Who is Chiccy Baritone?

Well HELLO!

I’m a newbie….to Blogging…and I am excited…ready….and smiling as I type because this has been a long time coming and I am finally posting my very first BLOG! *insert claps here*

So, Let me introduce myself…my name is Charlene Evans….but Chiccy Baritone is my alias…my alter ego that holds a pretty solid residency in the “right side” of my brain. She is a lot like Charlene during the day, well, because she has to be…she is a professional who works as an engineer but she is also a POET…Yes, I’m a POET:-)

Its a long story but I have a short version. In high school, back in the early 90’s, I was in the Miss Spring Valley Pageant and as my talent I did a monologue called,”Black Love” by Gwendolyn Brooks and I loved it. I challenged myself to read and memorize this poem and received a very surprising response from the audience that made me feel like I won the pageant. I went on to college where I begin to write poetry but kept it in a notebook and decided my senior year to visit an open mic and opened my personal notebook to the public. The response was unbelievable…the crowd applaud and cheered and as I went back to my seat, I was blown away. To me, these poems were my place to vent, my mental place of therapy and extremely personal. To the crowd, I was an artist..and they treated me that way but it took me a while to “get that”.

This was also a couple of years after the release of the movie “Love Jones” starring Nia Long and Lorenz Tate..the love story of a poet and photographer. I fell in LOVE with both forms of Art, in that order, but years apart from each other. So for now, the discovery of this gift from God called poetry, one that I grew more into as my personal relationship with Christ grew, was revealed and ready to come out and I was ready to share!

Fast forward to 2001, after graduating from South Carolina State University, I moved to Greenville, SC . I performed at an open mic at the Crown Plaza Hotel and from that point on I have been performing poetry all over the U.S. I continue to have a “hunger” for poetry and allowing myself to being introduced to so many avenues to express what I consider one of the greatest forms of self-expression…world outreach…and people progression. Poetry is more than a mic, a stage and words; it changes lives and challenges the human mind and heart.

My quest is to open up this world to you through blogging and sharing my thoughts beyond the limited characters of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. So “Follow me” here and hopefully something that I say you will “Like”….(did you catch that? *smile*) and it will inspire you because the beauty of creating a form of art in words is that what you say can mean something totally different to you, the reader, than it did to the writer and the exchange of sharing becomes inspiration recycled….Yes!!!

So, THANK YOU for taking out the time to read my first BLOG…my next blog will be May 2nd…every two weeks on a Friday…known as Freelance Friday’s with Chiccy Baritone…Welcome Aboard!