Untitled Document
StrangeTango.com is a multilayered art installation in cyberspace…the documentation of a life in three iterations: as a film treatment, a book, a blog.
“What remains as documentation of a life?”
Strange Tango haunts the boundaries of digital streams and visceral storytelling, where pixels and dreams flow together.
Video, reportage, and nonlinear narrative meld in captured moments from the life of A. D. Tejada, artist - traveler - citizen of the world.
Life is a strange tango...
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 Gwena and Jeff McIntosh, Just 4 K-9's & Kitty 2
When my family and I relocated from New England to southwest Oklahoma, we had two priorities. One was to find a home to buy so we could quickly settle in; another was to find a veterinarian and a dog groomer for our family pet. We decided on Just 4 K-9’s & Kitty 2 based on referrals from happy and satisfied customers.
The grooming and pet supply store quickly became our one-stop headquarters for everything from grooming to food, toys, and accessories for all the pets in our extended household. With 6,000 square feet of custom-designed space, Just 4 K-9’s & Kitty 2 is perhaps the finest specialty store in the country for dogs and cats. Continue reading Gwena and Jeff McIntosh, Just 4 K-9’s & Kitty 2
 Athima Chansanchai, Tima Media
I was off the grid until I arrived on the social media scene just over six months ago, and Athima Chansanchai is one of my first cyber friends. I first noticed Athima when she joined the Strange Tango fan/friend page on Facebook, leaving thoughtful comments on my posts. I was impressed that she had taken the initiative to visit our innovative personal website and to look for Strange Tango on Facebook. As I vetted her profile on the internet, I saw we had several friends in common, including Sangita Chandra, a longtime friend and StrangeTango.com adviser who was the co-chair of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) 2009 convention in Boston during which our website launched. Sangita is also an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture television producer/reporter at WCVB in Boston, the flagship Hearst-Argyle station. I later learned that Athima and Sangita had roomed together some years ago at a national convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color.
I friended Athima on my Facebook personal account, and we became a part of each other’s expansive social network. As I read her posts and updates about her life that streamed through my Facebook news feed, I was taken by the honesty and authenticity conveyed. Many Facebook users cultivate a branded persona on social media, so this raw and unfiltered individual was very credible to me. A multidimensional person was emerging: her life and aspirations shared on a continual basis with close to 1,000 Facebook friends, of which we had 82 friends in common. If she were intriguing to me—a literary stylist/conceptual artist with a finely-tuned sensibility who casts her net far and wide to curate some of the best content on the world wide web—it stood to reason that Athima would have an interesting personal history to share with the world. Indeed, she does. Continue reading Athima Chansanchai, Journalist and Do-Good Entrepreneur
 Steven Spriggs, Texas A&M '13
I first met Steven Spriggs a year ago when he was a senior at Eisenhower High School in Lawton, Oklahoma, applying for admission to Cornell University. As an alumna involved with the Cornell Alumni Admissions Ambassadors Network (CAAAN), I am privileged to meet and to recruit many promising young men and women for my alma mater.
Steven and I met at Starbucks, and my immediate impression was that he is a young Barack Obama: earnest, responsible, and highly intelligent. He was a National Merit Finalist, an Eagle Scout, and he was also selected to participate in the Leadership Education and Development Program in Business (LEAD) at the University of Virginia’s top-ranked Darden School of Business. A partnership of some of the top corporations and business schools in the country, LEAD’s mission is to build “a talented and diverse workforce ready for the global business environment.” Each summer, a highly diverse group of academically gifted and multi-talented high school juniors is selected for the program.
Despite his leadership roles and state and national awards, Steven is a humble young man from a former military family with a preternatural awareness of the world around him. He described to me how he helped organize a fundraiser to draw attention to the increasing number of people left homeless―students spent the night in the high school auditorium, confined to the living space of a cardboard box. This was a vivid portrayal of destitution, but one that I would have expected from a student attending an urban high school, not in America’s heartland where overt neediness is often invisible.
Given the questions he asked, the interview lasted an hour and a half.
When I next heard from Steven, it was to let me know he had been accepted to Cornell and the University of Chicago, but that Texas A&M had offered him a financial aid package that paid for all his college expenses. He would be able to graduate debt-free and to attend college closer to home. He asked if he could stay in touch with me, and I agreed to be his mentor. Continue reading Steven Spriggs, Role Model Millennial
StrangeTango.com: Life as Art is the personal website/blog of A. D. Tejada, a Filipino American feminist and first generation immigrant in America’s heartland who is Ivy League-educated, has lived in 7 major American cities, and has traveled through 35 countries on 5 continents.
At the nexus of art, culture, and politics, StrangeTango.com presents an innovative vision of a post-racial society.
The creative collaborators are multicultural and multigenerational; a Pulitzer Prize finalist/George Polk Award winner and an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture television producer have been involved from the conception of the global platform. Launched just five months ago, the site was featured in a presentation on innovation, creativity, and leadership in a university business curriculum.
Hope Webby and Oprah notice us… Continue reading At the Nexus of Art, Culture, and Politics
Traditionally, I am incommunicado during the month of December. This is my time for rituals of reflection and spiritual rejuvenation. The last week of the year aligns Christmas, birthdays, and New Year’s: the sequence punctuates the finality and passing of time, which inspires me to make my surroundings comfortable and cocoon myself from the exterior world. In my sanctuary, I meditate and prepare for what may come.
The year 2010 heralds America’s decennial population count. A decade ago, I created the itinerary and served as a press advance for the National Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Dr. Kenneth Prewitt, during his New England swing tour. I was also a census spokesperson as a member of the New England media team on the staff of Boston Regional Director Arthur Dukakis. Yes, Arthur was the cousin of Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis and Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis.
