Catch me, whore!
a day in the park, Black people really are everywhere, and exposition balls
¿What you heard?
The flag at Normandale Recreation Center flies at half-mast. Fires.
I post up on bird-poopy bleachers reading Anansi Boys, realizing that I probably just don’t dig Neil Gaiman as, behind me, an old vato speaks too loudly – because he hates his hearing aid – vocalizing the greatest hits of the various prisons he’s inhabited to his homey friend.
They cough while eating the weed brownies Old Vato’s daughter has helped him prepare.
A white Lateenager walks past shouting, “catch me, whore! You’re behind me, bitch!” to a Black teen with wobbly afro puffs wearing The Nightmare Before Christmas pajama pants.
“You took the easy route, loser!” he shouts back.
What you doin’?!
In Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Juan tells Little “there are Black people everywhere… No place you can go in the world ain’t got no Black people.”
It’s a great line, but is it true?
One of the intentions behind Gullah Binyah, the semi-documentary animated educational children’s travel show I’m developing, is to prove Juan right, so as I outline sample episodes of the show, I decided to challenge myself.
The proof of concept is called Aisha Been Watts. Everyone knows there are Black people in Watts, but could Aisha Been Mongolia?
Turns out, yes, and I bodied that outline.
I guess there really are Black people everywhere.
What you seen??
LET’S GO LUNA! (2018-2022) has what I wish Screenwriter Santa would have put in my stocking. It’s called the magic globe, but really it’s just a floating ball of exposition that basically just recites Wikipedia.
In this children’s travel show, the children are so whiplashed with world travel that they never actually know where they are until Magic Globe tells them.
Magic Globe should suck. Like she sounds like the dankest exposition dump ever, and I suppose she is, but like, she works anyway. That’s why I want need her!
As the series progresses though, the writers do give Magic Globe some characterization and agency so that, by the end of the third to last episode, she literally sprouts arms, floats up into space, and swordfights the moon.
