During the week of the US Social Forum, the First Annual Seminole Street Artist's Colony hosted a gaggle of friends to our great delight-- many of them Detroiters coming back to the city for the first time in years. The house turned into a Festival of Interesting every breakfast, every morning. There is no joy like seeing your father sip coffee contemplatively while a rapper snacks on eggs beside him, a midwife muses on the beauty of birth, and a woman's studies professor makes a case in favor of the word "queer" while giving a recent Smith graduate a massage. Yes, we had LOTS of fun.
One needed not attend the forum itself to benefit from the buzz that the thousands of attendees brought to town. Without paying a registration fee or entering a conference room, I was able to see folks camp out on Woodward avenue in a tent city, listen to people discuss the pros and cons of conducting a public panel on anti-Zionist movements, watch a bunch of slam poetry at the bar where Houdini died, and find out how an independent bookseller keeps her shelves so dynamic that her authors engage in complex socio-political discussion by merely sitting alongside one another. I also found out the answer to the infamous riddle: How do you cram a city full of queers into one tiny dive bar?... I can't reveal the answer, but it involved dancing in the street.
One fan favorite event that was affiliated with the USSF was the Mexican Revolution exhibition at the Skillman branch of the Detroit Public Library. This traveling exhibition of photographs by Agustin Casasola opened with a show by a very talented group called Son Solidarios, and was followed by a performance by a band that included the former high school art and music teachers of one in our gang.
When we were at home we relished in the pleasures of our collective little hearth during rain storms, tarot card readings, hash brown cookings, pie feasting, sun porch literary discussions, chilaquiles with ingredients from Mexican town and spooky ghost tours of the third floor. The core group of us got so addicted to having lots of folks around that we now describe our present psychological state as "the empty nest syndrome."
A couple of gals biking across the country came by shortly after our forum-folks left. They are working on a local food blog called The Hungry Bicyclists, which paved the way for us to be, somehow, in a permanent state of potluck. When my dad told my grandmother that some guests had baked us cornbread, she asked him how he came to be such a lucky man.
Opening our house has proven to be a remarkable exercise in allowing ourselves to be the recipients of a lot of goodness. Some have scoffed, but I've deemed the period of Detroit's Social Forum "The Era of the Gifts." It may be cheesy but it's true-- and you know what, sometimes I read Oprah magazine in the grocery store. What of it? We are feeling a lot of gratitude around here these days.
I title this blog post with my Aunt Cora May's favorite toast because I can't think of a better wish for the flock of travelers that descended upon us. Come back!
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