#soldiers' and sailors' monument

[detroitlib]

View of Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument and city hall. Pedestrians walk by as a street-car travels the road. Horse-drawn vehicles are also shown. Printed on front: "Soldiers' Monument and City Hall, Detroit, Mich." Printed on back: "Soldiers' Monument and City Hall, Detroit, Mich. The Soldiers' Monument towers to a height of 60 feet. The body is of granite and statues are golden bronze. It was completed in 1881 and cost $70,000. In the tower of the City Hall is located the second largest clock in the world. Published by Wolverine News Co., Detroit, Mich. Made in U.S.A." Handwritten on back: "I will be over at Clapham next Thursday. Have promised to spend the day with Mrs. Spelman. Will look in and see you on my way, about 12 o'clock. Love from Nellie." Card is postmarked September 18, 1913.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a brotherhood of Army, Navy, and Marine veterans who fought for the Union in the Civil War, pay tribute on May 30, 1929. At that time the holiday was known as Decoration Day. They are gathered at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Riverside Drive and 89th Street.

Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images

[indianapolisindiana]

Some images from the eclipse for downtown Indianapolis, IN 4-8-24

[the-random-sentence-library]

"Dark, breezy, and secluded, it was ours."

Quote randomly selected from page 71 of Megan Margulies's memoir My Captain America: A Granddaughter's Memoir of a Legendary Comic Book Artist.

Additional notes: "Ours" refers to the author and her friends. "It" refers to The Soldiers' and Sailors' monument in Manhattan, New York, the United States of America. The selection of this quote/book for American Independence Day was purely coincidental.

Quote was selected at random from a book chosen at random from my local library.

[rabbitcruiser]

General Lafayette, a French officer in the American Revolutionary War, spoke at what would become Lafayette Square, Buffalo, during his visit to the United States on June 4, 1825.  

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Exploring NYC: The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park (February 2023)

[aviationgeek71]

Remember...

Remember the Marine falling on a grenade to save a friend...

Remember the bomber pilot, desperately fighting for control of his burning aircraft, ensuring his crewmembers bailed out—yet remained in the cockpit a moment too long...

Remember the nurse diligently treating injuries until the lines collapsed, only to meet her fate in a concentration camp...

Remember the young Army private leaving cover to drag an injured friend off the battlefield, only to go down himself...

Remember the naval officer surrounded by the sounds of a dying ship—holding his post with water rising, ensuring sailors under his command escape—only to find his own fate in the ocean depths...

Remember our furry friends who remained by the side of their soldier in a hail of gunfire—whether a war horse or dog—loyal to their final moments...

From the fields of the American Revolution to the rocky terrain of Afghanistan, remember those Americans who did not come home. 🙏🇺🇲

This photo is a memorial to all the war dogs and their military handlers who did not come home from Vietnam War. If you look closely, the taller portion of the monument lists the names of 300 military handlers; while the lower portion depicts the names of over 4200 war dogs who served to the end.

The memorial is titled, “The Unbreakable Bond.” Mott's Military Museum, Groveport, Ohio. October 16, 2021

By @aviationgeek71

[scotland]

The National Monument of Scotland, situated on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, commemorates Scottish soldiers and sailors who died in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed by Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair, it was intended to resemble the Parthenon in Athens.

Construction began in 1826 but halted in 1829 due to lack of funds, leaving it incomplete with only twelve columns. This unfinished state has earned it the nickname “Scotland’s Disgrace.”

Despite this, the monument is a significant landmark, offering panoramic views of the city and symbolising Edinburgh’s neoclassical architectural heritage.

[ginandoldlace]

Today in 1982 Twenty sailors were killed when the destroyer HMS Sheffield was hit by an Argentinian Exocet missile during the Falklands War. The Falklands National Monument in Cardiff bears the names of the 255 sailors, soldiers and airmen who died on the UK side. The memorial centres on a five-tonne rock from the Falkland Islands, a gift from the islanders

[retropopcult]

Detroit, June 1908. "Cadillac Square, Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument and Hotel Pontchartrain from City Hall." Also the lower section of one of the city's famous "moonlight tower" arc lamps.  

