#< character study> tiger stripped cat

[reddragon-cowboy]

Stoicism. Bushido. Apathy

Spike doesn’t give too much thought to worry or anxiety. When things turn left or right, things that take a turn for the worst, things that are out of his control, he allows it to run its course as he accepts the reality of the situation with little hint of stress – not allowing the futures uncertainty to influence his attitude in the moment of utter doom. He prefers to portray a calm, easy-going demeanor in those situations, even finding a way to derive pleasure in those last, small moments in the wake of disaster, such as casually smoking a cigarette when he thought he was gonna die. This implies he likes to take a pause and enjoy the simple things, even when things might be falling apart around him. Spike refuses to panic and give in to fear, knowing death is a certainty in an instance he can no longer control his fate, so there’s no point in worrying what’s inevitable.

This influences his view on death where he has no fear of it. Even when he was younger there was no such fear. And as a full adult, he believes he has died once in the past, but this mindset he adopts is based on him faking his death to leave the crime syndicate and elope with his lover to start a new life. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. And her abandonment caused him to think there’s no point in living, in being alive, if he can’t have love – love is the strongest motivator that inspires life to sprout and burst within him. Without it, he feels dead. He never felt truly alive until he met her, and it’s the period where he truly felt he had something to lose – her.

This mindset also falls in line with Bushido, the way of the Samurai: to consider oneself dead so as to not fear death when it comes upon you, allows him to be fearless and accept when the time comes. Which was important to the Samurai because they may be called upon to give their life at any moment – in a life of service or seppuku ( the form of taking ones life in an act of honor). He takes the Samurai spirit during his adolescence while training in the syndicate along with learning Jeet kune do under Mao, until the belief wavers when he meets Julia where he has an actual reason to live, to which the idea of dying scared him for the first time in his life. He then desires to experience true freedom and liberation to live the life he wants while in love – the way of Jeet kune do.

But this stoic mindset he adopts could be misleading to others. Mistaken for being a stoic, he really wears an apathetic countenance due to depression. Not that he’s uncaring about things or people, but he’s lost the will to care about what happens to him. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for other people, their well-being, and life in general; he’s depressed, and it makes it difficult to find joy in life. And as a realist deep down, he accepts the reality of a situation in a realistic way, whether it can be helped or not. If it can be helped, he’ll jump to action to prevent injury to the best of his ability, if not, he moves on and tries not to dwell on it. Seeming apathetic, he may have little words to say as well, following how a samurai should speak: Seldom and only say what is needed, in which allows the other party to try to decipher the small meanings hidden within his words.

[drowning-moonlight]

My review for Shazam! Fury of the Gods

transcript below the cut

Shazam 2 was fine, you guys are just mean.

