Dana K has new cards and I’ve begun stuffing them into my fat little packet for door to door distribution. They are long overdue because I have to keep correcting folks who call her “Day nah” thinking that she is a him. Her name is pronounced Donna in Slavic tongues, short for “Bogdana” (Boag-Donna), meaning “God’s Gift.”
I also like telling folks that if she were to introduce herself she would sound like a good no-nonsense, Russian armed with a Kalishnikov…..”let me see your papers.”
I quickly explain that she is a Ukrainian by birth and not a Russian and that she came to the US at 15 and never managed to shake her accent. For that I’m grateful and I frequently go into a little shtick telling them how I imagine her sitting next to me as my colleague demanding she be given the long withheld data Art and I have fruitlessly requested in her thick Slavic accent. “I vahnt to see da data and I vahnt to see it now!”
I tell voters about Dana’s Johns Hopkins education in science and how she’s good at math something our previous school boards were absent and which lead to the loss of 200 teachers in exchange for half a billion in new buildings that previous Boards didn’t set aside any money to maintain.
BTW – I crack Dana up every time I launch into my cheesy Russian accent. Damn it. I could use more colleagues on the Board with a hearty sense of humor.
