Precious, my Precious: Black Female Citizenship, Complexity, and the Politics of Unrelenting Survival

I saw the film Precious some weeks ago and afterwards, I had every intention of writing strong words to explain exactly why it moved me the way that it did. Because for whatever reason -- with the exception of Armand White's review Pride & Precious, of course -- no one was touching on certain things about the movie that were glaringly obvious to me. After reading this note that was passed to me on facebook (thanks Tanya), I realized that someone else -- a black woman! -- had already said it for me.

This reblog is with the author's permission. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Precious, my Precious: Black Female Citizenship, Complexity, and the Politics of Unrelenting Survival by Malkia A. Cyril

Share/Yesterday at 2:53pm

As I sit against the florescence of the television screen, watching the conservative Fox News pundit Glen Beck drive political nails into progressive leaders using the fear of U.S. blacks and immigrants of color as his hammer, my memory harkens back to the year in which the book Push was set, 1987. During that time, eugenics theories about the inherent laziness and criminality of black teenagers was rampantly resurgent in the news. Conservative research was cementing stereotypes of the black welfare queen, the crack baby, the HIV infected black woman as the truth that justified the destruction of the safety net as we knew it. Since then, health care has become increasingly privatized. Welfare has turned horrifically to an indentured servitude of workfare. The numbers of black women with HIV have skyrocketed. And the movie Precious, based on the book Push by Sapphire, was released.

Caricatures or Complex Characters?

Clarice “Precious” Jones is an extreme character, meant to shock the senses and unveil the underbelly of the brutality of racism and capitalism in the patriarchal land of the free. In the film and in the book, Precious is a dark-skinned teenaged girl who experiences multiple forms of oppression and violence at the hands of multiple perpetrators. In the movie, her sexually brutal father is an invisible or blurry character at best, while her mother, whose victimization as a woman was only alluded to, is cast as the primary perpetrator. It is only through the extreme telling of an extreme story that this dichotomy of inequity is revealed. There are no men in the story as told in the movie, and the welfare and education systems which oppress black womanhood and subvert black female resistance are cast as saviors. Questions have been necessarily raised by black audiences –is this story the best way to reveal these contradictions? Is the mother the real villain? Does the story reflect reality or is it more of a caricature? And if a caricature how does that shape the impact of the film on the representations of black women in media and in the public psyche?

I have known many black girls afflicted by multiple forms of abuse, compounded by addiction and illness. I have watched black women beat their children to bloody pulps in the street, cursing them the whole time. I have heard black mothers threaten to cut their daughter’s pussy out to prevent them from having sex. I have witnessed black women trade their daughters for crack. I have heard and seen so many things. And I have also seen those same exact women place themselves in front of a fist to save their daughters. I have watched those black mothers walk the hoe stroll for hours to make enough money to feed and house and clothe their babies, as they struggled to overcome addiction. I have watched, in my own home, my own beautiful black mother struggle with the decision to keep her man and have an adult life or protect her daughters and live for her children. Eventually, she chose the latter, though not soon enough. My mother was alone from the time I was about 14 to her death in 2005. That’s almost 20 years of intimate solitude in an effort to stand between her black daughters and the world of violence that waited for us in and beyond our home because she did not know how to manage both the safety of her children and her needs as a woman. These characters, Precious and her mother, are not simple caricatures, and yet the film chose some truths over others, and must be interrogated. This is by no means an exhaustive review, or a review of any kind. It’s what came for me after watching the film.

Black Womanhood and Complexity

Can you imagine that patriarchal colonialism and a generational experience of slavery can result in an experience of powerlessness and shame that can twist the mind and give rise to the belief that your three-year-old child has stolen your man? Can you imagine that there are black and brown girls, and boys, all over this world, that have HIV, have been raped by their father, sexually and physically abused by their mother, failed by the school system and exploited by the welfare system. And that these girls are brilliant and beautiful and full of unrealized promise- as are their mothers. These women are two sides of one coin, mother and daughter. Both trapped in different ways, both villainized by “culture of poverty” research, and exploited by the economic system and the civil institutions that touch and shape the daily texture of their lives.