I thought it was good. Not really, really good. But good. I really liked the first Shazam. I liked it enough to see it three times in the theaters and even buy the DVD. Yes, people still watch those. And while I liked Fury of the Gods, I’m not sure if I would buy the DVD. I saw it twice but I don’t have plans to see it another time. Maybe I will, maybe not. I’ve seen a lot of people and critics really not like it but I don’t think it was that bad at all. Just not as good as the first one. I’m going to get into some spoilers so if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to know what happens, click away! So something I didn’t care for with this new Shazam was how little screen time the young actor for Billy received. Like Asher Angel was in maybe five scenes in the entire movie, which I think was a shame. Young Billy was there towards the beginning of the movie and a few scenes at the end but not hardly at all in the middle. I just would have liked a better balance between adult Billy and teenage Billy. Also, one of his struggles in the movie was his fear of aging out of the foster care system, meaning that once he turns 18 in a few months, Victor and Rosa won’t get checks from the government anymore, which will make him feel like a burden the way Mary does. This is only mentioned briefly like twice and I thought it could make for some interesting conflict so I was a little disappointed that that was resolved so easily. I mentioned Mary and her conflict was about her feelings about being an adult and wanting to get a job to help support the family. In the first movie, she wanted to go to college but expressed doubts about that when Billy saved her from getting hit by that truck. She wanted the campus experience but felt bad about leaving the family. But in this movie, she didn’t go to college at all but still studies textbooks. I don’t understand why they didn’t just have her get an online degree. You can go to school completely online nowadays and not have to move so that seems like a simple solution to her problem so I don’t know why that’s such a conflict for her in the second movie. I mean it’s not that much of a conflict because it’s only mentioned two or three times, but still. This is definitely what I liked about the first movie far more for is that it was more character driven, for the most part. Fury of the Gods is definitely more plot driven than character driven. Okay the first one was plot driven but also had a lot of character driven elements as well. If you take out Sivana from the first Shazam, even if you take out all of the magic stuff, there is still all of the conflict with the family and Billy trying to find his mom and all of that. If you take the magic and Daughters of Atlas out of Fury of the Gods, well there’s not much more to the movie, because a lot of the characters’ conflict between each other is only briefly mentioned a handful of times. I just wish it focused more on Billy’s fear of aging and Mary wanting to actually feel like an adult and Freddy wanting to be more independent and so on and so on. The other three kids didn’t really get much of an arc. They showed Eugine trying to map out the magic door room which I thought was cool and Pedro finding cool stuff like Steve the pen in the library. Darla got a cat named Tawny, you know like the tiger from the comics. I did like that they unequivocally confirmed that Pedro is gay. So in the first Shazam, there’s a scene where they go to a strip club and he says that’s not really his thing. Many fans took this as a hint that he could be either gay or asexual. Well in Fury of the Gods, he comes out as gay to the family and they all say that they already knew and that they loved him and that scene was very heartwarming and it still makes me smile. Especially with how wishy-washy a lot of films - especially superhero films - are when it comes to confirmed lgbt characters. Anyone remember how Marvel refused to confirm Valkyrie as bisexual in the third Thor movie? (I know there was a gay man in Eternals but I didn’t watch that movie sooo…) I’m just glad Pedro was able to flat out say, “I’m gay” to his whole family and the audience, leaving no room for misinterpretation or denial. Anyway, I don’t really have a whole lot more to say. I like the movie but I didn’t really like the movie, you know? This didn’t end up being much of a review but whatever. Oh wait! I did want to mention that Wonder Woman showed up! And not just as a headless cameo like Superman at the end of the first Shazam. (although there was a dream scene where Billy goes on a date with Wonder Woman but it never shows her face) Anyway, at the end of Fury of the Gods, Gal Gadot herself shows up and sort of brings Billy back from the dead. It was nice to see her again but I have to wonder how this might play into the new DCU that James Gunn is planning. Is Shazam - is this particular version of Shazam - going to be in Gunn’s DCU in the future?? I don’t know. I know the actor for older Billy, Zachry Levi, said that it would most likely depend on how well Fury of the Gods does at the box office so… unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see him again actually.

[insanityclause]

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A Director Making His Mark in More Ways Than One

LONDON — The director Jamie Lloyd was giving me a tour of his tattoos. Not the Pegasus on his chest or the skeleton astronaut floating on his back, though he gamely described those, but the onyx-inked adornments that cover his arms and hands, that wreathe his neck, that wrap around his shaved head.

When I asked about the dragon at his throat, he told me it had been “one of the ones that hurt the least,” then pointed to the flame-licked skulls on either side of his neck: his “covert way,” he said, of representing drama’s traditional emblems for comedy and tragedy.

“I thought maybe it’d be a little bit tacky to have theater masks on my neck,” he added, a laugh bubbling up, and it’s true: His dragon would have eaten them for lunch.

It was early December, and we were in a lounge beneath the Playhouse Theater, where Lloyd’s West End production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring James McAvoy in a skintight puffer jacket and his own regular-size nose, would soon open to packed houses and critical praise.

Running through Feb. 29, and arriving on cinema screens Feb. 20 in a National Theater Live broadcast, “Cyrano” — newly adapted by Martin Crimp, and positing its hero as a scrappy spoken-word wonder — capped a year that saw Lloyd celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.

In London last summer, his outdoor hit “Evita” traded conventional glamour for sexy grit, while his radical reinterpretation of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was hailed first in the West End, then on Broadway. Ben Brantley, reviewing “Betrayal” in The New York Times, called it “one of those rare shows I seem destined to think about forever.”

