Happy Weekend!
I hope that you’ve had a good week. I’ve spent most of it recovering from producing the COMEDY IN THE PLAZA event that I helped put on with the San Leandro Arts Commission and the City of San Leandro, California. What an awesome event! We took over the parking lot of the San Leandro Community Library Center, threw in some awesome staging and sound and presented some of the funniest comics from San Francisco and Los
Angeles, free to the public. Over 400 people filled the plaza with lawn chairs and blankets and had a marvelous evening of outdoor laughter as we watched the sun go down. We’re going to do it again next summer and I hope you’ll join us!
In the meantime, I’ve been dealing with the adrenaline crash that comes after the planning and execution (not to mention the performing) of an event of that magnitude. I’ve been EXHAUSTED.
I did manage to get my daily writing done on the Not a Genuine Black Man pilot and I was able to put out the second edition of the new COPELAND’S CORNER blog. If you’re receiving this newsletter, you should have received the blog in your mailbox on Wednesday morning. If not, please check your spam folder. I’ll be sending it out to all my various email lists for one more week. After that, you’ll have to
subscribe to get it. You can do that for free at briancopeland.substack.com.
I’ve just got a couple of things to tell you about this week…
WATCHING
Ms. Marvel
DISNEY+
I had been meaning to check out the new Marvel series on Disney+, Ms. Marvel, for a few weeks but couldn’t find the time. One evening this week I did manage to squeeze it in and planned on catching one episode. I was hooked and binged the whole darned thing late into the night. Ms. Marvel (based on the recent Marvel comic book) is a sequel of sorts to the big screen Captain Marvel, which
stars Brie Larsen. Maybe “sequel” isn’t the right word. It’s more like a companion piece.
Ms. Marvel is the story of 16-year-old Kamala Khan, a young Pakistani American high school student who idolizes Captain Marvel and gains mysterious powers of her own when she slips on an old bangle sent by her grandmother in Pakistan. Iman Vellani (a Canadian actress of Pakistani origin) is wonderful and adorable in what is essentially a coming-of-age story. What’s really great is that Ms. Marvel is
the first Muslim super-hero. While the story is set in New Jersey, where Kamala’s parents immigrated in the 1980s, a significant part of the tale takes place in Pakistan.
I found it incredibly educational. I knew absolutely nothing about the 1947 partition of India that created the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan prior to watching this excellent series which showed how Partition affected those people who were being shuffled around between newly created countries after the British occupation. There was a lot of
suffering and hardship that I knew nothing about. Kudos to Marvel and Disney for using a writing and creative team largely from the region.
The best part is, that with all the Muslim bashing we’ve seen in this country since 9/11, it’s great for young Muslim girls to have a positive role model of their own. One who saves people and one who can do amazing things. WATCH. Better still, if you have a young daughter, watch with her. No matter what your ethnic background.