This Week at City Hall: What’s Happening?
Week of August 29, 2022
PIAC Applications are due today – Wednesday 31 August 2022!!
The arts sustain neighborhoods – participate in your local arts – support a local artist or musician.
Municipal Art Commission Meeting – City of Kansas City MO 9 a.m. September 2, 2022
The Municipal Art Commission meeting scheduled for September 2, 2022 will be held via videoconference.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84546959158?pwd=dTh3bzI1eGFGOFJjVHpLa2xjVHVCUT09
Meeting ID: 845 4695 9158 Passcode: 762996
Several items include neighborhood-based arts programs. The city has a One Percent for Arts Program for all municipal construction projects from the Airport to the Zoo. Please pay attention to what is being funded, why and how.
City Council, Committees, Business and Legislative Sessions are canceled. The City Council meetings, which include Standing Committees and Business and Legislative Sessions, are canceled for the weeks of August 29, 2022, and September 5, 2022. Meetings will convene the week of September 12, 2022. For more information, please get in touch with the City Clerk’s Office at 816.513.6401.
Instead of a meeting at city hall – how about a poem? ….Because city hall may take a rest – but the streets don’t.
Letter to an Aspiring Junkie
By Maya Angelou
Let me hip you to the streets,
Jim,
Ain’t nothing happening.
Maybe some tomorrows gone up in smoke,
raggedy preachers, telling a joke
to lonely, son-less old ladies’ maids.
Nothing happening,
Nothing shakin’, Jim.
Oh, there’s a slough of young cats riding that
cold, white horse,
a grey old monkey on their back, of course,
does rodeo tricks.
No haps, man.
No haps.
A worn-out pimp, with a space-age conk,
setting up some fool for a game of tonk,
or poker or
get ‘em dead and alive.
The streets?
Climb into the streets, man, like you climb into the ass end of a lion.
Then it’s fine.
It’s a bug-a-loo and a shing-a-ling,
It’s African dreams on a buck-and-a-wing and a prayer.
That’s the streets, man,
N-o-t-h-i-n-g h-a-p-p-e-n-i-n-g.
The poem appears on Maya Angelou’s recording – The Poetry of Maya Angelou (1969). You can listen to her read this poem here: https://youtu.be/hrH1VWxTZfo
Source: The Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994).
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