When Time Out London ranked the best theater of 2019, it gave the top spot jointly to all three Lloyd productions, saying that he “has had a year that some of his peers might trade their entire careers for.”

Lloyd, who is 39, did not spring from the same mold as many of those peers. There was for him, he says, no youthful aha moment of watching Derek Jacobi onstage and divining that directing was his path. Epiphanies like that belonged to other kids, the ones who could afford the tickets.

If there is a standard background for a London theater director — and Lloyd would argue that certainly there used to be — that isn’t where he came from, growing up working class on the south coast of England, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

The first time I laid eyes on him, chatting in the Playhouse lobby after a preview of “Cyrano,” he was the picture of working-class flair — the gold pirate hoops, the pink and black T-shirt, the belt cinching high-waisted pants.

He looks nothing like your typical West End director. Which of course is precisely the point.

What’s underneath

“It’s quite often said of him,” McAvoy observed by phone, once the reviews were in, “that he strips things away or he tries to take classical works and turn them on their head. I think he’s always just trying to tell the story in the clearest and most exhilarating way possible.”

The “X-Men” star, who put the number of times he’s worked with Lloyd in the past decade at a “gazillion,” calls theirs “probably one of the most defining relationships that I’ve had in my career.”

Yet Lloyd himself is on board with the notion that his assertively contemporary stagings pare back stifling layers of performance history to lay bare what’s underneath.

Like the tiger and dragons that he had emblazoned on his head just last May, though, the unembellished nature of his shows — as minimalist in their way as his tattoos are the opposite — is a relatively recent development.

Lloyd’s first “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring Douglas Hodge in 2012, was also his Broadway debut. It was, he said, “absolutely the ‘Cyrano’ that you would expect,” with the fake nose, the hat, the plume, the sword-fighting.

There is, granted, sword-fighting in the new one — but the audience has to imagine the swords.

Lloyd’s productions, including a lauded revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Passion” in 2010, long marked him as a hot young director on the rise. But he sees in some of his previous work a noisy tendency toward idea overload.

The pivot point came in 2018, with a season that the Jamie Lloyd Company — which he formed seven years ago with the commercial producing powerhouse Ambassador Theater Group — devoted to the short works of Harold Pinter. The playwright’s distillation of language forced Lloyd to match it with his staging.

That immersion led to what the director Michael Grandage — one of Lloyd’s early champions, who tapped him at 27 to be his associate director at the Donmar Warehouse — called Lloyd’s “absolute masterpiece.”

“I had quite a lot of ambition to do a production of ‘Betrayal’ in my life,” Grandage said. “And then when I saw Jamie’s, I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I don’t ever, ever want to direct this play.’ Because that’s, for me, the perfect production.”

Playing dress-up

Charm is a ready currency in the theater, but Lloyd’s is disarming; he seems simply to be being himself, without veneer. Like when I fact-checked something I’d read by asking whether he was a vegan.

“Lapsed vegan,” he confessed immediately, with a tinge of guilt about eating eggs again.

Pay no attention to any tough-guy vibe in photos of him; do not be alarmed by the sharp-toothed cat on the back of his head. In conversation, Lloyd comes across as thoughtful and unassuming, with an animated humor that makes him fun company. If he speaks at the speed of someone with no time to waste, he balances that with focused attentiveness.

His father, Ray, was a truck driver. His mother, Joy (whose name is tattooed on his right forearm, near the elbow), cleaned houses, took in ironing and ran a costume-rental shop, where young Jamie would sneak in to dress up as the children’s cartoon character Rainbow Brite.

“It’s very embarrassing,” he said, squelching a laugh.

Seeing professional theater wasn’t an option then for Lloyd, whose grown-up passion for expanding audience access — one of the things he has made himself known for in the West End — grew out of that exclusion. His company has set aside 15,000 free and 15,000 £15 tickets for its current, characteristically starry three-show season, which will also include Emilia Clarke in “The Seagull” and Jessica Chastain in “A Doll’s House.” At the 786-seat Playhouse, that adds up to just over 38 full houses.

