by Omar Tyree
As I moved closer toward a chair that actually had my name on it, I heard Tracy giving instructions to one of the cameramen.
She said, “I want you to take the small, handheld camera outside with someone to interview the crowd about what Flyy Girl means to them. But don’t put them on camera until you know they’ve read the book and they have something worthwhile to say.”
The cameraman, a young guy in his mid-twenties with uncombed hair, nodded to her.
“Okay, we can do that.”
“Good. Because that crowd outside is phenomenal, and we want to make sure we document their responses to all of this. Plus, it makes their wait a lot less painful. So make sure you guys move all the way to the back. Don’t spend too much time at the front, and make sure you turn the camera on while you’re walking past the line. If they want to scream out at the camera while you’re moving, let them. But don’t stop unless you find someone who can really work it for us. You know what I mean? We want people who are camera ready, and not the nonsense.”
The young cameraman took it all in stride and said “I got you” before he gathered his camera and a couple of staff members. It must have been about forty of us in there, all doing our part.
Tracy then grabbed a microphone and addressed the buzzing crowd in the audience.
“Hello everyone. In case you didn’t know, my name is Tracy Ellison Grant—better known as the original Flyy Girl.”
As soon as she said that, the crowd at the back of the auditorium got extremely loud with their cheering.
“Yeaaah! Yeaaah!”
The agency people in the front rows, on the other hand, were all cool, calm, and collected, concentrating on the task at hand—to impress my cousin with their acting skills.
Tracy went on and said, “We’re gonna try and make this process as simple as possible. And for those of you who are used to a more private or secluded room to audition in, I apologize in advance, but this will be a movie with plenty of extras, so you all need to get used to the crowd.”
“I know that’s right!” someone yelled above the cheering from the back rows.
Tracy said, “But once we begin this process, we’re going to need complete silence from each and every one of you, as if you just paid a thousand dollars on Broadway.”
They all laughed with her. My big cousin was working it like I only wish I had the courage to do. It was easy to talk behind closed doors about all of my grand ideas, but Tracy was the one who could really work it out in the open.
She said, “And if you like the Flyy Girl Ltd. clothing line all our assistants are wearing today, well, I just want you to know, you can all buy it on your way out.”
They all laughed again, but Tracy was dead serious about her hustle.
“So, without further ado, let’s get it started.”
* * *
We had acting agency people who had traveled from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Atlanta, and as far south as Florida. And of course, Philadelphians were definitely in the house. Many of the actors and actresses were pretty people, and some of them were not. But one thing was for sure, just because you were signed to an acting agency didn’t mean that you were a lock, because some of those agency people were quick to overact, or totally misread the scene and their lines. I was actually wondering how many of those people had read the book, and if so, how many of them understood what they were even reading. Some of them were that bad.
As soon as we finished with one load of people, in came the next hundred. There were more than a few performers that I actually liked for a callback though. Tracy spotted some of the same performers that I had taken notes on. So did some of the other casting crew. But we all had to keep the show rolling nonstop, so we made our notes and kept the lines moving onstage, offstage, in the door, and out the door.
“What does that line look like outside now?” Tracy asked Maddy after noon.
Maddy shook her head. She said, “It looks like it didn’t even move. You just see the same people moving closer to the front, and people you haven’t seen before in the back.”
Robin said, “You know it’s no way we’re gonna see the rest of this line today. So we may as well cut it in half and give the rest of the people numbers for tomorrow. It’s a good thing we gave ourselves a week to do this.”
Tracy nodded. She said, “I knew what I was getting into. People have been waiting for years for a Flyy Girl movie.”
Sasha walked over to report on the clothing sales with a money box in hand.
She smiled and said, “We’re sold out of our line for today. They had me taking orders for tomorrow.”
Tracy looked at me and grinned.
“We’ll have Charmaine FedEx us a few more boxes for the end of the week. If we sell out of everything, not only will we break even, we’ll make a slight profit.”
“And everybody will spread the word on the new line,” Sasha commented.
Tracy said, “All right, well, let’s keep this machine moving.” She winked at me and hollered, “Next,” to the crowd of patiently waiting hopefuls.
We were all ready for a lunch break and couldn’t take one. So we had to order in and keep right ahead, eating while we worked.
* * *
By seven o’clock that night we had cut the line in half for the next day, just as Robin had said, but we still had another hundred to two hundred people to see.
“You think we’ve seen enough by now?” Tracy asked me specifically. I had taken notes on at least five people I liked to fill every role of the movie, including girls for Tracy’s lead, who had the same hazel eyes and everything. We had watched girls there who were prettier than all of us. Nevertheless, the process was the process, and the love-at-first-sight phenomenon, the casting crew had explained, was very risky when dealing with unknowns. That was the general reason why you called people back, to make sure you were getting what you thought you were getting.
I answered, “You never know. The next one may be the one.”