[divinedeathbed]

Being a monument mythos fan and a statue enjoyer read: fucker will have you being insane imagining the statue freedom on the dc capitol building having a lesbian polycule with other female state capitol statues

They r in love....

Lady Victory, on top of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis Indiana

Miss Penn or Commonwealth in Harrisburg PA

And ofc the goddess herself, Freedom <3

[adventuressclubamericas]

Flat Phryne in Buffalo!

Flat Phryne's adventures on the way to Miss Fisher Con in St. Paul continue. This week, she paid a visit to Buffalo, New York!

She checked in at the Hotel Lafayette. During it's prime, the Lafayette was one of the 15 finest hotels in the United States, boasting not only elevators, and hot and cold running water and a telephone in every room. Flat Phryne enjoyed her time there before heading out to see the sites.

Flat Phryne's first stop was Buffalo City Hall, one of the largest and tallest municipal buildings in the US. The Art Deco building, designed by Dietel, Wade and Jones, and featuring sculpture by Albert Steward, Rene Paul Chambellan and William Ehrich, was completed in 1931.

Next she made her way to the Liberty Building, built in 1925 and topped with replicas of the Statue of Liberty.  She wanted to replicate Didier Pasquette's 2010 tightrope walk between the 2 rooftop statues, but it wasn't in the cards. Maybe next time!

She then stopped by the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Lafayette Park.

Phryne was keen to learn more about Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, though she prefers footie to American football.

She made a quick stop to admire the Buffalo Savings Bank, 

and the Electric Tower building, 

before taking in a picture and enjoying the Wurlitzer extravaganza at Shea's. The Mighty Wurlitzer organ at Shea's (and in the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne!) were made just north of Buffalo. 

Today, the former Wurlitzer factory is home to a brewery, events, and an amazing chocolate factory.

Where will Flat Phryne turn up next? Stay tuned!

#MissFisher

#MsFisher

#1920s

#1920sfashion

#1920sstyle

#1960s

#1960sfashion

#1960svintage

#1930s

#1930sfashion

#1930sstyle

#1930svintage

#shanghai

#melbourne

#mnhistory

#flapper

#phrynefisher

#adventuressescluboftheamericas

#adventuress

#stpaulmn

#stpaul

#saintpaul

#saintpaulmn

#saintpaulminnesota

#saintpaulhotel

#buffalo

#buffalony

#wurlitzer

#artdeco

#flatphryne

 ·

[nedison]

The Voice In The Garden by Harlan Ellison

After the bomb, the last man on Earth wandered through the rubble of Cleveland, Ohio. It had never been a particularly jaunty town, nor even remotely appealing to aesthetes. But now, like Detroit and Rangoon and Minsk and Yokohama, it had been reduced to a petulantly shattered Tinkertoy of lath and brickwork, twisted steel girders and melted glass.

As he picked his way around the dust heap that had been the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in what had been Public Square, his eyes red-rimmed from crying at the loss of humanity, he saw something he had not seen in Beirut or Venice or London. He saw the movement of another human being.

Celestial choruses sang in his head as he broke into a run across the pitted and blasted remains of Euclid Avenue. It was a woman!

She saw him, and in the very posture of her body, he knew she was filled with the same glory he felt. She knew! She began running toward him, her arms outstretched. They seemed to swim toward each other in a ballet of slow motion. He stumbled once, but got to his feet quickly and went on. They detoured around the crumpled tin of tortured metal that had once been automobiles, and met in front of the shattered carcass that was, in a time seemingly cons before, The May Co.

"I'm the last man!" he blurted. He could not keep the words inside, they fought to fill the air. "I'm the last, the very last. They're all dead, everyone but us. I'm the last man, and you're the last woman, and we'll have to mate and start the race again, and this time we'll do it right. No war, no hate, no bigotry, nothing but goodness ... we'll do it, you'll see, it'll be fine, a bright new shining world from all this death and terror.

