like, "I know, I meant to [noises]." And she was like, "Did you even get to meet Judy Blume?" And I was like, "I didn't." She was like, "Come meet her right now."
Amena Brown:
And let me tell you, any performing artists worth their salt, and I would particularly say for poets who are performers and for singers, this is especially true. You never know when you're going to be in a moment where somebody is going to be like sing right now, do your poem right now. And sometimes people do that and it's not worth a moment, it's not worth a moment of you doing that live. My grandmother's in the grocery store with a stranger and she's like, "Do some poems, baby, do some poems for her. I told her you do poems." that feels like, "Oh, grandma, come on." but every now and then you're going to have this moment where you're going to be called upon, And that's your time.
Amena Brown:
i think there are a lot of singers that have stories to tell where that was Quincy Jones or that was whoever, insert record executive name here. And so there are times that you got to be a poet worth your salt right there. And am I going to go over here and give Judy Blume this poem as if I did it on a stage for 50,000 people? Oh, absolutely, I'm going to do it. So Dyllan takes me over, she's like, "I've got to run, but I'm just going to introduce the two of you." So in the green room at MAKERS, there's a partition. The first part where you walk in is where all the food, drink and stuff. But when you let go behind the partition, there are makeup artists and hair artists back there.
Amena Brown:
So Judy Blume is getting her makeup down y'all, and Dyllan walks me over, introduces us, tells her like, "Amena has this poem. I thought she was going to do it yesterday, she didn't. And I really wanted to see if it would be okay if she could do it for you." So I'm like. So Judy Blume is finishing up getting her makeup done, we're doing a little chit-chat. And then she says, "Well, how long is the poem?" And I said, "Oh, it's less than three minutes." And she was like, "Oh, I can do that." So the makeup artists finished her makeup and turned her makeup chair to face me. And one of the other makeup artists filmed this while this is happening.
Amena Brown:
And y'all, if I didn't get the opportunity for an audience of Judy Blume and the makeup artists and hair artists who were back there. To say Margaret to Judy Blume, it's just one of those things that you're like, that's only going to happen to you maybe once, maybe twice in your life that you write something inspired by someone else's work and you actually get to look them in the eyes and say it to them. So I performed the piece for her, she's laughing and gasping in all the places I hope someone laughs and gasps. She's teary and so am I because I can't believe I'm getting this opportunity. She hugs me.
Amena Brown:
I could just cry telling y'all that I had that opportunity to hug Judy Blume because even if I were to see her again, who knows how long it would be before I would be able to hug her. And just having this wonderful moment with her and getting to say in my own way to her, here is how much that book you wrote meant to me. So it turned out that that was, 2020 was 50 years since Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was published. So that's my story about Margaret y'all. It started with my sister inspired me to write this poem. And the current amazing thing about this poem is that I got a chance to actually perform that for Judy Blume.
Amena Brown:
What is life? I had so much fun talking to you all about that. I hope y'all had fun too. If you are a person with breasts, I hope that you just enjoy whatever size that you have. Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy it, take advantage of it. You can also listen to Margaret and some of my other poems by checking out my album Live at Java Monkey wherever you stream music. And you'll probably go there and find Live at Java Monkey, and you'll discover that I have a bunch of other albums that I hardly ever talk about, but they are there too. So you're welcome to peruse those on your favorite streaming app. You should also check out Judy Blume's book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. If you haven't, go to your favorite bookseller and do this and check out other works of Judy Blume's. She is amazing and such a pioneer for us in having brought some of these girl and woman conversations to the forefront in her book. We love to see it.
Amena Brown:
And if you want to actually watch me perform Margaret for Judy Blume, you can actually check that out on my IGTV. The footage is posted there. For this week's here for the crown, I want to shout out Dr. Maya Angelou. I was trying to think about other writers that really influenced me during that same time that I was reading Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and Maya Angelou came to my mind. And I hope you know this name because she has many, many crowns I'm sure, but I am happy to bestow upon her one more. I remember starting my journey with Dr. Maya Angelou's work by reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is written from the perspective of a young Black girl not too far in age from the age I was when I first started reading Judy Blume's work, when I first started really discovering what all of this was going to mean becoming a young girl, transitioning into whatever young womanhood would look like.
Amena Brown:
I never got to hear Dr. Angelou speak in person. But her words, her career, and her life left a serious mark on me, just the boom and timbre of her voice. Any of you that have listened to her work probably feel the same way. I remember watching her perform her poem at President Bill Clinton's inauguration. How so many of us, the generation of us were memorizing that poem and performing it at church or at speech competitions. And how amazing it was for me this year to be watching the inauguration of President Biden and watching Poet Amanda Gorman who is phenomenal. I actually originally got to meet Amanda on the Together Live tour in 2019, and she killed it.
Amena Brown:
And it just made me think watching her perform that here she is continuing on Dr. Angelou's legacy while also building this amazing legacy for herself. How many young Black girls just like me will look at Amanda and know that they can be poets too. Dr. Angelou, many of us are writers and poets because of you. You aren't physically here with us, but you left your presence and your legacy. May we make you proud by being ourselves and taking up our space just as you taught us. Dr. Maya Angelou, give her a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeart radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.