As we tumbled out of BB King’s on Beale Street after a night of celebration, a family friend said, “This may be the drinks talking, but I never saw you dance with your mother.”
I had danced with her—there’s photographic proof—but she wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t danced much that night.
There was a time when I was always the first on the dance floor. My mother tried to awaken that version of me when Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” came on.
I’ve struggled to find unabashed joy these past few years. And dancing, sweaty, silly, all-in dancing, has always been my most authentic expression of that relentless, unyielding, undeniable pleasure.
One of my mantras this year is get over yourself.
Another: don’t let these motherfuckers steal your sunshine.
When I don’t dance, especially with the people I love most, I’m not honoring the goals and values I’ve set for myself.
Worse, I’m not being true to who I am.
And worst of all, I’m letting the onslaught of negativity win.
As we got closer to Halloween, social media was filled with creators, influencers, and regular folks dressed to surprise, scare, or delight. The holiday has become a showcase for imagination, titillation, and referential humor, with little connection to the pagan or Christian rituals at its roots.
I sometimes lament not feeling as compelled to dress up as I once was. That won’t change, though. As I get older, I’m less interested in wearing a costume to amuse colleagues and friends. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love a good Halloween meme. Someone came to the office party dressed as a Labubu, and it was terrific.
But these days, I’m drawn to something else: remembrance. Why ignore, mock, or ward off the spirit world when the evils of our time don’t come from beyond? They are right here in human form, adorned in the clothing of authorities.
This Halloween, Tiffany and I took the Metro downtown for a night at the Mark Taper Forum to see Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. The show was her idea—a last-minute addition to our social calendar—but it turned out to be precisely what I needed. We arrived early and wandered through Grand Park, where the annual Día de los Muertos installation had transformed the plaza into a celebration of color, reverence, and resistance.
After my dad’s passing last year, I began reading about Día de los Muertosand the significance of the ofrenda, the altars families build to honor and invite departed loved ones back into their lives.
One of the exhibits invited visitors to write a message to someone who had passed. On a small index card, I wrote:
Dad (KT),
Dominique is getting married soon. Your presence is requested!
You are missed and loved.
—JT
It was the first time I’d written directly to him rather than about him. Usually, when I write or speak for the dead, it’s for myself or others. A way for us to process loss. But this felt like a conversation, a hope he might hear, and that with open invitation, he might make his presence known, especially at such a momentous occasion. This spirituality is so unlike me, but I meant every word. I hope he joins us.
The Grand Park installation also honored the living, especially those in Los Angeles whose lives are made precarious by our country’s immigration enforcement policies. With City Hall glowing behind it, the exhibit called out the trauma caused by ICE raids and border policies that tear families apart. Surrounded by marigolds and the righteous indignation of our Chicano brethren and sistren, I was reminded why I love this city. Los Angeles isn’t perfect, but it shows up. We fight for one another. We build community from loss and struggle.
And that spirit carried into the theater.
Los Angeles is the final stop for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’s initial touring company and likely the last time so many members of the original ensemble will perform together. To do so here feels right. As playwright Jocelyn Bioh said, “to culminate in such a special city that understands the power of community and coming together, that doesn’t feel like an accident.”
Set in a Harlem salon where a group of West African women—many working under tenuous visa conditions—build a makeshift family, the show is sharp, funny, and profoundly human. It captures what it means to chase the American Dream while being told you don’t belong.
By the time the curtain fell, I felt grateful. For the play, for this city, for the way art challenges me to stay open and engaged in my community: to remember, to listen, to love.
Lush Life, the first song on my father’s final album, runs eight minutes and eight seconds long. The live recording is billed as Kevin Toney and Friends, but this opening salvo is about him. Besides his adept command of the ivories, you only hear laughter as he improvises playfully in parts. Then, at the end, he speaks, his voice as confident and bright as his performance, like rays of morning sunlight. I’m listening to the whole album as I type this.
It’s the first anniversary of his death today. As clouds, cold, wind, and rain arrived in Los Angeles last week, so did melancholy. It has been nearly a week since I wrote in my journal, avoiding whatever emotion might escape from my fingers on the keyboard I’m most comfortable playing. I have been replaying last year’s events, imagining them as giant dominoes tumbling and unable to escape their path. I hear each block fall, the sound echoing in my ears, the shadow and threat growing ever larger. As it happened, I worried about the weight of it all. I worried so much that my body expressed it as ailments, first shingles and then appendicitis. However, when my mother called to tell me the news, I wasn’t crushed under those tumbling blocks; I was uplifted by the relief that his suffering was over.