Her face was lit with an ethereal beauty, even beneath the soot and deprivation. "Yes, yes," she said. "It'll be just like that. I love you, because we're all there is left to love, each other."

He touched her hand. "I love you. What is your name?"

She flushed slightly. "Eve," she said. "What's yours?"

"Bernie," he said.

[petervintonjr]

Lesson #107

"Good morning, sir! I've brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!"

In another "why on earth haven't they made a movie out of this person's life yet?" entry, we examine the fascinating tale of Robert Smalls.  Born enslaved on a plantation in 1839 Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls's childhood was, as one might expect, a never-ending horror show --the region was still grappling with the aftermath of Denmark Vesey's (planned) slave uprising, and local laws had decidedly amped up the oppression and the cruelty.  At the age of 12 Smalls's owner sent him to Charleston to work as a ship-rigger and sailor.  At the time all earnings went to the owner but Smalls managed to negotiate being able to keep 85% of the earnings by the time he was 18 --his plan ultimately being to buy his wife's and daughter's freedom.  During these years he learned everything there was to learn about seamanship and by the time the Civil War kicked off, Smalls found himself serving as a deckhand about the sidewheel steamer Planter, a supply ship tasked with delivering armaments to various Confederate forts, including the now-infamous Fort Sumter.

On May 13, 1862 at 2:30 a.m., Smalls changed the narrative a little. 

While the Planter was berthed in Charleston and all of her white crew (including its officers) were ashore, Smalls snuck his wife and children aboard her, and, along with twelve other secretly-recruited slaves from the city, commandeered the vessel and sailed her right past 5 other Confederate ships and other heavily-armed shore emplacements and forts --Smalls having mastered the coded whistle signals necessary to bluff his way past.  The Planter then approached the Union blockade and raised the white flag to hail a Union clipper ship, the Onward.  The Planter's entire store of munitions, plans, charts, and codebooks were turned over to U.S. Naval intelligence, and the ship itself became a Union warship.  Smalls quickly gained notoriety in the Union's cause and drew the attention of President Lincoln, which almost certainly influenced his decision to permit Black soldiers to enlist in the Union Army.

There is of course a great deal more to the story --not the least of which includes Smalls's commissioning as an actual U.S. Navy officer and formal instatement as the Planter's actual Captain.  He also piloted the Skipper, the Isaac Smith, and the ironclad Keokuk.  He supported Sherman's March to the Sea and was present for the Union flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter in April 1865.  His postwar story is equally compelling --including his purchase of his former owner's plantation house in Beaufort, and the founding of a school for Black children.  He lent support to the Freedmen's Bureau, started and published a Black-owned newspaper, the Beaufort Southern Standard , and then --perhaps most improbably of all-- in 1874 ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, won, and served in Congress a total of five terms (first in South Carolina's 5th District, then after gerrymandering, the 7th District).  His public role did not end in 1884 --he lived long enough into the twentieth century to witness the rise of Jim Crow and fiercely pushed back against Black disenfranchisement, which was being rewritten back into a great many state constitutions, including South Carolina's.  Smalls died of malaria in 1915, at the age of 75. 

A monument to Smalls at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort includes his 1895 statement to the South Carolina legislature: "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."

(Okay, I fibbed a bit in that first paragraph --there IS in fact a Robert Smalls biopic at last greenlit and in development by Amazon Studios.  No casting announcements yet, but it will reportedtly be directed by Malcolm M. Mays.  Keep an eye out.  In the meantime, for further enrichment I would recommend "Moonlight Helmsman" by Richard Maule and "Trouble The Water" by Rebecca Dwight Bruff --while I am not normally a fan of historical fiction, these two books definitely bring the drama and the excitement while still staying true to the actual facts.)