The Narrative of Black Female Citizenship

This set of contradictions, this opening of an unhealed national and international wound, is not a mere regurgitation of racist and sexist images. There is a real untold story here, and the voice of that child and the voice of her mother need to be heard. They need to be heard because it is our silence on issues of sexual abuse and systemic violence that allows the space for the empire’s story about us to be the only one told. We do not control our media and cultural systems or the institutions of civil society, and therefore the narrative of black female citizenship has been used in so many ways as the lynchpin to justify the most brutal democracy in the world. The lies that our citizenship is somehow a gift and not a right, that our mothers are responsible for the socialization of black children and therefore the cause of their incarceration, and that our daughters have drained and massacred the economy, have justified mass incarceration, war, the privatization of social services and health care, and the defunding of public education. The same has been done to black men, using different stereotypes. But this, right here, is about black women.

Let’s talk about education. It was a strong thread that bound this plot together through the realization of the unrelenting power of words. In the book Push, the transformation of Precious occurs over the course of more than a year. Her increasing sense of pride and self-worth is tied directly to her increasing ability to read. Literacy is a powerful thing. It increases one’s ability to navigate and transform the physical, political, and economic conditions we find ourselves subject to. The ability to express one’s story, to know that it will be witnessed, is as powerful a motivation for transformation as any. Why did the leaders of the Cuban revolution begin by increasing the literacy of the poor? For the same reason that Venezuela has placed so much import on democratizing their media system. Because the power of literacy, media or otherwise, is foundational for social change. The fact that the conductor of the orchestra in this case was a black lesbian added depth and complexity to the story of black women being told in the film. the depiction of black lesbians as allies to heterosexual black women was a blessing that brought tears to my eyes.

Hollywood vs. Our Stories

All this being said, the Hollywood version of the book absolutely invisibilized patriarchy, cast the system as a hero and not an actor responsible for the conditions of oppression in which precious lived and survived, and over-simplified Precious’ mother as an animal who fed her child to the wolves. The movie’s flaws are real, and knowing that the film was being viewed by white middle class audiences whose ability to discern the notes in this song was minimal, was painful to experience.

It doesn’t make the story less powerful, less revealing, or less necessary. But it does leave room for the next telling to make these contradictions less nuanced, the complexity more stark. For U.S. born blacks mitigated by a history of slavery and colonial violence, complexity is the name of the game. And though I am tired of our black mothers, whose internalized shame and experience of powerlessness sometimes results in extraordinary brutality, being cast in roles that are either victim or villain, and never as the complex intersection of both, never as victor- I was stunned to joyful silence by the numbers of young black girls and boys I saw in the theatre. This is a complicated conversation that is rarely had in our families or classrooms, and even more rarely had in public. And it needs to be had.

Unrelenting Survival

In 1987, I was 13, and the book Push changed my life. I identified in some ways with the experience of Precious. I remember the tenements, the crack houses, the emergence of AIDS and the way both devastated family connection. I recall the news, the myth of the teenaged super-predator, the labels of crack baby, welfare mother, the images of addiction and violence that shaped so many black children’s understanding of themselves. and then there are things I won’t talk about, that make me proud to watch Precious survive, and her mother repent, on the screen. Because I understand the untenable choices black girls and women feel, and are, forced to make.

Today I am 35, and I am grateful for those precious black and brown children, those daughters of this nation’s dust, those human queens subjected to -and the perpetrators of-inhuman cruelty. Because with each individual survival there is a greater chance of our collective survival and transformation. And that is a story, a historical legacy that is the journey in my feet, the ancestor at my back, and the bitter at the bottom of capitalism’s cup. We are our mothers’ daughters, more than the sum of empire’s history, and our mothers are no worse than human. That is the story that needs to be told. Sapphire is one of hundreds of writers who pull back the veil on black female citizenship to reveal the abject bullshit of this democracy’s contract, place humanity back into the narrative, and open the door for complexity. Tell the truth, in all its complexity, regardless of the dominant group’s watchful gaze. And even when Hollywood distorts the tale, we will, by our own honest hands, set ourselves free.

