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WHY ROSES WITH OUR BREAD?
THE BIRD DOESN'T SING BECAUSE IT HAS AN ANSWER, IT SINGS BECAUSE IT HAS A SONG."
-MAYA ANGELOU, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
A REPORTER CALLED AT WORK TODAY, AND ASKED ABOUT OUR NAME, BREAD AND ROSES, the cultural program for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 1199, in New York City. Why roses with bread? He asks, and then, how could roses be the job of a union? I can't imagine asking the implied question: why do we need culture?
Actually, my question is, why aren't cultural programs a normal part of our life, our experience, our thinking? We need programs where members have a chance to experience the feelings a garment worker so eloquently described recently, after taking a union-run art class: "I feel like a frog who has finally jumped out of a well."
Cultural expression of absolutely any kind--loud or soft singing, painting circles and violets and dreams, tap dancing and leaping straight up into the air, even karaoke-- has the mysterious potential of all art: we can be elevated by its practice, and by its experience. Creation has its own enormous power to add joy and sorrow and depth and meaning to experience in a thousand unfathomable ways. Imagine, if every time we heard a speech, we also heard a song. Not a predictable folk song, but a song a member sang, or two members, or twenty-five--a song reflective of who our members are. If all the cultures were represented, the stories and rhythms could become a part of our organizing and our daily union work. Why this hasn't happened yet is unfathomable to me. Surely even the most diehard practical subject-then-predicate union leader would be happy to hear music, most of the time.
Our twenty-five year cultural program, founded by Moe Foner, never questioned roses. Instead we sponsor theater programs by professionals, performances by our members, an art gallery, and classes in writing and photography.
Theater programs for workers at lunchtime bring any number of performers, including Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Harmony Tappers, and Playback Theater, into hospitals and nursing homes, into long-term healthcare treatment centers and community centers, not just for our membership but for patients...