No, it’s not the big evil from Mad Max.

It’s something else.

Just at this moment, I had this desire to go back to 1982, when I was eight years old and still felt like a skinny girl with baby fat. My hair was Pre-Con gelled down like a helmet with those yarn bows that my mother matches with all the colors of my outfit. Once I even got braids from the lady down the street so I could look like Princess Leah. I loved those big buns but I swear my scalp hurt forever. I used to toss and turn on the mattress I slept on so my scalp would be soothed somehow. I didn’t have a real bed until I was in fourth grade but that didn’t really phase me too much. I didn’t know we didn’t have much money. I knew we had food stamps and I hated to have to go the store to use them. I hated that I knew what they looked like. I hated that my mother was so flippant about them and made me go to the store in my pajamas and coat to buy something small and the Sunday paper. Food stamps didn’t seem to be only for poor people in my mind. They were for people who had a big neon “Look At Me” sign and I didn’t want to be that person. I just knew that I wanted a pair of moon boots really badly and I loved my puffer jacket beyond belief and wish my jelly shoes could be worn all year ’round. I watched Mighty Mouse reruns and lived on cereal. Our apartment was meager but clean and I used to go to sleep to Teddy Pendergrass album covers because I loved him so and wondered if he’d wait until I got old enough (ahem, this was before the “accident”). Then I considered just being Stephanie Mills since I was convinced that she was my height. My mother and I would stand at the bus stop and if it was a good day, I would have a heavenly smelling doughnut, crispy and sweet, the smell always better than the taste, from the hamburger stand across the street from the stop. Once, we saw a dog lying in the street, dead, and I begged my mother to call someone because nobody should have to die like that. And I cried.

But there was Kool-Aid and stick ball until dark and Archie comic books and things to send away for in the back of every comic I brought home. There was my crooked handwriting that carefully spelled out my name and address which I was proud of knowing. There was the feeling that we lived a bit better than most because we lived down the street from a college. Granted it was Highland Park Community College but it sure did feel smart with the tall trees and the winding pathways enclosed in metal rails that we tried to balance on. On Sunday nights, my dad took us to Aknartoon’s Eatery for my favorite bean soup and cornbread. He would try to get me to eat oxtails, saying they put hair on your chest and I would scream and think of my boyfriend from kindergarten who’s aunt actually had hair on her chest that I couldn’t stop staring at even though I wanted to run. In Aknartoon’s I would always get a slice of bean pie and star at the velvet paintings that seemed like intricate string architecutres formed into galaxies. When we finished eating in the booth, silently because my parents had a very strange relationship that had me at the center and some stuff I didn’t understand so it wasn’t spoken in front of me, we would go to Aknartoon’s Health Food store next door. I would sniff my dad’s bee pollen moist lotion that he used because of his dry hands, courtesy of years of working on the line at Ford Motor Co. I would pray I could get a Ginseng Up, the tangy carbonated sweet climbing down my throat and forcing a funny burp later. I would stare at all the vitamins, rows and rows of them in this clunky store that didn’t really seem to have any method to its madness. I would want to live there in all that surface pretty health stuff with the nutty earth smells and the wide smiling cashier. Afterwards, I would climb into the backseat of my dad’s Sunday car (back then it was a rose colored Cadillac with burgundy interior) and disappear into the leather like it was a big friend hugging me into its insides. I would either pretend to fall asleep or fall asleep as the sun when down. If it was summer, I would dream of playing kickball the next morning and listening to my friend’s Queen or Prince records and make up dance routines that usually consisted of me running around in a circle and doing the “rock” (see Michael Jackson). If I was lucky, my mom’s friend Betty would be sewing one of her teenage daughters a dress for some event. I would pretend that I was going too and I would get to feather my hair like Blair or Tootie from “Facts of Life” instead of my matching bows.

Where is all this goiing?

Well, in life everyone has a soundtrack to their lives. And here are mine for this 1982 time period. The last time I really felt like a kid and not yet deposited into the world with hormones and confusion. This was when beef jerky was a treat and baby hair was my uniform. I am not even sure what the transition was like out of this safe space but it must have been traumatic since I think back on the bridge from there to here like a blur.

Enjoy the soundtrack:

Had no idea what Stevie meant with this song but it sure sounded good while we played kickball and sucked on big squares of Laffy Taffy.

Daddy told me back then that Luther had “sugar in his back pocket” and I just pictured Luther have a big bag of Domino sugar in his jeans which seemed inconvenient and messy.

Betty’s daughter introduced me to Queen. Yes, black people can crossover! I did a mean routine to this one.

My first dance recital. Man this movie’s scary subway man still gives me nightmares. But I do love this rejoicing party.

Well of course you’d fall in love with Teddy and want to be Stephanie!

There was this girl in my class named Kelly. Boy did she drive me damn crazy with this song. I was like, “Girl, you are NOT his Kelly.”

I imagined eventually that Michael was singing this to me directly. Now this was before he fell on his head.

This song made me think new things about boys that I had never thought before! Now it took like twenty years for me to sort it out but whatever….

I was feeling sentimental. Feeling like a little girl who just wanted to crawl into her dad’s lap and watch the Dukes of Hazard, eating a Hostess Cherry pie and not wondering how long it would take to leave my system. I want to just hand make a Mother’s Day card for my mother and have that be enough. I want to roller skate in my apartment again and pretend I can be some feature player on “BJ and the Bear.” I want all my rainbow colors to be vivid again.

