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 I’m also realizing that it is the end of the semester and I didn’t post about the two outside of class events I went to. First off, I’d like to say I went to both of these events because I wanted to and the fact that they related to the course was also excellent! 

The first performance I went to was that of Staceyann Chin. She read a lot from her new memoir, The Other Side of Paradise.  She read about checking out her “cocobread” in the outhouse when she was a young girl, putting on her very first “Stay-free” pad upside down and trying to connect with her biological father. I really took a lot from her stories. They all had this beautiful innocence to them and they were just overflowing with impressions of her childhood in Jamaica. I actually have a bit of a confession; I wanted to get a feel of who Staceyann Chin was before I went to see some poet on a Friday night. So, I found some of her poetry on youtube. Namely, “Feminist or a Womanist”. By the time I went to see her performance, I knew all the words to “Feminist or a Womanist.” Possibly my favourite part of the evening was when she apologized to the men in the audience, at the end of her show, for potentially making them very uncomfortable with all her talk of dykery and periods, she followed this up by a quick pitch for any potential sperm donors among the men since she and her partner are trying to have a baby.