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Damali Ayo is an incredible artist, an incredible talker, and frankly, an incredible person. I’ve never met anyone with her particular combination of energy, humor, insight and charisma. Also, she has, how you say, balls. (Co-Jones, as my friend Luis would say.) She’s the kind of person I’m frankly a little intimidated by because I’m also a little in awe of her, which is dumb because she’s also super nice and approachable. But so it goes.

When we put out calls for the lists people had created under the Facebook meme “25 Random Things About Me,” I was really glad to hear back from her. We met at the Third Coast Festival a few years back, discovered we were both Brown alumni and kind of hit it off, I think. I interviewed her a few years ago for the Open Source show I produced on race and class in America from the perspective of black artists, and this was a welcome excuse to talk to her again. While we were chatting pre-interview, I took not of at least two or three other things I wanted to interview her about at some point. She’s really interesting.

In this story, Damali describes how she has proposed marriage to three different men over the course of her life, once in her teens, once in her 20s and once in her 30s. And, why she will never propose to another man ever again.

This story was produced as part of Vocalo.org‘s initiative Your Digital Life: Stories from the Web.