Grief is a never-ending journey, however, and that weight has returned. There is so much uncertainty in the world, and it is the terrible realization that one of the things I am sure of is that Kevin Toney isn’t here to experience it with us. While he brought joy to so many through his music, I am mourning his absence in our family’s everyday lives. His exuberance for youthful delights and overt expressions of love are absent. We have our memories, and we may seek to substitute what he did and how he did it with our versions, but my dad’s way was his way, and there’s no replacing that, no matter how much we might want it.
My sister has entered the recording and is performing a jazzy rendition of her song I Can’t Take That. The song is about the end of a romance with the lyrics, “Hurt doesn’t go away, the memories will never fade.” Later, she vamps and riffs around the refrain, “It left me distraught.”
Tears aren’t easy for me, but this sadness is worth crying over. Yesterday evening, as the sun set and I sat in my car in a scene reminiscent of Monday, March 18th, 2024, when that fateful call came, I accepted my feelings and allowed them in. There was nothing to do but to be with that hurt and submit to its heft. I was neither crushed by the weight of that pain nor comforted.
I was, and grief was. I am, and grief is.
This morning, though, with light coming through my windows, there was something else: a desire to hear his voice and his gifts. Kevin Toney and his friends are performing Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood. There is one more song left on this live recording. My father is acknowledging Azar Lawrence on saxophone as the crowd cheers.
That’s it.
While I may be in a sentimental mood at this moment, I’m no longer distraught. Those giant dominoes have been replaced with the black and white patterns of piano keys, and with my dad at the helm, what emanates is never a threat.
My mom sent a picture of her view in the northeast corner of the Valley early Friday evening before sunset.
I didn’t understand what direction she was facing. I thought it might have been the Lidia Fire burning on its last legs east of her or the Kenneth Fire to her southwest. She texted that she was looking due south to the mountains behind Encino, just a neighborhood or two over from us. She sent a second pic as dusk turned to night, which shocked me, and I looked out our window to deep red plumes, dark smoke, and flames exploding from the back of the hillside. The mountains often feel close enough to touch from our vantage point, five miles away. It was the first time I thought we might have to evacuate, not just in this wildfire disaster but in any Southern California disaster of the last twenty years.
We checked our go-bags, filled a few extra pieces of luggage, and confirmed we had everything necessary, like my passport and booze. Tiffany packed the car so we could be even more ready. As our ongoing crisis in LA moved closer than ever towards us, I turned on the TV and found local news. It was surreal to watch and hear broadcasters talk about firefighting efforts that we could see occurring in real time every time we looked out our dining room window.
Although the evacuation warning zones were within walking distance of us, The fact that an evacuation center was set up less than a mile from our home comforted me as we slept in our beds.
The following morning, the sun shone, and the winds were calm. White smoke over those mountaintops seemed like welcome progress. I sought out trusted local and national sources for additional context. I used the non-profit app Watch Duty for updates. Tiffany turned the local news back on. The battle raged throughout the day with meaningful progress as we hit dusk. This morning, after I had slept hard for ten hours, we awoke to clear skies where the inferno had raged 36 hours prior.
What I had little desire to do over that time when the crisis was so close to home was jump to social media.
I’ve seen tremendous value in social networks as a utility this past week: it’s great for finding out if loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are safe; mutual aid networks scale awareness for those in need quickly in these spaces; if you’ve tuned your feeds right, you might see things that deepen your understanding, build your resolve, make you laugh, or remind you that the folks you know and follow are primarily lovely people who want to take care of each other.
TikTok will likely disappear in the US by the end of the month, and I’m not sure I will miss it. The time I spend consuming content is overwhelmingly empty calories. I could be spending that time reading or idling, granting my brain a more hearty diet than the dopamine rush.
The communities I enjoy interacting with on Threads may not survive Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA machinations, and I will miss that if it happens. However, I’m not sure I have the energy to invest in another Social Media space beyond distributing my blog. The other upstart networks just haven’t been my thing.
I don’t want to chase your attention. I don’t want to be your audience. I want to be a part of something real.
When real shit goes down, these digital networks only simulate community and often through a funhouse mirror.
Real human networks come together directly. Like this week, the city of stars has proven itself as a city of angels every day, especially in times like these.
