At the first real wedding I ever attended I was the bride. I never dreamed of getting married when I was young. I hadn’t really wanted to. In high school, girls fantasized about big, poofy dresses and Long Island weddings while I visualized a dream of becoming a successful musician and actress. That’s all I cared about, so it was pretty ironic that I ended up having one of the decade’s most lavish New York weddings in one of the decade’s most dramatic, voluminous gowns.
Apart from the ambition, Tommy and I were completely different, and the Black part of myself caused him confusion. From the moment Tommy signed me, he tried to wash the “urban” (translation: Black) off of me. And it was no different when it came to the music. The songs on my very first demo, which would become my first smash album, were much more soulful, raw, and modern in their original state. Just as he did with my appearance, Tommy smoothed out the songs for Sony, trying to make them more general, more “universal,” more ambiguous. I always felt like he wanted to convert me into what he understood—a “mainstream” (meaning white) artist. For instance, he never wanted me to wear my hair straight. I think to him it didn’t look naturally straight, it looked straightened. He thought it made me look too “urban” (translation: Black) or R & B, like Faith Evans. Instead, he insisted that I always wear my loose and bouncy curls, which I think he thought made me look almost like an Italian girl (though, ironically, my curls are a direct result of my Black DNA, assisted by a good small-barrel curling wand to integrate the frizz).
My curls had certainly crisscrossed with Italian culture before I met Tommy. (I did live in more than a dozen places on Long Island.) In the eleventh grade I attended a beauty tech school. I was there mostly to kill time before I became a star (my only career goal). It was more creative, entertaining, and practical than regular high school. I’d always struggled with pulling a cohesive look together—there weren’t any of the tools or potions at home for me to play with, and I certainly didn’t have a consistent crew of girls to go through the passage from girl to teen with. There was a real allure to gaining more refined beauty skills. Also, I was a huge fan of the musical film Grease growing up; I thought I could have my own Pink Ladies moment. And I kinda did.
My beauty school class was made up of mostly Italian girls. There were mean girls, there were shy girls, there were regular girls, and then there were the girls. They were a clique of about three or four fabulous ones, who comparatively, of all the girls I’d ever seen on Long Island, were the most glamorous—or rather, they seemed to be having the most fun with it. But they were so serious about their look.
Subtlety, to these girls, was a waste of time and flavor. They were terminally tanned. Their heavily highlighted hair was coiffed within an inch of its life, every ringlet, puff, and bang sprayed into obedience. Their makeup was bright, flashy, and perfectly applied. They wore their fingernails long and did. Some even had nail art: a line of tiny gold studs, or their initials in crystals on a perfect, thick, bright white “French”—major.
We all had to wear a uniform of a drab maroon button-up smock with white pants and hideous, chunky white nurse shoes. But these girls would not have their flamboyance hidden. They wore their smocks open, revealing the leggings and boys’ ribbed white tank tops with fancy, lacy bras they featured underneath. And, of course, there was the jewelry: thick and thin gold link chains in flat, herringbone, and rope styles with Italian horns, crosses, and initial pendants dangling from them layered on their necks, hoops in their ears, and delicate gold and diamond rings on every finger.
They were so adult to me. They were obviously already having sex—obviously not only because they carried their bodies in a particular way but because they let everybody know it. They talked easily and openly about sex (which was secretly shocking to me). They called themselves “Guidettes,” and I had no idea what that meant, but I thought it was cool they had a name, like a singing group or something.
They would roll up to the beauty school in flashy cars, bumping WBLS, the urban dance radio station—ooh, if they only knew we called it the “Black Liberation Station”—loud. And of course I knew every song, and I would sing them—like Jocelyn Brown’s “Somebody Else’s Guy” (I quite enjoyed laying into the big, slow vocals at the beginning) or “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin On But the Rent” by Gwen Guthrie. The girls loved it, and my teacher hated it, because I was always singing, blowing out notes rather than doing blowouts.
It was my singing and constant popping of jokes that won these flashy teen princesses over, because I was from another school, and I hadn’t formed my own confident look—I was not quite cool clique material. We did manage to do each other’s hair. Surprisingly, no one ever questioned me about my mixed texture, the thickness (or thinness) of my lips, or any of my features. I learned a lot from those girls. They helped me bring more volume and energy to my hair and more gloss to my lips.
We had more in common than one would imagine. There’s always been an underground relationship between hip-hop and the mob in pop culture. We especially loved the style and swag of movies like The Godfather and Scarface.
