Take the Mic

Originally Published with The Minaret (Fall 2015)

The dark red wine sloshes from side to side in his glass as he swivels away from the amp he just hooked up and toward the audience. The skinny, 60-something man runs his hand through his dark but graying hair, leans down into the mic and fills the room with his dulcet voice. “Welcome to open mic night at Cafe Hey.”

That’s Zane Britt and it’s only his second time hosting the Thursday night open mic at Cafe Hey, but he’s been performing and hosting in other places for the last 42 years.

Cafe Hey is something special though, according to Britt. “It’s the most attentive audience I have ever heard.” Cafe Hey’s open mic has been Creative Loafing’s Best Open Mic in Tampa Bay for the past four years.

Britt straightens out his “Who’s your farmer?” t-shirt and sets out the sign-up sheet just before the 7-ish start time. Each performer gets about six minutes, though that’s pretty flexible. Open mic nights are not for people who need to stick to a strict schedule. There’s a lot of “let me just finish this” and “let’s do one more.”

Performers make their way up to the alcove that serves as a makeshift stage to put their names on the list. The amp and microphone catty-corner the performers between the windows and the ever-changing size of the audience. You could walk straight back from the door to the register and purchase a kale salad or a vegan sandwich from the young woman with dreads, but most people will hold off until the five-minute intermission.

Britt takes back the sign-up sheet and shakes up the order. Comedian John Jacobs is one of the first to make his way behind the microphone. An audience member  might recognize Jacobs from the MTV show Are You the One? but he’s also a 2012 UTampa alumus. He’s been doing stand-up since his senior year of high school in D.C. and he’s clearly comfortable on stage because he interacts with the audience like a good friend.

Jacobs raises the microphone and begins a natural but fast-paced comedy routine with a mix of new and old jokes. Every few jokes Jacobs slid out his “set list” of jokes from his pocket, glanced down at it in his left hand and then delivered another blunt punchline. Once he heard that UTampa students were present, he detoured off-script for a minute to say how he feels about campus now. “I walk past that pool and think, nobody’s learning here. It’s like a daycare run by Gatsby,” Jacobs laughs.

Jacobs’ no amateur in comedy. He has the whole café rumbling with laughter after only a few jokes. He performs at Cafe Hey nearly every week, but will do other area open mic nights too, for practice. “On weekends I’ll do bigger shows. I travel. I play colleges all over the country, which is awesome,” Jacobs said. “I even went to LA for six months just to check out the scene, but I didn’t really like it so I came back.” He’s also performed in Texas, Iowa, Missouri, New York.

Performer after performer takes the mic. There’s a mix of high school students, young preppy-looking adult males and older graying men.

While the night is heavy on comedy, a few musical performers take to the microphone as well. One of those is the 28-year-old Robert Casciotta, who didn’t know for sure what he would perform until he plugged in his dark blue, electric acoustic guitar and brought the bright green pick down on the strings.

The USF graduate went with some covers including Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks” and Pharrell’s “Happy,” playing with his eyes sealed shut and swaying back and forth on his heels as he strums. The flip of his dark hair bounces independently to the beat.

“I used them [open mic nights] as a catalyst to help myself get up in front of people and play,” Casciotta. “I have anxiety and it really helps with the anxiety. I can just get up there and do my thing and really not care.” Now, Casciotta just does open mic nights for himself. He likes when people enjoy his performances, but he’s not interested in fame. It’s just a good way to spend his Thursday nights.

As the light drifting through the flier-filled windows dwindles, the few lights in Cafe Hey and the occasional headlights of passing cars glint off the artwork that is both hung and drawn on their walls. The final performers tell their jokes and sing both covers and original music. Some of the same people will be back next week and some new people will show. “That’s the wonderful thing about Cafe Hey,” Britt told the audience, “You never know who is going to walk through that door.”

Caroline Hekate

Originally written for class (Fall 2015)

Angrily scratching circles into a new piece of paper, she cast aside her failed masterpiece and brought the new one, the one that showed nothing but frustration, to her mother Ileana. Then, she was only a few years old. It’s the first time she remembers working on art.

         

Caroline Hekate working in Lettuce Lake Park in Tampa

   She took piece to her mother and sarcastically asked, “Look at this, isn’t it cute?” Her anger only skyrocketed when Ileana told her ‘yes’ since she knew she didn’t try. Now, she looks back on it and sees growth. She’s no longer so hard on herself about mistakes with her art, or at least she tries not to be.

As a small child Ingrid Caroline Moran Escoto wanted to copy and paste things from the world and put them on her drawing paper. In the years since she changed her public name to Caroline Hekate and now uses the world as inspiration in place of replication. “I want to create something new,” Caroline explains. “I don’t want to make recycled material.”

