
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish
(2007, Bantam)These days everyone is into “urban homesteading” and “upcycling” or whatever, but back in the day it was just called “farming” and “not being wasteful” and, y’know, “common sense.” I totally get it. We are essentially living on a big, spinning ball of garbage covered with broken plasma TVs, disposable baby diapers, and old hypodermic needles. Even homeless dudes have smart phones. With everyone all wired up, it’s only natural to start romanticizing ye olden days when people churned butter and knew their neighbors and such. I am guilty of it too, which is why I wanted to read the memoir, Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, who was a farm kid in Iowa during the Great Depression.
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by Felicia “Snoop” Pearson and David Ritz
(2007, Grand Central Publishing)Continuing with the theme of women living through challenging times comes Grace After Midnight, the memoir of Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. Pearson is the real-life Baltimore drug dealer who became a cable TV fan favorite by playing a fictionalized version of herself on HBO’s The Wire. We may be living in a post-Glee era of “sexual fluidity” (barf) on TV right now, but from Snoop’s first appearance on the show, her presence was wholly unique and captivating. Was this calculating and magnetic character a boyish girl or girlish boy? Her sexual ambiguity, natural confidence, and cool intelligence made her one of the series’ standout characters.Snoop started life as a cross-eyed, three-pound crack baby with a drug-addicted mother and a stick-up man for a father, but she grew up with a pair of loving but inattentive foster parents. She was running drugs at eight, got her first 9mm in 6th grade, and when she was 14 went to jail for shooting a woman in the head (she claims self-defense). Iowa farmland this ain’t. She managed to get her GED in prison— where she also romanced a female correctional officer and started a homemade dildo business (!)— and tried walking the straight and narrow with jobs at a car wash and a factory after her release. She was fired from each when they found out she had a record, and the predictable backslide into dealing commenced.Snoop was written into The Wire after one of the show’s leads, Michael K. Williams (“Omar”), spotted her in a bar and introduced her to the creators. But even after nabbing a role on TV she kept on slinging. She’d keep tabs on her drug business while she wasn’t in front of cameras acting like someone working in the drug business. That’s some surreal shit.Grace After Midnight attempts to turn itself into a story of hope, making vague noises toward the end about her role on the show helping bring about a change of heart and a “new Snoop.” Raw talent notwithstanding, her success in the role seems like it was due more to dumb luck and good screenwriting than any real desire to change her life. The Wire went off the air in 2008, and just last month Snoop was sentenced to three years supervised probation when she was one of 60+ people busted as part of an East Baltimore drug sting. Wah-wah. But realistically speaking, how many acting roles are gonna be available to a lesbian baby gangsta from the corner? You want her to end up like The Wire’s Cuddy and his boxing gym, but maybe she’ll end up more like Michael or Dukie. Life really sucks.The book, like many ghostwritten celebrity autobios, is poorly structured and features senior citizen-sized text and clunky musical references used to give us a sense of time and place. All that said, if you’re a Snoop fan or Wire completist it’s worth checking out at the library (but maybe not worth spending money on). The knowledge that Snoop’s very first crush was Smurfette is something I will treasure forever and always.