amy

I remember scrambling a month ago to write a press release for our show and asking a friend for help. He transformed it into a captivating invitation for the media to check out our show. Right, so when does that happen exactly? At the press preview. When is that? How do we send it to them? Who’s in charge of inviting the press? As a very new production company, with no one on our team with any experience in producing a play or a Fringe show, we made a bunch of rookie errors.

Two days before our press preview, we scrambled to invite members of the media. Hopefully five people would show up. So, when more than 30 people, including reporters from the Weekly and the Sentinel, were in the audience, it felt amazing. It was our first full run through and it went great. The audience laughed and cried and they were with me. They clapped and thanked me afterwards.

A reporter for a hyper-local blog interviewed me afterwards and gave me a ton of encouragement and confidence. He said I should look for his review in the next few days. The next morning it was in my inbox. This review implored everyone to go see my show because I won him over in the first five minutes. It said I was more #woke than some black folk, such as Trump appointee Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. I was on cloud-9, wherever that is. I could see our show going viral. Everyone was going to love it.

I entered the show as a skeptic. Within the first 5 minutes, I found myself nodding in agreement with the insights Ms. Selikoff shared with the mostly white audience.

-David Porter, 32805 Blog

And then the next review from a well-known and respected local source came out and it was critical. Biting and stinging and I felt dismissive. Sure, there were some valid points of things we could improve, but come on give us credit for trying to do something really hard: talk about race as white people to white people. I was devastated. I was pissed. At the critic and myself. The critic because it felt too critical and myself because I forgot that if you do a play, you should expect to be reviewed. Also, you should expect to be reviewed and critiqued if you invited the entire local press to preview your show and do exactly that.

Amy never truly turns her microscope on herself, acknowledging but not fully exploring her personal complicity in white privilege.

Seth Kubersky, Orlando Weekly

Somehow, I had forgotten that, or hadn’t realized how hard it was to have the thing you loved and created and worked for years on to be judged and taken apart and printed in the paper for everyone to see. And it is a one-sided interaction: I perform, they write. There’s not a back and forth; I didn’t get a chance to clarify or justify certain decisions. And for an entire day I was undone. I wanted to give up before we had even started. There were still five performances to come, but would anyone show up?

It was at this point, a very low point, that our team decided I wouldn’t be looking at reviews until after Fringe. By the end of Fringe, we would have four reviews, two positive and two I have trouble viewing as anything but negative. But I think that’s part of the life of a critic; you’re going to make a lot of people unhappy because your writing is authoritative and definitive. And that’s what I need to keep in mind, the critic is important, but the critic is just one person’s opinion. So, focus on the upside, many first-time show don’t get four reviews or the press exposure we received.

In theory, I think critique can be useful; in practice, I think the critics are full of shit and I take it personally, very personally. Press coverage is a double-edged sword: it gets the word out, but then you focus on the coverage, not your craft and the truth you’re bringing to the world.

This feeling and thinking would haunt me all throughout Fringe. Other one-person shows were getting great reviews and press. My jealousy was palpable. But the comparison game is where creativity goes to die. I tried to tell myself that it was all okay, but to be honest I was panicking. Imposter syndrome on overdrive: who am I to be here, who am I to perform, how did I think a white lady could do this, what am I doing with my life?

But then my questions shifted. Why did I write this show in the first place? Who is my audience? What is the truth I have to speak? Do I know the answers to those questions? Yes; mostly. So, then I have to be true to those things, my values, and the talent I’ve been given and leave it there. Critics be damned. So, to speak.

Easier said than done though.

I was wondering why this was the topic of my first post since Fringe and I think it’s because criticism has been such a big part of my story. I think it’s also a good bell weather sign to check my intentions. Am I just after accolades or exposing the deep, dark truth of racism? As my therapist would say, how can I be kind to myself and not fall into perfectionism and self-contempt?

So here goes nothing:

• we had six performances;
• four reviews;
• one sold-out show;
• almost everybody told us they appreciated the show;
• many people asked how they could take their next steps;
• I cried at 4 of 6 performances during the Philando story;
• we were brave;
• we took big risks;
• we talked to hundreds of people (though it felt like a million);
• and we were people with a purpose.

I guess that’s a pretty good start. There’s still a long way to go.

In early 2015, Amy Selikoff was struck that though the Civil War had ended nearly 150 years before and yet, it really didn’t feel like it.

The Confederate flag is still on Mississippi’s state flag, the same flag flying on the grounds of South Carolina’s capitol, Michael Brown’s death sparking massive protests the summer before, the hashtag wars of #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter. Conversations about Obama’s legacy, mass incarceration, the urban-rural divide. Fractured. Fragmented. Frustrated.

Why haven’t we been able to put it behind us?

This question drove her to begin reading every book on the Civil War and Reconstruction. She found part of the answer, but she had to keep digging to find the thread of the source and traveled back to the 15^th century through today. Six centuries of captain’s logs, newspaper articles, speeches, declarations, enslaved person’s narratives, enslaver’s diaries, period novels, textbooks, even case law.

Her conclusions weren’t easy.

Nor did she know exactly what she was supposed to do: write a book, publish an essay to Medium, go back to school, or just keep reading. She read more and wrote some protest songs, listened to Lauren Hill and Bob Dylan, wrote some more protest songs. Played them for herself and her cats. But as she kept writing a sort of poetic history came about. Think Longfellow or Tennyson, but 21^st century and not so rhymey. She read the poem thing to a few friends and they didn’t hate it. But she kept reading, learning, thinking, and writing.

What should be done next? Some friends suggested running for office. No thanks. One friend said why not make it a show and apply to the Fringe. Why not? This at least was a start of a next step. And here’s where we find ourselves today.

A Bit of Backstory

When Amy was 11 she lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. She attended an amazing public school named Mississippi Creative Arts Elementary Magnet School and rode the bus across town an hour each day. This school was in a housing project for refugees from South East Asia, but it was also one of the most diverse schools in the state and one of the most successful.

Amy loved history, geography, science, and sports. In 1993, the History Day Project theme was past, present, and future.  How do communities change over time? The year before Amy read a book by Evelyn Fairbanks, called Days of Rondo. It’s about a historically black community of that name in St. Paul. The History Day adviser suggested that would make a very interesting project because most of Rondo was destroyed when Interstate-94 was created in the 1950s and 1960s. Significant African-American wealth wiped out as it lay directly in the path connecting St. Paul and Minneapolis.  Single-family homes replaced by housing projects, which still stood in 1993.

For research, Amy’s parents dropped her off downtown at the Minnesota Historical Society on Saturday afternoons and she found her way to the records room and fell in love with the stacks (rows of books). They also went to modern-day Rondo and walked across the highway bridge over the Interstate and took pictures of the divided community. African-Americans weren’t paid a fair price under the eminent domain laws guaranteed by the 5th Amendment. It wasn’t fair in 1950. And it 1993, it still wasn’t fair. And seven years later, this is what led Amy to be a double major in history and journalism.

Today a new corridor project underway in the planning stages, some in St. Paul fear a repeat of the injustice of Rondo.

In someways Somebody’s History is a continuation of the research project she started in 6th grade.