The first time I heard of this was when a friend posted on FB that she had tickets. Read a crappy review of it in AM New York, but since I generally find their reviews limited in scope, I didn't pay much attention to it. It's a holiday weekend, so my friend Amit and I decided we'd check it out.
What a disappointment. We went on 34th Street, and tix were like $17.00 each. No biggie; we're both single, employed and pretty good at managing our money (I think being a cheapskate is kinda cool and find I'm much more comfortable with people who tend to reign in their spending. I have most of the material things I want in life; what's the point in spending more money on more stuff?). The ticket prices would have been fine if it had been worth it. Neither one of us is terribly sophisticated, so when I can sit through a story line and go "why don't they just do X and end the movie?" or when we BOTH realize that half the plotline is missing, that indicates a problem. Still, geeks that we are, that would have been forgivable if the 3D in the movie had been half as good as the 3D in the trailers or in the studio branding. The 3D in the movie just wasn't that good.
Oh, well. We got to hang out for a coupla hours. Amit revealed his racism when we stopped at an Indian joint in Penn Station. He looked through the window and saw that all the servers were Hispanic and decided he didn't want to eat there. I told him he was being racist, but he said he wanted Indian food to be served by Indians.
On the way to Penn Station we passed by some guy in a shirt and tie, whose face was covered in blood and who was trying to make his tie into a tourniquet. We looked at him, and he had a bruise and cut above his left eye. Amit was among several people who offered him napkins, I told him to sit down, and a couple of people called 911. We couldn't tell if he was sober or not, there was no indication of what had happened to him, and we decided we didn't want to stay and gawk. Three teenagers were walking behind us as we entered Penn Station and told us their version of what happened. They said there had been a group of teens around the front of Penn Station. The injured man had been talking to the teenaged girls. The teenaged males had told him to stop. He started arguing with the males, and somehow ended up slapping one of the females. At that point, one or more of the males assaulted him; and elbow to the head apparently caused the wound. The teenagers talking to us thought it ironic that the man in the suit was seeming to be the victim; they viewed him as the instigator.
I've heard the results of our Episcopal Assignments, and they are as follows:
1st - Bishop Lawrence L. Reddick III
2nd - Bishop Sylvester Williams
3rd - Bishop Paul A.G. Stewart
4th - Bishop Thomas Brown
5th - Bishop W.E. Lockett
6th - Bishop Kenneth Carter
7th - Bishop Thomas Lanier Hoyt, Jr. - Senior Bishop of the CME Church
8th - Bishop Henry Williamson
9th - Bishop James Walker
10th - Bishop Godwin Umoette (West Africa and the Caribbean)
11th - Bishop Teresa Snorton (Central and South Africa)
What's interesting is that they went through all this stuff to create an 11th Episcopal district that segregated the Africans (they made these very bizarre and colonialist rules stating that the African indigenous bishop could not rotate into the States and could not be in line for Senior Bishop. They then created an 11th Episcopal district that cuts a wide swath through Central Africa (and is rumored to have 500,000 members)), and then they give that Episcopal District not only to someone who is not the indigenous African Bishop (they gave the indigenous African Bishop the region composed of a couple of West African countries and the Caribbean) -- not only is much of Africa not under the leadership of the indigenous African bishop, but it's under the leadership of a WOMAN! Ten years ago when we went to Ghana (which is not in Dr. Snorton's ED), we did some work on Women in Leadership in Ghana. While women are certainly in positions of leadership in Africa, it occurs to me that there, like many places in Christendom, the church suffers from its affinity with patriarchy. My impression is that the vestiges of patriarchy are still very strongly rooted in African Christendom, and I wonder how they'll react to a female presiding prelate? Already there is talk of a mass exodus of our African congregations over the snub relegating their Bishop to second-class status and over the election of a Bishop who is rumored not to be indigenous African so much as to be a dual passport holder. I wonder if the church is not setting Bishop Snorton up for failure? I don't know that all this information has been verified, but I just wonder....
I also need to talk a bit about the Avatar movie, about how this kid was thought to be the Savior of his race (an Avatar is something that represents something else; he has all these powers over the natural universe; there are evil people who know his divinity but who set out to do him harm; there's an instance of the moon turning red; there's all this stuff about supernatural powers and one person's place in the Master plan. We pay nearly $20.00 to see this, but try asking the average kid to pay $20.00 in church, and they'll balk. We need to look at that.
Just like we look at how we offer $100 million dollar contracts to guys who play a game for a living, but we have people who teach our children making salaries so low they qualify for public assistance. Both cases seem extreme to me, and I think we need to find a happy medium.
That's all for tonight.
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