[ausetkmt]

Oct. 5, 2022

Suzan-Lori Parks is drawn to archways. Early on in her New York life, long before she became one of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, she lived above a McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue — the Golden Arches. Then she moved out by Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, with its triumphal Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Now she lives in an apartment overlooking the marble monument honoring the nation’s first president at the entrance to Washington Square Park.

“It’s very symbolic,” Parks told me. “I’m always orienting myself to arches.”

Arches, of course, are gateways, portals between one world and another, and Parks is endlessly thinking about other worlds.

This season, audiences will have ample opportunity to join her.

A starry 20th-anniversary revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning fable about two brothers, three-card monte and one troubling inheritance, is in previews on Broadway. “Sally & Tom,” a new play about Parks’s two favorite subjects, history and theater, but also about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, has just begun performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “Plays for the Plague Year,” Parks’s diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers, is to be presented next month at Joe’s Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring. And “The Harder They Come,” her musical adaptation of the 1972 outlaw film with a reggae score, will be staged at the Public Theater early next year.

“I’m like a bard,” she said. “I want to sing the songs for the people, and have them remember who they are.”

At this point in her career, Parks, who in 2002 became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a revered figure, regularly described as one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.

“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us,” said the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches playwriting and performance studies at Yale.

“She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater,” he said. “And she really is the most successful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”

PARKS HAS BEEN TELLING STORIES since she was a child. She wrote songs. She tried writing a novel. There was a period when she made her own newspaper, called The Daily Daily, reporting on what she saw through a Vermont attic window. (She was born in Kentucky, and moved frequently because her father was in the military.)

While an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, she had the good fortune to take a creative-writing class at nearby Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who suggested she try playwriting, and, even though she feared he was just trying to politely steer her away from prose, she did. “That’s what I’m doing still,” she said. “Trying theater.”

Her apartment is filled with evidence of a furiously busy creative life: shelves heaving with plastic crates containing thoughts on pending and possible projects; elements of a second novel marinating on a wallboard cloaked by a blanket; index cards in Ziploc bags; a laptop perched on a crate atop the dining table; lyric revisions in notebooks on a music stand by an ever-at-the-ready guitar. (She is a songwriter who occasionally performs with a band; this season’s four productions all feature music she wrote.)

“Writing, I think, is related to being kind of like a witch,” she said as she showed me around. “Writing is magical. I loved mythology, and folk tales, and I could hear them — old stories — not in a recording of something that somebody living in my presence had told me, but if you listen, you can hear organizational principles of nature, which includes the history of people, which is narrative.”

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So writing is listening? “Not in a passive way,” she said. “I’m on the hunt.” By this point, she was on her feet, pantomiming the stalking stance of a wild cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re being drawn toward it, and you’re reeling it in at the same time, like a fisher.”

As she talked, she kept cutting herself off, reaching for ways to differentiate her craft. “There’s a lot of writers who have ideas, and they have an agenda, and that’s cool,” she said. “I think I’m something else.”

Digging in to the question of why she writes, she became more and more expansive, reflecting on the songlines of Indigenous Australians, which connect geography and mythology.

“We have our songlines too — we just forgot them a long time ago,” she said. “They’re encoded in all the religious texts. They’re in African folk tales. They’re in the stories that your mom or your grandmother taught you. They’re there, and I can’t get them out of my head.”

“If you can hear the world singing,” she added, “it’s your job to write it down, because that’s the calling.”

PARKS IS NOW 59, and her work has been in production for 35 years. In 1989, the first time The New York Times reviewed her work, the critic Mel Gussow declared her “the year’s most promising new playwright.” In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous quarter century; explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s co-chief theater critic, described Parks as “a specialist in the warping weight of American history,” and declared, “Suzan-Lori Parks has emerged as the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today.”

“She is a genre in and of herself,” said the playwright James Ijames, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fat Ham.” And what is that genre? “It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous — all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.”

Her early plays were experimental (“opaque,” Brantley once wrote). The recent plays have been more accessible, for which Parks makes no apologies.

