We’ve been through so many cities and I haven’t had access to the internet often. So I’m recapping two weeks later. To catch you up… To complete our Detroit experience…

Before heading out, Pippi got a new veggie oil tank and we had a cage created for us at a welding spot at 555 Studios by a dude that saw the show two nights before and wanted to offer us that service for free. While we waited for finishing touches on it, a few of us went into the Detroit Summer offices in the same building. Diana tells us Hurricane Ike is coming and if we wanted to be safe, we should get out now. Off we go – to Ann Arbor.

We clankity clank into “A Taste of University of Michigan” with our new caged tank blocking Sugarcube’s swinging doors. As acorns fell, banging loudly on the roof of the bus, the rain picked up, and new students walked around the parking lot getting free food from various ethnic restaurant vendors, we unloaded the set.

At the University of Michigan we had our first night in a hotel. I had started a conversation with Huey weeks early with, “I’m not high maintenance or anything…” But seriously, knowing we were going to be staying in a hotel got me excited! I’m not hard to please…

It is here in Ann Arbor that we watch hours and hours of television to see the damage Hurricane Ike was wreaking on areas of the Midwest we’d just left, and watched as the stock market crashed with a need of billion to bail companies out. (It’d drop dramatically as we went on through the Midwest.)

It is also in Anna Arbor that I read and finish Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. I hadn’t heard of her or the book, but some friends suggested it to me before leaving for the tour. I’d seen “Water,” looking at the lives of Hindu women and their fate after the death of their husbands. Now I was reading one woman’s relationship with her faith – Islam.

Amer, our gracious host, sees I am reading and asks me what I think about it. I admitted that I was disturbed by the preface, written by some white dude who clearly has issues with the religion and praises Ali’s forthcoming “indictment” of Islam. It had rubbed me the wrong way and I’d read excerpts of his preface to the Hurricane Season crew. It said on the cover that it was a best-seller and I couldn’t help but think that that was because of Americans’ brainwashing by our media, and a desire to have someone from “inside” agree with “our” representation of the faith. Amer begins telling me why he doesn’t like the book. I ask, “Oh, so I’m assuming you’ve read it?” “No. But I’ve heard her speak and read other things she’s written.”

As completely objective as I am when it comes to the religions of others (except Christianity, and since I grew up in it feel I can say what I think about that faith without apology), I felt myself reacting to what I felt was a defense of the treatment of women in Islam by a Muslim man. I told him I was actually more interested in hearing what other Muslim women, particularly women who have not denounced their faith and are critical of the treatment of women, speak on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “Fair,” he said. I could have hugged him for that backing down. I was extremely sensitive after having read her story and having seen “Water.”

Being a part of Hurricane Season, knowing that the creators are both women, hearing the words of women through the performance, working with the most forward-thinking women whose love – not anger or hate – has them act… I am seeing Toni Blackman’s words in another light. She’d told me that women are going to save hip hop. And I can’t help but think, “women are going to save the world.” I am guilty of constantly having male names on the tips of my tongue when talking about thought and societal transformation. This tour is having me look for the sheroes whose names will come easily when I go to speak on changing the world.