‘Reflections’ of Diana Ross: Through the Mirror of My Mind

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By Noma Faingold  (August 13, 2025)

Diane Ross will be appearing at San Francisco’s Stern Grove on Sunday, August 17, 2025 in a free afternoon concert. While sold out, 1000 tickets will be given away Friday at 5pm. See bottom of this article for details.

The family hi-fi set-up, anchored by two giant hidden speakers, was located in the dining room. We never ate there unless we had company. No one who came to the house knew where the speakers were because the beige tweed fabric covering them matched the adjacent drapes.

The first Diana Ross album I bought was simply titled, “Diana Ross.” The 1970 release was her debut solo record. I was in second grade and my musical taste was already firmly established. I gravitated to the slick soul of Motown – artists like The Jackson 5, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder and especially Ross, as opposed to popular hardcore rock bands of the time, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

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SANTOS: Skin to Skin

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By Gaetano Kazuo Maida

October 16, 2022

“The drum is like a heartbeat.” —John Santos

I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘50s. This was in an old Italian neighborhood, full of grape arbors and fig trees (even a goat!), but by the time I was eight our neighbors on one side and across the street were from Puerto Rico, and on the other side were African Americans; it’s mostly Caribbean now. My public school was a ten block walk from home and most of my classmates there were Jewish. My parents were a mixed couple (Japanese/Sicilian) and most of their friends were mixed in one way or another as well, so I had a strong sense of a wonderfully polyglot community that ill-prepared me for the rather homogeneous and affluent population of my elite public high school. But it did open my ears to a wide variety of music. The soundtrack at home was folk, blues, soul (long story), flamenco, and opera, but in the streets it was doo-wop and Afro-Caribbean.

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