Wednesday, December 10, 2014

These are a few of my favorite things... (Rebel Girl)

Yesterday in women's restrooms across campus:

The A-200 Women's Room never looked so good.



What unexpected delight.  A+!

Later Rebel Girl braved rush hour surface street traffic to get to Garden Grove for the swearing in of Bao Nguyen as mayor. Bao, a UCI grad and one of Red Emma's former students, was first elected to the Garden Grove Unified School District Board some years back.  (Historical note: Rebel Girl has nominated him as IVC commencement speaker for many years now.  He has failed to make the cut, even as a finalist despite that fact he looks quite dapper in a suit, which seems to be one of the criteria.)

Bao,  a very young 35 years old, has just made history as the country's first Vietnamese American mayor of a city of over 100,000.  It was worth the drive across the county to see him stand there, his mother who gave birth to him in a refugee camp in Thailand holding a copy of the Constitution (Bao's choice of swearing-in text) while Erwin Chemerinsky, UCI's law school dean and one of the country's leading Constitutional law scholars, did the honors.  Not bad for a Tuesday night.

Through it all Rebel Girl had to reflect that change is sometimes indeed slow but when it arrives, well, it's worth it.

The mayor!
It was a terrific scene.  SRO in council chambers and the overflow room filled as well.  As as she arrived late and did not score a seat inside, Rebel Girl had to do with hanging out in the hallway with the likes of Chemerinsky.  Tough luck. What a guy. A quick chat revealed they had friends in common, including one of his former students, Paul Davis, who studied at USC with Chemerinsky and who, Rebel Girl believes, may have taught at IVC years ago, before her time.

Chemerinsky's favorite amendment to the Constutuition?  The 14th, natch.  He recited the first section in that hallway:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The mayor and the dean and the Constitution.

It's a good one.  Poetry.

There's more to say about yesterday but Rebel Girl will close with Sarah Vaughan singing about whiskers on kittens and save the dog bites and bee stings for another time.

Home.






*
In the Huffington Post:    
Bao Nguyen, Rabble Rouser Transforming Politics in Little Saigon, OC

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who made all the little signs?

Anonymous said...

Who are you

Anonymous said...

Chemerinsky or Nguyen would be excellent commencement speakers.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...