Lloyd, who was studying acting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts when he decided he wanted to direct, found his way to theater as a child by acting in school shows and local amateur productions. Twice he was cast as a monkey; in “The Wizard of Oz,” thrillingly, he got to fly.

The details of his early days have always been colorful — like having a clown as his first stepfather, who performed at children’s parties under the stage name Uncle Funny. But Lloyd is quick to acknowledge the darkness lurking there.

“It sounds a little bit like some dodgy film, because he was actually a really violent man,” he said. “And there were times where he was very physically abusive to my mum. There was a sort of atmosphere of violence in that house that was really uneasy. And yet masked with this literal makeup, but also this sense of trying to entertain people whilst enacting terrible brutality behind the scenes.”

This is where he locates his own connection to Pinter’s work.

“A lot of that is that the violence is beneath the surface,” he said. “And on the top there is this sort of, what I call a kind of topspin, a layer of cover-up.”

Long relationships

Lloyd was still at drama school when he staged a production of Lapine and William Finn’s “Falsettoland” that won a prize: assistant directing a show at the Bush Theater in London. Based on that, Trevor Nunn hired him, at 22, to be his assistant director on “Anything Goes” in the West End — a job he did so well that Grandage got word of it and hired him to assist on “Guys and Dolls.” While Lloyd was doing that, he also began directing in his own right.

The costume and set designer Soutra Gilmour, who has been a constant with Lloyd since he cold-called her for his first professional production, Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” said theirs is an easy relationship, with a “symbiotic transference of ideas.” Even their creative aesthetics have evolved in sync.

“We’ve actually never fallen out in 13 years,” she said over mint tea on a trip to New York last month, just before “Betrayal” closed. “Never! I don’t even know how we would fall out.”

Of course, the one time she tried to decline a Lloyd project five years ago, because its tech rehearsals coincided with the due date for her son’s birth, he told her there was no one else he wanted to work with. So she did the show, warning that at some point she would have to leave. Now, she says, he understands that she won’t sit through endless evening previews, because she needs to go home to her child.

Lloyd and his wife, the actress Suzie Toase (whose name is tattooed on one of his arms), home-school their own three boys (whose names are tattooed on the other). Their eldest, 13-year-old Lewin, is an actor who recently played one of the principal characters, the heroine’s irresistible best friend, on the HBO and BBC One series “His Dark Materials,” whose cast boasts McAvoy as well.

Enter the child

Lloyd’s interpretation of “Betrayal,” a 1978 play that recounts a seven-year affair, imbued it with a distinctly non-’70s awareness of the fragility of family — the notion that children are the bystanders harmed when a marriage is tossed away.

Its gasp-inducing moment came with the entrance of a character Pinter wrote to be mentioned but not seen: the small daughter of the couple whose relationship is imperiled. In putting her onstage, Lloyd didn’t touch the text; it was a simple, wordless role. With it, he altered the resonance of the play.

To me, it seemed logical that Lloyd’s production would have been informed by his experience as a husband and father — and maybe also as a child in a splintering family. How old had he been, anyway, when his parents split up?

“Five,” Lloyd said. “The same age as the character would be.” He paused. “Oh God, yeah, fascinating. I’d not thought about that. Exactly the same age.”

If that fact was of more than intellectual interest to him, he didn’t let on. He volunteered a memory, though — of being a little one “amongst these kind of big giants, and I guess what we can now see as the mess of their lives.”

Blazer-free

Doing “Betrayal” in New York, Lloyd was struck by how eager Americans were to chat about his tattoos. Still, he told me after I texted him a follow-up question about them, he hadn’t expected his appearance to be such a talking point in this story.

It’s not just idle curiosity. It’s about what the tattoos signify in a field where, in Britain as in the United States, the top directors tend to have grown up very comfortably. It’s about who is welcome in a particular space, and who gets to be themselves there.

For a long time after Lloyd started working in the theater, he wore a blazer every day: a conscious attempt to conform in an industry where he felt a nagging sense of difference.

“Every other director at the time was from an Oxbridge background,” he said, “and looked and sounded a particular way. I spent a long time pretending to be like them.”

