by Omar Tyree
Susan smiled it off. She said, “My uncle Eddie has been telling us all for years that he doesn’t want a bunch of crying and carrying on when he dies. Nor does he want us fighting over his fortune. He just wants us to come together with wine and talk about him to everyone who will listen.”
Tracy grinned and said, “That sounds just like him. Let me go and get a glass of wine then.”
I know it was wrong, but all I could think about while I was there was how many millions of dollars we could borrow from the Weisner family to make our movie. It wasn’t as if we wouldn’t get it back. Flyy Girl was as sure a hit in my book as a Tom Cruise movie.
“So, what’s going on in your mind, Vanessa?” Susan asked me with her glass of wine in hand. She said, “I can see that your wheels are turning? You’re always thinking about something.”
Susan knew me real well. But it wasn’t hard to figure me out. I mean, I didn’t talk a lot around people I didn’t really know, but I was always thinking.
I told Susan, “Nothing in particular. I’m just a little tired from being up all last night.”
“You had a big assignment for school that was due?” she asked me.
“No, I was up thinking about other things.”
“Oh, it’s those naughty boys,” she assumed with a smirk. “They’ve been known to keep many a girl up late at night.”
On second thought, maybe she didn’t know me well. Not to say that I wouldn’t want a man eventually, they just were not on my mind at the present. But I was never scared of boys like Raheema was in her day. I was just two steps ahead of them, and they still had not quite caught up with me yet.
To humor Susan, I said, “I wish I did have a boy to keep me up late. But they don’t seem to like girls with a plan. I guess they look at it as too much competition.”
Susan looked at me and started laughing.
She said, “Have you been reading my diary? You are so on with that.”
I didn’t know whether to smile or frown at her. Weren’t we all there because her loved and respected uncle had died? I just couldn’t get into the celebration-of-a-loss thing. I understood the theory, I just felt a little hesitant about practicing it.
Tracy arrived just in time to save me from my conflicted thoughts and feelings about Susan.
“So, I guess you’ll be having visitors here for the next couple of days?” my cousin stated. We were all watching new visitors walk through the door.
Susan looked at her and said, “Try the next couple of weeks. My uncle Eddie knows a boatload of people. So the only thing that will stop this boat ride is my aunt Jillian getting a little worn out from it all.”
I looked over at the frail, gray-haired, and still attractive widow, who was meeting and greeting a gang of folks inside the house, and I wondered how much energy she would have left for herself when it was all said and done.
Susan then joked to Tracy, “I was just talking to Vanessa about her recent man problems. She says she was up all last night.”
Tracy looked at me and took a sip of her wine.
“She may have been up all last night, but she wasn’t thinking about any guys. She was thinking about something else,” she commented.
I was itching for Tracy to say what it was in front of Susan and the Hollywood powers-that-be who were inside that room. But I had to wait it out. It would have sounded like a setup if I broke down and said it myself.
“So, what were you thinking about?” Susan asked me.
I looked at Tracy, and she gave me a look of concern. I knew she wouldn’t want me badgering Susan about a Flyy Girl movie as much as I bothered her about it, especially at a mourning for her uncle.
So I backed down from it. I said, “I was just thinking about what I need to do to carve out my own particular niche in life while living under the roof of a famous cousin, that’s all.”
Susan stared at me. She said, “Hmm, now that is a dilemma. However, sometimes it’s better to get behind a wheel that’s already rolling instead of trying to push a brand-new one. And then once you understand the laws of momentum, you’ll be able to roll your own wheel with much less muscle. You know what I mean?”
She was telling me to stay behind Team Tracy and not think about Team Vanessa yet.
I said, “Well, what if the wheel doesn’t want to move in the direction that you would like to help and move it in?”
Tracy looked away as if she wasn’t in it.
Susan looked at my cousin briefly and then back to me.
“I can’t imagine Tracy not wanting to try new things. She’s always been the adventurous one. So, what direction are you trying to push her in? You have me curious now.”
Tracy finally spoke up about it. “She wants me to get involved with a complicated film project that we’ve already talked about, and I told her that we’ll all have to wait it out for the best time to do it.”
Susan looked at me and asked, “Is it something you’ve written? I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it. My uncle Eddie taught us all to always make new opportunities available.”
Susan was really reaching out to me. I appreciated that.
I answered, “No, it’s something that Tracy’s written that all the urban girls I know are already waiting on.”
“You can’t speak for everyone else,” Tracy told me. “A lot of people get overzealous about the ideas, but then they become lukewarm to the reality. I’ve seen that happen many times in the film world now.
“People said they loved Road Kill and Jump-start as ideas, just like I did,” she told me. “But they didn’t show up to give us love once the movies hit the theaters. So don’t believe everything you read about or hear from these so-called fans.”
“So what project is she talking about that you’ve written already?” Susan asked. She was still in the dark.
Tracy finally coughed it up. “Flyy Girl.”
Susan’s mouth dropped open before she let out a big, “Oh.” She said, “Yeah, the problem with that is the lack of known stars in that age category.”