I’m so far away from red hair and pale skin but I’m convinced that my kid is coming out like this. Though 08 is curvy like a woman, growing balls in 08 is very sexy:

I ask this question for real. I am one who will go see a play cause I like plays. But must us theater people cajole you folks into seeing something non-Tyler Perry related by throwing in a Diddy. Did anyone here go see Diddy in “A Raisin in The Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry (I must name her name because somehow we forget the first black female playwright to hit Broadway when we keep talking about these cornbread crumb like circumstances around the revival)? Did you bust the doors down like it was Biggie concert? Cause now they are making it into a film and I think I might just need to rock back and forth in a pew for awhile (any pew will do).

I’m telling you this hip hop actors (Mos Def excluded because I know his name as Dante and that’s because I knew him before he flashed his mini-sexy in “The Italian Job”) are doing Ashton Kutcher like dances when they think of how they are pulling it over on you guillable watchers. If you say something like Beyonce is your favorite actress, you might as well drink no name brand Kool-Aid. Make them fools work harder! Make them go to acting school. Marilyn Monroe did! Granted it may not make them better but at least make them try….come to think of it, this might be why we have so many babies having babies. Too easy. Milkshakes bring the boys to the yard but that don’t mean you gotta let them drink and discard like it was a McDonald’s dollar menu item.

I digress.

Feast your eyes on cheese.

Phylicia, I am shamed. I can’t even call you Mrs. Huxtable right now. I know you’ve spent some time in the Ntozake Shange (Google some shit) purple feather theater era and could probably do a sonnet or twenty so please tell me you had a mortgage due. That’s all I want to hear from you.

Audra, you ARE working on Broadway right now. Was this an urgent move on your part to crossover to Press Play audiences?

Sanaa, well, we go back to the Wesley romance and we roll deep. You could just ask your dad Stan to borrow his backyard and put on a Little Rascals “Barber of Seville” if you were bored. Hell, I’ll write it (plug plug).

The baby is too young to mess with.

I stay away from video games because I know I have a killer competitive streak that would render me homeless with a bad thumb, starring in an MTV True Life: I Have Gaming Issues. Even though I’m kinda hippy and crunchy granola, my SuperHero side comes out when you give ma fake gun. It’s bad I know. But these Wii kids nowadays did not just grow out of the ground! They have history dating back to the pinball machine, traveling through PacMan and landing into Hitman. If you read this blog regularly, you already know I have issues with the Bill Cosby Crew acting like kids are not influenced by their elders, both good and bad. I prefer y’all to be all up in the TV screen saving the world as opposed to doing drive bys. However, there’s another way:

It is refreshing to me when I see mult-stupidillionaires reconnecting to a root I almost forgot.

Beyonce, according to Kanye, is a reigning Connect Four champ around the Black Gatsby (Great Gatsby, a book….Google some shit) Crew. See kids, you don’t always have to spend the money you earn immediately. That game cost about fifteen dollars and they look very entertained. In the immortal words of MC Lyte:

Funky Fresh dressed to impress ready to party
Money in your pocket, dying to move your body
To get inside you paid the whole ten dollars
Scotch taped with a razor blade taped to your collar
Leave the guns and the crack and the knives alone
MC Lyte’s on the microphone
Bum rushin and crushin, snatchin and taxin
I cram to understand why brother’s don’t be maxin
There’s only one disco, they’ll close one more
You ain’t guarding the door so what you got a gun for?
Do you rob the rich and give to the poor?

This from Pagesix.com:

Eddie Murphy, 46, and Tracey Edmonds, 40, were married in Bora Bora on New Year’s Day in front of 25 friends and family, but a lawyer is stating that the marriage is likely to be invalid.

In an interview with the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Malgras Benoit, a general law specialist in French Polynesia, declared that the couple was ineligible to be married locally because they had not lived in the region for at least thirty days, which is a qualification that must be met under French law.

Malgras explained that the wedding, which took place on the beach with Tracey walking barefoot down the aisle to Gladys Knight’s “Makings of You,” does not constitute, “a real marriage, if it is on the beach with only a local priest. I think it was just an exotic, artistic ‘marriage.’”

These two are pretty smart (okay, wait, this one girl is really smart). I mean she married Babyface, became a producer of notable interest (so notable that I can’t even get her company to read my script but I digress…her loss!), had two kids, has grown men writing songs about her and always manages to look impeccable. Home girl KNOWS how invalid her wedding is. And I am not talking about Eddie. I suspect invites went out but contracts weren’t to her liking. She better call Katie Cruise’s team STAT!

A) Happy curve 08! Women are going to rule the school this year! It’s a vajority, fellas! If you don’t have the 8 hourglass (this means you too, Ms. Lohan if you’re nasty), you’re screwed. Just try to ride the coattails of a curvy. My coattails are full so don’t even think about it!

B) In my lifetime, I have seen some really fun “oh no you didn’t cheat on me” and some classic “please don’t leave me” scenes. My favorite of the latter would be when I was eight and my mother ran after my father in the snow after he caught her doing something dumb (my mother has really fun dramatic issues that I will write about once that stop being my nightmares). The former would be when my friend Jess broke a 40 bottle and chased her boyfriend down the street. Except that was high school in Detroit so that was almost like her trying to get extra credit or something. Colle prep if you wil.

But this has got to be the best ever:

In case you are having a hard time following either the drama, the accent or the very polite way she just schooled her husband, here is what she said:

Today is a special day for The Olympic Channel, and a special day for Mr. Zhang Bin, and for me too. Because just two hours ago, I found out that besides me, Mr. Zhang Bin has been maintaining an improper relationship with another woman.”

On tv.

Kim Porter, take notes!