I remember a friend of mine telling me what a great guy Jeffrey was for me, and how she thought he was really the one. But I couldn’t see it at that point in my life. So when Jeffrey finished his residency and was offered a hospital job a few hours outside of New York City, I backed away and decided that we had to break up. I told him that our relationship couldn’t last. I had to be in New York City to do my job, and long-distance relationships never work in the long term… . Excuses, excuses, each one lamer than the next. But I think Jeffrey knew the truth, that I was actually ambivalent about him. And for someone who was so sure of what he wanted, that was the kiss of death.
After we broke up, I had second thoughts, but at that point it was too late. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and I couldn’t blame him. Later I’d find out that he married a girl who was ready in all the ways I wasn’t, and who knew exactly what she wanted—she wanted a husband and a provider, and she wanted to be a wife. I genuinely wished them both the best, and I tried not to regret the choice I’d made.
AFTER JEFFREY, I CONTINUED the serial monogamy phase of my dating life. I dated some good guys, some crazy guys, and some guys who seemed good and turned out to be crazy.
I tried some younger guys who were still figuring things out, like Brad, whom I met at my gym. He was very sweet and extremely good-looking, but he had no idea what he was doing in his life. Meanwhile, what he lacked in ambition he made up for in muscles. The first time he took off his shirt, the sight of his six-pack actually intimidated me, and in a weird way, it was a turnoff. Call me insecure, but I like to feel like I have a better body than my boyfriend. When we had sex, I was worried he’d spot some cellulite that I didn’t know about. And when he asked me if I wanted to go to the gym with him, I wasn’t sure if it was because he wanted to spend time with me, or because he was giving me a hint that I needed some exercise.
Then there was Foster, who got one question wrong on his SATs but was completely emotionally stunted. He was like Rain Man—his brain worked like a computer, but he didn’t realize that it was considered rude to eat with both hands at the dinner table. He worked in finance and was incredibly bright and I admired his mind, but when he started drawing investment diagrams on the back of a paper napkin at a cocktail party, my eyes crossed. Not to mention, I couldn’t take him out to restaurants.
While things with Jeffrey didn’t end well, I had to admit that there was something to be said for dating a nice Jewish boy, so for a while there I did the whole Jewish dating circuit, going to all the singles events. I met Spencer at a Sabbath dinner, and we dated a few times, but he was so boring, so mind-numbingly stupid that even though he was a perfectly nice guy I would have sooner gone steady with Ted Bundy. I walked out of Spencer’s apartment after our third date, and when he said, “I’d like to see you again,” I actually burst into tears. It wasn’t because I was sad, but because I realized it would be cruel to tell him that he was too dumb to date. I remember I felt so bad about the whole thing that I made him cookies.
I even dated an Orthodox guy at one point. He was very handsome and came from a huge family of ten kids. I stayed over at his place a few times, and unlike some men who told you they had an early meeting as a way of shoving you out the door, each time he was in a rush to go to early services. He kept strictly kosher, and when I added that fact to the number of babies his mother had brought into the world, I thought to myself, Who am I kidding? I eat spareribs on the Sabbath. I never met a lobster I wouldn’t consume with relish. In his eyes, I wasn’t even a Jew. He probably thought of me as his shiksa girlfriend.
If I had to come up with my funniest dating story, I guess it would be a tie between (1) the blind date who took a Quaalude before dinner and actually nodded off in his spaghetti (I kid you not: facedown in his plate of pasta) and (2) the man my sister fixed me up with who turned out to be an ex-con. Actually, I think number two wins by at least a nose. Just try keeping a straight face while your date tells you about his criminal drug record. It’s not easy. I realized at that point that there was a limit to the drama that even I was looking for in a relationship. No fingernail files baked into layer cakes for me. I had to draw the line somewhere.
This cookie recipe has a lot of versatility, and what you add to it can really depend on who you’re making the cookies for. If you feel like you’re going bananas because your guy won’t commit, by all means add Banana Nut Crunch. If your boyfriend is a real jackass, then Apple Jacks would be perfect, and maybe you should eat them yourself—he doesn’t deserve cookies. If you want to drop a big hint and tell your guy that you’re ready to go all the way, mix in some Lucky Charms. You get the drift.
FRUITY PEBBLES COOKIES
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ cup packed light brown sugar
¼ cup sugar
¾ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 cups Fruity Pebbles cereal, divided
2 large parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Cream butter and sugars. Add vanilla. Add egg and blend well.
In a small bowl, stir together flour and baking soda, then mix into the wet ingredients. Now add one cup of the cereal and mix lightly, just until distributed.
Using a small ice cream scoop, scoop out dough onto prepared cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart. Now take your remaining cup of cereal, and place a small pinch of it on the top of each cookie, lightly pressing down until just slightly flattened.
Bake 10 to 12 minutes, until just slightly golden at the edges.
Let cookies cool on rack.
Makes 30 small cookies.
CHAPTER 9
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Some women cry over men. Some cry over the bathroom scale or the dressing-room mirror. Some can work up tears over television commercials. I tend to keep my emotions to myself—maybe to a fault—but I will cry over a broken heart. The time I cried the most wasn’t over some guy, though. It was over a job—a dream job. A job I loved more than I’d loved any man up to that point.
