A Piece of My Heart

What a weekend! On Friday I went out to dinner with Gabi and Mandi at Murasaki, a local sushi place. Then I went to Union Jacks with Terence and his roommate for a night of dancing. That was so much fun!

Saturday I had to do a review for The Eagle of a play called "A Piece of My Heart" I'll post a link on Thursday when the article runs in the paper but for now, here's a YouTube video talking about the play.


It was a great performance and I can't wait for my review to be published. I didn't learn that much about Vietnam in school and "A Piece of My Heart" is base off of 26 of 1,500 interviews conducted of women who served in Vietnam as nurses, civilian humanitarians, and intelligence officers. I'm happy I went. I'm also writing a review of a comedy CD, Greg Giraldo. I didn't think he was funny, he was actually really offensive, but it's hard to write that in 600 words. Seeing as I just did it in a sentence. "Don't listen to him. He's offensive not funny." There, I finished my review. 

Today I woke up late and wrote my reviews and then, since it was a BEAUTIFUL day, Terence and I went to Mattie Stepanek's peace park. I heard about Mattie when I saw his mother, Jeni, on the news the other night. Her son suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy, dysautonomic mitochrondrial myopathy from which he died before his 14th birthday. His mother has just written a memoir about Mattie which is why she was on the news, but her son was astounding. Mattie published poems of peace and advocated on Capitol Hill for peace. Mattie had two other siblings who died from the same disease, and at the age of three, he learned to cope with the death of his brother through poetry. He published five books of poems, some of which were New York Times best sellers!

Mattie and his family live in Rockville, MD. After his death they created a park in his name where a statue of him is in addition to football fields, tennis courts, basketball courts, a massive playground, a dog park, and more. On benches scattered around the park quotes from his poems are posted. It was a fantastic experience not only to see his mother talk about Mattie on the news last week, but to go to the park and see how much the community he lives in still loves him.

I ordered his books through the consortium from school so I'll be sure to share some poems when I read them hopefully next week.

After that Terence and I went to Mi Ranchero (which I'll review on Yelp later) a Mexican restaurant we have wanted to go to since he lived there. It was fantastic. Now I'm winding down the night, posting photos, writing articles, getting ready for the week and getting ready to watch the Eagles game.

Wishing everyone a great week!