Caroline now expresses her art in painting, drawing, photography, film and belly dance. When it comes to art, Caroline is a modern-day Renaissance woman. To put it simply Caroline says, “As a kid, I had trouble choosing one thing I really liked. That’s carried over into my adult life.” She tries to focus most of her energy on painting, drawing and photography, but focus is one of her most difficult challenges.

Today, she gets out of her van, unpacks her foldable easel, tripod, camera and backpack from the back and leans out from behind it to wave hello. Her reddish brown hair glints in the little bit of sunlight that makes it through the trees to the ground.

She walks straight back onto the nearest wooded path, but makes a wrong turn and has to change course after a minute of walking. At the end of this second path is her usual spot.

The spot Caroline has selected is in a small break in the woods where there is a marshy pond and some logs to sit on. Surprisingly, she sets up her easel facing away from the water. She angles the easel a little more and her reasoning becomes clear: there’s a small patch of bright light streaming through the trees right onto the mostly done drawing she clips onto the easel.

Caroline leans her slim 25-year-old frame over her tripod and her dangly earrings with their blue gems tilt at a 45 degree angle from her body. The camera records as a silent observer to her work in Lettuce Lake Park. This is one of her favorite places to come for inspiration. It’s still in Tampa, but it feels like you’re out in the [tropical] countryside.

The park is her studio today because she’s moving back to Boston soon and no longer has studio space in Tampa. Boston is more of a home to Caroline. She’s also spent time in several Florida cities growing up and also lived part of her life in Honduras as a child before her parents divorced. While she was born in Boston and spent most of her life stateside, unlike her younger sister who attends school in Honduras, Caroline still speaks with a hint of an accent in her voice.

She shares her history in a childlike way with a hundred thoughts trying to surface at once as she plays with twigs on the ground. She jumps from the past to the present and back again in one breath, but a deep sense of wisdom seems to hang on her words.

After her parents divorced in the mid 1990s, Caroline spent her childhood switching homes. Her parents had no other children together and so Caroline experienced this rotation in solitude. In her early years after the divorce, she was given the go-ahead for her creativity and began to experience the world through art while maintaining other interests, like science.

She tried dancing the first time at 6-years-old with classical ballet, but abandoned it for other things until she turned 20-years-old and took up dance again. “I never took a belly dance class. I guess that’s where my pride came in. I connected with belly dance and didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do.” As an adult named Caroline, spunky Ingrid still shows through.

“I was absolutely mesmerized by her belly dancing,” says Samantha Brennan, a junior at the University of Tampa who saw Caroline perform at a tattoo convention. “She made such fluid, elegant movements and she had this chilling background music that made your skin crawl.”

Caroline’s life wasn’t stable, but not in a way that made her feel unsafe or unloved. More than anything she struggled to make memorable friendships since she wasn’t in one place for very long. Art tended to fill that space in her life. Her family also tried out many religions as she grew up starting out as Roman Catholics, then Evangelist converts, then Baptists, then Pentecostals. “I had no long-term friends, no long-term anything, but I had time to figure out myself,” Caroline explains.

Caroline certainly has differentiated herself from others. She wears a small pentagram necklace and a clear, shiny crystal necklace over her almost entirely black outfit. Her dark eyes stand out from her even darker eye makeup and her lip ring is the only part of her face visible when she kneels, leaning into her easel while her hair hangs down like a curtain. Her black combat boots twist in behind her to form a seat for when she finally leans backwards to take a quick break from her drawing.

Today she is working on finishing an ink drawing piece she began in September, or maybe October, that is based on the astrological signs. Caroline is an Aries and the day she began the project she started with Libra. “Libra is my opposite and I was feeling in a place where that made sense. I always study my feelings like a scientist and see how to relate feelings into a physical art.”

The piece is a part of a collection she’s working on called Sanctuary. Once all of the pieces are done, they will resemble cathedral windows together and show a love-balance between male and female energies. Like a mantra to herself Caroline repeats, “That’s what love is. The balance between female and male energies. That’s what love is.”

Astrology will be readily represented in this collection, but so will alchemy, occult, mathematics, Hinduism and even yogi principles. It will likely debut in Boston. She doesn’t know when it will be ready just yet, but she knows that it will be. “I’m really trying to do this one thing with discipline,” Caroline says. “When I work on too many things nothing gets done. My science friends tell me ‘Humans aren’t meant to multitask.’ We need to focus our energy on one thing.”