“People — not you, but people — when they ask that question, they’re like, ‘Oh, so now you’re selling out! You’re getting more mainstream and you’re not being true to your roots!’” she said. “Oh, no. I’m becoming more and more and more true. Trust me on this one: I’m following the spirit, no doubt. So, yeah, ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ looks like real life, cause it is. So maybe we ought to think about what am I writing about, and if I’m true to what I’m writing about.”

Reflecting her singular stature, Parks has an unusual perch from which to work: She is a writer in residence at the Public Theater, where she receives a full-time salary and benefits. At the Public, she also conducts one of her great ongoing experiments, “Watch Me Work,” a series of events, in-person before the pandemic and online now, at which anyone can work on their own writing while she works on hers, and then they talk about creativity. Early in the pandemic, Parks held such sessions online every day.

“Her great subject,” said the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”

As part of her arrangement with the Public, Parks is also an arts professor at N.Y.U., which is how she wound up across from Washington Square Park, where she lives in faculty housing with her husband, Christian Konopka, and their 11-year-old son. For years, they shared one bedroom; this summer, they finally scored an upgrade, just 70 steps down the hall (their son counted), but now with a bit more space and that archward view.

She has surrounded herself with a striking number of good-luck charms: not only the pink unicorn balance board on which she stands while typing, but also a tray of unicorn plushies; James Baldwin and Frida Kahlo votive candles; a hamsa wall hanging she picked up at a flea market; milagro hearts from Mexico; Buddha, Ganesh, rabbit and turtle figurines; and a deck of tarot cards (yes, she did a basic reading for me; I drew the high priestess card). Also: she has tattooed into one arm, three times, a yoga sutra in Sanskrit that she translated as “submit your will to the will of God.” (She calls herself a “faith-based, spiritual-based person,” and is also a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, which she does every morning, after meditation and before writing.)

“All the help I can get, baby,” she said.

THE MANY ARTIFACTS on display in her apartment include a shelf set up as a shrine to Baldwin, a dollar bill Parks collected when, feeling the need to perform, she tried busking in a subway station, and a “Black Lives Matter” placard she held at protests during the summer of 2020, when she also signed the “We See You White American Theater” petition, written by an anonymous collective, calling for changes in the industry.

“Hey, I’m angry as the next Black woman,” she said. “And yet, to get through this, we need to also listen — listen to the voice of anger, listen to the voice of love, listen to the voice of wisdom, listen to the voice of history.”

She added, “Let’s not just stand around telling people that they suck. At least where I come from, that’s not a conversation, and, at least where I come from, that’s not good dialogue.”

The tone of some of the conversation around diversity in theater is clearly a concern of hers — that’s obvious in “Plays for the Plague Year,” which, in the most recent draft, contains a playlet called “The Black Police,” in which three “Black Cops” approach a “writer,” played by Parks, and say, “We’re here to talk with you about your blackness/Why you work with who you work with.”

In our interview, Parks said she was troubled by “the policing of Black people by Black people, and not just in the arts,” adding, “we have to wake up to the ways we are policing each other to our detriment.”

“No more trauma-based writing!” she said. “These are rules. And Suzan-Lori Parks does not like to be policed. Any policing cuts me off from hearing the spirit. Sometimes the spirit sings a song of trauma. I’m not supposed to extend my hand to that spirit that is hurting because it’s no longer marketable, or because I should be only extending my hand to the spirits who are singing a song of joy? That’s not how I want to conduct my artistic life.”

She also said she is troubled by how much anger, at the Public Theater and elsewhere, has been directed at white women. “Not to say that Karen doesn’t exist. Yes, yes, yes. But it’s interesting that on our mission to dismantle the patriarchy, we sure did go after a lot of white women. If you talk about it, it’s ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.’ No, I’m not. I’m supporting nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of that got lost, and lot of times we just stayed silent when the loudest voice in the room was talking, and the loudest voice in the room is not always the voice of wisdom.”

THIS SEASON, SHE’S PIVOTING back toward the stage after a stretch of film work in which she wrote the screenplay for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and was a writer, showrunner and executive producer of “Genius: Aretha,” both of which were released last year.

