Keep Your Head Up & Other Affirmations, Cliches, and Bon Mots To Keep It Moving

Times are tough. Many baby boomers I know are struggling to stay level in a topsy turvy universe. They are being edged out of their jobs by younger workers willing to work for less. Struggling to launch children into adulthood. Trying to help their parents with health and housing issues. Trying to maintain their own mental and physical health. All while watching the daily nightmare news from Washington with increasing dismay.

Earlier this week, surveying my own troublesome situation, I reached back in my mind for a song lyric to both sum up the issue and encourage me (I often think and communicate in song lyrics). I thought first of Tupac's "Keep Your Head Up," and also Soul II Soul's "Keep On Moving," but being a baby boomer I went even further back to a 1972 rock anthem by a one-hit wonder called Argent. The song, "Hold Your Head Up," had the lyrics I was seeking in the moment (though it has an overlong instrumental break with an insipid and damn near unbearable organ solo). I quote:

"And if it's bad, don't let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts, don't let them see you cry, you can make it
Hold your head up, ho! hold your head up, ho! hold your head high

And if they stare, just let them burn their eyes on your moving (movie?)
And if they shout, don't let it change a thing that you're doing
Hold your head up, ho! hold your head up, ho! hold your head high"

Great message, but the real power is in shouting the "ho!" as loudly as possible.

Listening to this got me thinking about our culture of relentless cheerleading and the numerous cliches and bits of folk wisdom that have developed around the ideas of not only powering through rough patches, but also daring to take risks. These little bon mots are ingrained early, and we never question them.

A couple of years ago I was working one of my many side gigs. This one had me grading essays written by sixth graders for a statewide literacy test in response to a prompt. Almost every paper offered some form of homespun wisdom, some variation on a theme, and I saw several of these sayings in more than one paper. Here are some of them:

1. You gotta be in it to win it.
2. You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.
3. History isn't made in the dark.
4. In life, you're the driver, not the passenger.
5. A closed mouth doesn't get fed.
6. If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.
7. Don't arrive at death safely.
8. If you're not living your dream, someone will pay you to help them live theirs.
9. Life is an uphill climb but if you look around the view is great.
10. Even a turtle has to stick his head out to get ahead.
11. Wishes are goals without action.
12. A lesson is a trophy for trying.
13. Don't live the What If lifestyle, live the Oh Well lifestyle.
15. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.
16. Sometimes wrong choices lead to the right places.

Sure -- there is some inspiration to be taken from these perspectives, and also in the fact that today's schoolchildren are adopting a can-do attitude at such a young age. But there's also the possibility that for a statewide test, these kids are just dredging up what they think school authorities want to hear, and are parroting back the blather they get from teachers, coaches, and parents at every turn. Perhaps they will internalize the motivation and positivity these sayings are meant to engender.

In repeating these sayings here, I am reminded that this moment is only fleeting. I can make the next one better.

Interview Encounters I: Teddy P.

I joined Billboard in November 1987 as a copyeditor.

It was a big step backward, careerwise, moneywise, as I’d already been a section editor at Essence. But I’d made a brief misstep by leaving the magazine to double my paycheck as a public information officer at the New York City Housing Authority, a job I learned to hate very quickly. I was desperate to get out of City government and lucked up on the Billboard editorial support position. It was a great move for me, because all I was interested in then was music and writing. I’d worked for NYCHA for a grand total of 90 days when I turned in my resignation.

Nelson George was editor of the Black Music section, a part-timer who came into the office at 1515 Broadway to open his mail, turn in his stories and conduct other business. We’d met first at Essence, where he was a frequent contributor. Now that I was at Billboard, we sat on the same cubicle aisle. He made sure that I was usually the one to copyedit his stories because I’d seen his raw copy at Essence and I knew both the music and his turns of phrase. Sometimes his good buddy Reggie Hudlin would visit with him to shoot the shit and glom any castoff promo CDs or cassettes Nelson felt like giving away. Nelson was good for coming in with various associates and sharing the wealth of freebies while opening his mail. (It was during one of these sessions when I mentioned to Reggie that I was thinking of getting master’s degree in journalism, and he said, “Why take fishing lessons when you’ve already hooked a big fish?”)