Caroline no longer follows a specific religion, but she learns the beliefs of others and often likes to incorporate them into her artwork. She once met a Hindu sage that turned her attention to vegetarianism. “I’m trying to be vegetarian,” Caroline shares. “And that’s very hard with a Latin American family. They know I’m vegetarian and they’re still like ‘You want some meat?’”

Even with the pressure to eat meat, Caroline still agrees with the sage that asked her, “Why am I going to put something deadly into my body if I am not dead yet?” regarding animals killed for food. She says that around this point in her personal journey she realized animals had souls and she couldn’t continue eating them.

This realization occurred around the same time that Caroline took on college. She started at 20-years-old and went for three years. To please her parents, Ileana and Abraham, she started off with a Business Administration major but quickly changed to Art.

Even still, it didn’t feel quite right. She was learning technique. And learning technique. And some more technique. “I didn’t feel challenged,” Caroline says. “I had been doing that since I was a kid.” It was then she started her company Lunam Art and began to pursue art full-time.

Her parents “reacted with a pause” to Caroline’s announcement that she was leaving school and choosing art over practicality. However, Caroline and college just weren’t a match. “College felt like ‘Man, I’m in the 16^th grade.’”

Her parents were worried about her financial stability; and Caroline worried about it at first too and hated money because it was getting in the way. But, Caroline changed her frame of mind. She now says, “The more you hate something, the more power it has over you.” Her parents quickly got behind her decision and now give advice when they can.

Caroline absentmindedly fiddles with the crystal on her necklace as she pulls her marker away from the page to give thought to where her next marks should go. She’s in the shading stage of this piece: too much and it will look like a black blob, too little and it will look unfinished. Like the theme of the piece, she needs to find the right balance.

“I’m not looking to be a saint,” Caroline explains. “I’m not looking to be perfect. I’m looking to be comfortable and my comfort may be uncomfortable to others.

Gun Violence on the Rise in Tampa

Originally written for class (Fall 2015)    

  Playing a pickup game of basketball shouldn’t be dangerous. Neither should leaving a grocery store nor eating at a restaurant nor walking home. These are activities we do everyday without much thought, but they have been deadly for some Tampa residents.

      Over the past several years, overall violent crime rates have declined both in U.S. and in Tampa. Violent crimes have shown a 14.5 percent decrease from 2004 to 2013 nationwide, as reported by the FBI. However, gun-related violence in Tampa is growing.

From January to June of 2014, all gun-related incidents numbered 320. This year in that same window, there have been 443 of these crimes, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office website. Much of this violence took place in settings like those mentioned above.

            Shootings, specifically, in first few months of 2015 doubled that of the same time frame in 2014, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office website. As of Independence Day, the total number of homicides this year (most of which involved guns) had reached 21, as reported by The Tampa Tribune. That’s only one short of the 2014 total, just past the halfway mark of the year. The uptick in numbers is startling given that The Tampa Tribune reports a nearly full two percent decrease in crime overall in the city.

            The rise of gun-related violent crime is not because of fewer police officers on the job in Tampa. In fact, the number of police employed in Tampa has been consistently above the Florida average per capita since 2001. The Tampa crime rate has also been consistently above the U.S. national average during the same time period, according to a 2013 report by City Data.

            So what is causing gun-related-homicides and shootings to escalate this year? Tampa Bay Times crime and law enforcement staff writer Dan Sullivan thinks there are many contributing factors. “While each case is different, there have been a few commonalities to the violence. Most of those killed have been young African-American men. The local police have been somewhat hesitant to say it, but I think a lot of the killings have been gang-related,” Sullivan stated. The Tampa Police Department did not respond for comment on this phenomenon.

            Sullivan also believes that some of the violence is a direct result of the racial turmoil in communities like Ferguson, Mo. and Baltimore, Md. These events appear to have triggered a kill-or-be-killed mentality in many U.S. communities that may have arrived in Tampa with 2015.

            “I think the attention those cases received, and the sense of injustice that many felt from them, stoked a feeling of distrust toward authority [police in particular]. And that, in turn, has contributed to a degree of lawlessness in some communities,” Sullivan surmised.

This year has also been a banner year for stolen firearms, and guns that can't be traced to a suspect only increase the problem as they spread throughout the city. Halfway through this year, the Tampa Police Department had recorded 177 stolen firearms. That is nearly 40 more than the first six months of 2014, according to The Tampa Tribune.