“Please,” Tracy commented. “But you’re right. That’s why we have to make time to see every last person.” So we got right back to work until we had seen them all—we finally finished at nine o’clock.
“You mean to tell me we have to get back up tomorrow and do this all over again?” Maddy asked. We were all helping to clean up the facility.
“Yup,” my cousin answered. “But you knew that already. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have booked the hotel rooms for a week.”
That was all she needed to say to shut Maddy’s mouth. We were all there to take care of the business of Flyy Girl, and that was it.
“So, you’re actually gonna do it, hunh? You’re gonna make a movie out of our lives?” someone asked Tracy from behind.
I turned and spotted Mercedes. I figured it was her. I knew her voice from her phone calls to L.A., but I had never actually met her before. She had cut her hair into a short bob, but you could tell that it could grow long. It was straight and soft with no perm needed. And she still had a look of distinction in her face, although it was a little rough around the edges. Her hardened eyes proved that she had lived a serious life, yet she had remained attractive in her brown skin.
Tracy asked her, “How long have you been here?”
“For about the last hour. I heard it was crazy crowded in here though. I didn’t want to come in the middle of all of that.”
Tracy nodded. “Yeah, it was.”
Mercedes said, “I like the shirts and hats. Who designed them?”
“My girl Charmaine from L.A.”
All of my girls were watching and listening in silence. I think they already knew who it was. They were putting the pieces together from Mercedes’s grand entrance, her life story comments, her jaded personality, and her physical appearance. We were all sizing her up against my cousin’s book. Mercedes was the high-stakes girl we had all read about, and she was standing right there in front of us. She wasted no time in getting my cousin’s
attention either.
“Can I talk to you for a minute, Tracy?”
It sounded so obvious that it was surreal. I could just imagine Mercedes asking Tracy for money to do a film that revealed painful parts of her own life. And they were indeed painful. But after Tracy had agreed to write Mercedes a check for the down payment on her house in Yeadon, how dare she extort her for more money?
I didn’t have any proof of this as they spoke in private, but I was surely planning to ask Tracy about it afterward.
“Is that who I think it is?” Alexandria whispered to me.
“In the flesh,” I told her.
“It is?” Jasmine whispered to Alexandria. Sasha and Maddy were standing close by her as we all prepared to take the limo back to our hotel.
Alexandria nodded her head to them. “Yup.”
Tracy broke away from her private conversation with Mercedes and said, “Okay, we’ll talk later then.”
“Aw’ight,” Mercedes mumbled as she headed off.
We were all itching to ask Tracy what had been said, but none of us dared to start that conversation.
Everyone helped to wrap up the camera equipment and lug everything back to the vans. Then we took the limo for the ride back down Broad Street toward downtown. Robin rode in the limo with us, and she was the only one with enough guts to ask Tracy the big question out in the open.
“So, that was the infamous Mercedes?”
We all looked on in curiosity for an answer to the obvious.
“Her character speaks volumes, doesn’t it?” Tracy answered with a question. She seemed to be staring into the multicolored night-lights of the limo.
“What did she ask you?” Jasmine asked before I could. However, I had planned to do so in private.
Tracy didn’t even look at Jasmine.
She said, “Some things are better left alone.”
“That’s what she said about the movie? So, she doesn’t want you to do it?”
Jasmine was asking the very questions racing through my head.
Tracy told her sternly, “I’m talking about you, Jasmine. Now let it be.”
That was answer enough for us. Whatever Mercedes had said, it had definitely gotten under Tracy’s skin.
So we rode the rest of the way down Broad Street in a whisper.
The Marriott
When Tracy called me to her hotel suite that night, I knew she was pissed before I entered the room. So I prepared myself for a solid ear drumming. I was aware that she may need someone she could trust to vent to, and I was the one. But when she let me into her room, she was already on the cell phone letting her steam roll all out.
“Look, I’ve been away before and it hasn’t caused you this much of a problem. So why are you acting like this now?”
She shut the door behind me and paid me no mind. So I quietly walked in and took a seat in the comfortable black leather chair behind her executive desk. There was a beautiful skyline view of downtown Philadelphia from her room. And I must say, it was very nice to be there.
I looked around the floor trying to preoccupy myself while my cousin argued over the phone. She had boxes of bios, photos, and attached notes to the talent she liked. On top of the desk, she had a box of tapes from the cameraman’s casting footage that she was still watching on the room’s nineteen-inch color television set. So I went ahead and watched some of the tape.
“So it’s over, just like that?” she asked into the phone.
I wasn’t really trying to listen, but how could I not? Tracy was right there in the same room with me, and I was shocked by her conversation. I realized by then that she was talking to her friend out in L.A., but I didn’t believe that he would be that serious about breaking up with her that soon. He had to have planned it all along.
“Now you know that’s out of the question. Dalvin, what kind of ultimatum is that? You know how much this project means to me.”
Tracy paced the room in front of me while they spoke.
