Brian Slattery photo
Myles Tripp and Elaine Roper — ConnCORP’s director of audience development and vice president of culture and community relations, respectively — were on the stage at ConnCORP Saturday evening hyping up the crowd. The immediate reason was a raffle; the larger reason was the celebration of two events: the holiday of Juneteenth and ConnCORP’s fifth anniversary as an organization.
The festivites were at The Lab at ConnCORP, at 496 Newhall St. in Hamden. The afternoon featured a complimentary lunch of grilled summer favorites, a DJ, raffles, several arts and crafts projects, a bounce house, and — fully in keeping with ConnCORP’s mission of helping to develop and support Black entrepreneurs — a panoply of Black business vendors, selling everything from art to herbal baths to flavored popcorn. The entire event was free and open to the public.
ConnCORP held a Juneteenth celebration last year and “we just wanted to take it up a notch,” said Jahkeeva Morgan, director of programming at the Lab at ConnCORP. The organization was originally thinking of marking the holiday and its own anniversary separately and “decided to combine the two.” The original idea was to have the party outside. Then the threat of rain “gave us another pivot,” and they moved inside ConnCORP’s building. With “all these minds coming together, it was a really great effort.”
The festivities brought dozens to the ConnCORP space, who settled into enjoying hamburgers, veggie burgers, and hot dogs as a DJ filled the room with R&B favorites. Kids took over the bounce house in the corner of the gymnasium and sat at tables to make crowns. Adults milled about the space, visiting with friends and checking out what the vendors had to offer.
Among those vendors was Sharon McDuffie Burruss and her daughter, of Lady Pop flavored popcorn. When McDuffie-Burruss first bought her popcorn machine in 2017, “I didn’t know anything about making flavored popcorn at all,” she said. She bought it intending on renting it out as part of a business providing popcorn, cotton candy, bounce houses and other amenities to parties. “But it never happened,” she said.
One day, on a whim, she decided to try making flavored popcorn. Her first batch “wasn’t too good,” she said with a laugh. But she kept at it and “perfected it,” she said. “I just was determined to make the popcorn good. I believe God gave me that business because I had never thought about making popcorn.” So Lady Pop was born.
Her first hit recipe was popcorn flavored with cookies and cream. “They always ask me, ‘How does this popcorn taste like ice cream?’ ” McDuffie-Burruss said. She also makes banana pudding and strawberry shortcake popcorn, in addition to more traditional flavored popcorn like caramel and chocolate. “I just think about it like a cake. How do you make strawberry shortcake? I add all that to the popcorn.” There is manipulation of ingredients to coat the popcorn first as it’s popping and then figuring out what can be added later. A batch of popcorn takes about an hour.
Her current most popular flavor is a crunchy caramel and chocolate with nuts, which people tell her “tastes like a Snickers.” She has 25 flavors in all, from coconut to key lime. She makes pumpkin spice flavor for fall and candy-cane flavored popcorn for Christmas time. And she’s developing a new pistachio flavor as well.
Lady Pop works birthday parties, weddings, and other events like anniversaries and fundraisers. She has been known to color-code the popcorn to match the decor of the party. “If someone’s having a party and it’s red and black, I’ll do red and black popcorn. I’ve done that was orange and green — that was football-themed.” One fundraiser led to her making 150 bags of popcorn for one party, her largest yet.
“We’re up and coming, and all my popcorn is made fresh,” McDuffie-Burruss said. “I made fresh popcorn this morning.”
Alisa Wiliams-Howard, of A Statement — “it’s dolls and decor, and so much more,” she said — was also on hand with a display from her vast collection of dolls, for Juneteenth all dolls of Black skin tones, and of all body types. She started the collection because “when I was growing up I didn’t get to see images of me,” she said. Now, to have dolls in “all array of hair textures, skin tones, even sizes — some of the dolls are thicker than others — I love it.” She found male dolls, too, with cornrows and fades. Finding diversity in dolls “just opened up a world for me.”
Williams-Howard “was obsessed with Barbie” when she was a child and collected them. She didn’t have any that depicted Black people, but “I loved them,” she said. Mattel rolled out its first Black dolls in the 1960s — Francie in 1967, Christie in 1968, and Julia in 1969 — but didn’t release its first Black Barbie until 1980. Williams-Howard’s first Black Barbie was a Career Barbie, a ballerina. “I was hooked,” Williams-Howard said. She then found a shirt with three Barbies on it, “and one of them was African-American. I still have it.”
Her collection began from those store-bought purchases. Since then, she has found the dolls at tag sales and through social media. She has received some as gifts. She now has over 5,000 dolls, after 40 years of diligent collecting. Her dolls represent all races, she said, and she has a few dolls of “no gender” (Mattel released one in 2019), because “the world is not one, it’s all. So I collect all, and I love it.”
Williams-Howard works as a secretary at Conte West Hills Magnet School and runs an after-school program there, and said that her collection helps her connect with her students. “When you’re teaching, you have to teach diversity.”
She has a similar outlook for A Statement. “I do birthday parties, weddings. I did a nail salon. They had an opening and I did a little miniature” of it. “It keeps me grounded, and it keeps me humble, and it makes me happy.”
For Juneteenth, her collection of all Black dolls was a statement about the importance of representation. “When I first saw” a Black Barbie as a child, “I cried, because it said that somebody noticed me, and I was beautiful.” She also felt “more connected, because I could go into a toy store anywhere and see me. I was so excited.” Her hope is that “when little girls and little boys of all races see themselves, it makes them feel connected, a part of, beautiful, accepted. It’s important.”