For me, songs are always about emotion. My mother may not have taken me to church, but jamming with jazz musicians was close to a spiritual experience. There’s a creative energy that flows through the room. You learn to sit and listen to what the other musicians are doing, and you get inspired by a guitar riff or what the pianist is playing. When you are in a zone, it is a miraculous madness. For me, it was always an exquisite escape, which I desperately needed and always sought.
By the time I was eleven or twelve my mother was taking me to a supper club on Long Island to sit in with her and other musicians. There was a dining room on the ground floor where they would serve dinner, and upstairs was live jazz. I was in the sixth grade, up in there at all hours of the night, any day of the week, sitting in with grown-ass musicians. I’m not sure if my mother just wanted to be able to hang out at night and sing and not be stuck in the shack—I mean “cottage”—with a kid, or if she was consciously developing me as an artist, or if maybe she wanted to present to her friends her little protégée? I do remember her encouraging me while I sang. I felt more welcomed (and natural) with jazz musicians at night in the club than with my classmates during the day—those kids who asked incessantly, “What are you?” those kids who judged me by the way I looked and had no idea what my life was really like. I always knew that the world of suburban Long Island wasn’t for me. I was a fish out of water, and though I survived it, I knew that no one there really cared about me, and I certainly knew I wasn’t staying.
And my mother wasn’t just any old mom supporting me—she was a Juilliard-trained musician. Music was something we genuinely connected on, and without pushing or becoming one of those overbearing stage mothers or “momagers,” she instilled in me the power of believing in myself. Whenever I mused about what I’d do “if I make it,” she would cut me short and say, “Don’t say ‘if I make it,’ say ‘when I make it.’ Believe you can do it, and you will do it.”
The fact that I believed I could become a successful artist is one of my greatest strengths. Around the same time, my mother entered me in a talent competition in the city and I sang one of my favorite songs: “Out Here On My Own” by Irene Cara.
I felt “Out Here On My Own” described my entire life, and I loved singing that way—singing to reveal a piece of my soul. And I won doing it. At that age, I lived for the movie Fame, and Irene Cara was everything to me. I related to her multicultural look (Puerto Rican and Cuban), her multitextured hair, and, most importantly, her ambition and accomplishments. She won an Oscar for Best Original Song for “Flashdance … What a Feeling” (which she cowrote), from Flashdance, making her the first Black woman to win in a category other than acting. (She won a Grammy, a Golden Globe, and an American Music Award for the song too.) But “Out Here On My Own” was such a pure song that touched my heart, and I couldn’t believe I won a trophy for singing a song I loved. It was the first time I’d received validation as an artist. What a feeling.
It wasn’t just music my mother exposed me to. She had friends who treated me like family, which helped offset all the shabby places we lived and the disheveled way I often looked.
My mother had a friend named “Sunshine,” who was short and quite a large woman, with a warm and generous heart. She wore her hair in two long ponytails, like Carole and Paula from The Magic Garden (a popular local kids’ TV show I loved, which was hosted by two young, hippie-esque women with a pink squirrel sidekick, who sang folksy songs and told stories, in the seventies and early eighties). Sunshine had big, older sons and no daughters, so she took an interest in me, especially in my disorderly and neglected appearance. She would often bring me cute, girlie clothes that she made herself. On my sixth birthday, she outfitted me in a white embroidered shirt paired with a blue skirt, white tights, and Mary Jane shoes. She even got my hair to lie down in pigtails (maybe being a Jewish woman and having textured hair gave her some insight). My birthday crown sat nicely right on top. She even bought me a birthday cake decorated like a lamb! A lamb!