Cause we are watching too. And this, precious, is for you.

anatomy of a scenario

it wasn't what i thought it would be.

i expected something bigger, grander. a bit of flash, at least. what i saw was a sliver of a building next to an auto body shop -- weirdly appropriate, somehow -- that squatted on a narrow street near a four way intersection that demanded the cars stop several feet away from the red light so they could make turns without hitting each other. the LIRR was right there, hanging above us in this stealthy ominous way, racing by every so often, its parking lots sprawling across the street from the action, this infamous gentleman's club, and all of us.



all of us was ed durante our somewhat fearless leader, tanya the ever-present script lady and james at the camera and at the ready, with a host of black actors that have worked with ed before, for the most part. all of us were dressed in black, as per ed's request. all of us were a little freaked out.



all of this was for the sean bell film project, organized by ed. this was some fast and furious-ness at work here, creatively. all the directors were given the same rules: one day shoot, two charaters speaking, no more than 3 minutes long, delivered in 7 days, all of them done by early september.



for ed's piece, all of us had to learn a monologue from hamlet. this would have been a cakewalk for me under ordinary circumstances, especially since i took a shakespeare workshop earlier this summer with jeff at dog run rep. and what with all the work they had to do, one would think that the least i could do was learn my lines. but once i was actually in front of the camera, all i could think about was these three brothers in their car getting shot at 50 times by cops that never identified themselves. my anger had long since dissipated. i was swimming in iambic pentameter, drowning in so much feeling, choking back something that felt way more like empathy than anything else. shockingly, ed didn't yell at me. to tell you the truth, i think i kind of wanted him to. anything to shake my lines loose.

and oh, what a beautiful day it was. there was something ironic and depressing and black-hearted and foul about all that sunshine and the picture-perfect blue sky wonderment that framed it so incessantly. yeah, the sun wasn't helping me, either.

it got even worse when we began to talk amongst ourselves and share our feelings about what happened. it got grim when we put ourselves in sean's place. it was james (the actor) who really brought me down when he talked about his bachelor party and dissected how it could have happened to him or any of his fraternity brothers. it was strange, all of us wallowing in our makeshift grief on the sidewalk as the bright sunshine made everything gleam like something out of a disney movie. somewhere in there, i walked to the bodega on the corner and got a piece of fruit and some tea and someone told a funny story and everything got a little giddy, because every thing was so sunny and so dark and so abysmally strange.

when it was all over and we were finally left with the unspoken question -- where did they shoot him down, anyway? -- we collectively walked around the corner to find our answer.



i tried to leave the sunshine there but it followed me all the way back to a gentrified west harlem, chok full of way too many hipster white people and the overbearing police presence that they brought with them. and so did this weird, weird grief that sits on my chest like a playful 2 year old and leaves me feeling like i swallowed a cinderblock.

i don't know what to do about a police force that won't collectively think before it shoots, especially when their guns are aimed at black men, or a local/state/federal government that won't prosecute the police officers in question when they kill innocent black folk and call it a "horrible senseless tradegy" or "a terrible accident" or "a case of bad timing" or a "misunderstanding" and all of the other phrases they use to justify themselves. i don't know how to battle any of that.

i am beginning to think that art can affect change. i'm beginning to want to make art that changes things. being a part of that process in someone else's project/vision is an important step to make towards creating something powerful that's mine.

this is how it begins -- someone or something inspires me and i get ideas...

oh, ed!

couldn't help posting this one. Time Out New York caught ed durante in the street -- in monkey fur! (oh, ed.) he's the illustrious director of jake gets paid, the indie i was in last spring. enjoy!