After several months at Billboard I began asking Nelson to let me write a feature story. Finally Nelson said, OK, write me a story, here’s the publicity info, go for it. In my memory, that first story was on Teddy Pendergrass. I was excited. I was no stranger to writing stories or to conducting interviews, but I hadn’t spoken to many recording artists of any stature -- yet. In my estimation, Teddy Pendergrass was a Star with a capital S. His music had ruled a long stretch of my high school and college years. At this juncture, Teddy had already suffered the catastrophic 1982 automobile accident that had rendered him paralyzed from the waist down and had undergone intensive rehabilitation and therapy. His biggest hits – “Only You,” “Close The Door,” “Turn Out the Lights,” not to mention his work with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes – were fifteen years or more behind him, but he had rallied since the crash. He’d had surgeries, rehab, therapy. He got around via a motorized wheelchair; he could talk and eventually he could sing again. During that period he had released hit duets with Whitney Houston and Stephanie Mills. He had also made a triumphant performance at the LiveAid concert in Philadelphia in 1985. Now, Elektra was releasing the 1988 album Joy, led by the feel-good single of the same name.

In the earliest days of writing Billboard I did exhaustive research for interviews. I listened to all of Teddy’s music, analyzed the entire advance CD track by track, wrote out thoughtful questions, and practiced my composure. I didn’t usually get rattled by famous people – fame being relative -- but as an introvert (albeit a high-functioning one) I could get nervous and geek out just meeting anyone new. My tried and true tactics were just to smile, be personable, and ask really good questions. Nothing stunts an interview quite like a bored interviewer who asks uninformed questions.

I met with Teddy in a hotel suite on Eighth Avenue, the theater district in New York. His hair had grown long and was slicked back, and he still had that dazzling smile, the full beard, and that great smokey, husky voice. He seemed willing and gracious, but I could tell instantly that he was tired. He’d probably done dozens of these promotional interviews, and as a quadriplegic his energy was probably limited. I’d come armed with a dozen detailed questions, but midway through I decided to curtail the interview. Teddy’s answers were getting shorter and shorter and the in-depth, memory-lane discussion I’d envisioned was not going to happen. I’m blessed and cursed with way too much empathy for others, so as his energy flagged and I sensed the publicist hovering, I wrapped it up. I’d gotten enough for the story.

So I thanked Teddy profusely and offered my hand to shake. There was an uncomfortable pause.

Oh my God. Even though the man was seated in a wheelchair right in front of me, I’d forgotten that Teddy Pendergrass is a quadriplegic with limited use of his hands. Awkward. I think his curled fist and my hand managed to connect in farewell, but I was momentarily mortified as I scuttled out of the room and into the elevator. In retrospect, it wasn’t that big a deal, but in that moment I felt that I’d been insensitive in the extreme.

Years later I was able to meet Teddy again in social situations in Philadelphia, thanks to my girlfriend Dyana Williams, and I was invited to be part of the production team for his Teddy 25 fundraiser at the Kimmel Center in June of 2007. I wrote the script for the all-star celebration of Teddy’s life that featured Bill Cosby, Mo’Nique, Ashford & Simpson, Patti LaBelle, Melba Moore, noted dance troupe Philadanco, Kindred, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, and others. It was a fantastic evening, and I was proud to have been part of it. Though Teddy had wanted it to be an annual event, unfortunately he didn’t get the backing and his health began to decline until he passed away in January of 2010.

I wrote the Teddy story for Nelson and it ran in the Black Music section. After that, Nelson was pretty generous with doling out the story assignments. The magazine didn’t pay me any extra for them, and Nelson could cover the artists without having to do the work himself – he had plenty on his plate already. It was a win-win situation. It was great for me, because I was building my Billboard clip list. When Nelson left the magazine to do bigger and better things, I was named editor in June of 1989. Thanks, Nelson and thanks, Teddy.

Up In Smoke: Memories Of A Bad Habit

A month or so ago, I had this really weird dream. I'll spare you the bizarre, surreal details, except this one: Me and Kevin Costner standing in a Wells Fargo way station. (I know, just go with it.) I had just taken out a cigarette; Kevin thought it was for him and took it from me, but then he saw that it was a Virginia Slim or Benson & Hedges -- something menthol, at any rate, long and skinny, from my real-life smoking past -- so he flipped it and stuck it in my mouth with a smirk. I reached in my pocket and pulled out an oversized pack of Marlboros in the red and white carton and he took one. It was like this funny little personal moment of comedy between us. Then he took a silver fliptop lighter and lit us both up. In the dream that cigarette was so good! I haven't had an entire tobacco cigarette since the '90s.