At the start of the pandemic, she assigned herself the project that became “Plays for the Plague Year,” writing one short play each day for 13 months. The discipline was a familiar one: In 2002, after winning the Pulitzer, she began “365 Days/365 Plays,” then she did another daily playwriting exercise during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The pandemic play is part personal history — how the coronavirus affected Parks and her family — and part requiem for those who died during that period, from George Floyd to Parks’s first husband. The play, like much of Parks’s work, features songs she wrote. “I was moved into other states, where I wasn’t just documenting what happened that day, but I wanted to sing,” she said.

She’s got plenty still to come — she’s still polishing “The Harder They Come,” which will feature songs by Jimmy Cliff and others, including Parks, who said the story, set in Jamaica, “really captures a beautiful people in their struggle.” She’s then hoping to turn to that second novel (a first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003).

She is planning a screen adaptation of “Topdog,” as well as a new segment of her Civil War drama “Father Comes Home From the Wars” (so far, three parts have been staged; she said she expects to write nine or 12). Also: she’s writing the book, music and lyrics for an Afrofuturist musical, “Jubilee,” that she’s developing with Bard College; “Jubilee,” inspired by “Treemonisha,” a Scott Joplin opera that was staged on Broadway in 1975, is about a woman who establishes a new society on the site of a former plantation.

On a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks settled in behind a folding table to watch a stumble-through of “Sally & Tom,” which is being developed in association with the Public, where it is expected to be staged next fall. The work, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is structured as a play-within-a-play — it depicts a contemporary New York theater company in the final days of rehearsing a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks has had a longtime interest in Jefferson and Hemings, and at one point had worked on a television project about the relationship that never got made; the play, she said, is not a straight historical drama, but “about how the world is made, and how we live in this country.”

The protagonist is a playwright who, like Parks, is warm but exacting, and is rewriting and restructuring the show as opening night nears. When I asked Joseph Haj, the Guthrie’s artistic director, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he at first shrugged it off, saying artists are always present in their work. After the run-through, he grabbed me to amend his remarks. “I take back everything I said,” he said. “I see her all over this.”

Kristen Ariza, who is playing the playwright as well as Hemings (the fictional playwright stars in her own play) said “the play is full of humor, until it’s not.”

“It feels so meta, because we’re doing the play, within the play, and we’re doing all these things like within the play,” she said. “She’s constantly questioning, ‘Does this fit? Is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She’s hearing our voices and adding things and making things work better as we go.”

A few days later, Parks was in Times Square, watching an invited dress rehearsal for “Topdog/Underdog.” The set is draped in a floor-to-ceiling gold-dipped American flag, meant, the director, Kenny Leon, told me, to reflect the way commerce infuses the culture.

Two actors who have enjoyed success onscreen, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the story’s brothers, mischievously named Lincoln and Booth. They share a shabby apartment; Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Their relationship to each other, to truth-telling, and to their shared history is at the heart of the story.

Both actors encountered the play as undergraduates; Hawkins was a stagehand on a production at Juilliard, and Abdul-Mateen read a few scenes as Booth while at Berkeley. “It’s the first piece of material that I ever performed on a stage that I felt like was written for someone like me,” Abdul-Mateen said.

Like many people I spoke with, Abdul-Mateen was particularly struck by Parks’s ear for dialogue. “It’s as if she eavesdropped on these two characters,” he said, “and just wrote everything down as she heard it.”

Hawkins called the play “an ode to young Black men who don’t always get to live out loud.” And he is embracing that opportunity — one night, he called Parks at 2 a.m. to discuss a section of the play; she has also helped him learn the guitar, which he had not played before getting this role. “There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries,” he said. “When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her.”

Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang: Hawkins again, this time with a reverential plea. “Make us proud, man,” he said. “She’s a national treasure for us.”

[rabbitcruiser]

The Indiana State Soldiers and Sailors Monument was dedicated on May 15, 1902.