Well, dear visitor, I am Madame X! The funny thing is that I created the fictional headmistress of a secret school for ‘clever girls’, with the fun, expressed goal of NOT telling you! Novel, exciting, useful engagement that delights families has always been a focus of mine; and I enjoy creating cool, unexpected touch-points for the Madame X families who participate in the program. I’ve communicated with parents and kids with coded messages; produced personalized educational ‘video drops’ and ciphers; and also developed at-home activity sheets and projects for Madame X’ers to do outside of the events - free of charge and without future enrollment expectation. I care deeply about every, single detail of my experiences and program. I’m also very proud of it and the kids, which is why I post a lot of photos!

What’s Your Background?

I’m a career marketing professional with three decades of experience that spans communications, marketing, brand strategy and design. I’ve been vice president, managing director, head of comms and senior strategist numerous times, at several well-known agencies and start-ups (including one of the very first tech-focused PR firms in the country, which was instrumental in ushering in the mass adoption of Silicon Valley tech). I’ve also worked extensively as an independent communications and marketing consultant, and have enjoyed a diverse career that includes working in technology, entertainment and publishing. I’ve launched a lot of products and companies over the course of my career; and have counseled a lot of CEOs and executive teams. I should mention in these crazy days and times, that I’m also very skilled at crisis communications. Just sayin’….

What is Your Role Within Madame X? What Do you Do?

Madame X is my baby from initial concept and brand articulation; to hands-on execution of every single role and detail. I am the organization's sole:

creative director, brand strategist, event namer, producer, designer; educational researcher, curriculum designer & writer; logo designer (brand & per themed event), marketing collateral copywriter & art designer, multi-sensory/multi-activity designer, procurement specialist, digital designer and copywriter for web, email, social media (social recently disabled), t-shirt and tchotchke designer, photo & video editor, photographer (I’m one of a few), packaging and gift designer (for example: farm goods, tea party gifts, concealed book safes, (including, my spy-themed dossier and edible,“anti-venom,” which, of course, was key to the villain’s storyline!), venue researcher, scout & negotiator; registrar, business manager, lead educator & entertainer; guest instructor researcher & recruiter, customer relations (families, parents + kids), volunteer wrangler. I don’t use outside agencies. I am the agencies.

Madame X was a way of expressing my values through education, the creation of unique, elevated experiences; and my desire to develop a positive, like-minded community. I implement the program without external funding, so my professional talents, personal financial resources and D.I.Y skills are are my super powers.

Below, are answers to some basic questions:

Why Don’t You Use Your Real Name?

I deliberately concealed my name, because it was part of Madame X’s secret spy-academy backstory! I would have loved this as a kid! More significantly, I was testing Madame X as a ‘proof of concept,’ starting with my first experience, “Ain’t MisBEEhavin,’” which I hosted at a local library. As an experimental social enterprise, I initially didn’t want to promote myself, because I didn’t know if The Madame X Academy was going to be a ‘one-off’ experience or not. The Internet is forever! Also, although, I was driven to develop the organization for social good; I also created it as a personal outlet for my creativity, skills and talents. I could do everything that I wanted, exactly the way I wanted to do it.

Singer, Erykah Badu, best explained the delicate nature of personal expression in the live intro of Tyrone, when she said, “Now, keep in mind I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my ‘..ish’.” [edit mine] Me, too, Erykah!!! As it turned out, my experiences were incredibly fun and rewarding to produce, and the families loved them so much that I just kept going. Fundraising and profit, be damned! I knew eventually that I had to figure out how to grow and develop this idea, if it were to continue. I knew it would come to me, if only I could produce just one more….

Wait! How Long Have You Been Doing This?!!!

I’m a Gen X’er, so I’ve been doing this for a minute. Tech companies were called…Wait for it….”dot coms” back then. Yahoo! had an iconic, illuminated billboard over the Bay Bridge; San Francisco and BART were always packed, and startup founders spent way too much money on launch parties, only to go belly up a year later. I still have one of Webvan’s, original laminate catering platters (it’s strangely high quality!), and my husband continues to wear an orange and white promotional Hawaiian shirt that he got from one of their customer-wooing successors. Oh! and our single pint ice cream delivery orders undoubtedly contributed to this company’s premature demise. Tech and I go back like babies and pacifiers. I have a lot of 90’s start-up swag and tchotchkes in my garage, so I’m both an historian and museum, all rolled up in one.

What Was Your Motivation for Creating This Organization?