I, New York

Time Out New York / Issue 652 : Mar 27–Apr 2, 2008

Public eye Ed DuRanté, 41/7th St and First Ave

Photograph: Jay Muhlin

Can we take your picture for the magazine?
[Laughs] This is too funny. My brother has been going around with this homburg hat and pipe, and I’ve been telling him he’s gonna get into Time Out because of it.

I don’t think I’d notice any hat within ten feet of your jacket.
It’s Mongolian monkey.

Sure it is.
I am dead serious! My ex-girlfriend got it years ago as a gift from her mother. She wouldn’t wear it, so I took it.

What do you do?
I’m a filmmaker. I just finished my first feature, Jake Gets Paid. It’s a black black comedy. It’s about a woman who, after discovering that her boyfriend is having an affair, decides to give him a surprise party. She invites the mistress, Jake’s parents, the friends. Everyone knows this party shouldn’t happen, yet they all come because they all love Jake. I just sent it to Cannes.

Anything autobiographical about the plot?
Well, you know. These things happen.

Monogamy is not a natural human inclination.
[Laughs] You said it, not me.
[Editor’s note: Wikipedia lists 16 different forms of non monogamy.]

Does the girl with the monkey jacket play into this?
Um, no comment? All my scripts are inspired by things in my life that hurt or were great. It took me three years to get this one right—mostly because it took so long to be truthful with myself.

Black black comedy is a catchy term. Do you think other people will start using it to describe their work? That’d be great. As long as they give me credit.

More thoughts from Ed

“I want to see Passing Strange. The show is political and deals with race and sex and so many other things that I deal with in my own work.”

“I worked for Ed Koch at City Hall for awhile. Eventually, I was like, Why am I doing this? I’m an artist. So I quit and started Talking Drum Theater Company. Then I started a hip-hop rock band. Then I applied to NYU’s film program and they gave me a full scholarship. How did I fit all that in? I did a lot of cocaine.”

“The ring and bracelet were my dad’s. When he died I put all his jewelry in a box because I didn’t feel like I was man enough to wear it. Then at a certain point in my life, I was like, You know what? I’m ready now. Our dad had a lot of style—he was a painter, very much a dandy. That’s why the brothers DuRanté roll with whatever we feel like wearing. [Laughs]”

—Kate Lowenstein

"Jake" didn't get in!

unbelievable but true -- the film i was in called Jake Gets Paid didn't get accepted to Sundance Film Festival. well, thankfully they're not the only game in town. there are festivals everywhere, not just colorado. if you know of one, tell the director ed durante all about it at jakegetspaid@gmail.com.

Jake Gets Paid -- The final edit

i went to the tisch school of the arts screening room to see the final edit of jake gets paid, the movie i shot with ed durante in april. it was a nine day shoot -- every saturday and sunday that month -- and it was tight. there were moments when it felt like a massive impossibility but we all got through it. the finished product needs work here and there (they haven't fixed the sound, for example) but all in all, it was astonishingly good. especially the new ending, which kind of blew me away.

it's not that i ever doubted ed. it's obvious that he knows what he's doing. it's just that with film, you don't know what you have until you've edited it and it's up on the screen. while you're actually doing it, everything is all over the place. there's just no predicting it. it's pretty clear that ed is ambitious and aggressive with all this. he's going to follow through with the festival circuit and push as hard as he has to, to make something happen. it's his first feature. (and mine.)

with theater, you can read the script and know what you've got. and when all else fails, great acting can save bad direction. not so with film. it's all about the direction -- ed's vision, his ideas, they're all up there.

the fun part is, my nieces leslie and monique came out to see it, and leslie brought her husband ernest. leslie and ernest sat behind my friend and i, and i got to talk to them before the movie started to fill them in on my life and make faces at them and stuff after everything was underway. fun. and ralph was there. and stephen. and john and judtsna. it's like i got this moment to catch every one up on at least some part of what i've been up to this year. quite gratifying.