When I joined Hot 97, it was the dance-music sister station to Kiss FM. I was hired to be the newsperson for the morning show, and I was excited about it. This was when I officially changed my on-air name to Lisa G. I’d never really loved my full name—I didn’t think it sounded great on radio and people always struggled to spell it. I wanted something fresh and easy to remember … and I’ve been Lisa G. ever since.
Unfortunately, very soon after I started, the program director made it clear to me that he hadn’t hired me for my personality. He told me I was “just a newsperson.” Meaning, he wanted me to write my news reports, read them on-air, and not expect to banter with the hosts the way I’d always done. Luckily, that situation didn’t last. A new program director came on board and he had the brilliant idea to bring in Doctor Dré and Ed Lover, former cohosts of MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps. Around this time, hip-hop was just beginning to become more mainstream, and despite the fact that an enormous number of New Yorkers listened to hip-hop, it was still considered a fringey, outsider kind of music to a lot of the traditional media. So the fact that Hot 97, a major market radio station, was going to devote its morning drive-time radio show to hip-hop music was a really big deal.
Dré and Ed were already celebrities and tremendously knowledgeable about the music, but they’d never hosted a major market morning radio show before. So the program director wanted me to show them the ropes. Suddenly, my chains were off—I was back in local radio again, and they wanted my personality to come out. I felt liberated. There was no set of rules for us to follow because no one had ever really done this kind of morning radio before. So we just kind of made it up as we went along, and we decided to sound just as new and different as we actually were—because why have a hip-hop show if we were going to do everything the same as all the other stations?
My co
workers now make fun of me when I tell them stories about my days at Hot 97. They just don’t believe me when I tell them how huge we were. But if you weren’t in the city then, or you weren’t listening to hip-hop radio, you cannot know what a phenomenon that show became. One afternoon at the height of our success, I was walking out of Macy’s after doing a little shopping, and a mob of teenage girls saw me from down the block. They ran toward me while screaming their heads off, totally surrounded me, then begged me for my autograph. It was the closest I’ll ever come to knowing how Paul McCartney felt in 1964. The only difference was that our audience was black and Latino kids from Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
© by Hot 97 FM, New York
At that point, music radio was still very much stuck in the old ways of doing things. In contrast, we were reaching out to the black and Latino youth of New York City in a way that no other station really did. We were a station that reflected the demographics of the city, playing the music that the city actually listened to in the clubs and in their cars. Back before you could listen to the radio on the Internet, people would actually tape-record our show and send it to their friends around the country. And entertainers and politicians who wanted to reach that untapped audience wanted to be on our show because they knew the power we had. In one two-hour window we could have on a rap artist, a movie star, Johnnie Cochran, and Jesse Jackson.
The combination of me, Ed, and Dré could so easily have failed. We could have not gotten along, we could have had zero chemistry. I could have tried too hard to sound like I was a homegirl, and they could have rolled their eyes at me and not taken me seriously. Instead, it was love at first sight and we all had a blast. It was the most fun I’d had on the radio since I started my career. Ed and Dré took to me right away, because I didn’t pretend to know as much about the music as they did, and I made it so obvious that I was ready to learn. They knew that I wasn’t trying to be anything other than who I was, a Jewish girl born and raised in Long Island.
I think that’s a big part of why we worked so well together. Dré said to me recently that our differences made for great radio. He liked to joke that we were from opposite sides of the tracks, and he and Ed were always teasing me about the differences between white people and black people. He loved to say that white people were so crazy that when there was a hurricane at sea, we’d all run to the beach to look at it, and then get washed away by a wave. Meanwhile black people had the sense to run in the opposite direction.
I was just as willing as Ed and Dré were to talk about anything. When I got on the mike and freestyled with them or sang badly with one of our guests, it was hilarious. One time Ed said, “Who told Lisa she could sing if she just focused? The only way Lisa could sing is if she focused on another singer.” I followed that put-down by trying to hit a high C on-air. It wasn’t pretty, but it was definitely entertaining. Another time Ed said that guys were always asking him to set them up with me because I sounded so sexy, so he decided to try to auction me off on-air.
I’d bring in my dating stories, they’d bring in theirs, and they’d try to get me to tell them how good I was in bed. My boobs came up in one conversation and I told them that my cleavage had its own website. Dré said that the URL was www.wherearethey.com. So then we all said Dré’s boobs were bigger than mine. It was back and forth like that all morning, every single day. We’d bust on each other and give advice like two black brothers and their Jewish little sister.
The whole atmosphere at the station was the perfect combination of close-knit family and creative excitement. I couldn’t believe that I was working right across the hall from the fabulously smooth and soulful Isaac Hayes, who did the morning show for Kiss FM that aired opposite ours. He’d tell me fantastic music industry stories, and in return I’d steal his organic popcorn. This was back when it was really difficult to find and I’d grab any opportunity to snag some of his. He started calling me “the popcorn bandit,” which makes me laugh to this day.
