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Something strange started happening at my skating rink in Vermont as the 2000s approached the 2010s: When I’d arrive for my 6 o’clock lesson before school, the ice seemed to be emptier than the week before. The way it had always worked at our skating club was that as kids grew into teenagers, a new crop of younger skaters would take their place, learning scratch spins and waltz jumps. Suddenly, and without explanation, the crop had thinned out.
Sports fade in and out of fashion for all kinds of reasons. Rollerblading was an immensely popular form of exercise in the 1980s and ’90s before becoming a punchline for homophobic jokes and subsequently dying out just as pro skateboarding and BMX went mainstream. Field hockey, a mostly male-dominated game in Europe, is almost exclusively played by girls in the US due to the passing of Title IX in 1972, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in public schools and made field hock
Jasmine Sanders on the Black Romantic
Aaron Hicks,
Daniel in the Lion’s Den, 2000, lacquer and acrylic on canvas, 30 × 36 .
I WAS RAISED BY MY GRANDMOTHER in the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago’s South Side, but frequently stayed at the home of my aunt Rosemary Jarrett, my grandmother’s oldest daughter. When my adoption was finalized, my birth certificate and other documents indelibly amended, my aunt became, legally, my sister, a novel relation that would be indispensable, steadying.
My aunt had back then a marvelously filthy mouth, supplemented by a full and ribald laugh. She inherited from her mother a talent for entertaining, as well as an exuberant, maximalist approach to the adornment of self and home. These impulses converged in the art parties she hosted when I was younger.