It was a performance of sorts, with a costume he donned for the role.

It was only about seven or eight years ago — around the time he left the Donmar and started putting together his own company — that he stopped worrying about what people might think if he looked the way he wanted.

“My dad had tattoos” was the first thing he said when I asked him about his own.

“I guess it’s partly getting older,” he mused, “but it’s just sort of going, ‘You can’t pretend to be someone. You’ve got to be who you really are, in every way.’”

The tattoos that have gradually transformed him are from a different aesthetic universe than his recent work onstage. Yet the impulse, somehow, is the same.

In shedding the blazer, in inking his skin, Lloyd has peeled back layers of imposed convention to show who’s underneath.

And should you spot him at the theater, where he is hard to miss, you’ll notice that he looks just like himself.

[souslejaune]

Soon after Auntie Dee Dee’s burial... (Folio 1: Part 3)

Soon after Auntie Dee Dee’s burial, in sleep and wakefulness, a new buzz hovered over my existence, a filmy sub-ocular glaze of super sensitivity. I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, but my father saw me taking pictures of a dead lizard with my bright yellow battery-less camera from China.

“Ebo, what are you doing?”

“I want to compare it with the picture in the Encyclopaedia,” I lied.

Since I spent my entire youth flipping through volumes of the 1979 World Book Encyclopaedia, it was a safe lie.

“Oh, I see. Come to me if you need help, OK?”

“OK.”

In the next few weeks I took pictures of an endless collection of dead creatures: shy geckos, almost transparent with hunger; rats, still in the rigour of greed; flea-bitten dogs, dust-beaten cats, startled rainbow dragonflies, and a face-making toad.  I had no sympathy for dead animals generally – especially not rats and lizards. They were always encroaching on strictly human territories, like kitchens. One of my older cousins even told me that some of the boys in boarding school had the soles of their feet gnawed by rats sometimes.

I felt sorry for the toad though. It was the victim of one of our random playground challenges. Spotted while we were in the land by the local garbage dump playing a football game called four corners, it immediately became the fifth target. Four corners was played by four persons with each one defending a small target. You got two touches of the ball: one to defend your goal, and one to shoot at someone else’s. I was playing with Yaw a.k.a. Table-head, a short, wide-shouldered boy with a flat head and tooth-packed grin; Ato, who we called Tom Brown because his hair always faded to brown as soon as it grew beyond half-an-inch; and Kofi. Kofi used to be called Silas Marner because he always seemed to have more money than us and never wanted to share, but the name Silas Marner ebbed out of use after Ato named him Fagan and it stuck. We actually called him Kofi Fagan; it sounded nicer. Most of us were named after characters from the English books we were made to read at school. I was sometimes called Pip because I loved Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations so much.

Soon after the toad was spotted, all our shots started to head in Yaw’s direction as he was closest to the toad.

Ruffled by the unfair attention, he exclaimed, “I won’t play anymore!”

“OK Table, let’s stone the toad,” suggested Kofi Fagan grabbing a handful of pebbles. “First person to hit it wins the game.”

It was a ploy by Kofi Fagan to turn the game in his favour. He was lethal at throwing stones. He could rescue a ripe mango from its tree with a single shot.

Tom Brown grimaced.

“OK.” Table flung a smooth brown pebble towards the toad as he spoke.

He caught the toad as it was reaching its pink tongue out to catch a fly. The pebble flew across a suspended haze of dust, sneaked into the toad’s mouth and choked it; with its long tongue still out, decorated with a live fly. I ran home to get my camera. In secondary school I would show this picture to Mrs Ogbogu – my Nigerian biology teacher – when she remarked how rare it was to see a toad with its tongue out.

In addition to pictures, I had a single mounted creature. A giant spider. I had an illogical fear of spiders. Size was irrelevant. Once a creeper made the transition from six legs to eight, insect to arachnid, it had me shitting in my shorts. I accomplished many remarkable physical feats when confronted by spiders. Tom Brown, Table and Kofi Fagan often testified to that. I hurdled fences, jumped down trees, and outran cars. This spider, I caught because of the dreams that followed Auntie Dee Dee’s funeral. To confront my fear. I even wrote instructions for it.

