Jan and I would be in Puerto Rico for a few weeks on our own, then our parents would arrive for a week of family visits, and then we’d have to head home. While leaving Grandma Nelly’s house was a relief, it was always sad leaving the cool tile floor and rich, spicy aromas of Grandma Mercedes’s place. We dreaded the day of departure, partly because Daddy was in the military and we were able to fly on the cheap if we were willing to wait around for an available seat on a cargo plane. We’d pack our bags the night before and head to the airport before dawn. Sometimes the whole day would drag by without an opportunity to board. Jan and I chased each other around and played Rock, Paper, Scissors. We chatted enthusiastically about Menudo. We hotly debated who was cuter, John Schneider or John Stamos, and argued hard about which one of us liked which one of them better. Having exhausted that topic, we’d make up stupid songs and sing them over and over until the grown-ups got impatient and told us to shut up. Then we’d sit and read or play hangman. If the last flight took off without us, we’d schlep our bags back home and return the next day to try again, but if the stars aligned and there were open seats, we’d strap ourselves into them for the three-hour flight, next to racks of auto parts, boxes of office supplies, cases of powdered eggs, giant mysterious crates of military stuff—anything up to and including a war tank.
Once we got home, Grandma Nelly redeemed herself. Jan and I were crazy about this strange and wonderful new thing called MTV, and we begged Daddy to get cable so we could watch it, but he didn’t see the necessity for that. So Grandma Nelly would roll VHS tapes, recording hours of MTV, and send them to us. It exposed us to the new stars reshaping the music of the decade—Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie, Prince. We loved Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” and Irene Cara’s “Fame” and Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” They were creating something that combined music and spectacle the way live performances do, pulling music, dance, fashion, storytelling, cinematography, videography, and theater into a fabulous mash up of art forms.
In 1983, just before I turned ten, Jan and I saw Flashdance at the movie theater in North Carolina, and it rocked my little world from start to finish. The feverish “Maniac” sequence captured the crazy energy that took over my body when I was dancing, and though I certainly didn’t let Jan see it, I had tears streaming down my face during those final soaring moments when Alex Owens dances her heart out to “What a Feeling.” I didn’t know at the time, of course, that Jennifer Beals had to have three body doubles—one of them a sixteen-year-old dude—in order to get through that number, and I’m glad I didn’t know. Thinking it was all her made me believe I could do it, too.
I adored Flashdance. I used some of my belly dancing money to buy the Flashdance sound track and couldn’t get enough of it. Dancing like a maniac, maniac on the floor, I wore grooves in the grooves playing the album over and over. Flashdance offered a PG-rated romance that a ten-year-old could embrace, while vividly demonstrating the hours of blood, sweat, and tears that go into a professional dance career. And can we just talk about the iconic Alex Owens style? All the girls were slashing their sweatshirts and incorporating leg warmers into their school wardrobes, but more than anything else, I loved Jennifer Beals’s unapologetically curly hair and her “Are you white or are you black?” skin, the same color as mine. I dreamed of living in my own warehouse apartment with a ballet barre, sassy attitude, and pit bull named Grunt.
A year later, my little world got rocked again. Jan took Mama and me to see Purple Rain.
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Jan and I were instantly obsessed with Purple Rain, playing the album for months in our room with the sound track blaring. I was always Apollonia—minus the boobs—because I was a girly girl but brave, like Prince’s love interest in the movie. Jan was learning to play guitar, so she wanted to be Wendy (or maybe she had a crush on Wendy and didn’t yet know how to articulate that), but her best friend also wanted to be Wendy, so it often devolved to an argument.
“I am Wendy!”
“You’re not Wendy! I am!”
Eventually, for the sake of world peace, I’d intercept and tell Jan, “You can’t be Wendy. Your hair’s not long enough. Be Lisa. Lisa is just as cool.”
I funded the sound track purchase with my belly dancing money, and we begged to see the movie again. We loved the music, the power of Prince’s performances, of course, and the style, the style, the style—even an elementary school kid couldn’t miss it. I mean, look at the fashion in this film! Prince’s ruffles, the motorcycle studs, the Wonderbra-convenient leather motorcycle jacket that Apollonia strips off at not–Lake Minnetonka.