Staceyann Chin - my heroine

I am not quite sure what qualities one needs to have to be a groupie. If hip-hop videos are to be believed, I had to have stalked this woman, slept with her (or at least have that at the top of my to-do list) been to all her shows and so on. Clearly being a groupie is expensive and since I had never heard of Staceyann Chin before in my life, I do not qualify as a groupie or is that a stalker? ok, look I will just call myself a huge fan and ignore the fact that I have only seen her perform once. Once was enough. I went to the Cape Town leg of Urban Voices mainly to see a friend of mine perform, and she never disappoints. You see, I do not really think I am "cultured" enough for the poetry crowd. Half the time, if I sit there during these intervals or before a show, I really have no idea what these people are talking about. Discussing authors I had never heard of and basically going all pseudo-intellectual on me. I always try to avoid them and just park myself in the theatre and wait for the show. Anyway, back to Staceyann, from the minute she came onto the stage with her huge afro and tiny figure I knew I was going to like this woman. Then I found out through the intro that she was a lesbian activist, had bucketloads of attitude and a "womanist/feminist", then she immediately registered in my brain as a real life superhero. (hence the picture). Her poetry is accesible and she speaks about women's issues that I could identify with like your period, rape, religion, sex etc. For example, she asked "why hasn't anyone invented a machine to suck out the blood yet?". Her stage performance is a bit of a mess, throwing papers around, reading from her memoir, walking around the stage or demonstrating (while sitting on chair with one leg almost on the floor) how she almost fell into a pit toilet when she was young. She is hilarious, thought provoking, interesting and entertaining. And all this I got from seeing her at the Baxter theatre for about 30 minutes. But like a real groupie I absolutely had to have a picture taken with her after the show, and I did. In case you're wondering. happy Woman's month to all the ladies reading this...