Grammy Dinner

Now doesn’t that look beautiful sitting there on the mantle?
That’s called foreshadowing for all of you non-literary muff-occurs

First off-- this is a pre-point-&-shoot-purchase post...so naw, we ain't got no damn pictures other than the souvenir book! But anyway, jumping ahead to October, we got an invitation to attend the Chicago chapter of the Recording Academy Honors Dinner from our G.O.O.D. friend John Monopoly ((his life is the game)). He blessed Kink Not with seats right next to Ye's table ((Ye = Kanye, in case ur a blockhead)). It was set up perfect, right? Kink Not in the spot, demo in the pock, looking hot, doin' it ta def non stop!

It was like we could see the light at the end of the tunnel

...OK enough shots of the damn book cover! Needless to say, we felt like we were doing it real big when we sat down in our finest linens to a spread of culinary excellence. The dope thing about the Grammy Dinner is that it honors cats who are really doing their thing in Chicago, like my man Joe Shanahan.

If you call yourself a music artist in Chicago and you ain’t rocked at one of Shanahan's spots, you ain’t really doing it, B! Double Door was where Kinky Notti has rocked consistently ((we killed that Res show, btw...big ups to our peeps at Swank Society for the show booking))

Respect goes out to our man, Joe Shanahan

Anyway, you know who is wild deez? Dude from Cheap Trick, Rick Nielson . Who cares about what he said exactly that night...he had us dying just based off his stee alone. Kanye’s speech was mad inspiring. There were points in his speech where we could see how passionate he was about his craft...and we could truly relate.

We all know Ye isn't afraid of shouting out his accomplishments for the world to hear! His rationale was "why wouldn't I say that I'm hot if I know I'm hot right now?...That's like it being somebody's birthday, but they don't let anybody know...but instead waiting til the next day to say 'it was my birthday yesterday'...so why didn't you tell anybody, muff-occur??" It was the perfect analogy to us.

Dude is crazy...but doing pretty good as far as geniuses go.

The whole time we were there, we were on this high, like “this is where we should be”. We were sitting there as Plain White T’s and Flosstradamus both commanded the stage. Kink Not could have been there with them. Oh well, maybe next time. As blurry as the evening was, the one thing we'll never forget was seeing the lovely, Dr. Donda West. The event was ending and we were walking over to the Ye table to say what up to Don C and the rest of the entourage.

As we were walking up, Donda West gave us this look like she recognized us, but not the same way she would recognize a former student. It was more like she recognized our purpose for being there and acknowledged that we should've been there; like she knew where we were going. She smiled as we approached. It was a warm and genuine smile. It made us want to get all our moms together for lunch so they could all talk about how proud there were of their children. 

We had never met her before so as we spoke, we felt the urge to reach out and hug her...but we didn't know if that would have been appropriate. Although her smile spoke that she would have accepted the embrace of strangers, it was an awkward moment in time. It was one of those moments that seems so much longer when you think back on it...everything gets slow enough for you to say, “Damn, I shoulda done this, or I shoulda done that". Hindsight really is 20/20…regret and mistake-free. Instead of us getting geeked at Kanye's performance on stage, maybe we should've been inappropriate. Maybe we should've hugged Donda West.

One love to our fellow Chicagoan, Kanye West