Authors: Rosie Perez
“Yes! What’s so damn funny?” I asked defensively.
“Calm down. Damn. Look at you, all ghetto.”
Ghetto? You can live in a ghetto, but that didn’t mean you were
ghetto
. Back home, “ghetto” didn’t mean that you were poor or used a certain vernacular or even had a temper. “Ghetto” meant possessing a certain ignorant mentality—it meant thinking that type of ignorance was cute: lacking empathy and doing stupid, malicious things because you just didn’t care about the human cost. No, I was not ghetto. I wanted to correct his error in judgment, but didn’t. I thought of Sister Renata’s warning about my temper and didn’t want to blow this. Can you believe that? I took a deep breath and calmed down. “Whatever,” I simply replied.
“Yeah, okay, miss thang. Bobby will come by in three days,” Louil continued.
“Okay. And thank you for this opportunity. I appreciate it. I won’t let you down.”
“You better not. Don’t make me hire someone else, Little Miss Attitude.”
Three days! Holy crapola! I hired this dance group that I loved watching in the local nightclubs called Heart and Soul—Arthur, Willie, Derrick, Bruce, and Kaylan were five guys from Watts. They were original and tight in their routines and looked clean as hell. Kaylan couldn’t make it. I offered the rest of them $200 each out of my fee of $1,500—MCA was not going to give me a separate fee for the dancers. I told them that, to save time, we would combine some of their existing routines and some of my stuff and tailor the choreography to Bobby.
We practiced and rehearsed hard as hell. It was kind of easy for me to edit both of our styles. I could see the entire dance number in my head. It unfortunately wasn’t easy for Heart and Soul to accept their routines being cut up, and it took them a minute to get the New York style down. There was a lot of arguing, to the point where it began to get ugly, on both sides. I finally told them that if they couldn’t see the bigger picture and compromise, I would have to hire another group instead. I had little time for bickering and no room to lose this job. Arthur, who spoke with a slow southern Los Angeles drawl, stepped in and set things straight.
“Hey look, man. I didn’t bring my ass all the way down from Watts to blow this shit. She gonna get the Soul Brothers [another local dance crew], and our asses will be assed out back on the bus to damn Watts! So let’s do this shit or take our asses the fuck on home.”
From then on, Arthur and I were a team—although he didn’t know it yet.
I went to work hard. I knew this was going to be big. Hip-hop artists didn’t get prime-time camera action back then. Break-dancing and popping were featured here and there, but hip-hop, no. I knew that with Bobby it was going to blow up! And the boys hated my ass over those three days, but I was on a mission. They weren’t used to structure. I made them do the routines over and over again until everything was perfect. I broke down the routine by each eight-count. If an arm or foot wasn’t where it was supposed to be, I’d stop everything and make them do it again. I was a taskmaster, as strict as Sister Renata and the nuns. I was surprised by how embedded it was to be that way, and how easily it came out—scary, right?
We were all nervous as hell. Bobby came in with only his brother Tommy, dressed in sweats and a T-shirt. We were expecting bodyguards, limos, designer clothes, and whatnot. We didn’t know at the time how little money he made with New Edition.
Bobby shook everyone’s hand, was very sweet, and spoke low and soft. Tommy was gangster and kept it real. We did the routine, me acting as Bobby. We could all see from Bobby’s reaction as he sat on my piece-of-shit couch that he was hyped! This was so different from New Edition, and Bobby knew what I already knew—this was going to take him to another level. He hired us on the spot! The fellas and I started screaming, jumping up and down and hugging each other! Then the bad news came.
Tommy asked to speak with me alone. I sent the boys outside. He told me they only needed two dancers, like the rappers. He picked Derrick because he thought he was the best-looking and Willie because he liked his charm. Great. They already thought I was a bitch, and now they were really gonna think so. Bobby and Tommy left. Heart and Soul came back into my apartment. I put my game face on. “Derrick, Willie, you two are gonna dance behind Bobby, okay. The rest of you, I would love it if you stayed for support. I’ll still pay you what I promised. Cool?” No one moved. The silence was killing me. Then Arthur stepped up again.
“Fuck it, man. At least two of my homies will be representing Heart and Soul. Come on, let’s do this shit.”
