Driving While Brown

I had a first on the last night of the show. I was in a car that got pulled over.

Sigrid (the awesome playwright) gave me and two of our scene changers, Adrian and Christian, and ride over to the park where we performed the play. Cornerstone got four high school interns from Pacoima to work on the production, and 14 year old Adrian and 17 year old Christian were brothers who had never really done theatre before but were totally game and willing to go along with the crazy things we had in store for them. We had the four interns work as "scene shifters" or scene changers, doing things like holding signs, moving chairs, and in a few scenes donning large costumes of products like hot sauce and spam. They even had a few lines.

Anyway, so I was sitting in the front seat with Sigrid driving down a side street when she says, "Why is that cop riding on my ass? He needs to stop." As soon as she said that the cop car's lights turned on. We weren't speeding, and we hadn't run a light or stop sign. Sigrid pulled over and two cops approached either side of the car.

They asked her for her license and registration, but the cops clearly did not expect to find a black woman and a white woman in the front seat. They directed all of their questions to Hispanic Adrian and Christian in the back seat and barely looked at the two of us. "You from around here?" (of course they are, Pacoima is like 85% Hispanic) "Where are you guys heading?" Given that we were heading to a PARK to do a PLAY and the two guys were holding their ribbon wrapped posters from the cast party we'd just had, they glanced at Sigrid's license, didn't even open her registration still in its envelope, and let us go.

As soon as they were out of earshot and the windows were up I said, "What the f**k was that? Are we in Arizona?" The other riders of the car were in agreement. The guys were so cool about it and we all laughed about how the cops were not expecting me and Sig in the front seat, or for us to be heading to a park to do a play. Adrian and Christian also laughed about how they're not in a gang or anything, so it's pretty ridiculous. But it was difficult for me to shake it off. Sig told us about a friend of hers, a playwright with two master's who is a large man and gets tatoos for every play he writes. Apparently he's been pulled over by police multiple times and even beaten up by them for no reason, just because of how he looks. Did I mention that the Rodney King incident happened near Pacoima?

I'm not so naive. I know (and knew) this crap still happens. But it affects you differently when you directly experience or witness it. And a lot of the past month was about directly confronting all of the abstracts I knew in theory. I already wrote about the inequality in education, but it was more than that: working with 15 year old teenage mothers, people who had been in prisons, etc. But despite the problems these people faced, they all shared something positive in common: our play. I'm honored to have been a part of their experience and to know them.