Tag: Teddy Robertson
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Village Life: If it’s Tuesday, that means jazz at Soggy Bottom Bar
By Teddy Robertson Tuesday night in downtown Flint and that means jazz at Soggy Bottom. On this cool April evening a gust of wind propels people through the front door just as the smiling drummer John Hill grabs the mic and announces, “We’re going to do some spring songs!” Together with Pat Cronley on keyboard…
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When they’d “had enough,” Mott Park Blight Squad stepped up to save their neighborhood
By Teddy Robertson On Father’s Day, Sunday, June 19, NBC-25 aired a local news segment that showed a group of Mott Park residents as they cleared brush, cut dangling branches, boarded up windows, and mowed overgrown grass at a vacant house in the neighborhood. Six volunteers, including an eager three-year-old helper named Jack, worked fast…
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View from the Coast: “Indivisible” group well underway to resist, combat Trump
By Teddy Robertson It’s Feb. 16 and a big rainstorm is predicted for California tonight. It is also Day 27 of the new administration of the 45th President of the United States. I’ve come out for the first meeting of San Pedro, California, residents interested in a movement to resist the Trump agenda called “Indivisible.” I live in…
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Essay: Protests carry forward spirits of two mothers and an old friend, still on the march
By Teddy Robertson I haven’t seen Judy for fifty years, but here she is on Facebook, standing next to a sign that reads: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.” Her face is not really familiar to me but it triggers the memory of another face—her mother. Of course, I might not recognize Judy…
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Happy Anyway: A Flint Anthology launches with complex stories, national interest
By Jan Worth-Nelson UPDATE: We have added late-arriving comments here from contributor Layla Meillier. Please see below. Editors and publishers nationally already are expressing interest in a new collection of essays about Flint, according to the publisher. Happy Anyway: A Flint Anthology, is coming out this month from Belt Publishing, which produces an online magazine…
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View from a grass-roots table: people coming together to cope with Flint water
By Teddy Robertson We sit in a rectangle of tables, old manila file folders halved and then creased so we can write our names and prop them up in front of us. I’ve found my way to the basement of the Unitarian Universalist church for the meeting of a group called Communication/Publication. It’s something to…
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Bernie makes it better: remembering That Weekend (Part 2)
By Teddy Robertson The March 6, 2016 Democratic debate is over. That it was held in Flint seems more amazing now than it did the Sunday I stood in a line that snaked around the Whiting parking lot—students, Flint old timers (“I walked to Flint Central 50 years ago!”), guys with union hall physiques and no…
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Fluttered away like a pack of cards: reflections on Alice in Wonderland and adulthood
By Teddy Robertson When I was about eight years old I was very sick with a fever that must have been unusually high. What caused it or what my mother and grandmother surmised it might be, I don’t remember now. But I was in bed in a dark room, restless and confused. The family prescription…
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