            With the swell of gun-related violence, it makes one wonder if University of Tampa students are at risk. University of Tampa student and criminal justice major, Brianna Jones remains unfazed by the gun-related incidents in the city. “It really doesn’t worry me much because I recognize that Tampa is growing more and more every year and with a bigger city comes different rates of crime,” Jones explained. This idea that crime increases with population growth per capita is a supported theory put forth by criminology researcher John Braithwaite in the mid-1970s

            The university also has methods in place to maintain a safe environment on campus. “Campus Safety works with local law enforcement, continuously patrols campus, and tries to engage every person here to let them know if they see something that doesn't seem quite right,” UT Vice President for Operations and Planning Linda Devine explained. This seems to be working on campus based on the statistics reported on the UT website. In 2012 there were five illegal weapons referrals, but the number dropped to three in the following year. Other types of crimes, excluding drug and alcohol offenses, have either declined or held steady on campus.

Another UT student, biology major Wesley Schweiger, shares a perspective similar to that of Jones. “I’m always a little more cautious,” Schweiger said. “But, I feel safer on campus, with campus security.”

To supplement Campus Safety’s physical presence, the university also implements an electronic alert system, including text messages, emails, voicemail and social media to warn students of potential dangers. Schweiger finds these notifications helpful as it makes him feel safer to know when and where crimes are happening.

“Here on a college campus, it’s safer. It’s not a hotspot area and there’s campus safety that are armed themselves. We do a very good job of keeping people that aren’t supposed to be on campus off of campus,” Jones said.

Despite Campus Safety’s efforts to keep our tiny community within Tampa protected, Devine maintains that this is not solely their responsibility. “It is impossible to "seal" a porous environment like a college campus,” Devine stated. “We all need to take ownership to make this as safe an environment as possible.”

By remaining alert and reporting on suspicious activities, Tampa residents become a cluster of unintentional neighborhood watch groups that can help prevent crime. Community involvement with police is increasingly difficult to come by, however, and the challenge to find individuals willing to speak to police only amplifies after a crime is on the books.

“In many cases, investigators have had trouble making arrests because witnesses refuse to talk,” Sullivan said.

It’s not just witnesses that refuse to talk. Program Manager for the Hillsborough County Victim Assistance Program Curtis Baughman says that victims aren’t often forthcoming with information either. “The single most challenging factor of advocating for gun-related victims is soliciting their cooperation in the prosecution of cases,” Baughman said in an email. “Most often this arises because victims in gun-related crimes struggle with fear, anxiety and depression.”

Tampa Police Chief, and UT alumna, Jane Castor has issued several statements this year asking for the public to come forward with information regarding crimes in the city.

Without witnesses, police must rely only on hard evidence. And there is rarely enough. Several of the fatal incidents this year, including those of 16-year-old Jamylin Turner and 44-year-old Bryant Murray, were drive-by shootings in Tampa Heights and West Tampa respectively. In a drive-by scenario without willing witnesses, it is difficult for police to recover much more than evidence that leads back to the (often stolen) weapon.

            Dr. Sorle Diih, a 22-year NYPD veteran and UT law enforcement and criminology professor, says that this is not something that the police should attempt to accomplish alone. Rather, the police department needs to collaborate to tackle root causes such as familial deterioration, social institutions and public health.

Diih remains positive despite the immense undertaking this would require. “I think something can be done. Researchers, practitioners, committee members and leaders need to come together. The academia should be involved. People need to take a more objective look at what is happening, accept the challenges that we have and then implement tested strategies that have worked around the country.”

Without intervention, gun-related violent crime will increase and make residents feel progressively less safe, according to Diih. “If nothing changes and the trend holds, we will continue to see a spike in gun-related violence,” Diih explained. If everything stays as is, gun-related violence will make our daily activities more dangerous.

“I’m used to a small town where at night I would go ride my bike and not really worry about having any issues with that,” Jones said. “But, in Tampa, I won’t go.”

The House Survived, But The Pokémon Didn’t

Originally Written for Class (Fall 2014)

It’s been eleven years since the then seven-year-old Brennan Ackermon lost his entire Pokémon card collection to Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. He even lost his favorite card, the “Kyogre EX.” Ackermon had been building a substantial collection of Pokémon cards for almost four years, but he laments this card above any other. “It was a special one. Shiny and rare,” said the now 18-year-old Ackermon.

The category five hurricane inundated Ackermon’s hometown of West Bay, Grand Cayman with destructive wind and rain for nearly two days straight. Ackermon and his family weathered the storm in a second-floor, concrete-walled condo in a building that his mother managed at the time.

“I remember looking out from the balcony and seeing water coming in past the pool even though it was 100 feet away from the beach,” said Ackermon of the flooding Hurricane Ivan brought Grand Cayman. The higher vantage point of the condo, though better than the Ackermon family home, did little to benefit the Ackermon family as the storm progressed. Ackermon recalls that they had some flooding, even on the second floor.

