Larger Than Lyfe (26 page)

The kickoff of the Miami auditions at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale received as huge a turnout as the Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta auditions. News cameras panned the huge crowd of young hopefuls. Many of them had camped out outside the performing arts center like they had in Los Angeles. All of them wanted to secure one of the highly coveted, numbered wristbands that guaranteed them a place in the auditions.

The local FOX news station did an exclusive interview with Keshari to discuss the nationwide talent search. Keshari put on her public relations fac
e and talked candidly about how pleased she was at the amazing talent that her record label had discovered in the audition cities they’d hit so far and how excited and assured she was that Larger Than Lyfe would discover some equally amazing talent in Miami.

The interviewer pleaded with Keshari for the name of a celebrity or two who would sit on the celebrity panel of judges at the televised grand finale show. Keshari smiled demurely and stayed mum. The celebrity panel of judges was not being revealed to anyone. It would be a complete surprise that would not be revealed until the night of the grand finale event.

The interviewer changed the subject.

“You’ve been keeping company with the very handsome general counsel for ASCAP. I know that he accompanied you to the Atlanta auditions and very reliable sources tell me that he flew into Miami late the other night. Are things serious? Any wedding bells in the near future?”

“The nationwide talent search and other projects demand my complete focus,” Keshari responded. “I barely have time to sleep, much less establish and maintain a love life.”

“Oh, come on,” the interviewer cajoled. “I know that you’re not attempting to convince me and the public that you’re not in love. You’re GLOWING, for God’s sake.”

“It’s the Miami humidity,” Keshari responded coyly.

On day two of the Miami auditions, a very, very special discovery was made. Sharonda Richards and Andre DeJesus had been carefully observing the incoming crowd of auditioners from the television monitors set up around the judges’ panel. Although Keshari was also present as a member of the panel of judges, she’d been preoccupied on her laptop for the greater part of the morning, trading communications with her attorney.

A twenty-year-old female singer took the stage wearing a flowing, Asian-inspired sundress and high-heeled sandals. She was stunning, an amalgamation of cultures…half-Black, half-Korean, with warm, flawless, brown skin and a cascade of silky, raven curls. Physically, she looked a lot like Keshari and almost everyone commented on that. Her voice was PHENOMENAL. It was an intoxicating mix of smoky, sultry, with a streetwise edge and a hint of the angelic. She sang a song that she had written herself and her whole aura exuded star quality that could not be denied.

The New Millennium music industry is roughly 70 percent image and about 30 percent true talent. Only a handful of artists possess the kind of transcendent creativity in production and writing and vocal ability and range as singers that makes the music industry and public music enthusiasts just KNOW that music was what these artists were MADE to do. The rest of the industry are illusions
very carefully concocted from strategic marketing plans, state-of-the-art recording studio technology, and whatever is most popular in the music industry at the time.

A significant goal that Keshari intended to accomplish with her label’s nationwide talent search was to firmly establish its R & B and jazz genres by filling its repertoire with fresh, amazingly talented, new R & B and jazz artists. Keshari was a lover of MUSIC, not just hip-hop, and one of her long-range plans had always been to have all of the Black music genres under her label’s umbrella and she wanted to fully start realizing that goal with a female R & B singer possessing the kind of magnetism and crossover quality to make millions for her record label.

Larger Than Lyfe had been searching for quite some time for a young, beautiful, highly talented female to groom to become a worldwide superstar, its R & B-hip-hop princess. Beyoncé Knowles was one thing. What Larger Than Lyfe had in mind was even greater. Prior to the nationwide talent search project, LTL’s A & R team traveled the country, hitting nightclubs on the tips of others. They’d listened to hundreds of demos and viewed stacks and stacks of photos with accompanying CDs of models-slash-singers. They’d attended high school and college talent events. Not once had they found the female wh
o possessed the distinctive qualities that they were looking for…until now.

The moment that she took the stage, Sharonda Richards was in awe. She leaned over and tapped Andre DeJesus, but he was already on the same vibe. He leaned over and whispered to Keshari. Keshari had already stopped what she was doing and was watching the young woman with interest.

“She’s the one,” Andre said.

“I know,” Keshari replied.

