We ourselves defer to authority and show respect.
Excellence is equivalent to appropriateness and virtue;
Deferring to authority and showing respect
Is appropriate and virtuous.
Suppose that such actions were lacking!
Nancy Coscione was born into an Italian culture in the city of Detroit. Her father is an Italian immigrant and her mother was of French descent and had been given up to an orphanage by her mother when she was a small child. Nancy's father had worked mostly in the bakery business until he eventually owned his own business. Nancy remembers herself as a very serious child who was beautiful but never considered "cute" in the ways that she felt little girls should be seen. She was very bright in school and got into trouble when the nuns found her day-dreaming after finishing her work too quickly.
Eventually, her family moved to a smaller town in Michigan where Nancy was faced with the prejudice which often confronts a new girl in town. When she was thirteen, Nancy started having sex and experimenting with drugs. She began having a keen interest in art but it was not enough to keep her out of trouble. Her father tried many ways to control her some of which may have been more appropriate in Italy than in the States. She ran away from home several times and, when she was sixteen, stayed away with her boyfriend for over a month. When the two teenagers' resources had run out, Nancy came back home and her father demanded that either she marry her boyfriend or never see her boyfriend again. She chose the former and her husband joined the Army. A year later she had her first child. Nancy's husband had been abused as a child and often became violent with Nancy. Eventually, Nancy was made so afraid that she had a friend, who later became her second husband, help her get her child and run away. She was still only nineteen.
She stayed married to her rescuer, who was 12 years older than she was, for over twelve years. She enjoyed his protection but at times became so reclusive that she was afraid to leave the house. Eventually her husband started working construction jobs which took him out of town. She was forced to become more independent. She loved going to the library and was convinced by the library staff to take her G.E.D. She scored so high that she was told that she had to take some classes at Richland College. Her skills were such that she could take Honors English. She fantasized about many different majors but came back to Art. Her husband thought that her courses were taking too much time away from their relationship and discouraged her from attending. The marriage began deteriorating.
We met when our children became friends while taking a gymnastics class together. Nancy and I became friends also. I tried denying that I had feelings for her for some time but eventually gave in and told her how I really felt about her. She dodged the issue somewhat appropriately for a married woman but suggested that, if I were to write anything about my feelings, she would like to read it. I wrote her Confessions of a Fallen Brother and the poem helped win me a kiss. The kiss was the magical moment that convinced me that our very essence was in harmony. I wrote a total of 52 poems during our intense courtship. She tried moving in with me but got very sick, partly from the exhaustion of trying to move out of her apartment too quickly. She lived with her father for a while and considered going back to her husband. She made a wonderful sculpture from a chair called Chrysalis that was used in a performance that we created together called Love Poems. This was a kind of marriage for me although Nancy was still trying to go back to her husband. She eventually moved back in with me when her husband started staying at her father's and she became sick again.
Nancy became a very prolific sculptor and won a prize at the Richland Student Art Show and participated in group shows at the 500 Exposition Gallery and the Meyerson Symphony Hall. She did all this while still being harassed by her husband. In the Summer of 1992, we moved to our camping place in Tesuque, which, needless to say, was pretty rough for a city-girl from Detroit. Nancy was accepted at the College of Santa Fe on scholarship and has was a strait-A student until receiving her BFA. She has received special recognition and cash prizes at two of the student art shows. Her interest and skill in both Modern and Afro-Haitian Dance has risen to impressive heights. Together, we have performed in two student art shows and a few dance showcases as well as two Novenae; one in Santa Fe and the other in Nebraska. We performed a piece in Dallas using the documentation from the Oshkosh Novena including much of the following text. Again, the Tsan from the T'ai Hsuan Ching have been added later and the correspondences are somewhat coincidental: