"African Grove== 
 One of the things I've been trying to do lately is to lay down some background of real African American performance in the U.S. in the years before the rage for blackface. I found out about the African Grove Theater Eric Lott's Love and Theft; found more in a few places on the web. Given your interests you may know something about it that I didn't find, so I thought I'd ping you on this. Oh, and thank you very much for sticking around here despite having apparently become the favorite target of the Hitler Youth verbal (and visual) drive-by squad. The shit they are doing to you is a good reminder to me that I get off relatively easy on that count. Let me know if there is anything I can do on your behalf with respect to these gutter-rats besides wish you well and them ill.   |   

 :I've known of the African Grove theater company since, I suppose, the early '70s (I attended Howard University, and there's a theater there named after Ira Aldridge), but that's about it.  I seem to also recall a play by, perhaps, August Wilson that dealt with the company and its trevails and its eventual destruction by a rival white theater owner.  I'm pretty sure it was an August Wilson play, because he later  or about the same time  founded an institute or foundation named after the Grove in New York, or Philly, or Newark (somewhere).  I don't know what happened to it, though. I haven't read the article yet  I'm really pressed for time this week  but I'll get to it.  I'm glad you're on it. 

 :And, no.  There's really nothing that can be done about the intermittent vandalism.  It's annoying, sometimes lewd and disgusting, but I'm not going to waste my time with it.  (I thought I was done with the dumb white-boy gross-out pranks when I left high school, but, alas, ""contributors"" like Scatboy and the pink pr*ck exhibitionist have proven me wrong.)  Wikipedia has proven itself utterly useless in such matters, even when the users are registered.  (These vandals are just morons with too much time on their hands and precious few active brain cells.) But thanks for asking.  Peace. )   

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