But that sent me on a total reverie about my smoking past.

I smoked cigarettes on and off for at least 20 to 25 years, surprisingly. In the 1970s black folks in the NY hood by and large smoked menthol: Kools, Salems and Newports. It was pretty ubiquitous. All the cool kids smoked. In high school, along with other grown-people habits this babyfaced good girl attempted to adopt, I started buying Newports from time to time to pose with in the smoking bathroom at school and at parties.(Yes, amazingly, we had a smoking bathroom where occasionally things besides cigarettes were consumed and where I knew many of my friends could be found.) I didn't inhale my cigarette, just puffed and blew. It gave me time to practice how to light and hold the thing.

My then-boyfriend Paul, a Jamaican born in England, was a smoker and I got to observe how he managed the habit. Cigarettes are delicate things -- they're made of thin paper and shredded tobacco, they break, get wet, come apart, and you gotta be careful not to set yourself on fire, get live cinders on your clothes, burn your fingers, or inhale the filter once you light 'em up. Because they need to keep their shape so you can suck air through, you can't put a death grip on them -- though I've seen some people pinch the filter flat to hold -- so you're prone to dropping them or flipping them across the room. When you accidentally dropped that last cigarette into a puddle, or tried to drop ash out the window of a moving car and either sprayed yourself with cinders or had the wind suck it completely out of your hand, that was a sad, pathetic moment.

One summer when I was 15 or so, I had a Jobs For Youth job at the Young Filmmakers Foundation down on Rivington Street in Manhattan. Jobs For Youth was a city program for summer jobs; Young Filmmakers had received grants to document youth arts programs around the city, with plans to broadcast on the local public service channels once they were produced. My boss Lillian and the main camera man, both Hispanic, smoked. I got coffee and snacks, carried equipment and sometimes monitored the audio, setting up the boom mikes and running the audio recorder. One day we were in a Harlem brownstone to film a group of congueros in a drum circle. On a break I asked the cute camera man for a cig. I was trying to impress this 20something Peruvian with my inordinate cool. Nobody had a light so I went to the stove. Instead of sticking the end of the cigarette into the flame till it caught and then inhaling, in my inexperience I put it to my mouth, leaned over and turned on the burner. Poof! As the flame shot up it singed off my eyelashes, eyebrows, and bangs in one whoosh. My face was only mildly burned, but I was brushing crispy bits of flash-fried hair off my shirt for the rest of the day, and I had to use makeup and hats for weeks to cover up my hair loss. Stupid kid.

I date my true smoking experience to my 19th birthday. I had just gotten back to Simmons for sophomore year during orientation week, purportedly as a volunteer to help incoming freshmen, and somebody, I don't remember who, brought me some herb as a present. I hadn't smoked much of that before. My freshman-year roommate Donna was a marijuana master, so it might have been her gift; freshman year she had kept a journal to document The Smallest Roach Ever, burnt pieces of rolling paper taped into a notebook with the date and the names of all who partook, but she figured out quick that I was only wasting the smoke and barred me from her sessions. Anyway, one of my two sophomore roommates was there, and some other girls from the dorms, and I got schooled in how to actually inhale. Up to then I didn't understand how to get the smoke into my lungs! Once I figured it out and was good and toasted, I remember jumping up and down saying "Ooh, ooh -- gimme a cigarette!" Because now I could stop perpetrating.

From then on I smoked. I smoked after meals, I smoked while studying, I smoked out at clubs and parties. As I recall, I smoked Newports to start, but then to I began with the Virginia Slims because they were longer and thinner and had a richer finish. We all smoked, most of my friends. Relationships with guys could start just through asking for a cigarette or a light, and of course you could still smoke everywhere in the '70s and '80s. It gave me something to do with my hands, and the nicotine fix kept me from being too tense. There was something incredibly calming and grounding about performing the ritual of pulling the cigarette from the pack, putting it in your mouth, finding a light, getting it lit, inhaling and exhaling, tapping the ash, configuring it in your hands. Today, people fiddle with their phones as their performance ritual, but without the physical interaction with the smoke.

