McDonalds Part I: You Deserve a Break Today...................................................... and McDonald's Part II: SuAnne Big Crow & Geronimo

SuAnne Big Crow & Geronimo



Sometimes when you are in a foreign country, you need a break. You need a break because:

1. You have not been able to get in or out of a door for the entire day without two or three tries - Is this a push, pull, tap, hit, bang, kick, or "minor explosive needed" door-opening device ?????

2. You urgently need a ladies room and you open the door to find a ceramic hole in the floor - and you really don't have the time to figure out what you're supposed to do next.

3. You have been playing Japanese Roulette at the restaurants one too many times and ended up with a plate of crispy baby sea-creatures that are looking up at you with their sad little eyes...

4. You went through the Exit at the train station and some big gate thumped you across the kneecaps. You made it through anyway - and nobody caught you - but there was all that adrenalin rush and fear - like what if I can't get back out of here because I've gone in the wrong way without a ticket...I can see the headlines now..."Texas Cowgirl Arrested for Gate Crashing: She Must Be Attached to the US Diplomatic Corps"

5. You need a break because you are not used to "thinking" so much. Do realize how much of our day revolves around auto-pilot????? There is no auto-pilot in a foreign country....

That's when the little jingle goes off in your head...."You deserve a break today at McDONALD'S !!!!!!" OK, I know this is bad - I've been here barely a week and I'm hiding out in my sunglasses behind a book at McDonald's - hoping that I don't see anyone I know - no joke, that would be just my luck - here I am ready to bite into a Big Mac and someone says "Aren't you Greg Smith's wife??? " Of course they'll tell him later - "I saw your wife at McDonald's today." That's as bad as having the Donut man know your name.....

McDonalds Part II: SuAnne Big Crow & Geronimo

(PS - As I told Dwooley, this excerpt actually relates to the birds and shops I have seen in Tokyo - I promise I will warn you if I start copying chapters of War & Peace for your entertainment)


Anyway, I work through my anxiety attack about being discovered at McDonald's and begin to read my book. (That is the other way to get a break in a foreign country...read a book that has nothing to do with that country - or so you think at the time - I am finding that everything is related.) I am reading "On the Rez" by Ian Frazier, who was the author of the National Bestseller "Great Plains." For you "Honkies" out there (or "Gaijin," as the Japanese would say)"Rez" is short for "Reservation."

I am reading the chapter about SuAnne Big Crow, a high school girl from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, who was a basketball phenomenon in the late 1980's. Here is her tear-jerker of a story with excerpts from Frazier's book. I have left the name of the South Dakota city out of the story - I have good a good friend in SD and want to keep her - you hear that Rita?)

"In the fall of 1988, the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes went to (-----)to play a basketball game. SuAnne was a full member of the team by then. She was a freshman, fourteen years old. Getting ready in the locker room, the Pine Ridge girls could hear the din from some of the fans. They were yelling fake-Indian war cries...As the team waited in the hallway leading from the locker room, the heckling got louder. A typical kind of hollered remark was 'Squaw!' or 'Where's the cheese?' (The joke being that if Indians were lining up, it must be to get commodity cheese); Usually the Thorpes lined up for their entry more or less according to height, which meant that senior Doni De Cory, one of the tallest, went first. Today no one remembers exactly what was said but Doni looked out the door and told her teammates, "I can't handle this." SuAnne quickly offered to go first. She was so eager that Doni became suspicious. 'Don't embarrass us." SuAnne said, 'I won't embarrass you.' Doni gave her the ball.

SuAnne went running onto the court dribbling the basketball, with her teammates running behind. On the court, the noise was deafeningly loud. SuAnne went right down the middle; but instead of running a full lap, she suddenly stopped when she got to center court. Her teammates were taken by surprise, and some bumped into one another. SuAnne turned to Doni and tossed her the ball. Then she stepped into the jump-ball circle at center court. She unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance. SuAnne knew all the traditional dances, and the dance she chose was a young woman's dance - graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time. And then she started to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl. The crowd went completely silent. 'All that stuff the fans were yelling - it was like she reversed it somehow,' a team-mate said. In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni, and ran a lap around the court, dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud."

"In an ancient sense which her Oglala kin could recognize, SuAnne counted coup on the hecklers...'It was funny,' Doni De Cory said, 'but after that game, the relationship between (----) and us was tremendous....Later, when we went to a tournament and (----) was there, we hung out with the (----) girls and ate pizza with them. We got to know some of their parents, too. What SuAnne did made a big impression and changed the whole situation...."

In later years, SuAnne went on to lead her girls' basketball team to win a state championship. (When interviewed by a reporter, with her usual sense of good humor, SuAnne quipped that the story needed to be titled "Tragedy at Sioux Falls" ... a tongue-in-cheek reference to Tom Brokaw's recent bleak reservation story called "Tragedy at Pine Ridge" that somehow missed any reference to the good things happening on the reservation.) SuAnne was chosen to be part of the National Indian Basketball Team and performed in the USA, Europe, and Australia... She was an excellent student with scholarships to top schools across the US. Unfortunately for all of us, in February of her Senior year, SuAnne died, reservation-style, in a car accident. She and her mother were on their way to Huron, South Dakota, for the Miss Basketball award banquet. The award is the state's most prestigious for girls' basketball, and SuAnne was one of the nominees.

SuAnne's vision was to go to college and return to Pine Ridge to help her people. She had often talked of an ideal place she called Happytown - where kids could go and hang out and have fun and not get in trouble. In the year following her death, her mother, along with support from the tribe and private contributors, established the Big Crow Center which is now affiliated with the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America - the first chartered on a reservation.

"To count coup means to touch an armed enemy in full possession of his powers. The touch is not a blow, and only serves to indicate how close to the enemy you came. Counting coup was an act of almost abstract courage, of pure playfulness taken to the most daring extreme. There's magic in what SuAnne did, along with the promise that public acts of courage are still alive out there somewhere..."

...Now flash back to the fact that I am reading this to you from McDonald's in Tokyo and I am trying to keep from bawling - because there are NO pigeons here in this part of Tokyo - I am surrounded by BIG BLACK CROWS - SuAnne Big Crow has counted coup here in Tokyo today - I get up, walk back toward my hotel, window shopping along the way - and there is a Geronimo T-shirt in the window.....

Counting Coup:
US = McDonalds & CocaCola
Japan = Toyota & Sony