Miz Lady - People's Light

Miz Lady: Trust and Believe

Miche Braden introduces her new alter ego, Miz Lady, with timely musings from her front porch.

"Most people know me from my music presentations. Not many people know that I’ve been writing as long as I’ve been singing. When I lived in Brooklyn, there was an older woman that lived in her brownstone across the street from me. She sat in the parlor window everyday like she was the neighborhood watch. She had a sing songy “How You Doin’” greeting way before Wendy Williams. Her grand daughter, about 6 years old would join her sometimes with the same greeting. Her presence inspired a short story that I wrote in a creative writing class. I was working on a play from that story before the quarantine started. Now I’ve decided I’m gonna join the ranks of YouTube performers with my newest alter ego.

Ladies & Gentlemen, meet Miz Lady!"

– MICHE BRADEN

MICHE BRADEN is an actor and musician. People’s Light: Sarah in Nina Simone: Four Women, Bessie Smith/Music Director in The Devil’s Music: The Life & Blues Of Bessie Smith, Co-Author/Music Director of Jazz Is & Jazz Is… Too, Lady Day/Music Director in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. Theatre Includes: Regional: Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Marie & Rosetta; The Tempest. Film/Television Includes: Law & Order SVU ("Trials," "Soulless"), & music for Ms. Purple (Sundance), & Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Spike Lee Joint). Musical recordings include her album Diva Out of Bounds; “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Purple Rain,” “Old Town Road” and others with Postmodern Jukebox; New Beginnings (Gayelynn McKinney); At the Crossroads, Gardenias for Lady Day (James Carter); Ella: Accentuate the Positive (Regina Carter).

This project was commissioned in solidarity with those protesting systemic racism, anti-Black violence, and nationwide inaction regarding police brutality. In recent months, People’s Light has reached out to a number of Black artists with whom we have relationships to ask how our people and resources can help elevate Black perspectives and art at this time. From these conversations emerged a series of digital commissions that range widely in form and content — from video to poetry to oral histories — but share a creative impulse that emerges from and speaks to this historic moment of activism and reckoning.

As a predominantly white institution, People’s Light has long benefited from and perpetuated the racist systems and structures that contribute to the violence, discrimination, and marginalization towards Black people that persist today. This series of commissions is one immediately tangible way we can support Black artists and use our public platforms to amplify Black voices, but true change must run deeper and be rigorously ongoing. We are currently crafting an in-depth Anti-Racism action plan that both reflects on our past and looks to the future.

We hope you will watch, listen, and amplify. Black Lives Matter.

Miche Braden introduces her new alter ego, Miz Lady, with timely musings from her front porch.

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Making a Homeplace: Stories From the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore

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The Black Arts Movement 2.0: The Uprising by Zuhairah McGill

Mr. Floyd by Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.