Sharing Time - NPR

Here is the link to a This I Believe Essay about dancing... you are going to love it. Be sure to listen to it, and not read it. I can't believe that 'year of the dance' is almost over.

This makes me excited to write my own 'This I Believe Essay'.. but I don't know if mine will be any good. I'd probably do one like "I believe in Lara Croft".

Here is my friend Laura's essay, that made it on to the show:

I believe in hip-hop. And being a white girl born and raised in the whitest conditions, I feel like a nerd admitting it. Not only that, but I used to hate it. My husband, Adam, used to try to play it in his car while we were dating and I hated it so much that I would give him the silent treatment. Nine months after we married, Adam was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and all of my American dreams of an education, job, house, and kids came crashing down. My working-class life began. I had to drop out of college indefinitely to work a factory job that provides generous mental health insurance. And I was flung into the isolation and stigma that so naturally follows any word of mental illness in our society. Even after two years, most days still feel like a struggle. My dream now is to help make mental illness easier for others. I have a passionate desire to fight the problems of inaccessible treatment, incarceration, substance abuse, stigma, homelessness, and poverty that those with mental illness face. The only problem is that I'm stuck working in a factory all day everyday just to pay for the medications my husband needs to get by. And this is why hip-hop makes sense to me now. I believe in hip-hop because it is the voice of the working- class and the soundtrack to advocacy. Because I don't have my own story about my rise from struggle to success, I rely on the stories of others. And I find the most compelling stories through hip-hop. I believe in the rhymes of socially conscious MC's who rose from difficult situations, only to turn around and use their success to point out societal ills and offer their own desires for change. I believe in the story of the genre itself. Born out of an on-going struggle so brutal I could never truly relate; hip-hop was invented in the housing projects of the Bronx, by people who were brilliant and innovative enough to use turntables when conventional instruments weren't available. Its humble beginnings have yielded enormous success as hip-hop has exploded worldwide and split into many sub-genres. Hip-hop has also served as my gateway to learning about African-American history. References to people and events in songs have sent me looking through shelves of books and documentaries as I've searched for the history of remarkable, inspiring people that I never learned about in my all-white schools.
Hip-hop is what gets me through my day. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to listen to as much hip-hop as I want. When I am feeling frustrated, hopeless, and tired, there is nothing like the beats and rhymes of Blackalicious, Saul Williams, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli that keep me going.