GISH 2020

 For the past three years, I've participated in the annual GISH event. It's a week of wacky fun, creativity, caring, and charity. I've been lucky enough to land on an amazing team, led by team captain Sister Resister Anne. 

The week-long event challenges team members to create, make, bake, find, perform, ... all kinds of tasks.

Because the event is positive and full o' love, among the over 200 tasks there are several items that focus on social issues and are progressive in nature. Because politics is my thang, I was happy to undertake many of those items. I thought it fitting to share them here. 

Item #102. Give Sarah Cooper a run for her money lip-syncing Trump or any other politician you think deserves this presidential treatment.

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Last year, there was a challenge to create a PSA for stroke awareness using the tune for "Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes." So, in homage to that task, I chose the same tune for this year's song challenge. Plus the tune is easy. :-)

Item #105. Write and sing an original protest song about police brutality, and the racist foundations of the United States' criminal justice system. 

I can't sing, so this is way outside my comfort zone! But it's important, so I did it!

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This item challenged GISHers to re-create a vintage suffragette poster with a face from today:

Item #48.  This year marks the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in the United States. We've made a lot of progress since then, but women represent only 25% of the US Senate and 23% of the House of Representatives, so we still have a long way to go. Find a female candidate you support and update a women's suffrage poster so that instead of being about obtaining the right TO vote for women, it's about getting votes FOR women — specifically, your candidate. Post the vintage poster and your update on social media, tagging the candidate and @sheshouldrun. Then, submit both the original poster and your updated version as a side-by-side image with the link to your social media post. (Do not submit a screenshot of your post — we want your original artwork.) - Inspired by Jrosebud. #kamalaharris #kamalaforvp #SheShouldRun 

I was pretty proud of this. I sketched it free-hand in the waning minutes of the hunt. 

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Makin' us learn: 

Item #256. Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis recently passed away. At his funeral, former President Obama read his eulogy, and Former Presidents Clinton and Bush also made remarks. Listen to all three memorial speeches, then write a single paragraph about commonalities between the three speeches.

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Our team was set to the task of doing a virtual demonstration:

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Speaking of social justice, I did my first-ever crayon drip painting!

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And we made a fundraiser for this year's cause. Please donate if you can! This cause works toward equitable justice for all. Check it out here. 

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I guess this one is political. As a Speech-Language Pathologist, this resonated with me. so I grabbed it. (FYI the video had to be no more than 14 seconds long)

Item # 121: Not that we have a strong opinion on the topic, but to be a casual English language grammar prescriptivist is to be complicit and prideful in systems that, by nature, devalue cultural and colloquial flexibility in the use of language (lookin' at you, AAVE) by maintaining that only those selective demographics who have dominated the academy, or been deemed valuable by the academy, have the license to create language to suit their communicative needs — Big Academia only affords the grace of words to the voices of a specific demographic (generally, in the West, the well-educated, affluent and predominantly white members of society). Perform a mic-dropping slam poem highlighting the value of eschewing prescriptivism and embracing dynamic, evolving forms and dialects of grammar. You may not USE any language variance that's currently in use (like AAVE) to do this item as it may be appropriative or racially or technically insensitive, depending on the speaker… instead, you must perform it in academic English. Hypocritical? Yup.

Thanks for coming along on my GISH journey!