I REMEMBER THE HARDEST thing about morning radio, especially during my days at Hot 97, was just to try to make myself look presentable in the morning. The show aired from 6 A.M. to 10 A.M., so I had to be at the studio by 5:15. I’d power down some coffee and a bagel and then it was a marathon, no stopping. I had to wear glasses, because my eyes would be too puffy to get my contacts in, and I definitely wasn’t camera ready. Meanwhile, we had a constant flow of celebrity guests.
Singing along with the guests became a running joke for me. My two favorites were Barry White and Tom Jones. There I was with two men known around the world for their deep, sexy, rich voices and I screeched along beside them to “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” and “What’s New Pussycat?”
I did not sing along with Shaquille O’Neal when he came in, although come to think of it, that would have been pretty funny. In addition to being just as silly as you’d think, he was truly the tallest man I have ever seen in my life. I could have taken a picture of the two of us side by side—he’s seven foot whatever and I’m five foot three. But that would be trite. So I took a picture of our feet instead.
I’d always loved the way radio stations felt like families, and I’d enjoyed joking around with the on-air staff at all my various jobs. But Dré and Ed took that to another level. Everyone who walked into that studio was treated like family, and they treated the fans the same way. I learned a lot from them about how to be more open-minded and to just enjoy people, even total strangers. We did a ton of promotional events after hours, and Ed and Dré loved the fans, loved talking to them, and they had no sense of entitlement. Unlike the kind of people that I grew up with in the wealthy Long Island suburbs, Ed and Dré didn’t take their success for granted. They remembered where they came from. Some of their natural warmth and charm started to rub off on me, and I found myself opening up to fans more, and really stopping to listen and appreciate. I wasn’t quite there with opening up to boyfriends yet, but in other ways, I was definitely becoming a better person.
While I’d always been pretty exclusively focused on getting ahead by working hard and keeping my eyes on the prize, I started to absorb the way a lot of Dré and Ed’s popularity was sustained by friendship. They supported their friends no matter what, and their door was always open. I think that’s why everyone loved them, including artists who’d already made it big and didn’t really need Ed and Dré for a push. Will Smith, who had already made it big in Independence Day, would come by to promote a new movie, but instead of zipping in and out to do his interview like the typical celebrity would, he’d stick around just to hang with Ed and Dré. I look back on it now, and it’s amazing to think of the people who would just stop by and ring the bell of the studio’s private back door at six in the morning: Jamie Foxx before he was a big star. Tupac Shakur. Biggie Smalls. When Wu-Tang Clan came by, they’d bring their entire posse with them, and we’d end up with more than thirty people in the studio—it was like a packed train. Method Man drew a sketch for me that I ended up making into stationery.
Method Man’s sketch.
Not all the artists who came by were easy. Mary J. Blige has come a long way since then, but when she first made it big and would come by the station for interviews, she was really difficult to draw out. She’d be all covered up in spandex and wearing sunglasses that she’d never take off. You couldn’t see her eyes, so there was no way to read her mood during an interview, or to tell if she was even listening. Her handlers from the record company would stand around kind of looking at each other like, Is it going to be a good day or a bad day? When Ed asked Mary how the new album was going, the most we could get out of her was that it was “a lot of work.” Period, that was it. Luckily Ed was a comedian, so he was good at filling dead air. And worst-case scenario, we could always go to a song.
In a million years I would never have predicted that just over a decade later Mary J. Blige would be breaking the all-time record for selling perfume on the Home Shopping Network. I find her story really inspiring. She proves that any
one can reinvent themselves and start over. I could also really relate to any of our guests who had substance abuse problems. My problem wasn’t alcohol or drugs, it was emotional denial. But I was just as attached to my bad habits as any addict was. For years I was like the Hollywood sign—impressive from the front, but propped up and with nothing behind it. So I had a great deal of sympathy for anyone else who was trying hard to maintain a façade.
P. Diddy was another regular at the station, and he always came in with an entourage. His career was really taking off, and even at 7 A.M. he’d arrive looking like something out of a hip-hop GQ magazine spread. It seemed to me like there was a tornado of energy around Diddy, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was good energy or bad energy. He would drop by out of the blue, but unlike some of the guys who’d come just to hang out, Diddy had an agenda—it was always, play my music, play my music, play my artist, play my artist. Push, push, push. He was a businessman at heart, and he never stopped working. The moral of that story is that you don’t get as successful as P. Diddy by accident.
I was always really impressed by Queen Latifah as a person. She was breaking out of music and into TV and becoming a big celebrity, but she never lost her warm, local-girl quality. Whenever she’d come up to visit, she was a great interview, game for anything, friendly and professional. I had started doing some freelance work around that time and I reached out to her management to interview her for Seventeen magazine. There can be a lot of back and forth with management in those situations, and you end up wondering how difficult it could possibly be to get an artist to say yes or no. But with her management there was no drama or keeping me hanging, she said yes right away. When she did a special concert for Hot 97 at Webster Hall, I met her during a rehearsal break and she couldn’t have been nicer. I always thought she had a fantastic singing voice, and I remember telling her that she should do an album of jazz standards. This was years before she did Chicago, so when she blew people’s minds with her performance in that movie, I wasn’t surprised at all.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 9