At times, we might use these platforms to help facilitate coordinated action but they aren’t are our only resource and likely aren’t even the best.
The best might be just going where you’re needed and asking, “How can I help?”
And yet, I am grateful. The sun is shining. There is breath in my lungs. My legs work. I have a roof over my head. I have food in my fridge. There is love, laughter, and light in my life everywhere I look.
I give thanks to the medical professionals who cared for me this year through shingles and a ruptured appendix. I’m grateful for those who showed compassion and kindness for my father in his final days.
I’m grateful for sports, especially women’s basketball. I haven’t done a complete count, but I may have attended over 50 sporting events this year, spanning the NCAAWBB, WNBA, NWSL, NFL, and NCAAWVB in three states. Sports have brought new friends into my life and deepened my connection with people I’ve known for years. They deliver joy when desperately needed and never fail to surprise and delight. Thank you.
I’m grateful for family, friends, and colleagues who stepped up when my chips were down.
I’m grateful for my mom and sister as we grieve separately and together. They lift me up.
And then there’s Tiffany, the love of my life, my person, my partner, who has been, well, everything over the last 12 months.
Lear has long been an inspiration of mine, and that love for humanity, the arts, and civic duty caught me off guard. His words, work, and commitment to ensuring all kinds of families are honored, respected, protected, and seen in this American experiment also matter to me.
After brief remarks from a representative of The People for the American Way, Mike Royce and Gloria Calderón Kellett explained how the afternoon’s event would go, and then the complete title sequence was presented on screen, performed by Gloria Estefan.
This is it. (oh-oh-oh-oh) This is life, the one you get So go and have a ball.
This is it. Straight ahead and rest assured You can’t be sure at all.
So, while you’re here, enjoy the view Keep on doing what you do Hold on tight. We’ll muddle through One day at a time.
So up on your feet. (Pa’ arriba!) Somewhere, there’s music playing. Don’t you worry none We’ll just take it like it comes.
One day at a time! One day at a time! One day at a time. (Un día a la vez, lo tomas un día a la vez). One day at a time, one day at a time. One day at a time!
As the lights came back up, my nose was runny, and I was desperate for a tissue to dab my eyes. We would go on to laugh uproariously for the next two hours as Rita Moreno, Isabella Gomez, Todd Grinnell, Justina Machado, Marcel Ruiz, and Stephen Tobolowsky reminded us how good they are and how funny and poignant this show was and is.
Despite the laughs, I didn’t stop crying until the final ovation. Family had been at the top of my mind all day before we arrived at the show. As I did my Saturday morning ritual of reviewing what music I had been listening to recently, I realized Cleo Sol had returned to the top of my spins. A year before, her album Gold was what I would listen to on my daily commutes to visit my dad in the hospital. Without consciously thinking about it, I had already begun to revisit that series of terrible events that would dominate the final months of 2023.
One of the three episodes the cast performed was titled “Best Birthday Ever!” and featured Rita Moreno’s Lydia uncharacteristically sad and unwilling to celebrate herself. Throughout the episode, we learn that she’s mourning the loss of keepsakes from her childhood in Cuba and the possibility that she will never get to see these images or hear sounds from that time. By the end, she is treated to the experience of hearing her mother’s voice for the first time since her death, and it fills her with joy.
I suspect I will go through similar whirlwinds of emotion over the next few months. I remember last fall viscerally, and if this weekend is any indication, my feelings will be turned all the way on, and that’s fine.
All emotions are welcome. Let’s feel all the feelings. I just don’t want to get lost in the sads. Much like at the Table Read, I want to balance the melancholy with opportunities for joy.
María Ampara Escandón loves Los Angeles. More importantly, she understands it. Her novel, L.A. Weather, is about family and the subtle nuances within each relationship. It’s also about identity, the hold that secrets can have over us, and how we handle the crises that can face a family unit in any given year. Los Angeles is where the Alvarados happen to live in this story. This city I love is both the setting and a key player in the plot.
As Storygraph‘s personalized preview of the novel suggested in more polite words: this kind of yarn is my shit.
Throughout the novel, characters describe their visions of L.A.
Compared to New York, we’re like ducks in a pond.
“They glide effortlessly on the tranquil surface, but you can see they’re frantically paddling when you go underwater. […] To survive, you have to keep your cool. Angelenos only sweat in public at the gym.”