Jake Gets Paid

here's the trailer from my first feature film, Jake Gets Paid. it's my first real role. you know what i mean: more than five lines. not background work. not "extra" work. it's me, in a supporting role that has me saying and doing things all the way through the flick. that's never happened before. i'm filled with sweet relief that it's happening now.

i was antsy about what i'd look like because i'm not as skinny as i was last year and my hair is totally natural and i'm not necessarily a film actor (yet). but when i saw the rough cut, i realized that my hair looks way better than i dared to imagine it would. and when i relaxed, the camera seemed to like me. now i'm very comfortable on camera, thank God -- which is probably why i keep getting called back for almost every commercial that will see me.

what's especially cool is that the director ed durante is using two of my songs, in the very beginning and the very end of the movie.




ed and his editor sen are close to a final edit, so they want some viable feedback. they're going to show it at tisch school of the arts (ed's alma mater) next week. i can't wait to see what it looks like and how it feels. and yes -- when all is said and done, i'm really glad that i did it.

Queen Esther Gets Paid

a few days ago, i got a call from ed durante, the director of the indie black black comedy jake gets paid. this was my first substantial film role to date -- although i have some blactress buddies that think my moment in that grand farce marcy x (a medium/semi-close up shot of me, in a kente cloth headwrap no less, yelling "get that bitch off the stage!" in reference to a pink chanel-suit wearing lisa kudrow) was a pretty good one. ed sounded a little giddy, as usual. he decided to have one last rough cut showing of the film before he submitted it to sundance, to get some feedback. that's got to be a crazy trajectory, drumming up support to get your film seen there. because it's not about independent film anymore. and it doesn't necessarily matter how good your film is. he had put it up for "public" consumption somewhere on nyu's campus (his alma mater) on the same night as sekou sundiata's memorial, so i figured i was destined to not see it before the rest of the world did. but here was ed's phone call. i couldn't say no.

ed pulled that shoot off in april by scheduling everything on the weekends. in retrospect, i can't believe he did it. wait a minute -- what am i saying? film is a collaborative effort. we did it -- the cast, the crew, all of us. we really did.

he said 7pm, so i'm thinking he'll click the light switch off at 6:55pm and of course when i show up at about 6:20pm or something i'm the very first person there, which is embarassing and wierd. i got to thinking, maybe i should give up on this whole "punctual" thing i've got going. it's totally working for me but not really. ed was at his rosy effervescent best -- wisecracking and wine-sipping his way through it as he rearranged furniture with his brother paris and answered the door and greeted the guests and poured the vino. there were a dozen of us or so. it was very much a listening room.

i have to say, i really liked the movie. it looks so warm and lush. and there are moments that feel immediate and familiar because of the camera angles, the rhythm in conversation and some fairly straightforward funny moments. there were moments when i wouldn't look at my face but i didn't look as fat as i thought i would, so all i could really feel was sweet relief. i didn't know that ed would bookend the movie with my songs. that was a beautiful surprise.

the first was "stand by your man" which rang out stark and weary as the main character Liza, a brunette white girl, runs out of the bedroom towards the camera completely naked in slow motion a la peckinpah (at least that's who i thought of when i saw it) with her black boyfriend jake's freshly removed condom. the next shot has her in the tub, emptying the contents of said condom into her vagina and tilting her hips upward, in an obvious effort to impregnate herself, all the while chatting casually with the boyfriend through the closed/locked door, who thinks she's simply washing up. obviously a psycho, right? there's more but i really don't want to give it away...
later when it was time to ask questions and toss up opinions, i remembered out loud an article i read somewhere about desperate modern women who say they don't want to get married or have kids but who poke tiny pinholes in their condoms and diaphrams or stop taking the pill, or whatever, to entrap whoever they're with. conception by deception. it's supposedly on the upswing in urban areas, especially new york city -- but no one had ever heard of such a thing. how cool was ed, to tap into something so topical.

