A little soul

For about a month now I've been volunteering at the Ruth Ellis Center in Highland Park (a city surrounded by Detroit) on Wednesday evenings. This is a drop-in center for homosexual and gender-variant teens and young adults, a place for them to express themselves without fear of a culture that doesn't get it. Surrounded as it is by Detroit, the kids are all black or Hispanic (and not many of those). Monty, the intern, and I are the only white dudes on Wednesday evenings. The center provides two meals a day and snacks when available (big bags of bagels always seem available). There are laundry facilities and a clothes closet (useful for that first job interview). Carol leads a discussion group after dinner (a lesbian group on Wednesdays so I'm not invited). There are various games (the most popular being the card game Spades), a sound system to which the guys dance imitating (I think) some kind of fashion runway (it can get loud so last night I started taking ear plugs but didn't need to use them), a big TV, which gets tuned to Jeopardy and Project Runway, and kids just having a good time.

My duties for the evening are to help with dinner, help keep the kitchen in order, and interact with the kids. I haven't done much of the last bit yet as they can be rather intimidating and I'm still an outsider.

The staff includes Carol, Smoke (female), Rasool (male), Monty, and April (male and a volunteer). April sometimes works as a female impersonator. In the case of April I should ask about pronoun preference, which I haven't done.

There was a humorous incident from yesterday. I usually arrive in time to help serve dinner. I got there yesterday at 4:45 to find dinner hadn't been started because someone was still out purchasing supplies. Soon the ingredients for spaghetti were in hand and I got the meat on into the skillet as April got the onion out to chop. I was about to add basil to the meat when April stopped me saying something like this, "Oh, honey, that won't do. People here don't like it that way. That's an Italian spice and you must have learned it from your mother" My ancestry is German and English, not Italian. "Do you see any Italians here? We need to season this with a little soul." Soul season turned out to be garlic powder, salt, pepper, and onion. After a while he thought the tomato sauce was a bit too plain (only cans of plain tomato sauce and paste) so considered adding salsa to it. Since I obviously didn't know how to do it I left it to April and I made the garlic toast. April put the spaghetti on to cook and soon the pot was boiling over and he was a bit miffed when I turned down the heat. Apparently cleaning up the large puddle on the stove was just a part of doing business. When it was all ready and mixed together, April dumped it onto a platter, decided that platter wasn't big enough, and dumped that onto a bigger one. He served from the big platter. I saw how his cooking methods weren't all that sanitary, so I declined to have some (I had seen from previous weeks that the menu doesn't always fit my dietary needs so I ate at home). We served about 15 kids.