What I appreciated most about my work with Census 2000 was the opportunity to immerse myself in the diversity and multiculturalism that is America. The individual stories and snapshots across the country, of natives and immigrants alike, create a rich and varied tapestry encompassing the range of human emotion and experience. To honor what is unique about America—her people—much of what I curate for StrangeTango.com: Life as Art includes emerging and underrepresented ethnic communities, nascent ideas, and fresh voices and perspectives: content that is authentic, relevant, and intriguing.
Depending on the schedules of gifted collaborators—Hasan Diwan, Daniel Brunelle, Marlee O’Neal, Chris Barros, Brian Saffold, and Raphael Seligmann—we hope to add a new installation to the continuously evolving website later in the year: a nonlinear music matrix as part of an experiment in interactive storytelling. ”Millennium Muse” is the experimental space reserved for such installations, that are added as new technologies become available and as we discover new collaborators who can help bring the vision to life. Continue reading Happy New Year and Decade
John Psaropoulos is the Editor of The New Athenian; he is also a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) and CNN in Greece. We had met at the start of our journalism careers working at CNN International in Atlanta. John had studied at King’s College in London, and I had a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University’s top-ranked College of Communication. At the time, Riz Khan was an anchor and top executives Eason Jordan, Chris Cramer, and Rena Golden were at the forefront of CNNI’s regionalization strategy. A decade later, John and I reconnected on Facebook through a web site set up for CNN alumni. As a guest columnist, John shares his sensibility as a modern day Athenian. Continue reading Cloudburst
 Erin Yoshimura and Gil Asakawa
Gil Asakawa and I first met at a multimedia presentation during the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston this past summer. As a former AAJA/New England National Board member and National Scholarship Chair, the launch of the personal website StrangeTango.com: Life as Art in my former hometown of Boston was personally significant to me. I had been chatting with a new friend, Henry Fuhrmann, the Assistant Managing Editor at the “Los Angeles Times,” who had learned of the website prior to its launch from a Facebook post broadcasted by Filipino/Asian American activist Rene Astudillo in San Francisco, when Gil took the empty seat next to me. Henry and Gil knew each other so introductions were made.
Strange Tango is a labor of love, I explained to Gil. He mentioned that he and his wife were working on something that was for them also a labor of love: a project involving Asian American leaders. He wished me luck and said he hoped the website paid off for me. I replied that Strange Tango―non-commercial and non-monetized―already had.
I have been involved with social media for less than half a year. As a newcomer to Facebook, Gil Asakawa, a nationally known Asian American writer and online content and SEO expert, became one of my first cyber friends. His informative and personable posts would range from music, to Asian American culture, and even dining reviews. Since I was planning a trip to Denver, I thought Gil would be an interesting subject and emailed a request for an interview. He agreed but also let me know his wife Erin Yoshimura was working on a new project and would I interview her instead? This suggestion gave me the best of both worlds, so we all arranged to meet for lunch at Domo, an authentic, Japanese country restaurant that he had posted about on #twEATs.
This is how I found myself in downtown Denver on a warm and sunny day, inside a beautiful, traditional Japanese garden on the edge of a commercial district. Continue reading Erin Yoshimura, Gil Asakawa, and visualizAsian.com
 Me, at the time I began writing Strange Tango.
The destinies of a pantheon of gifted Cornell graduates unfold through the internet.
After my niece had graduated from pre-kindergarten several years back, she started summer classes at vacation bible school where she saw Luke, a former classmate who had left the class to be home-schooled in anticipation of his father’s deployment to Iraq.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he shyly replied. “I do.”
The weeklong pattern of rainy and gray New England weather inspired me to remain in my cocoon and to revisit my early adulthood. Once a person has entered my orbit and been a significant part of an era in my life, a bond of shared experiences is created. There is history between us. I carefully choose the people I invite into my space, so relationships have been of long duration. I can recall only one significant disappointment.
Prompted by a vivid dream, I sought to reconnect with someone who once mattered to me. “We don’t want any contact with you at all,” he replied. Still, I persisted. How could someone with whom you have had a symbiotic bond—a karmic connection—change, or age, so much? He had such love of beauty, how could charm and grace be replaced by fear and inflexibility?
Or had he simply forgotten me?
For the next nine months, I sought openings that would reveal the answer to me until, finally, I released the beautiful memory of a dear friend to the stranger he had become. My dream was indeed prophetic: his heart was dead inside.
Other reconnections have had far happier endings. Continue reading Speak, Memory
 Moulton Brown's New Age Traveler kit
New Age Traveler is an excerpt from Millennium Muse, my book of narrative nonfiction, essays, and observations.
My favorite travel agent booked me for automatic electronic upgrades to first class, so on two round trip legs between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Chicago, air travel was sheer bliss. On the second trip, I gave my seat to my father, who had joined me. He was pleased with the personalized service, comfortable seating, and the meal of fried rice, lechon (pieces of roasted whole pig), and wine.
I fly first class as an upgrade whenever possible, usually paying $50 per leg for an upgrade ticket, but complementary is always nice. I’ve done well cultivating longstanding relationships that offer value-added benefits with products and services.
I’ve traveled to at least thirty-five countries on five continents. These days, it’s leisure travel for me, with stays at some of the finest hotels in the world. However, my travel habits have remained the same. Unless I’m on a cruise ship where I don’t have to unpack more than once, I keep things simple. Continue reading New Age Traveler
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