he ends with the song "get it right this time" which totally worked. it was almost as though the lyrics were saying what jake was really thinking.

i remember walking to the subway and thinking, okay, i'm over the hump. i've done three national commercials, i've done a supporting role in a film. i've finally got on-camera stuff that shows that i can act. now what i need is a role on the "law and order" franchise and my transition to film/tv/commercials will be complete -- relatively speaking, naturally.

bang! bang! bang! - alt theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part three

my friend renee got cast in a short film awhile back. sometimes when we hung out, she'd let fly with all of these tidbits about what the process was like. she thought that i should meet ed durante the director of the short film because he seemed to be as much of an anomaly as me. and strangely, he was. after we'd met, renee showed me his reel of short films. i thought that much of what i saw was filled with beautiful imagery that was compelling and, well, interesting. clearly, he knew how to tell a story with visuals. that alone was enough to put him a cut above a lot of people who called themselves filmmakers. i was intrigued. okay, i thought. he knows how to do what he does -- no small feat there. now what does he want to say?

but i digress.

where did the initial introduction take place? there are so many moments that blur together, like some strange syrupy goo: the video shoot for renee's dance project, where a hardworking focused ed (surprisingly) gave it his all, with beautiful visuals and real direction; the sit-down dinner at ed's girlfriend's place, wherein we showed up later than expected because we expected something a little more casual, much to ed's bemusement and (slight) chagrin; ed, telling me that i was really onto something with my whole "black americana" thing and how we should make a video of the song "stand by your man"; ed, looking at my photos on myspace.com and telling me how bad he thought they were; and of course there was the burlesque show at the slipper room, wherein during the go-go section of the show, ed's righteous black friends asked rather indignantly how long to we have to watch these flabby white girls jiggle around, anyway? what a fun night that was. i distinctly remember that ed freaked himself out when he realized he was turned on by little brooklyn's clown moment.

i'm not sure when it happened but somewhere in there, ed and i connected. and then we bonded. renee's project brought us together and i figured another one would probably happen along, but i had absolutely no idea what it might be. and besides -- i wasn't sure ed would work with me because i didn't have a lot of film experience. there were a few el-lay moments when he'd go on a little too long about what someone looked like on camera that he wanted to work with, not knowing or caring whether they could actually act. as an actor that can act, that bothered me. but whatever. for some strange reason, he called me in to read for his first feature length film and for some strange reason, i auditioned well and for some strange reason, he kept calling me back until he finally offered me a part.

the first problem, it seemed, was that we would shoot on the weekends in april, which meant that my hair had to be consistent. so my first question was, do i have to straighten it? needless to say, ed is progressive enough as a black man to find black women attractive in their natural state -- so we agreed that my hair would stay the way it was. i was warming up to the fact that my character seemed to be such a smarmy high-brow back-stabbing two-faced hedonist. all that detail right below the surface seemed drama-ready -- and after giving the script a thorough read, i realized that really, that was the whole idea.

film is a funny thing. you can read a play and know if it's good but you don't really know what you've got with film until you're looking at the final edit. (and i mean final.) to be honest, it's hard for me to trust anyone. and here i was, trusting ed. he knew what he was asking, of all of us.

before i left his apartment, i remember him telling me, "this is going to be a crazy adventure and you're going to hate me by the time this is over, but you're going to be glad that you did this." and i think he said something or another about making me a star. i can't remember. i was too busy thinking about the crazy adventure and the hate and the happiness.

i remember walking down the street thinking, ed may be nuts -- but he is talented. and he is my kind of nuts. so this just might work...

