No shame in this cup of joe
Local poet takes Leap into scripting java
On Saturday morning, Leap Coffee Roasters will introduce a new blend called Shameless, which was developed in collaboration with a local poet who has found a distinctive way to give her words more weight.
Angie LaPaglia calls Mulhall home, but she started making noise in Oklahoma City about 2 1/2 years ago when she began expressing her poetry as visual art.
Among her earliest fans was Kari Hirst Starkey, co-owner of Leap Coffee Roasters. Starkey said she first became aware of LaPaglia at the Nasty Women Show in 2017. There, LaPaglia's first experimented with adding dimension to the display of her poetry.
“Her words were cut out in a piece of art like 8 feet by 5 feet or something, a huge panel of words and they're popping out and they're shadowed and it was so moving.”
After LaPaglia performed her poem that night, Starkey said she knew they were destined to cross paths.
She had good reason to believe it, the curator of the Nasty Women show was Romy Owens, the first local artist to collaborate with Leap Coffee Roasters on an Artist Series Blend. She was followed by Amanda Zoey Weathers, the musical duo Miss Brown to You and Eyakem Gulilat.
Artists work directly with Leap's head coffee roaster to develop the blend.
“I drink coffees that have subtleties — that have this and that — but I very much wanted a coffee that knew who it was was, unashamed ... bold but not bitter.”
Starting Saturday, Shameless will be at select Sprouts and Homeland locations and online at leapcoffeeroasters.net. Or you can stop by Leap's retail warehouse, 44 NE 51 St.
LaPaglia will be there Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to launch the blend with poetry readings. Chef Ryan Parrott of Picasso Cafe will provide brunch snacks, and Norman singersongwriter Lacy Saunders will perform. LaPaglia will discuss her "2020 femme-ilition" to lift up Oklahoma women and the two exhibitions she's curating this year, one featuring emerging female artists.
“My work is very informed by my experiences as a woman, so it was very important to me to promote and support other women.”
With that in mind, Leap was able to source beans from farms in Brazil and Guatemala with female ownership and a coffee co-op in Sumatra owned by women.
Shameless is a light to medium-body roast. Starkey calls it "light in color, but deep in flavor."
The same kind of juxtaposition is present in LaPaglia's unabashedly vulnerable work.
She uses her life experiences like paints to express raw, naked emotion she hopes people recognize.
"Sometimes things happen that we didn't choose that are very powerful and shape us," she explained. "And sometimes there's even shame associated with these things we didn't choose — hardships, family issues, whatever. And we kind of bear it personally and quietly by ourselves. But what I have discovered is if we just say it out loud, sort of pull the curtain back, pull the rug back that we stuff all this shame under, shame can't survive. Once we say it out loud, then it makes it OK. And what we find out is others have been bearing the same burdens quietly by themselves.
"So when you say it out loud it sort of gives them permission and we can connect together."
Between shame and freedom, LaPaglia found her voice. Now she can't keep it down.