THE BLACK AND JAPANESE BEGINNING

Well I first came up with the idea of doing parties after I had my birthday party at H2O with The Usual Suspectz. They promote there on Thursdays, and I had been a regular at all of their parties that they had on Saturday nights at Kolumbia (back then it was called Le Tarbouche). So on June 6th, which was four days before my birthday, I came up with the idea to have a party for myself there. I gathered up as many of my friends' emails as I could and sent out a long-ass evite...Ya know...my usual M.O. Well, close to 200 people came out to celebrate my birthday with me that day. But that wasn't so much the impressive part. The most impressive part was the quality of the crowd. When I say they looked good...that's really an understatement. Afterwards, everyone was telling me that I should do more parties. I considered it, but didn't really move too much on it. I knew that throwing parties was a lot harder than most people think, and wasn't sure I wanted the headache of it all.

Approximately one month later, a good friend of mine named Kenji, who happened to make it to my birthday party, approached me about doing a Tuesday night hip-hop promotion with a DJ at his sushi restaurant called Cafe Japone in Dupont Circle. Now Japone has a bar in the basement that is very small but quaint. He offered me 20% of the bar on those nights. Well, I brought a DJ in and I gave him 15% and I kept 5%. So needless to say, there was very little money and a lot of work in it for me. But hey, it was a start. I remember on my first night, I made $8! I was getting pizaid.... But more important, I was working out the kinks and learning as much as I could about promoting before I really got into it.

In the meantime, I was dating this African girl (or should I say playa, who shall remain nameless?) who invited me to this cookout she was having at her house. I was like the one out of four non Africans there. But I was happy because I was really interested in making some new contacts from Africa because I had just read this paper this guy wrote about why there is such a disconnect between Africans and African-Americans, which was a question I had for many moons myself. I may try to get this paper and put it up on my site if I can ever find that guy. But anyway, while I am at the cookout, I am doing my usual; ya know... going around socializing and making new contacts. But then I was introduced to this guy named Niyi Shomade. Now, at this cookout, the food was like a runaway slave (off tha chain), but this dude ain't eatin nothing! I was like, whassup man? You know something I don't know? They got roaches or something?" He looked at me all seriously and said, "No my brotha, I am fasting until the sun goes down in respect for the people in Sudan who are being systematically killed as we eat." Was I expecting him to be saying that at a cookout? NO... In fact, I almost dropped the rib out of my mouth.

So anyway, we talked more and more about it and I asked him for his number. I called him later that week and we exchanged emails. It turned out that he worked really closely with Ralph Nader. He then put me on his email list that he sent out once a week or so where he talked about a lot of different things going on in the world. Well, one day he sent out an invite for a forum he had in conjunction with TransAfrica and some other organizations where everyone was supposed to get together to talk about what we can do over here in the US to help Africans in the struggle. I then forwarded this invite to virtually everyone in my address book. I figured this would be something people might be interested in. Wrong! Not one person showed up from my list.