So It Goes.

and my personal favorite:

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink        of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says, I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you’d make wider washbins, anyway My grandmother knows one culture—the right one, as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them, my grandmother might as well have been squatting in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor, Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which, when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge. “You can’t do that,” one of the women protests, turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.” “We wash our feet five times a day,” my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic. “My feet are cleaner than their sink. Worried about their sink, are they? I should worry about my feet!” My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.” Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers, all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed, is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps that match her purse, I think in case someone from one of the best families of Aleppo should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display I smile at the midwestern women as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them and shrug at my grandmother as if they had just apologized through me No one is fooled, but I hold the door open for everyone and we all emerge on the sales floor and lose ourselves in the great common ground of housewares on markdown.

—–

I DON’T LIKE THAT YOU’RE GETTING POLITICAL. WHY DON’T YOU JUST STICK TO CARD GAMES?

Why don’t you stick to seeing how many Hot Wheels cars you can fit up your asshole?

I’D LIKE TO CANCEL MY ORDER.

Harvey Milk was even in on it and told people to stop drinking the stuff at breakfast. Gay and lesbian bars refused to serve orange juice or any drink made with it. They would make screwdrivers and other cocktails that traditionally called for orange juice with other alternatives like grapefruit. The only way you could get something with orange juice in it was if you brought your own fresh oranges and squeezed them yourself (some bars had handheld citrus juicers on the bar top) but if you brought in something with Florida Citrus on the label, it would get poured down the drain.

This was the first organized boycott in support the LGBT community. People called it the Gaycott and it got national coverage. Anita Bryant and her homophobic propaganda (she was the one who famously would tout “Gays can’t reproduce so they have to recruit.” and spread fear towards parents about gays corrupting children) truly gave gays across the nation something to unite against and it inadvertently gave LGBT people a much larger stage to have their voices heard. Wherever she went, there were protests. There were magazine covers, tv reports, songs about the boycott, and a whole bunch of anti-Anita/anti-orange juice merch. 

But with creative writing, as long as it’s like… coherent, do whatever the fuck you want. You’re trying to establish a character’s voice, not win the Most Grammatically Correct award. People don’t talk or think in perfect English and neither should your characters.

Basic grammar, yes. Good. Smashing.