I said, “I see movies with white teenagers every month, who don’t have big names either.”
Susan said, “Yeah, but many of those guys are coming from the ranks of television. And they may not be known stars to you, but they do have a television audience to build on.”
“So do our rappers and singers,” I countered. “They have a built-in audience, too.”
“Yeah, but they don’t have acting credentials,” Tracy butted in.
“Nor did you, but you came out and blew Led Astray out of the water,” I snapped at her. I was getting fed up with all the talk about the actors and actresses making the movie. What about the story making unknown actors and actresses into stars? Doesn’t anyone believe in the power of the story anymore?
I said, “Nick Cannon was an unknown from television, but look what Drumline did for him? So I know it can be done.”
Tracy gave me a look, and I realized I was in there doing exactly what I told myself not to do, causing a public ruckus over the Flyy Girl project. There were a few people there who began to eye us curiously. So I went ahead and apologized.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get all worked up about it. I guess I just need to stop thinking about it.”
“But why would you do that?” Susan asked me. “You’re supposed to work toward the ideas that you want to happen, Vanessa. That’s one of the first rules of making a project work, figuring out exactly how to make it work.”
“Yeah, well, she’s been driving me crazy about it,” Tracy stated. “Flyy Girl this, Flyy Girl that,” she mocked me.
Susan grinned and finished off her glass of wine.
“Sounds like something we need to sink our teeth into,” she mumbled over the rim of her glass. “But let’s talk about this a little later.”
“I agree,” Tracy added.
I nodded. “Okay.”
Then we all went back to mingling and chatting with Edward Weisner’s crowd of family member
s, close friends, and Hollywood associates.
The Game Plan
Tracy was pissed at me on the drive back home.
“I don’t believe you marched right up in there and did that.
I said, “I wasn’t trying to, but you heard her asking me about it and digging for it.”
“Well, you should have just been polite and declined to talk about it.”
“Why? Are you afraid of doing this movie or something?”
I just wasn’t getting her angle.
Tracy shook her head and looked away from me. I didn’t sweat her though. I needed to get back to class at UCLA anyway, and it was right up there in Hollywood. I had all of my school things with me already.
She said, “Now you’re gonna have me do all this work . . .”
It sounded as if I was finally breaking her down.
But by then I was getting tired of the conversation myself.
I said, “If you really don’t want to do it, then there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just trying to get you to see the bigger picture. It may be a lot of hard work for all of us, because I’ll definitely be included in that. But in the long run, I know we’ll have a movie that will be watched forever, and even redone a couple of times.
“As you already know, they’re redoing a lot of classic movies and television shows now,” I commented.
Tracy smirked and continued to drive.
She mumbled, “What the hell have I gotten myself into with you?”
I didn’t say a word. There was no need to. Slowly but surely, I was getting Tracy to see the picture . . . and on the big screen.
* * *
After Jason had stopped chasing the women of California and returned to school at Temple, I ended up making fast friends with Sasha Kim and Jasmine Flores. It was a coincidence that Sasha liked Jason and ended up meeting me. She never got too serious about Jason—she was only trying him out as a friend first. But once she realized that my excitable cousin was only out to score and break camp back East, she and Jasmine decided to stay in touch with Tracy and me. Of course, Tracy had less time for them than I had. They were all closer to my age anyway. I then included a couple of other girls who filled out our model/actress/go-girl clique. So I had plenty of pals to run my ideas past.
They all stopped by the house that week, and we all got to talking about ideas for an urban girl’s club, fashion line, and social activities group. We had soda, chips, pretzels, juice, cake, and the television set on MTV inside the living room.
“So, what do we do, create, like, memberships, like the Girl Scouts or something?”
That was my friend Tonya. She graduated from high school with me at Dominguez. Then she attended USC, which was closer to the ’hood of South Central L.A., Inglewood, Compton, Carson, and Long Beach. Tonya was taller than all of us, medium brown, short-cut hair, played all kinds of sports, and she loved to talk before she thought. So we all laughed at her Girl Scout comment.
Jasmine said, “Oh my God, don’t compare us to the fuckin’ Girl Scouts. That’s kid shit.”
“Wait a minute, I was a Girl Scout for a year,” Sasha told us.
“And were you a kid?” Jasmine asked her.
“Of course I was.”
“Well, okay then. And I see you never told me that.”
“It never came up.”
I broke up the tangent chatter and redirected our conversation.
“Anyway, I think the best thing for us to do is to start a website at UrbanMiss.com, give out email addresses, and open up chat lines. That would be the fastest and easiest way for us to attract members and grow.”
“Oh, and I could get my brother to set up the website. That’s all that boy’s into now.”
That was Petula. She went to UCLA and studied media relations with me. She was dark brown, with braided hair, and from Nigeria. She had a very large and educated family.
“Yeah, and then we’d have a bunch of computer geeks all calling themselves whatever,” Madison Davenport commented. We called her “Maddy” for short, and the name fit, because she always seemed to be mad about something.