All of the judges seated at the panel leaned together in a huddle.
They were about to make the very first exception to the rules of the audition process and the entire nationwide talent search project since the project commenced. The young lady’s name was “Ntozake,” a Swahili name that means “she who comes with her own things.” She was named after the famous, Black poet-activist Ntozake Shange. She was a military brat. She was extremely talented and her background was interesting without their PR department having to create a bio for her.

Keshari Mitchell and Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment wanted to extend to her an invitation to bypass the entire audition process, come to Los Angeles, and go into their studios to record for them. She’d get the opportunity to flex her writing chops, she’d work with some of the country’s best producers, and LTL would give her project the kind of attention and promotion that was usually reserved for megastars.

“Tell me,” Keshari said. “How would you like to come to Los Angeles and record an album for our label?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question,” Ntozake responded. “Are you asking me how I’d feel to be the winner of the nationwide talent search?”

“No,” Keshari said. “We’d like you to forgo the talent search altogether and sign with Larger Than Lyfe immediately.”

Ntozake’s screams and tears of delirious delight were surely confirmation enough of her acceptance of their astounding offer. The local news got wind of the story later in the day and covered the story for the remainder of the Miami auditions.

Mars had only been able to spend a day with Keshari right before the Miami auditions kicked off because he had to fly back to Los
Angeles to be in court, but he returned to Palm Beach the night that the Miami auditions wrapped. He planned to fly back to L.A. with Keshari and her crew on the Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment jet.

Keshari was unusually quiet now that the excitement of the auditions and a multitude of press coverage were past. Mars simply believed that she was exhausted and needed a little time to fully decompress. He had no idea that there was so, so much more weighing on her mind than fatigue. The two had dinner on the terrace, swam naked in the middle of the night in the infinity pool, and curled up in the master bedroom suite in the wee hours of the morning to watch a movie.

“What’s on your mind?” Mars asked her. “You’ve been so quiet and you seem tense.”

The two were lying in a pile of pillows on the floor in front of the huge, wall-mounted plasma television. She pulled Mars’s arms around her tighter as they spooned, half-watching
Love and Basketball.

“I feel like, at any moment, I’m gonna wake up and ALL of this…even you…will have just been a dream.”

Mars chuckled. “As long as you’re not talking about a nightmare when you say that.”

Keshari was serious. “Mars,” she said softly, “I love you. There is so much that I want to say to you. There is so much that I need to say to you, but the timing is always off. Over what’s only been a very brief period, we’ve had an
incredible
time together. I feel as if I’ve known you all my life. But there is still so much about me that you don’t know…and, right now, my life is on the verge of spiraling completely out of control.”

“Why don’t you take some time off?” Mars suggested. “You have a more than competent staff to manage your record company’s
operations in your absence while you take some personal time for yourself to regroup. I know that this talent search…flying from city to city week after week…has got to be wearing you out, and your mind and your body are trying to tell you that they need a break.”

“Mars, it’
s more than that.”

“Then, what is it?” Mars asked.

“You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I’m probably…no…most likely…going to lose you.”

The telephone rang and postponed their discussion. The call was from Los Angeles. There’d been some sort of security breach at Keshari’s mansion.

P
ortia was sickly obsessed and a part of her absolutely knew it, but she’d come to a point where she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing what she was doing, even if she wanted to. She’d always been something of a “drama queen” and she was definitely no stranger to the “Naomi Campbell syndrome” when she was provoked. The pregnancy stunt absolutely took the cake, but what she had been getting herself into lately was extreme, even for her. Almost every day, Portia had been orchestrating her hectic work schedule around her driving up to spy on Keshari Mitchell’s Palos Verdes mansion.

If it was daytime, she would sit up the street from the entrance to the bitch’s house and watch the comings and goings of delivery trucks, pool cleaners, gardeners, security officers, Keshari Mitchell’s employees from her record label, Misha Tierney, the party promoter, Mars, and the bitch herself. She’d even begun to notice who she believed to be paparazzi in an unmarked van photographing, and sometimes videotaping, movement on Keshari’s enclosed property.

If it was nighttime, Portia would often boldly sit directly across the street from the mansion’s driveway, ducking down in her car seat and waiting until the bitch came speeding up the street in one of her fleet of six-figure-price-tagged cars. She’d watch the bitch get out of her car and go into her beautiful home. A couple of times, she saw Keshari running on the lawn, tossing a tennis ball at her two massive Rottweilers.