Adventures of Nefertiti

She’s beautiful and plays a Desperate Housewife on TV, and not too long ago this Mexican-American actress took a DNA test and discovered on the PBS series Faces of America, that she has African ancestry. Her name is Eva Longoria Parker, and while some viewers may have been surprised at what was revealed, I wasn’t one of them. Eight years ago a friend and I vacationed in Acapulco, Mexico. There, we had the time of our lives. We did all the touristy stuff like sightseeing and taking loads of pictures, but what captivated me the most, was the connection I discovered we had with the Mexican people. My friend Sanquetta and I stayed at the Mayan Palace Resort. The resort itself was a luxury that I had never before encountered. The lobby complete with marble floors and Mayan themes with a temple entrance was simply breathtaking. Combined with nightly entertainment, open air buffet restaurants and the longest lazy river pool in Mexico, this beach front property more than exceeded our wildest e...

She lay on the chaise lounge face down on the deck of the pool, a few feet from the edge of the water. It was mid-day and the sun bore down on her intensely, baking her skin into a light golden bronze. Casually, she slid her spaghetti strap down her left shoulder to the side of her bikini bra. She didn ’t want a tan line there. She wanted her upper body nice and even. Not too far away, a dark-skinned woman looked out the window of the clubhouse overlooking the resort’s lazy river pool and noticed the middle-aged woman baking in the sun. The dark-skinned lady thought about how she would love to catch a few sun rays herself, since it was good for her body in it’s conversion of Vitamin D. But, she didn ’t understand the point of sun bathing to the point of obsession. She recalled back one time while in Acapulco, while relaxing out by the pool with a good book in hand, noticing an elderly gentleman laying out next to her, covered in what looked like lesions of melanoma. Of course, her dark...

For most of my adult life, I’ve completely been against subscribing to premium movie channels. In the past, I’ve felt that if I really wanted to see a good movie and if I failed to see it in the movie theatre, well then I should just visit Blockbuster and rent it. This mindset changed for me a few years ago. Upon my relocation to South Carolina, I decided to invest my money in a little at home entertainment. Now with my basic cable and internet package, I also have one group of premium movie channels, and that is with HBO. HBO has been good to me, although my monthly bill is a bit too high, I’m still pretty content with their selection of movie choices and original shows. True Blood and Entourage are can’t miss summer thrills. And very recently, I’ve been really impressed with what HBO has had to offer. Within the past few days, I’ve watched three fantastic shows that have been educational, enlightening, and entertaining. Those three are... Something the Lord Made Sugar Treme Something...

Sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in this small town that I reside in. Although most of the time, I think it’s just me. Over the past few years I’ve become a bit paranoid and feel sometimes that pairs of eyes are trying to get a hold of me. Now it doesn’t help here that South Carolina is a conservative red state and that from time to time I’ve seen a confederate flag hanging over the balcony of the apartment across the parking lot from me. Nor does it help that at one time my office was so charged politically that I called in sick the day after President Obama was elected. Still despite all of this, I have felt relatively safe in my surroundings, albeit a bit uncomfortable. But tonight I experienced something so unsettling that I’m just not sure how I should label it. Lately it seems I’ve had a taste for barbeque. A few weeks ago I was intrigued by a quick conversation on identity with the cashier in the drive-thru at Jim N-Nick’s BBQ and today, I decided to visit a new barbeque resta...

There’s not much to do here in Bluffton , South Carolina, but there sure can be loads of picture taking moments. I moved here a few years ago when my job relocated my office to the resort town of Hilton Head Island. Hilton Head is a sea island off the tip of south eastern South Carolina. And Bluffton is a tiny historic town on the mainland across the bridge from Hilton Head. It takes me maybe twenty minutes to drive from Bluffton to Hilton Head for my office hours. Since I moved to this area, which is also known as the low country, I just haven’t ventured out much. I’ ve hit all the sightseeing spots back on the island, but haven’t had a desire to check out the historic district of my new home community in Bluffton . So today, on this fine Easter Sunday, I decided to drive around the corner with my Canon SX 120 and park the car and take a walk. Only five minutes away from my apartment, what I found here, is a photographer’s dream come true. Of course I took lots of pictures and I...

I hope I don’t get in trouble, but I had been putting off filling out my 2010 Census Form, and now that I have filled it out, I may not have given the response that the government wanted to see. I had been aware of the controversy regarding the word Negro, and I wasn’t too eager to deal with it. Still, I completely expected to have the opportunity to check a box that read Black, or a box that read African American or a box that read Negro. Instead, last night as I sat down to fill out my form, I discovered lumped together under one box to check, read the line.... Black, African American or Negro. Hmm... So have we fully embraced this new millennium or have we traveled back in time to the 1920’s? I remember last month talking with my Grandmother regarding the latest census and asking what she thought about the word Negro being added, and her response was; “Why did they bring that word back?” My point exactly! The reasoning behind that was because the Census Bureau felt that some older g...

This past weekend my brother spent Friday and Saturday evening in the hospital with his baby girl. My 3-year-old niece Dezi was running a high fever Friday afternoon, and after a call from the daycare, my brother Tommy, rushed her to the hospital. She’s fine now, but when I talked with my brother Sunday afternoon, they were still at the hospital and my brother hadn’t had any sleep. He says he was afraid to take his eyes off of her, even for one second. I wish I could have been there for him, because I hate that he had to endure that anguish alone. But I couldn’t, because he’s in Florida, and I’m in South Carolina. My mother is in Kentucky and my father is in Indiana, and they couldn’t have been with him either. My brother has lots of loved ones in Orlando, but no blood relative. While talking with my brother, I asked how Dezi was handling being in the hospital, and he said that she was demanding to go home and that every time the doctor came by to take blood, she would give him the evi...