• • •
Bobby casually strutted into rehearsals with a facade of calm and confidence. Derrick and Willie may have been puffing up, but they were scared as hell. I wasn’t nervous at all. I was excited, happy, and focused. So focused that I understood how they were feeling, saw right through them and knew how to handle them, especially Bobby. Bobby was acting similarly to the way I had with some of the kids in “outside” school, acting as if being in the Home had no effect on me, creating an aloof facade to hide my true feelings behind. The only difference was that I never strutted. I didn’t have that skill set or the nerve.
It surprised me that choreographing was so easy and so much fun, that it felt so right to me—not just coming up with routines, but guiding artists to become their best. My empathy allowed me to connect with Bobby, to make him feel good about himself as an artist by reaffirming his talent, and to provide a safe environment for mistakes without embarrassment, ensuring nothing would go down at his emotional expense. I would take Bobby aside to whisper minor corrections, never making his errors a big deal; I’d praise his improvement without false adoration and champion him when he organically did something that was on some superstar shit. It was the same feeling Tia provided me. The same feeling Miss Connie, Beth, Nigel, and especially Grace offered me.
Heart and Soul and the routine didn’t make the “Don’t Be Cruel” video. The dancers and I were disappointed. We had busted our asses in preparation and were not told until after the video was shot. Louil thought Bobby and the dancers weren’t ready. But we were ready enough to perform on
Soul Train
a couple of weeks later! Showing up on
Soul Train
not as a dancer but as a choreographer, for none other than Bobby Brown, was something else. Half of the
Soul Train
dancers were happy for me, and the rest were jealous as hell. And the few dance crews that were on the show were jealous of Heart and Soul. I understood. I didn’t take it personally.
Don, though, forget about it. He was so angry. “What is she doing here?!” Louil smoothed things over with him. I had told him what went down, and he instructed me not to utter a word, just to act professional, and he would take care of the rest. I desperately wanted to apologize to Don, but didn’t push it. I had bigger fish to fry.
Bobby took the stage and killed it! Not the entire routine, but it didn’t matter. He was so dynamic, he had the crowd in the palm of his hands. Even though Derrick and Willie showed their nervousness, they stayed in the pocket and the crowd loved them too. It sounds corny, but when Big Lou, one of the most popular
Soul Train
dancers to date, enthusiastically high-fived Bobby during the number, I jumped for joy. It meant a lot, seriously.
Even before the episode was aired, Louil Silas Jr. made sure everyone in the music business knew that I had choreographed Bobby. By the time Derrick, Willie, and Bobby performed on
The Arsenio Hall Show
, I was a name in the record and music video industry. Motown asked me to choreograph “Dial My Heart,” a new single by its boys group, called the Boys, produced by L. A. Reid and Babyface for their
Soul Train
appearance and later multiple videos. I also staged and went on the Boys’ first major tour.
I brought the rest of Heart and Soul along. I hired Arthur as my assistant choreographer on every job. Derrick, Willie, Kaylan, and Bruce tagged along to help out for some spot dates too. We were having a blast, hanging out, making up routines, rehearsing, telling stupid jokes. It was fun. My life was fun, and I was making some money—God bless America
three
times!
One of those dates was where I met Mike Tyson. Actually, I had met him before in Brooklyn, but he didn’t remember. In Brooklyn he was the champ even before he was the Champ. I’d run into him all the time in the clubs. When the Boys tour pulled into Chicago, Mike Tyson was there to meet them. Mike was a big fan of the Boys and met up with everyone backstage, hanging with us for a couple of tour dates. I loved him. He was a dented can too: smart, damaged, silly, and still on the make. As the Boys were about to go on, we went over the numbers, and Mike was on the side watching. I was wearing spandex and a tank top. I went to sit next to Mike, and he whispered, “Damn, Wosie. You got a biscuit booty. Love to pour gravy all over that shit.”
“Mike, shut up.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
We both laughed. He never hit on me again.
• • •
A little under a year had passed. All was good, and then sadly, Derrick and Willie fell out with me. They had decided to do Bobby’s new video, “Every Little Step I Take,” without us and didn’t tell us we were axed out. We had already spent hours choreographing most of the song—teaching it to Derrick and Willie! They finished the routine on their own, filling in the empty spaces with some really fly steps, I must admit. I was upset, not that they moved on, but that they pulled a fast one. They told Arthur they felt justified because they had thought I gypped them on the initial fee from our first job together.
