My older sister Rahilah and her friends were the great storytellers of my childhood. We lived in an extremely humble and rural community in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. We’d carry drinking water home from a natural runoff, split firewood to keep warm, cook our meals on cast-iron wood burning stoves and light the wicks of our oil fueled argand burners to see the night through. All of this is to say that even though it was 2002 Television was not our reality. The works of Faraday and Franklin had yet to illuminate our lives with the basics of modern electricity; never mind the entertainment of TV.