“The storm was loud and so much water was coming into the building,” said Ackermon. The water and wind would prove damaging as destruction impeded the function of daily life in Grand Cayman for months after the Ivan’s hurricane weather concluded.

Ackermon’s house survived the storm but suffered extreme water damage and they deemed the cars total losses. “We had no electricity for three months. We used a gas generator to boil sea water and had a survival kit with dried and canned foods to eat,” said Ackermon. He and his family lived simply in those months and a more typical lifestyle was reestablished after many stores reopened about two months after the storm.

A new normal was certainly established in Grand Cayman as the island community recovered from Hurricane Ivan. The storm negatively impacted the economy and much of the area had needed to be rebuilt. “The storm changed the path of Cayman. Some area companies gained more control in the rebuilding than they probably would have,” Ackermon said.

Ackermon appeared pensive as he talked about the diverging paths of Grand Cayman and his own life, gazing at nothing in particular, sighing and saying, “Things changed for Cayman after the hurricane. I wonder what would have happened with the businesses if the storm didn’t happen.”

It’s hard to know for sure what would have happened with Grand Cayman economically if Hurricane Ivan had never paid a visit, but Ackermon would have gotten to keep his favorite Pokémon card at least a little longer.

Trump’s Wall Proven Good Idea

Originally Published in The Minaret
Satire

No doubt about it—the wall that Donald Trump proposes to build along the U.S. border with Mexico will be the ultimate solution to all of our nation’s problems regarding immigration and Mexican drug cartels.

This wall that Trump proposes will be anywhere from 30 to 65 feet tall, possibly higher, depending upon which of his many declamations on the subject you give credence to. That’s way taller than your average Mexican (men average just below 5’ 6” according to LiveStrong). So, that will definitely stop people from crossing the border illegally. Afterall, it was just a fluke thing that in 2015 CNN reported on a system of underground drug cartel tunnels beneath the border. There’s no way people will just dig tunnels elsewhere along the border, right?

If the Trump presidency becomes a reality, the wall’s massive height will probably, most-likely, interfere with the drug catapults that NBC reported that the Mexican drug cartel was using back in 2011 to heave drugs over the border. But, hey, here’s hoping that the over $100 billion Americans spent on illegal drugs (in 2010) according to Business Insider, are simply dissuaded by the wall and the inevitable illegal drug price increases it causes.

The wall would probably be kind of expensive. Trump has suggested in interviews that we could probably swing it as low as $10-12 billion for the just under 2,000 mile border. No matter that a lot of that area is private property and would need to be seized under eminent domain in order to make space to put the wall up in the first place. Trump will just get his lawyers involved like always and take care of them. And the cost? Even if it does get up to about $16 million per mile, like Politico suggests, it’s okay. We’re just going to force Mexico to pay for it anyway, even though their government officials have already essentially declared that pigs would fly before they paid for a border wall.

If HGTV shows have taught me anything, it’s that budgets when building things tend only to increase as problems arise. The rough terrain and occasional body of water (the Colorado River, the Rio Grande) definitely won’t make the wall more challenging. If Politico’s numbers are correct (and they’re using fences as a jumping off point, not a solid concrete wall), then we’re talking a base number of $31.264 billion, just a little higher than Trump’s estimate. Yearly maintenance on the wall is estimated at an additional $750 million, as reported by Politico. Mexico’s going to pay for it somehow, though, so it’s totally okay.

Don’t fret about legal immigration being more challenging: Trump plans to put in a big, beautiful door,” for the “good ones” according to statements he made during the Oct. 2015 Republican debate. It’s not like walls have dissuaded people from immigrating/emigrating in the past – definitely not in 1960s Berlin – right? Trump compares his dream wall to the 13, 171 mile Great Wall of China, saying that his will be much easier to build since the U.S. border is less than one-sixth the size. If it took one-sixth the time it’d probably be done around 2199, but that’s without considering technology and construction upgrades since the sixteenth century. Realistically, even by modern standards, Trump would probably need to at least win the presidency a second time to see his wall completed.

Some residents along the U.S. border with Mexico have suggested that an increased Border Patrol presence should supercede Trump’s wall idea, but that’s silly since Trump wants to triple Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in his immigration plan, anyway, according to his website. Since we’re making Mexico pay for the wall, we can find the money for this too. No big deal. It’s not like we have a $365.7 billion trade deficit with China; we have unlimited funding for Trump’s project.

It will all be worth it, because “a nation without borders is not a nation,” according to Trump’s website. Apparently a wall is required to have a border, so we might want to share that information with basically every other country in the world.