1. My sisters and I have resumed giving one another and writing Sibling Assignments. Over the weekend, we each posted completed pieces, all written for the month of February. We wrote about family dinners, food feeds in Kellogg, and music -- we each created and commented on a ten song playlist. If you'd like to read my posts, they are here, here, and here and links to my sisters' posts are included in each my pieces.
2. Christy introduced a new twist to our Sunday family dinners by serving the meal she prepared at 2:00 this afternoon. She prepared a delicious foil packet dinner of salmon and asparagus accompanied by a fresh green salad. Paul couldn't make today's dinner. He was keeping an eye on the Sixth Street Melodrama's production of The Rivals, performed as readers theater. We talked about a wide range of topics. Our discussion of different gulches and other geographical features of the Silver Valley area made me want to jump up, grab a map, leap into the Sube, and start driving up and down gulches and acquaint myself streets I've either long forgotten or never really knew.
3. Last year, Chicago's radio station WBEZ produced a podcast series entitled, Making Oprah and explored how Oprah Winfrey built her media empire. Now the station has released a second series. It's entitled Making Obama. It does not look at Barack Obama's presidency, but looks at Obama's formative years as he worked his way toward becoming a national political figure.
The Deke and I listened to three episodes last night. I enjoyed that the program spent a lot of time unfolding the history of Chicago over the last thirty-five years or so. The program looked at the demanding and substantial work Barack Obama performed as a community organizer for three years in Chicago's South Side when he was in his twenties. As an Ivy League educated outsider, he had difficulties earning the trust and respect of community leaders in South Chicago, but he did, especially as he got involved in, and helped to spearhead, the nitty gritty efforts to improve and rectify terrible housing and other conditions created by the city's neglect of these South Side neighborhoods. As much as we learned about Obama's life in the 80s, 90s, and the early 2000s, I think we learned even more about the history of the city of Chicago and how Barack Obama involved himself in working to address some of the city's most difficult, tense, and chronic problems. It toughened him up, as did his later involvement in Chicago and Illinois electoral politics.
If you'd like to check out Making Obama, click here.
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