My answer is a love letter to creativity; but also a deeply held belief that it was my responsibility to share wisdom, truth, dignity, art and love with future generations. Also, one of my greatest motivations was to combat and counter-balance the extremely negative portrayals of African-American women, (and Black people, in general), that are constantly promoted within entertainment and pop-culture. Madame X was a personal form of resistance, and a publicly staged revolt against what I felt was becoming a permanent state of debasing content and behavior. I understood that I couldn’t change the world, but I knew that I could positively influence someone’s life within my sphere of influence. The idea came to me well over a decade ago: Why not create incredible, elevated, educational experiences for kids that promoted innovative thinking and stimulated their creativity; while teaching each bespoke experience through the lens of African-American innovators, leaders, heroes and inventors?

I knew that if kids learned about our complicated history, filled with success, dignity, innovation, resistance, resilience and love; it could change how they felt about themselves, their communities, and the value of their lives. They would also become far more critical of these negative, willfully-produced representations, and less personally influenced to internalize and adopt them.

Why is Sharing Our History So Important?

There are so many unsung heroes who will be lost to time and memory, if we don’t step up and teach this aspect of AMERICAN HISTORY to kids and adults of all nationalities, races, ethnicities and backgrounds. Also, George Santayana once famously and wisely mused,"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." Truer words have never been spoken.

I decided to create fun, highly-elevated, ‘edutainment’ experiences with an ‘African-American twist,’ and recruit warm, talented, skilled professionals as subject matter experts and guest-instructors. Despite my obvious target audience and focus; I believe that history lessons should be colorblind, because we’re all bonded and inextricably linked together. We’re a tapestry of many different people who can’t be unwoven; so why do we try to unravel our shared history, as if the individual elements are separate and unequal?

No one’s history is more important than anyone else’s, so we need to better demonstrate a greater degree of mutual respect, between and among, all people and cultures.

In this particular context, respect would entail greatly expanding the focus of Black history beyond that of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement.

Can you really respect a racial or ethnic group, when you unconsciously support the notion that they only have a few people among them worth noting?

Although, I deeply appreciate and admire brave and resilient leaders such as Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr.; we have innovators, inventors, intellectuals, business leaders, philanthropists and every day heroes, who have been waiting patiently for their stories to be told. I’m sorry to tell the woefully uninformed, but Black folks have far more than five exceptional people within our ranks. Don’t get me started….

As a society, we’ve been collectively mismanaging a huge backlog of ethereal history-makers who have been waiting to be remembered within the annals of time. We need to “rethink” history, how we express it, and the stories we tell. People will cease to listen, learn and feel, if we constantly retread the same people and narratives over the course of our lifetimes. This is tantamount to an historical Groundhog Day, and, ironically, history is created anew, with each passing day.

Who Funds the Organization?

Madame X has always been founder & participant supported. My family is the primary financial donor behind the organization, and my friends and family have occasionally contributed modest funds to underwrite some of the cost of my experiences. To the great detriment of the organization, I’m a creative and an educator; not a fundraiser. If you’d like to volunteer for that job, I won’t turn it down.

What’s Next for Madame X? Are You Launching Any New Experiences?

I’ve developed a treasure trove of spectacular future experiences. Incidentally, Madame X was originally going to be a pop-up experience that I would ‘take on the road’ to other communities based on consumer demand, and/or my interest in specific markets; so we’ll see were I take it in the future.

What Have You Learned During This Journey of Education, Creativity, Community and Self-Exploration?

I love all of the Madame X families that I’ve met, and I’m humbled by the positive social and educational impact that my organization has had on participating kids. Parents tell me their children have impressive memory recall and retention with regard to my rich and expansive material (which they wouldn’t have learned anywhere else!!!); and the kids beam with pride when they explain to me what they’ve learned and shared with their classmates. One of our parents moved their vacation dates around, so that their child wouldn’t miss an upcoming event. What an honor! I’ll always cherish the supportive words, nice notes and videos sent to me by Madame X’ers and their parents.

Final Thoughts

What I’d most like to share with parents and educators regarding my experience is that adopting a more contemporary ideology, and more engaging teaching methodologies is crucial for learning.

My goal for kids is to encourage them to think freely, creatively and critically. I want them to stay curious and pursue that curiosity with questions. Lots of them. I want them to apply what they’ve learned from different disciplines, seemingly unrelated references, experiences, facts and subjects.

Related to that, an increasing number of individuals, business leaders and other entities are using social media, data mining, artificial intelligence and other very advanced technologies as their blanket fact-finding solutions. Data and information from these sophisticated instruments is neither infallible nor incorruptible, just like the people who use and control them. This is dangerous.

I hope that young people never underestimate or abandon their own God-given logic, creativity and problem-solving skills. Although, technology (and data) is king, it can also be an evil court jester, operating like a weird, digital Rube Goldberg machine, going everywhere, but a straight line to the truth. Sometimes simply being curious, critical, and posing well-crafted questions between, and among, actual humans, yields more nuanced information and far more accurate results.

Stay Curious. Seek Truth. Embrace Humanity.