hey! is that thing loaded or what? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part two

the real reason why i never bothered to audition for film or tv before was because what you looked like seemed to matter way more than whether or not you could actually act. frankly, i didn't think that i was light-skinned enough or conventionally pretty enough to seriously pursue it. i didn't believe that most film actors were especially talented because most of them had never done any theater. film is not an actor's medium, contrary to popular belief. theater is. to my way of thinking, an actor that's never done any theater is like a surgeon that's never actually operated on anybody. and truth be told, when film actors did do theater, they almost always sucked at it.

and another thing. film people -- directors, editors, producers, the whole lot -- were freaking annoying. they walked around like they were breathing some rarified air that the rest of us knew nothing of, for the sake of a genre and the fame that somehow elevated all of them. i would go into these auditions and they would say, what have you been in and they would look at my resume like it was a blank piece of paper because i didn't have any film work on it. well. a lot of them just flat-out didn't know what they were doing. it was disturbing: all of these people, wallowing in gobs of money, running around hob-nobbing, and for what. wouldn't i always be too old, too young, too black, too patently unattractive, too strong, too...something to these people? why should i have to convince them of anything? wouldn't success make me beautiful (ie bankable) in their eyes? it certainly seemed to work that way for everyone else.

it didn't help that i had befriended one too many film majors when i was in college who would sit around and and argue endlessly about who was brilliant, who wasn't and why. hardly anyone was making any art -- and if they were, it was derivative and boring and encrusted with scholastic excess. i suppose it was way more interesting to trash everyone else's work than come up with something original. or at least cool.

by the time i decided to take acting seriously, i already knew rejection -- the hard way.

i was called a white girl in grade school like that was my name and roundly ostrasized because not only did i know how to read but i actually enjoyed it. thanks to intellectual pursuits that included reading dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun along with the clothes that my mother lovingly made for me turned me into a garden variety wierdo in the african american community and made me the object of ridicule amongst my peers for most of my youth. somewhere in there, when i was 8 or so, my mother accidentally dropped a straightening comb on my neck. i told myself that there was nothing wrong with my hair in its natural state when everything in my world told me otherwise. afterwards, i promised myself that when i grew up, my hair would be natural. i never fully understood why i had to straighten it to be considered pretty but that's a whole other conversation.

so i had already endured a lifetime of "no" by the time i hit puberty. what i endured in my early years in new york city was nothing in comparison. it was luncheon and an afternoon nap in a field of wildflowers and daffodils. it was a walk in the freakin' park.

circumstances of my youth may have convinced me that i was fugly, but no one ever disputed my intelligence or my talent -- expecially the people who ridiculed me in the first place. i put all of it behind me and i kept going and going and going...

just as i'd hit a wall with alt-theater/off-broadway, everything shifted gradually towards tv/film and commercials. the first step was bravo's the it factor. i did it because i had little or no camera experience and i had no money or time for on camera classes. i needed to learn how to be comfortable in front of a camera and i figured having a crew follow me around for six months or so would compel me to break some bad habits. it worked. i got my SAG card when i got RENT but i finally used it when i got a part in Marci X that didn't end up on the cutting room floor.

the next step was auditioning like crazy. but there were obstacles. to find them, i had to be objective about my physical self. i quickly learned that how things look in a camera's eye can be very different from my own. i had to see things differently. there were some concessions i wasn't willing to make -- like straightening my hair, for example -- but now that i got rid of those annoying tics that seemed to happen if i was on camera for too long, i had to work hard to lose the chunk that made me look heavier than i actually was and get my teeth fixed, an extremely expensive proposition. most importantly, i had to learn how to audition on camera well. this would take time, but i was up for the challenge.

i had a million auditions and callbacks before i got anything. but finally, something happened: in october, i got my first national commercial, for ocean spray. two weeks ago, i got another national commercial, for prego. and somewhere in there, i met filmmaker ed durante, and his feature length project "jake gets paid" happened.

how did i meet ed durante? now that's a long story...