One of the Alvarado daughters, who thinks in Instagram captions, believes the city to have been developed horizontally so that it could be projected in Panavision. She goes to the Griffith Park Observatory frequently to remind herself:
“[T]hat because she lived in the wealthiest city of the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, she had been bestowed with the ultimate responsibility: to thrive in her endeavors many times over on behalf of all the immigrants who hadn’t been given a chance.”
The patriarch of the family shares my perspective on the City of Angels:
“Every race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and food preference was well represented within Los Angeles County, and this is what [he] loved most about his city: how it welcomed everything and everyone.”
Threads has become my social media app of choice over the last year, and recently, there has been this regular drumbeat of new residents of L.A. starting conversations in which long-time Angelenos on the app feel the need to step in and correct their incorrect assumptions. I try my best to stay out of these engagement traps. Los Angeles doesn’t require you to love it. Few will demand that you give up your hometown allegiances or suppress that identity to succeed here. I’ve known people who have lived here for 20 years and still claim Chicago, New York, or wherever. And the city is cool with that.
But, as Escandón seems to know, magic happens if you fall in love with this place—with the parts of it that truly make this city and county shine. This place and its people will love you back. You will find a home. You will find family. You will believe anything is possible when we come together.
L.A. Weather is L.A. County Public Library’s summer read. If you’re a fan of women of color writing about complicated families, intriguing women, and how they make their way through seemingly impossible situations—usually with wit and humor—this is also for you.
This past Wednesday, my family hosted a musical tribute to my father, Kevin Toney. I wasn’t an active participant in the production or planning. Outside of doing half of a rough draft of a script for the M.C., I tapped out.
“This is not for us,” I said. “This is for everyone else.”
It was more than that, of course. It was my mother’s gift to his musical legacy. The show was a retrospective of his work in a way he had not done during his life. It spanned eras and genres. It merged his faith with his soul-stirring compositions.
It was expertly performed by his talented friends and loved ones, including my sister, Dominique Toney. Video of him talking about and performing his work played throughout, allowing him to speak for himself even though he was gone.
Despite this spectacular show, it couldn’t give me the one thing I wanted: Kevin Toney alive in the room.
The show closed with a video of my dad alone on stage at a piano. The audience can’t be seen, but you can feel their presence. They are in awe as his outstretched fingers glide across the keys. It’s Kevin Toney, the entertainer, in all his glory. One foot is on the pedals, and the other rests under the bench. He was tall with long arms, so he leaned away from the instrument, giving himself room to move. I watch as he hears the sounds in his head before they exit from the strings on the piano. A phone rings. It’s his. It’s my mom. He finally banters with the crowd a little bit, and they chuckle at this break in seriousness from the maestro. He turns back to the piano and closes with a flourish.
It’s quintessentially him, and what I felt intensely in that moment was his absence.
Everyone did right by him, but Kevin Toney was not on that stage. My father is gone.
In the three months since he passed, the primary feeling I have had is relief. I’ve been relieved that he was no longer in a hospital attached to machines and stuck in bed. I’ve been relieved that the stress of being his advocate was no longer a burden for my mom. I’ve been relieved not to make myself physically sick with worry for all of us. I’ve been relieved for life to be taken off pause.
I’d been dreading the show, though, as I sensed some new emotions creeping in as it approached: sadness and loss.
During the tribute, a montage of photos was played on the video screens. One image took my breath away: a picture from my parents’ wedding reception. My father shared the frame with my grandmother and my uncle, Mike.
Michael Saunders and Kevin Toney are the two most influential men in my life, and they are both gone now.
On this Father’s Day, I’m allowing that reality to wash over me and accepting this next stage of grief.
In what ways is my life a tribute to theirs while I’m the one alive in the room?
It wasn’t every day that I would join my dad on his doctor’s visits, but on one of those rare occasions, we met with a new doctor who said, “Men our age have to figure out life in retirement.”
My dad’s voice, though weakened, still carried the strength of his spirit. ‘I’m not retired,’ he declared, ‘I’m a musician, composer, conductor, and author.’ His words were a testament to his unwavering dedication to his craft and the life he and his God had created.
The doctor apologized, and we moved on, but over the last year, no matter the circumstance, Kevin Toney wanted those who would treat and care for him to know who he was.
Musician. Composer. Conductor. Author. Son. Brother. Husband. Father. Man of God.
His titles were posted in his room to remind us that he was much more than a patient.
No matter who he was to us as individuals, his presence resonated far beyond our spheres. Kevin Toney was a beacon of inspiration, a guiding light, and a source of comfort to countless others worldwide.