Locate your fear

Find a suitable glass

Trap your fear under the glass

Lifting the glass slightly, spray perfume into it

Watch from a distance until your fear dies

I mounted it on a round piece of yellow card and labelled its body parts in a scrawl with sharper edges than my usual handwriting. Testament to the fact that I had perhaps not fully conquered my fear.  I had learned more about it, but it lay beneath the surface ready to stump me if I didn't remain vigilant.

In the dreams, black and red spiders swarmed the food that was served to me by dancing cadavers. I had to swipe them away to eat, but they kept multiplying and making a webbed playground of my body. My body became a living interpretation of Miss Havisham’s wedding room in Great Expectations.

After I mounted my fear, and learned to distinguish the cephalothorax from the abdomen, the spiders disappeared with a single swipe into the dark subworld of the tables around me. I was often the only guest at a cadaver cabaret with four faceless waiters to attend to my needs. On a green stage of knitted vapour, cooking and singing, was Auntie Dee Dee, her face still stuffed with the cotton wool the embalmers used to fill her cheeks.

“Dad, when you die, do you stop breathing first or does your heart stop beating?”

If I weren’t so curious nobody would have guessed that my interest in death was growing at the speed of sickness. I had done everything as I used to except for the pictures, which I had a good excuse for, and reading Great Expectations over and over again; wondering why, if there were so many cobwebs in Miss Havisham’s house, no spiders were ever mentioned. I later found that all the books we had read at school were obscure abridged versions produced locally. The full version – the one produced based on the serialised tale Charles Dickens published in his weekly journal All The Year Round – had “speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies.”

My father raised his eyes from his shop’s inventory list, crinkling his forehead in the process. He studied me with unwavering eyes – a spider contemplating a daring fly.

“It depends son. I guess if you die from a heart attack your heart stops beating first. If you drown you stop breathing first. The only way to know for sure in to ask a doctor…”

“…Or a dead person,” he added laughing.

“They don’t talk about it.”

“What?”

The fly was webbed. The room was suddenly too small. I felt like all the photos on our living room wall were watching me: My sister holidaying in Trafalgar Square with pigeons pecking her feet out of view; Grandma fanning flames under last year’s family feast, the entire Oppong-Ribeiro clan – my family – squinting and smiling at the Odwira festival… What year was that? Why wasn’t I in the picture? A photo of my father with his right arm lawfully draped over his Datsun iterated his silent authority. It was too late to change what I had said.

"What did you say?" My father persisted, his voice softer.

“They don't talk about it; I asked them.”

The creases in my father’s forehead deepened. “Who?”

“The dead people.”

“You’ve been talking to ghosts?”

“No, dead bodies.”

“Dead bodies?”

It sounded really silly once I had said it. I tried to make it sound better.

“In my dreams.”

He inclined his head slightly to the right.

“I don’t speak to anyone I don’t know. Just Auntie Dee Dee…”

“… and sometimes the waiters.”

“No, no, no.” My father sensed my fear of punishment. He had large rough palms that he rarely used on us, but, when he did, we felt the ridges of his rage on our buttocks for days.

“I’m not angry. Tell me about the dreams. Can you tell me?”

I told him about the cabarets and the food; platefuls of steaming jollof with the rice enlivened with colourful vegetables and geometric invasions of meat; endless bowls of oil-speckled groundnut soup; delicious fried plantain streaked red, orange and black by a ridged saucepan, accompanied by a bean sauce that climbed all over your senses in tracks of spiced palm oil, mouthfuls of tiger nuts – crunchy and juicy; yam and cocoyam graffitied with strips of chicken and kontomire; silver spoonfuls of strawberry ice cream; trays full of groundnut and coconut brittle; palmwine, “I didn’t drink it, Daddy”; and mangoes, mangoes, mangoes… Then I told him about the spiders and why I had to mount one.

“I had to eat. It was Auntie Dee Dee’s cooking.”

My father listened. Then he cried. Silver rivulets of sorrow that made him look old. He reached for me. Watching my father cry pulled a cord inside me and I began to sob.

“I’m sorry son.”

