More Life

On 7/7/16 we woke up at the crack of dawn to be guests on the day time game show, Let's Make A Deal with Wayne Brady. I was not a fan of being on national television but I am a team player. It turned out to be a very memorial experience. My bestie enjoyed her birthday and enjoyed the special surprises that came with it. I never made a big deal about birthdays until I began to lose people who I was very close to. The older I get the more I learn to appreciate what I term "remarkable life moments". I remember my Mom and all of the life lessons she taught me. Never in a million years would I ever imagine approaching my 31st birthday and Mommy Maggie no longer be a phone call away. Another wife, mother, sister, daughter, and friend lost to complications with breast cancer. I remember dancing on the beach with Tonisha Bell Alston and Jamison Carter only two years ago at 2am in the morning, knowing that would probably be the last memoriable moment I would have with Tonisha. She died just a few days shy of her 36th birthday due to complications from Synovial Sarcoma (soft tissue cancer). I will never forget the fun we had and how it felt to celebrate Tonisha's birthday, this time without her. Life is short. Happy Birthday Lakeena Alexander!! Cheers to more life and even more remarkable memories. After spending all morning and most of the afternoon on the game show set, we all were extremely famished. We came back to the hotel to change out of our costumes and headed to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. That waffle though!! I didn't even bother to take a picture of the food, that's how fast that waffle and those succulent chicken wings disappeared from my plate. Zero time to waste for matters of the stomach.

As we left Roscoe's and were heading to the car, a homeless man saw that my friend had a take out cup and asked her for it. He came and got the cup from her and walked off drinking, out of her straw. Wow! The homeless population is the worse I have ever seen in California, Los Angeles, in particular. My friend travels to the west coast a lot for work and always talks about Skid Row. She describes this area of LA as the homeless capital of the city. When she first witnessed Skid Row, she mistaked it as a block party. There were that many homeless men and women congregated in one area. Being from a place where everyone knows each other and/or every other person is your cousin, everyone had a place to lay their heads at night (indoors), no matter how much you saw them hanging out on the corner looking homeless. I never saw a homeless person until I moved to Atlanta for grad school. Talk about a reality check.

We ended the evening at Skyspace, LA. We had a first class look at the city from the view inside one of the skyscraper buildings. We were able to experience the latest technology and took pictures from the buildings balcony. The talk of Skyspace was the slide that we could take that would take you one floor below. It was a clear tube that provided a view of the city as you slid down. It lasted for about .5 seconds, very cute. What a beautiful city, so long Los Angeles. Santa Barbara, we're coming for ya!