Maddy was the roughneck of the crew, medium brown, curved in all the right places like a video girl, and was always doubting whatever we tried to do. She had a job at a Virgin Records store in Torrance, and she was always up-to-date on the new music.
“Yeah, if we just did the website thing, then how would we get to choose who we want to join?” Alexandria asked us.
She was one of Sasha’s friends, as light as me, with long brown hair and hazel eyes that changed to different colors. She was the most exotic-looking of the bunch and she usually got the most attention from guys. Alexandria was also the most exclusive. Everybody had to pass her cool points test to get in with her.
Sasha said, “Well, we still have to give them the email addresses. It’s not like they can just create them on their own.”
“But why are we calling ourselves Urban Miss anyway? I mean, what’s up with the Flyy Girls?” Jasmine asked the group.
“Yeah?” Tonya agreed.
Then they all looked at me.
I shook my head and turned the idea down.
I said, “I already tried talking to my cousin about that. I talk to her about it all the time. But she’s just not feeling it yet. I guess she’s trying to build up more Hollywood muscle before she goes all out with it or something.”
I had talked about the Flyy Girl film situation with my friends before. And none of them understood it. Flyy Girl was a surefire hit to every one of us.
Sasha said, “Well, if we make a big deal out of it and build the hype on the street level, it should make more Hollywood types take notice. Don’t you think?”
Maddy said, “If they can have some damn Cheetah Girls then I know we can have a Flyy Girl.”
“I know,” Jasmine agreed.
Petula said, “I like the Cheetah Girls. We needed something like that.”
“We need Flyy Girl, too,” Maddy insisted. “I mean, you ever notice how they always wanna do that safe-and-sound shit but never the real?”
“Because safe and sound sells more,” Sasha stated. “PG always outsells R.”
I spoke up on that myself. “No, it doesn’t. Especially not in our community. If you look at the majority of the classic black films, or even Asian and Latino films for that matter, the majority of them are dramas that really meant something to the people, and that’s why we still watch them. Like, Cooley High has always been a classic to watch in Philadelphia. And now we have Spike Lee movies, John Singleton movies, the Hughes Brothers. And they were all dealing with mature content.
“So that PG shit doesn’t work for us,” I told them.
“But it works for Hollywood. And they don’t care about any classics. They care about making their money right now,” Alexandria argued.
“Well, that’s why we can’t make Flyy Girl then. We have conflicting interests,” I responded. Our argument about the movie went back and forth.
“But you don’t think Flyy Girl would make any money. I think it would,” Petula spoke out. “Because American girls are very materialistic, and they like looking back in time at other fashion statements. I mean, Flyy Girl is all about the eighties, right?”
“I thought we were supposed to be talking about starting an urban girl’s club,” Tonya asked us. “How did we all of a sudden start talking about Flyy Girl again?”
Jasmine said, “Because I think Flyy Girls is a better name for us than some Urban Miss. I mean, what if they’re not even from an urban area? It just alienates people. But anybody can be a flyy girl. You can be a flyy girl and live on a farm.”
Maddy said, “No, you can’t. You can be a damn cowgirl if you live on a farm, but not a flyy girl.”
Alexandria agreed with her. She said, “I know. You just make it seem like any girl can be flyy.”
Jasmine said, “Being flyy is just a state of mind to me.”
I told her, “My cousin Tracy said t
hat, in her day, you had to be flyy in attitude, your clothes, your man, everything. You just didn’t throw that word around on anybody, you really had to be flyy.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Alexandria agreed. “And you tell your cousin that if she need me for the movie, I’m right here.”
Jasmine said, “Here we go. Just because you have rainbows for eyes does not mean that you fit the part. Because you’re way more stuck up than she is.”
Alexandria looked appalled by it. She said, “Stuck up? Why, because I don’t get all excited about everything like you do?”
“I don’t get excited about everything.”
“You don’t? Oh, you could have fooled me. ‘There’s Tyrese! There’s Tyrese!’ ” Alexandria mocked her from a past visit to the Beverly Hills Galleria where we spotted the singer/actor shopping with his boys.
Jasmine smiled and said, “Well, I happen to like Tyrese.”
Petula said, “I have a younger brother who looks just like him. But he’s too young for you. Onan is only sixteen.”
“She’ll take him, as long as he’s jet black,” Maddy joked. “She loves herself a dark-skinned black man.”
“Shut up!” Jasmine told her.
“So, how are we gonna do this, Vanessa?” Tonya asked me again, concerning the membership.
We were getting way off the subject.
I said, “Again, I think setting up a website is the best way. And we can post all of our ideas, discussions, and events, and have all of our members respond to them.”
All of a sudden, Tonya shouted, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, they’re about to show Fifty Cents’ crib!”
Maddy said, “You like him? He is not cute.”
“His money is though,” Tonya responded with a laugh.
“Yeah, and he just got that yesterday,” Maddy told her.
Tracy walked in the door on us in the heat of everything.
“Hi everybody,” she said in passing. She headed straight past us and right up to her room.
My friends were all in silent shock.
“Should we ask her about using the name?” Sasha asked us all.
“I’ll ask her,” Jasmine dared.