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The life coach, who uses dance to help others, talks about touring with Madonna
The life coach, who uses dance to help others, talks about touring with Madonna
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Mine was the third black family to move into our neighbourhood. One moment I’ll always remember – my brother Tony and I were playing on my block. This white woman yelled at us, “You, [N-word], get out of my yard.” We went back and told my mom.
I always thought of my mom as Whitney Houston. On the exterior, she’s super gorgeous, but she has this absolute ghetto side to her. She was ready to go out that night but she stopped what she was doing, put her hair up, put vaseline on her face. She walked down the street and went off on that woman.
People were like, “Of course you would say Madonna.” But no, I was a young black boy from the South Side of Chicago, the queen for me was the chocolate Whitney.
My dance career truly has been a divine orchestration. It started as a fixit for a part of my life that wasn’t working. My dad had family in Florida. I started my first year at a high school in Florida in 1978, when I was 14, but within a quarter of that year, I hated it. I called my parents and they immediately flew me home.
My mom ran into my eighth-grade teacher at the grocery store, who said, “Let me talk to some colleagues.” The one who opened the door happened to be a dance instructor at a magnet school. Magnet schools in America have to pull in students from all over the city, selected through academic standing or for having proved themselves in the higher arts field.
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That teacher said she would work with me over the summer and teach me the audition piece. When the audition came, in the fall, I had to pretend I was meeting her and doing the choreography for the first time. I had to do it well enough to pull it off. Puff the magic dragon. It worked.