what are you going to do, shoot me? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part one

a few years ago, it seemed that i couldn't sit through a movie preview without seeing someone that i knew onscreen. i'd think back and remember which off-off broadway play or musical we'd done and when, and in my head i'd feel a strange sense of pride and glee for them, that they'd gone hollywood and "made it"-- not fame, really. just steady work. and to my way of thinking, that was making it. mazeltov.

but then one day i turned on the television and they were there, too. almost every commercial break meant having to sit and watch someone i knew hawking cookies or room sanitizer or God knows what all -- which was hysterical, if you really stop to think about it. i even recognized a few here and there with roles on sit coms and tv series. eventually, a passing conversation with an actor-acquaintance who gave me a ball park idea as to how much they were probably making made my jaw drop. was i missing the boat here?

when i had this epiphany, i had been doing theater in nyc professionally for about 10 years. i don't dance, so i knew that the broadway chorus wasn't anything for me to consider. once i understood that the great white way tends to favor heavy-set black female performers, i began to lean towards a much less conventional approach. eventually the breakthrough happened when i made the original cast in the national tour of RENT on a cattle call -- no representation, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. but for several years before that happened, when i got here from down south and everyone pretty much ignored me, there was no work. so i developed my own ideas -- in alt-music and alt-theater. with the two one person shows that i wrote and performed, i proved that i was an originator. with the various roles in george c wolfe's "harlem song," i proved that not only could i could carry the lead in a broadway caliber musical but that i could originate work on a grander scale.

after one evening's performance, my mentor the director jeff cohen met me at the stage door. somewhere in the conversation that ensued, he said, "you'd better enjoy this moment, because this probably won't happen again for you for another 10 years." he was right, of course. downtown rags described me as an "alt-diva." casting directors said that i was "quirky." the general vibe was that i was "unconventional" -- simply put, that i wasn't the black girl that they thought i should be, the black girl that they could easily recognize from their deepest imaginings or the most innocuous media saturation or even around the way. the fact of the matter was, i was unlike anything they'd ever seen. or heard.

more often than not, my uniqueness was percieved of as a threat. why? because i wasn't behaving like a stereotype. because for some, the unfamiliar and the unknown are things to be afraid of, especially where black people are concerned -- and especially with black women. because i wasn't sitting around trying to figure out which black girl to turn myself into, to get the job. i wasn't desperate -- and to be honest, that must have made me look like an uppity negress. but because i actually am an uppity negress, i really didn't care. and i still don't.

i was just being myself. was that so wrong?

i almost forgot!

here's the good news of the moment: i got cast in a truly indie feature length film called Jake Gets Paid. i'm calling it "truly indie" because the director Ed Durante wants to shoot 12 pages a day for 7 days, every weekend in april -- starting saturday march 31st -- from 8am to 3pm. coffee, bagels. no pay.

it's an interesting role. i'll definitely have a significant amount of camera time -- and that is what i wanted when i started to seriously pursue film/tv. here's the deal: as a vocalist and a theater performer, i don't have much of a reel -- so when someone offers me a film role, it would kind of behoove me to take it. the thing is, you can't necessarily read a script and tell if a movie is going to be worthwhile. you have to trust the director and his vision and his process -- and hope that it comes out well in the end. on the one hand, if the director has a reputation, you have something to hang your hope on. but even that's no guarantee. on the other hand, if it's just this well-intentioned enthusiastic and probably even talented guy standing there with a bunch of short films to his credit going, trust me -- well, that's a whole other ball of wax. just ask alan arkin.

mr. durante says it's going to be tight and he promised me that i'll hate him when it's over but in the end he says it'll be worth it. thankfully, i get to keep my hair very natural: no wigs, no extensions, no nothing. that fills me with sweet relief. one thing, though -- i'm getting my body back and since he'll probably be shooting this movie out of sequence, there'll probably be some scenes that'll have me looking chubbier than others. that'll be funny. chubby me in one scene, lean me in the next one. ha.

let the adventure begin.