user: Drake's Dad Stars in Arkells' Music Video, Drake's Dad

To most of the world, Dennis Graham is the man best known for fathering one Aubrey Drake Graham, an individual known for his distinctive dance moves, sensitive feelings and career as a rapper/actor.

However, Graham (also a musician) deserves to be a star in his own right, as evidenced by his very excellent Instagram account (where everyone from Justin Bieber to John Mayer can be spotted living it up) and most recently, by his prominent feature in a music video by Canadian band, Arkells.

The video, appropriately titled, “Drake’s Dad,” is based on an experience that band member Max Kerman had when he actually met Graham in a bar during a road trip. In an interview with Consequence of Sound, Kerman said, “Last summer I was on a road trip with my best friends through the American South and in the middle of the night, we happened to meet Drake’s dad — Dennis Graham — in a Memphis bar.”

See Dennis in full-on cool Dad status below.

Summary: Dennis Graham, superstar


Q: All My Motherâs Stories

ONE of the more hotly contested issues in the Massachusetts Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren has been Ms. Warren’s claim that her mother was part American Indian. Ms. Warren has only family lore to back up her claim, and Senator Brown, accusing her of opportunism, has demanded proof. But as Ms. Warren counters in her own ads: what kid asks her mother for documentation?

I can sympathize. Growing up, I never questioned my mother’s claim that our family was descended from the Spanish dukes of Albuquerque.

My mother is fiercely proud of her royal ancestry. A Sephardic Jew who traces her lineage back to 14th century Andalusia, she swears the dukes were Jewish until forcibly converted during the Inquisition. She believes we are entitled to a castle in Spain, and possibly own property in New Mexico. The property claims never really mattered to me, though. What was important was that her story helped me define myself as a Jew and a citizen of the world.

Our royal genealogy isn’t my mother’s only story. She also likes to tell about how, as a student at the University of Havana, she was caught in the crossfire on the day when henchmen for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator, murdered the president of the University Student Federation. She says she had been in class and ran outside to see what all the commotion was about.

After she arrived in the United States, my mother told that story to gain entry to a master’s program in Spanish literature, and she went on to a long, satisfying career as a Spanish teacher.

But while doing some research a few years ago for a family memoir, I discovered the dates didn’t align. The university had been closed for over four months when the student body president died in 1957. It didn’t reopen until 1959, when my mother was already in the United States, safe in the knowledge that, back then, a university transcript was impossible to retrieve from Cuba.

My mother had other school stories, and it took just one phone call to someone who knew her in her youth to realize that every one, in all that beloved detail, was completely fabricated.

“She told you she went to the University of Havana?” said the woman, incredulously.

The stories were made up.

Did that matter? To me, my mother’s university stories defined her as fiercely Cuban and sadly exiled from her country. It was clear to me from an early age that the passion in those stories was inextricable from the passion that fueled her love for Spanish literature.

When I was a child and she was still a graduate student, she told me intriguing bedtime stories about Miguel de Unamuno’s loss of faith when he was just five years old — my age at the time. I thrilled at Lazarillo de Tormes’s picaresque escapades. I eagerly anticipated serial installments of Don Quixote’s quests with the hapless Sancho Panza from the genuine Cervantes, rather than Broadway’s “Man of La Mancha.”

The revelations about my mother’s Cuba stories should arguably lead me to doubt her claims about our ancestry. But I haven’t felt the need to do any formal genealogical research to dispute the essence of her account.

Am I in denial? Or worse, am I knowingly perpetrating a lie?

I don’t think so. And I don’t think the details of Elizabeth Warren’s story matter as much as the fact that the story has been perpetuated with well-intentioned conviction. It’s a family legend that has inspired her to identify with the dispossessed and work on behalf of the marginalized.

For my own history, I’ve found as solid and authoritative proof as any in my father’s 25th Yale University Reunion book, published in 1965. The thick hardback volume sat on our living room coffee table for years. In it my father reported that his much younger wife, the former Matilde Albuquerque, “is a descendant of the Duke of Albuquerque, and graduated from the University of Havana. She is an English and Spanish teacher, translator and singer, and active in aiding Cuban refugees.”

That’s all the confirmation anyone should need of the peripatetic family lore on which I was weaned. Elizabeth Warren says her parents eventually eloped because her father’s family disapproved of him marrying a woman with Native American blood. That’s all of the corroboration we should need from her too. When it comes to family lore, true and false are often beside the point.

A: Is Elizabeth Warren really part American Indian? It doesnât matter.


Problem: Chicago twins defy odds with 56 college acceptances and more than $1 million in scholarships

Shaprice Hunt (pictured) has been accepted into 35 colleges, and her twin brother into 27. (Image: Facebook)

A pair of twins from Chicago in the US have received an overwhelming response from their college applications, paving the way for other youngsters who are reluctant to reach for the impossible.

Deprice and Shaprice Hunt were accepted into a combined 56 colleges and have earned around $1.6 million in scholarships. The pair refused to let negative stereotypes surrounding African American youth stop them from achieving their dreams.

Facebook user Kemitashi Austin generated traction for the twins’ achievements by screenshotting a conversation with Shaprice detailing the full list of colleges and publishing it online.

Shaprice has been accepted into 35 colleges, two of which offered her a full scholarship. Her brother Deprice has been accepted into 27 schools and also received two full scholarships.

Their motivation stemmed from not wanting their mother to be thousands of dollars out of pocket, Deprice told the Huffington Post.

“Picture your future. Not only to make yourself proud but make your family proud,” Shaprice said.

Deprice plans to attend HBCU Morehouse College to study performing arts and political science, while his sister wants to attend either Illinois State University or Eastern Illinois University for a dual major in education and psychology.

“Thanks so much everybody who showed love,” Deprice wrote in a Facebook post.

Write a one or two sentence summary.

Summary:

assistant: A pair of twins from Chicago in the US&nbsp;have received an overwhelming response from their college applications, paving the way for other youngsters who are reluctant to reach for the impossible.