When we needed to communicate on his behalf—to receive his messages, answer his emails, respond to voicemails, and such—it became apparent that his list of signifiers should grow.
He was also a mentor to so many. As his son, I saw him as quiet, often stoic. He always had his questions for me, but he was comfortable listening to the rest of us be vocal at home. I thought of him as speaking with his fingers on a keyboard or with a mic in his hand.
But that was not the whole of him. With his broad circle of family, friends, colleagues, fans, and beyond, he was loud. He was a frequent and trusted voice in so many lives.
Fred Rodgers—the children’s TV host—talked about looking for helpers during a tragedy. In so many lives, Kevin Toney was that Helper. He was generous with his time, his dollars, and his wisdom.
The most critical honorific I can convey to him, which I have said about him over the years, is that “he is a good man.” My father’s journey was not always smooth. He faced his share of challenges and made mistakes along the way. But what set him apart was his unwavering commitment to self-improvement. He tried hard to be a better person every day, to learn from his mistakes, and to make amends. He didn’t want regrets. He sought to correct his transgressions. He wanted no relationship in his life to sit in conflict. He was ever hungry for reconciliation, connection, mutual respect, and love.
Those are the actions of a musician, composer, conductor, author, son, brother, husband, father, mentor, Helper, good man, and man of God.
Dad, you have left an indelible mark on this world, and your legacy will continue to inspire and guide us. Thank you for the music, the wisdom, and the love. We will carry your memory in our hearts forever.
My father, Kevin Toney, made his peaceful transition on March 18th, 2024. We laid him to rest on April 4th, 2024.
It took me six weeks to complete Michael W. Twitty’s part autobiography, part narrative history, part cookbook. It’s only 400 pages long. My slow burn through rate is not a reflection on the writing which is often beautiful and lyrical and always well-crafted and considered. No, my pace is a common occurrence when faced with the grim reality of slavery as a lived experience. If I’m not taking it in small bites, I’m avoiding it entirely. Black grief isn’t for me, which is why I haven’t seen 12 Years A Slave or Hotel Rwanda or made my way to the end of Fruitvale Station.
I made it through The Cooking Gene, though, with my heart bruised but intact. Twitty makes plain what it must have been like for his specific ancestors and thus, the kin of many of us for whom enslavement was our forced entry into these United States. In the lived experience, we can feel in our bones the back-breaking work of picking cotton under the crack of the whip. We must consider the soul-crushing work of toiling in hot kitchens for our enslavers (who might also rape us on a whim and treat the children from the villainous union as property). In the papers from the time, we might understand the cruelty of the middle passage, the diet built on malnourishment (which plagues the genetic makeup of black folks to this day), the crimes of family separation. In the sober hunt for and re-telling of our shared history, we might stew in anger at the willful ignorance of those who would like to pretend slavery was something other than it is, and who endeavor to revisit those sins on people living today.
In the food, we might find where hope was found and resiliency fortified. In the food, we might find where the roots of true American cuisine began. In the food, we might see even more nuanced ways in which wealth, power, and culture were taken from black bodies, black hands, black ingenuity. In the food, we might find threads of our family trees back to Louisiana or Virginia or the Carolinas.
I don’t know my own history beyond a few generations on my mother’s side, but through The Cooking Gene, I can imagine my people were first brought to this country in the rice growing lands. Perhaps my love of the food comes to me from my ancestors, deep in my bones, in my DNA. What might I learn if I go wherever that thread takes me? What parts of Africa and Europe might I land?
Tiffany is cooking a true Southern meal today of smothered chicken, collards, and mac & cheese (macaroni pie, in the old words). If I get my gumption up, I might whip up a batch of biscuits to sop up the gravy and potlikker. It smells like kitchens of my youth in our house today. Like my grandma’s and great grandma’s homes in the summertime. It probably smells like the kitchens of their youth. And the kitchens our enslaved kin toiled in as well.
They only rarely would’ve been able to make such a meal for their families, producing it instead on the regular for Sunday dinners for the white people who had bought their bodies and claimed to own them.
It took me six weeks to finish The Cooking Gene. To move any faster would’ve felt like disrespect to the memory of the spirits Twitty stirs. To go more quickly would have removed the emotional release valve I require to process America’s terrible history.
In retrospect, a month and a half is a short time with Twitty’s tales. They will stay with me for much longer.
