I skipped this strip in the queue for a while, because it seemed appropriate to use this day to remember radio host, journalist, musician, and old friend Andrea Lewis, who died with shocking suddenness this past November.
I’d already been in the middle of a radio-show storyline when I found out, oddly, so it seemed like a sign to pay tribute in the strip, somehow. But in the wake of such awful news, it was hard to come up with anything that’d be appropriate to a lightweight comic strip, let alone sufficiently honoring of her professional legacy and my personal memories of her. I settled for a visual salute to Andrea’s warm, brilliant presence in the studio and everywhere else, and to her nickname JazzDiva, as well as a background hat tip to Louis’, one of her neighborhood haunts in the Ocean Beach area of San Francisco, the city she’d called home for decades since driving there solo in a van from Detroit.
Fortunately, others have done a superior job of honoring her life and work. You’ve got to scroll the dial just over halfway to get to this tribute show on KPFA, and I wish they’d also archived the longer tribute hosted by her colleague Victoria Z, but it’s a good sampling. Tributes by The Progressive and California poet laureate Al Young, and Youtube coverage of her Nov. 24 memorial service in Oakland are all good too.
I last saw Andrea in July ’09; we had lunch just down the road from Louis’ at the Beach Chalet. It was an unusually beautiful afternoon for Ocean Beach in July; we caught up the way old friends do when they live 3000 miles apart; she followed up with a Biblically long Facebook message about her favorite guitar apps that reminded me what an impressive music geek she was in addition to everything else that made her so remarkable. Four months later, she was gone. She was so young, she’d accomplished so much, she’d had so much left to do.
There are any number of ways to honor Dr. King today. For me this year, it’s remembering a friend who walked with his spirit, working til her life’s end to give voice to community activism, to explore how all forms of oppression are connected, and to find beauty in a remarkably wide range of personal experience. And promising to do as much as I can in service to the memory of both.