From what I had heard, Bobby and his “people” told Willie and Derrick that they should have gotten more money because the routine was theirs—not true. It was a sleazy tactic to sidestep me since I had asked for more money for the video. I had done my homework—other choreographers, like Paula Abdul (who I loved), were making close to $10,000 a video. And they were trying to pay my ass only $1,500, on a hit artist that we helped become a hit, with a huge video budget to boot? Fuck that. I had never gypped anyone. We shared steps, but “shared” is the operative word. Plus, the concept and the structure were all mine. And had I fed them out of my fee every day—four guys—and paid for gas to and from the rehearsal studio and jobs, dropping them off in Watts.
Derrick and Willie ended up making less money after all, because in the end they were only hired as dancers, not as choreographers. Thank goodness Bobby took them on tour or they really wouldn’t have made anything. I do have to admit that “Every Little Step I Take” was great—an R&B video classic. I would have to be a real hater not to admit it. They really did a great job.
• • •
Believe it or not, I was still going to school during this time. It was a joke. I was failing my classes, spending too much time taking choreographing
jobs, lying to myself that it was only for financial reasons to help pay for college expenses. And since the music industry in Los Angeles—with its misogyny and Derrick and Willie’s backstabbing—was making me depressed, I decided it was time to go home, try to apply to Stony Brook University in Long Island, and get my priorities in order. I needed to go back to the place I had thought I needed to move away from, the place that had brought me the most happiness and a sense of home. I had to go back to Brooklyn.
My friends took me out for my last week in L.A. to a club called Funky Reggae, where Matt Robinson, Holly Robinson’s brother, was spinning. Spike Lee was having a “butt” contest to see which black chick had the biggest ass—no lie—as a device to promote his latest movie,
School Daze
. Disgusted by it, I jumped on the stage, okay, so it was a speaker, and bent over shaking my ass, making a mockery of the whole thing. Bouncers came over with this little skinny guy and told me to get down. My bravado vanished. In fact, I got a bit teary, thinking they were going to throw my ass out. Instead, one of them told me that Spike Lee, the little skinny thing, wanted to meet me. Who? Honestly, I didn’t know who the hell he was. I loved
She’s Gotta Have It
, but didn’t recognize his name.
He was kind of laughing, looking at me, amused, and I started to get pissed. He held out his hand. “Sup. I’m Spike. What the hell were you doing up on that speaker?” he says, still kind of laughing. I rolled my eyes at him and said something, I don’t remember what, because I was still kind of shook, but it made him laugh again. His hand was still extended. I gave him a half-ass handshake. “Tonight is fate,” he said. I was like, “Oh you wish.” He bent over with laughter. Who the hell was this guy?
“Where you from?”
“I’m from Brooklyn.”
“Aah, shit! Where?!”
“Well, from Bushwick, but I’m staying with my sister in Bed-Stuy.”
“Bed-Stuy?! Aaahhhh, shit! This is fate! Fate! Hey, Monty, give her our number!”
My friends and I left quickly after that. As we were walking outside to our cars, I went to throw the card away, but my girlfriend Marion grabbed it, screaming, “Nooo! Do you know who that is?” Thank goodness she did. I was too nervous to get on the phone, so Marion called first. Spike wanted to speak only with the girl with the accent. I got on the phone. He told me he wanted to meet with me about a movie project. I told him I wasn’t an actress.
“Oh yes you are!”
I told him I couldn’t meet with him anyway because I was traveling with Marion to Washington, D.C.—she was transferring to Howard University—and then I was making my way by train to Brooklyn. “I’m staying with my sister Carmen in Bed-Stuy.”
“Bed-Stuy! Ah, shit! This is fate! We’re gonna be in Maryland tomorrow and heading back to Brooklyn afterward too! Let’s ride up together.”
I made Marion go with me. Well, actually she wanted to go because she wanted to see this dear friend of ours, Robbie, who had just moved to Brooklyn. I’ll get into Robbie later. Anyway, I don’t know why I trusted him enough to go with him and his producing partner, Monty, but I did. I think it was Monty’s kindness. I think it was curiosity from the hype by Marion. Or maybe it was all of the above—duh! I kept thinking to myself,
Could this be? Am I going to be like Lana Turner who was discovered at a drugstore in Hollywood but wasn’t really?
(
Imitation of Life
—love!) I don’t know why, but I believed it to be so, but was kind of freaked out about it too.