{"id":15758,"date":"2011-08-21T03:12:27","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T03:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15758"},"modified":"2016-06-10T18:07:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T18:07:40","slug":"scouting-the-city-for-her-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15758","title":{"rendered":"Scouting the City for Her Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/21\/nyregion\/sarah-jones-playwright-scouting-the-city-for-her-characters.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">Scouting the City for Her Characters<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2011-08-19<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Leland<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A Summer afternoon in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chelsea,_Manhattan\" target=\"_blank\">Chelsea<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/sarahjonesonline.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sarah Jones<\/a> was on a recon mission, searching for&#8230; she did not know what, exactly. An accent, for starters. An ethnic wild card. \u201cHybridity,\u201d she said, using a word she uses often to describe her field of urban study.<\/p>\n<p>She noted a young man with a do-rag under his baseball cap and a belt buckle in the shape of a handgun; a Caribbean woman pushing a white baby in a designer stroller; a heavy woman smoking a long, exaggeratedly slim cigarette. \u201cThe slim cigarette trumps the fact that she wasn\u2019t talking to anyone,\u201d Ms. Jones said, turning to follow the woman. \u201cNobody smokes those anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ms. Jones asked the woman for a cigarette, but got nothing useful in return. \u201cShe didn\u2019t say, \u2018Yeah, honey, you can have one,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Jones said, shifting her voice to sound like a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bensonhurst,_Brooklyn\" target=\"_blank\">Bensonhurst<\/a> ashtray, circa 1938. \u201cI\u2019m looking for something else.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ms. Jones, 37, might be described as an unlicensed anthropologist, an explorer of the cultural fault lines that unite and divide the city. More plainly, she is a playwright and performer whose one-woman shows carry her through rapid successions of ethnically diverse male and female roles: a Russian immigrant or an elderly Jewish woman; an Italian cop or a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brooklyn\" target=\"_blank\">Brooklyn<\/a> rapper seeking treatment for rhyme addiction; an American Indian comedian or a Chinese-American woman whose daughter, to her disappointment, is lesbian&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Ms. Jones, the daughter of a white mother and a black father, both doctors, came by her cultural inquisitiveness early, as a child in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baltimore\" target=\"_blank\">Baltimore<\/a> trying to figure out who she was. When she brought home forms from school asking her to designate her race, her mother would cross out the line and write \u201chuman,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean,\u201d Ms. Jones said. \u201cMy father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn\u2019t want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment. I don\u2019t think of it as having a fractured self, but as having many interconnecting selves, concentric identities.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/21\/nyregion\/sarah-jones-playwright-scouting-the-city-for-her-characters.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scouting the City for Her Characters The New York Times 2011-08-19 John Leland A Summer afternoon in Chelsea, and Sarah Jones was on a recon mission, searching for&#8230; she did not know what, exactly. An accent, for starters. An ethnic wild card. \u201cHybridity,\u201d she said, using a word she uses often to describe her field [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,8,20,25],"tags":[7286,2711,7287,2327],"class_list":["post-15758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-john-leland","tag-new-york","tag-sarah-jones","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47511,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15758\/revisions\/47511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}