He shook. His dark skin felt like a minor earthquake beneath my hands.

“I’m sorry son.” He wiped his face and looked at me through glistening lashes. “Death is difficult for everyone.”

I never made sense of the dreams, nor did I understand why my father apologised, but the dreams stopped. They came back once. This time the food was devoured by the spiders before the plates got to me. The only evidence of the food’s existence was the intricate brown tracks left by the spiders, like dust patterns. I woke up with an acute hunger. It was early 1983.

In the same year there was a terrible food shortage in Ghana. Everything was rationed. The queues of people waiting to buy their provisions lasted for hours and criss-crossed the city. Brown patterns as intricate as a dust-stained spider web. Still, we were invisible. The West was reluctant to help a Ghanaian government that was sending its students to Castro’s Cuba to study. People begged. You can’t afford pride when you have children. The head of state called us comrades. He was thin too. We learnt to make a single meal last an entire day. A stillness enveloped the entire nation. School suddenly seemed difficult. We lacked the energy for endless football games and I soon forgot the spider dreams in the vortex of hunger.  

—–

continued >> here <<… | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez

[ikagrp]

Welcome Andi! You’ve been accepted as your first choice of Hailee Steinfeld as Freya Romero Please send in your account within the next 24 hours. Also, please follow these tags: ikag starter , Ikag social, ikaghh , ikag important , ikag task ,  ikagfollow ,  ikagunfollow and  ikag event.

OOC Information

Name (and pronouns) /Age/Timezone:

Andi the flop/21/EST 

Activity

I’m on almost 24/7 (I literally have no life 90% of the time lmfao)

RP Experience

four years woop woop

IC Information

Who is the character?

Please keep this layout for us. So that it is easier for us to update everything. 

NAME: Freya Romero

AGE: 18

LOCATION: Las Vegas, Nevada

FACECLAIM: Hailee Steinfeld

BIRTHDAY: December 8, 1998

BIOGRAPHY:

It wasn’t easy growing up in the life of Freya Romero. She was born to a single mother named Angelique Romero, who was also known as “Angel” around the streets of Vegas. Working in an off-set strip club, Angel had been known to a good handful of the city, but the crowd was shocked to know that one day, she had just infamously disappeared. The truth was that one of the clients had gotten her pregnant over the process of her job, so she couldn’t handle the pressure from keeping her physique in tact anymore. That’s when Angel chose to live on the streets and in various homeless shelters when she was still pregnant. Eventually, she gave birth to Freya and swore to herself that she would protect her daughter with her life and always put her first.

As time went by for the two girls, Angel and Freya were always seen roaming the streets of Vegas trying to get food and shelter for themselves. It was a hard lifestyle to live especially for the younger girl as she didn’t have much of an education going around. One day, a talent publicist recognized Angel from when she used to do her strip club shows and had told her that he had admired her from afar asking her to be a showgirl in one of Vegas’ biggest shows. Of course, Angel had immediately accepted the offer and that led to her and Freya going from rags to riches within months. While Angel had been getting paid to do her shows, Freya was offered an education and was tutored by Angel’s new publicist. The younger girl had loved learning new and various things while her mother completely opposed the idea considering she had thought Freya would grow up to be like her.

Freya’s intention was never that in of itself. She actually had a passion for being a cat specialist, one who studied wild cats such as lions, tigers… but not bears. Other than her education, she was also determined to find out something else that was on her mind for her entire life: who her father was. Sure she looked up to Angel’s publicist as a father, but her biological father had to be somewhere out in the world. When Freya had finally turned 18, she had the courage to ask Angel about the whereabouts of her father. At first, Angel was a little hesitant about breaking the news to her daughter, but then she finally gave in. Freya’s father was none other than Oliver Russo, Katerina Russo’s father. She knew everything about the pop star as she was one of Katerina’s most dedicated and loyal fans, even running her biggest fan page blog and meeting her in concert a few times. When Freya heard about the news, she thought about a way to contact Katerina. Since she was no longer in the US, she decided it would be best to join IKAG herself and break the news to her.

Para sample

nah fam

Anything else

She’s Katerina Russo’s half sister!