La Vicki Grise is 30 years old, a hometown girl and performance artist who's in her second year of graduate school in the Performing Arts en Los Angeles. You may know her for The Panza Monologues , produced by Irma Mayorga. Vicki is the future of theatre. When you turn off the television after a long hoping of some truth, confused because it leaves you feeling not pretty enough, not rich enough, remember, remember, that people used to gather around and tell each other stories. And there was always that one woman who could make you laugh - and cry. She told your story, and made you see how yes, you were necessary to the world. Postcard from Vicki Grise I am in Amsterdam now at my new office - the open bare biblioteek. The city is laid out in a series of cocentric circles with canals and bridges cutting across them on every block. The old buildings, lined right up against the other, lean forward and they look as if they are supporting each other. Everyone rides a bike and I a...

Well, its official. Back in the day, alternative newspapers were really that. Now of course it's sex ads and restaurant reviews and the publisher is livin large. Ok, I'll swallow that if you give me the news I can't find in the mainstream. Here in San Antonio, we got the Editor of the San Antonio Current , Elaine Wolff, using her position to promote (D) Mikal Watts and his Senatorial campaign, whose claim to fame is that he's a very rich trial lawyer and anti-U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R). Have I mentioned that Rick Noriega (D), a Texas legislator who served in Iraq is also considering entering the race? Have I mentioned that he's not rich ? http://halfempth.blogspot.com/2007/07/watts-v-noriega-in-blogosphere.html (My disclosure: I'm no fan of war heroes, they tend to be conflicted about taking on the status quo, fearful of being called Mexicans instead of Hispanic and sent back to la madre patria. ) Back in the day, the alternatives would be all...

I read the local paper, the San Antonio Express-News, searching for a nugget about political officials, corruption, the Edwards Aquifer and the golf resort that's threatening it, why the streets are flooding with all the rains, etc. But we get stories about Eva Longoria and Tony Parker, football, and praise for our military heroes. (Remember, we have four bases here). Nobody under thirty years old I know reads the paper. If they're halfway educated, they scan it online, otherwise, they buy it on Fridays for the Weekend Guide and on Sundays for the coupons and the Sports Section. That's it. I heard last night from a good source that twenty people were laid off in the latest round, I say that because about half-a-dozen people got their pink slips a month ago or so. In reading the paper today, there was no mention of the layoffs. Who cares? I do. Before you read who got the shove, let me remind you who's been kicked out already one way or the other: (These are n...

Gina Galaviz , 43, KSAT-TV's I-love-the-police reporter, "has been fired" from the television station , according to the San Antonio Express-News, and I'm quoting verbatim here from Jeanne Jakle's byline, "after she was charged with assault following a fight with her boyfriend," Ronald Aguillen, 46. Ok, so we in San Antonio know about the time in 2004 when Gina filed charges against another boyfriend, the former SWAT cop, who was a councilman at-the-time, Ron Segovia . There were allegations of an apple being thrown at her nalgas, which humiliated her, and that he also pointed a gun at her. It was not the first time, she told me. Tough-guy Segovia got off - I think he had three attorneys representing him if I remember correctly, and in this city, like too many, the cops are in bed with the grand jury - they need and depend on each other, and this grand jury decided there "wasn't enough evidence to pursue a criminal case against him." Seg...

In San Antonio, it's been raining cats. Forget the biblical lluvia that's turned our city into an Eden in August. Los gatos , calicos, Cary Grant-tuxedoes, marigold tabbys, long-hair, short-hair, and witchy black ones with motor-purrs. They are raining down to tell us something. And Maria has seen them in the alleys and streets of el Westside of San Antonio as charcoal bits - burned beyond recognition. She's seen gangmembers run over them in joyrides, so their little tripitas make them laugh. She's seen them poisoned with anti-freeze, and she's found them mewing from trashcans on Zarzamora Street. Maria, a housekeeper, has rescued more than sixty of them. With her money, and sometimes threatened with rape - or death - for her compassion. San Antonio has a problem. There are too many of them, the animal shelter is full, and too many waiting for adoption. We are a very poor city. But in this city, the cats are lost, abandoned, as if we don...

T he writer James Hillman, in Our Terrible Love of War , says that peace isn't the absence of war, it's the abscence of remembering. B ut if we don't want war we have to remember. We have to know what war does to soldiers, to the familes, to the women, to the children. With that in mind, here's a postcard from Pablo Martinez, poeta, university professor and activista, who's been in Stockholm doing quien-sabe-que. Stockholm , 24 July 2007 It's been wonderfully cool here the past two days. But I'm not writing to issue a weather report -- that's the job of the Weather Channel. Today I visited the Medelhavs Museet, the Museum of Middle Eastern art and culture. Unlike the other museums I've visited, this one was quiet -- eerily quiet. I was there to see an exhibition of photographs; the show is titled Children of Baghdad in 1999. A fairly pedestrian title, until you consider that in 1999 , Iraq was not anywhere in our collective consciou...

Bueno, so I haven't been writing because I've just finished two manuscripts, and cross-your-fingers, parece que I have a good chance of getting them published with UT Press. There were agents interested in my Golondrina (a love story about a woman who falls in love with the man who helps her cross the border), pero a dream I had told me to let the money-thing go. I want a beautiful book, a forever-book, and UT Press understands me. That doesn't mean I'll get it, it just means our stories deserve the editors, artists and publishing houses that turn our books into the jewels they were when our grandmothers left them to us. So. It's time, maybe by this time next year I 'll have two books to tell you about. Speaking of books, my favorite subject, even before politics, I've just finished a novela by Almudena Grandes, a Spanish writer I discovered at the Intl PEN Festival of World Literature in NYC in April (when I lost my panties in the subway, see previous ...