So I'm mindin' my own bidness watching the Aspire network yesterday when I see visions of Akeelah and the Bee juxtaposed with somebody who looked kinda-enough like Left Eye tombout whataboutchofriends. Awlluh this flashed with a whole bunch of other scenes that ended with what looked like a trailer for CrazySexyCool: The TLC Movie.
HOW IN THE WORLD IS TLC HAVING A MOVIE 'BOUT THEY LIVES ALREADY?!?!
Talk about a switch, yo.
Dern.
I looked right at my Mama and said, "So this is how you must've felt when Dreamgirls hit Broadway, huh?"
She knew Florence, Diana and Mary the same way I knew Left Eye, T-Boz and Chili. They're our 'round-the-way girls; watching a movie about them would be like watching a movie about our own selves. A not-as-well-lit, Babyface-less movie about ourselves, but still ... our struggles, our wigs, our glee, our overalls, our harmonies. It's not like I need to watch myself to know I'd lived ...
Yes, I know Left Eye is no longer with us, and Chili and T-Boz either pushin' (honestly, they look GOOD y'all) or already up in they 40s, but c'mon.
It was just yesterday that I was sittin' on the floor at my Mama's coffee table rollin' Scrooge McDuck's mounds worth of coins to buy tickets to see TLC in concert. I was twelve.
Kids today don't know nothin' 'bout rollin' coins.
Shood, kids today don't even know what coins are, do they?
Y'all, I rolled fawty-eight dollahs worth of COIN to get to that concert.
It took me all day to stack pennies into 10-piles, 5 rows deep. I had never been so happy to see 40 nickels gathered in one place in all my life.
But that concert though? That concert was amazing. TLC, Boyz II Men and HAMMER (bein' 2 Legit 2 Quit, he'd dropped the MC by then). (I think Jodeci might've been in there, too, but I am also fairly certain that even then I made judicious choices about when to take a bathroom break.) Here's what I remember about TLC:
- I had on overalls. They had on overalls. The end. We was friendz. If I had a Lisa Frank font right now, I'd prove it to you 4UrEyezOnly style, but trust ... allegiance was pledged.
- They were hype!!! (Yes, all dem exclamation points is necessary!) As someone dangerously close to getting my own locker in junior high, the idea of screaming "What about your friends/Will they stand their ground/Will they let you down again" at the top of my lungs really spoke to my soul.
- From Left Eye's front overall pocket, to her hands, to my outstretched hands, a rainbow of incredibly vibrant, individually packaged, um, "balloons" were bequeathed to me in the throes of "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg." (And no, I was not too proud to squeal and beg for said balloons like that was my Michael Jackson fan moment.)
I was twelve. I honestly thought they were balloons. I got home and emptied the contents of that front overall pocket onto my bed, and I remember tossing them into the air like I had some easy-to-clean confetti. It was the best night: I was front row! Me and Left-Eye had essentially high-fived as she handed me the balloons. I nearly removed Nate's shoe during the BIIM set. And I was officially 2 Legit 2 Quit. (So legit in fact that I had Hammer's towel in my sole possession. I'm tombout his towel, this cloth with which he wiped his abdominably ripped personage before handing said cloth to me. Not the stank behind grown-ass woman who nearly squished me to death against the stage barricade, not errybody else with albatross arms who tried to grab it, no. He handed it to me.) Anyway, I'd just Julie Andrews twirled in the midst of these flying balloons when my Mama entered to tell me to carry my behind to bed--for the umpteenth time--when she froze.
She snatched up one of those balloons and oh the horror.
What in the world?!
Where the hell did you?
I know you are NOT!
Good God.
No child of mine.
What the hell you look like with a pocket full of condoms.
Condoms. I had no idea what a condom was, what they did or what they meant besides the wrath of my Mama. I do know that as soon as she'd stormed away, me and my Walkman had an intermission that night. And in the days and years afterwards, whenever I heard "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," "Baby-Baby-Baby," "Creep" and best of all, "Waterfalls" I thought of those condoms and not just how aghast my mother was at the gall of some city girls handing such things to innocent little girls who sang only to hairbrushes and boomboxes with record buttons, but I thought about how incredible those girls were. Bold. Brave. Beautiful.
They did what many artists before them did. They put the fun in funky and slipped a message in the music, and I've never forgotten that.
This post is a rebuke of growing old. I do not feel like I'm old enough to watch a movie about TLC. I'm conflicted. It's a great way to give the flowers to those while they're living and all, and I'm not saying those three wondergirls didn't experience things that aren't movie-worthy, but I'm just not having it. I'm Peter Pan pooh-poohing all over this for several reasons--the main one being that right now I don't feel like being a grown up and, therefore, I do not like these short-term-memory-having producers stamping "life story" on things that just happened in the 90s.
Yes I said just.
Shit.
Y'all actin' like anything that happened before Y2K is the same as saying B.C.
It ain't necessarily so ... unless we're talking acid wash.
Secondly, Akeelah and the Bee is playing Chili. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Keke is grown and all, but y'all all know we thinkin' the same thing: Akeelah and the Bee worked too HARD to spell pulchritude correctly, and here she come with "Das de Way We Like 'Em" and "Shock Dat Monkey."
Let the church say, NAW.
VH1 will be airing the movie on the 21st of October. I'm not sure I'll watch; I'll probably DVR it. But I am curious. Are you going to watch it? Here's hoping it's more "Diggin' On You" and less "Case of the Fake People."