Was she giving up her man for the Flyy Girl movie? I felt bad again. But what kind of man gives up a woman just because she has the drive to accomplish the things she wants to do? I don’t think I would have liked a man like that for myself. I know I wanted to do a lot of things in life, and no man was going to stop me from doing them.
“Okay, well, let’s just discuss this when I get back to L.A.”
Now she sounded like she was trying to compromise.
“Well, there’s really nothing to talk about right now, because I’m going to be here for a week. And you know that already. I just can’t up and leave. How would that look?”
She made sense to me, but her friend made no sense at all. I didn’t even have to hear his argument. It sounded like your typical male ego tripping. He wanted his woman home, barefoot, and naked.
The next minute, Tracy looked at the phone and then over at me without ever saying good-bye.
“He hung up?” I asked her. The question just slipped out of my mouth.
She said, “Of course he did. And he’s being a complete asshole about this.”
I didn’t want to add to anything so I held my tongue. It sounded like she had the right assessment to me. I didn’t want to break up my cousin’s relationship, but her friend was not my friend, and Tracy was not married to the man. Therefore, I had no loyalty to him.
She shook her head and said, “Anyway . . . I’ll deal with him later.” Then she took another minute to gather her thoughts.
“I can’t believe that damn Mercedes today,” she commented. “That’s why I didn’t want to get any of my friends and family involved in this thing yet. I wanted these first few days to be just us looking at talent. Period.”
She took a deep breath and said, “In the process of making every film, there are a million different challenges to overcome. You try to predict most of those challenges, but you still end up improvising due to things you can’t control.”
She was speaking from experience. I had already been around the process with her last two films. They may not have done well at the box office but they both got done. So I was perfectly poised in my role of assistance and support.
I asked my cousin, “Do you mind if I ask you what Mercedes said?” I was still curious.
Tracy slowly nodded to me. She said, “Well, you know she never liked me writing about her asking for a down payment check for her house in Yeadon in For the Love of Money. She said it was embarrassing. Now she’s saying that a movie that may show her drug addiction days as a teenager may not only get her fired from her job, but may also inhibit her from getting other jobs in the future.”
I joked and said, “Halle Berry’s career blew up after portraying a crackhead in Jungle Fever.”
It was bad taste in the present situation, but it had slipped out of my mouth anyway.
My cousin looked at me and said, “This is not a fictional portrayal, Vanessa. Mercedes has some valid points.”
“So, you just take out her drug and tricking scenes, and just have your characters talk about it,” I suggested too quickly.
Tracy said, “And then I’d lose one of the most dramatic character arcs in the script. That scene affects everybody. You can’t talk about something like that. You have to show it. But that’s really not the point, Vanessa. Mercedes knows I can’t take her scene out. She’s trying to use her concerns to get more money out of me. If anything, people would see how she’s changed her life around. I did a lot of crazy things, too. We all did, and we’ll all share in the risk, pain, joy, understanding, et cetera in this movie.”
“You won’t all share the money though,” I blurted out. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me that night. I was really being insensitive. Some assistant I was.
But instead of getting upset with me for telling the blunt truth, Tracy smiled.
She said, “That’s always the dilemma in doing a real-life project that affects more than one person.”
“They get away with it in these reality shows,” I co
mmented.
“That’s not real content,” Tracy responded. “Those shows are as phony as they wanna be. And those people are all sacrificing their privacies for a few thousand dollars and a magazine article.”
Tracy hit the nail right on the head.
I was supposed to be in there listening, but I guess I was just too damn tired at the moment. That’s when you start yawning and rambling on at the mouth—and I was doing both.
My cousin noticed it and said, “Okay, I think you’re a little tired now.”
After all, it was approaching midnight on the East Coast, which I was no longer used to, and I had been up since six o’clock in the morning with no time for a nap. I was wondering how Tracy could do it. I guess that’s why she was the Flyy Girl and I was only the little cousin. We could all relate to some of her drive, energy, passion, and flair, but only she possessed it to use on a regular basis.
I said, “I’m sorry,” and tried my best not to yawn when I said it. But it didn’t work.
“Go on and go to bed, girl. You gotta get up early tomorrow morning and do it all over again anyway,” she told me. “And make sure those girls of yours are in bed, too.” Then she grabbed me by the arm and escorted me back to the door.
* * *
When I got off of the elevator on my floor, I spotted Maddy talking to one of the camera crew guys from New York. They were standing in the hallway outside of her room, two doors down from mine.
“Speak of the devil,” the New Yorker commented to me.
He was a short and stocky Columbia University student named Shamor.
“So who was talking about me?” I joked to him.
“We both were,” he answered.
Maddy only smiled in my direction.
“Good things or bad?” I asked them both.
Shamor spoke up again before Maddy could. “Only good things, of course.”
“So I’m not a devil then,” I told him with a grin.
He shook it off and said, “It’s only a figure of speech. Don’t take it personal.”