Everything Connects

Sometimes I am afraid to admit to the artist my connections with the issues of the day. Privately I like to string together playful sequences of these connections, even end them exactly where I began. Take this morning for example. A typical morning on a normal sort of day for me. The second most powerful religious leader in the land was on TV. (A man I've mentioned before.) My eldest sister knows him. (He was the person I was hoping to swim with after the poignant reunion with my five sisters.) The interview as it happens was being conducted by an old school friend of mine. Someone with whom I acted in several plays and exchanged bad poetry. At one point during the interview the religious leader took off his dog collar and clipped it into pieces with a giant pair of scissors, stating it was in protest against Zimbabwean misruler Robert Mugabe. (I will make an exception and mention him by name.) Now Mugabe from 1958-1960 taught at Apowa Secondary School in the relatively small town of Takoradi in western Ghana, and I happened to turn up there many years later after crossing the Ivorian border. I was met there by a man who knew west Africa like the back of his conscience and who once played in a band with the then future and now former prime minister, the one before the one refusing these past few days to meet with Mugabe. Now this man, as well introducing me to tribal elders and palm wine, also introduced me while there to a focus-puller, and I bumped into this former focus puller again with his wife in the public swimming pool two or three weeks ago. In between exchanging splashed sundries about our children, I asked the man's wife how her own film work was going, as I remembered she dabbled. She mentioned that she was doing something with a well known singer and told me the name. I had a connection with this singer. She had her portrait once done by the artist. I may be afraid to admit to the artist my connections with the issues of the day sometimes. But I still enjoy stringing together playful sequences and back.