So I was in the smoking culture at school in Boston and back in NY, but not around my family. If I came home to the Bronx reeking of tobacco smoke, I could always say it was because I'd been at a club or a party. I always had a pack of cigarettes in my purse, sometimes Newports, often Virginia Slims, sometimes Benson & Hedges, very rarely Mores (which were distinctive for their brown paper). They were relatively cheap back then -- 2 or 3 bucks a pack. I liked collecting matchbooks from the numerous clubs and restaurants I frequented across Boston and New York; I wasn't that good at keeping lighters, which always got lost. When I was home from college in the summers, I sometimes splurged on a pack of English Dunhills. The menthols came in a gorgeous double-wide forest-green package rimmed with gold, and being European to boot, they looked pretty damned sophisticated when you brought those bad boys out at parties. But I actually didn't like smoking Dunhills that much; they were dense and took forever to smoke (so dense that if you left one lit in an ash tray for too long it put itself out rather than burning to the filter), and they tasted thick too. Some of the crowd went further with the French Galoises, which were impossibly strong; and the bohemian crowd liked the clove cigarettes, which smelled interesting but gave me a headache. I liked my Virginia Slims.

Graduating from school and coming home to my parents' place in New York for good put a crimp on my smoking habits. I could only smoke outside of the house, and even while working I don't remember being able to light up at my desk. Smoking was basically for socializing only. I would go out for drinks with friends, or on dates, and we would smoke the night away. I remember sucking down a lot of kir royales and White Russians in those first months home from college in the early '80s, cigarettes at the ready.

When I met my former husband, the teetotaler, I had to whittle back my cigarette habit. Fortunately, and I don't know how I was so lucky, it was easy for me to cut back. I wasn't physically addicted, suffered no withdrawal, cravings, or other ill effects. I became a non-smoker during the early years of my marriage, but once I got to Billboard and entered the music industry, where every other person I met smoked, I started buying my own smokes again, if only to stop bumming off of people all the time. And life was fast paced, pressure filled, and there were too many parties and premieres, too many free drinks, too many people lighting up around me, and of course my marriage was in the toilet, so my smoking habit escalated. By the time I got my own place on Central Park West, working at Arista Records, I was a morning-noon-and-night smoker again.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, smoking habit well entrenched. Still, if it wasn't convenient or appropriate to whip out a cigarette, I was OK. I'm not sure that I would have been such great friends with certain people who became dear to me at that time if I smoked in front of them. But once again I could smoke in my own apartment, and did; I think even as I lost 40 pounds on Jenny Craig, I was still sucking on those cancer sticks.

I'm not sure when I finally put the cigarettes down for good. It's not clear to me when the final moment arrived. Those surgeon general warnings were pretty intense, and in Los Angeles the restrictions on smoking indoors were becoming more pervasive. It wasn't as easy to light up any and everywhere. And cigarettes also began to get crazy expensive. After paying 3 or 4 dollars for a pack for years, suddenly in LA my Virginia Slims shot up to 8 or 9 bucks. I noticed that there were certain people who reeked of smoke, you could smell them from afar, and I didn't want to be one of those folks. Plus, more and more people I met and liked were not smokers and rabidly anti-smoke. So I just stopped. I didn't miss cigarettes; it was a pain to always keep matches, to argue with people who complained about me lighting up, to get the smell out of my hair and clothes, to spend the money on keeping a supply.

After five years or so my weight started creeping back up and work got insane; I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea, but I wanted to go back to a ritual that would calm me down and might even burn off a few pounds. So I went right to the corner doughnut shop one morning and purchased a hard pack along with my coffee. I remember sitting at my little white kitchen cafe table in my Cochran Street apartment, with my little crystal ashtray, and determinedly whipping out that first cig from a fresh pack -- oh! that lush tobacco smell! -- and lighting up. And it was godawful. So nasty. I couldn't even finish it. And I was mad! But I also couldn't believe that I'd ever smoked at all, or had smoked for YEARS.

And that was pretty much it for me and cigarettes. Thank God.