With the most confidence I had ever felt in my entire mothafuckin’ life, I put my two twenties on the middle card. Within five seconds, I was as broke as I had been a half hour earlier. Y’all, I never gambled again!
I took my last couple of dollars to get some fruit at a bodega on the corner of 55th and Broadway, when who do I bump into but Gregory Hines. “Hey, did you audition for my new show? It’s called Comin’ Uptown.” He gave me the address. “Tell the choreographer I sent you.” I ran the short block to my apartment and put on a wig I had stolen from the “Oriental Blues” number in Eubie! (Ten years later I would be on the cover of the Los Angeles Times arts section wearing that same wig—and it was crooked!)
It took me just ten minutes to put on mascara and some red lips and power-walk to the rehearsal space off Broadway. As the lyric from A Chorus Line goes: I went “up a steep and very narrow stairway” in my flowing polyester red top and black tights to audition for Comin’ Uptown. It was an outfit my black-ish character Ruby Johnson would have loved (but I was forty pounds lighter then!).
Once again, I belted out my stock audition number—“Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The choreographer then asked me, “Can you dance?” As I’ve said, I have never been a great dancer. But like Streisand in the audition scene in Funny Girl where she is asked “Can you skate?,” I said, “Absolutely!” If it might get me the job, then hell, yeah I will go for it.
In that moment, everything fell into place: the cheerleading at Kinloch High, the study of dynamics and Feldenkrais in college, and the vaudeville moves I had learned while touring with Baggy Pants. I drew back, and pow, my highest kick into a fantastic battement into a grand layout. I don’t think I impressed the director, Philip Rose, but Michael Peters, the choreographer, went nuts! Yes, that Michael Peters—the choreographer who would go on to win a Tony for Dreamgirls, but who is perhaps most famous for his genius work on the music videos for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Beat It.”
I got the job, my second Broadway show in just six months of arriving in New York City. Comin’ Uptown was a musical update of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Gregory Hines played Scrooge, reimagined as a Harlem slumlord. I played one of the Salvation Army Trio, which also included Debbie Burrell and Deborah Bridges. Loretta Devine was making her second Broadway appearance, too. This was also the show where I became close with Shirley Black-Brown, a former Ailey dancer, who played Bob Cratchit’s daughter. The show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in December 1979, but ran for fewer than fifty performances.
FOUR
DICK DIVA
Like most successful Broadway shows, Eubie! spawned a national touring company. I got cast in the upcoming six-month tour just two days after Comin’ Uptown closed.
The day before I departed for the tour, Ken, a journalist friend, came over for a little “afternoon delight.” Right after he left, Perry called and said he was leaving town and wanted to see me. Dear, delicious Perry! We had been lovers since my sophomore year at Webster (during my breakups from Miguel, of course). Perry had moved to New York City to pursue a show business career.
I recall the first time I saw Perry as I stepped out of my dorm room on the all-girls floor where I lived. I knew immediately that he had to be a dancer because of his long, shapely physique. Perry had trained with the great Katherine Dunham at her studio in East St. Louis. When I saw him, a freshman, wandering around looking lost, I had only one thought: Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Fans of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire might have called my dorm room the “Tarantula Arms”!
That afternoon, Perry and I began a pattern of loving up on each other between relationships that would continue for several decades. We made love the entire night before I arose at dawn to fly to Los Angeles for the start of the Eubie! national tour.
I landed in LA with a terrible cold. Linda Saputo, a Webster friend whose outstanding talents had taken her to Hollywood, picked me up at the airport and drove me straight to the theater. My cold was really bad, so on the recommendation of Kelly, the company manager, that afternoon I went to an acupuncturist named Mrs. Chen. It seemed she porcupined my ass, but damn if those ten thousand needles didn’t eliminate most of my cold symptoms. After she removed the last needle, she looked into my eyes, squinted, and spoke harshly in her thick Chinese accent.
MRS. CHEN
“How many boyfriend you got?”
JENIFER
“Excuse me?”
MRS. CHEN
“How many boyfriend you got last night?”
JENIFER
“Ummm . . . one?”
[MRS. CHEN’S squint grows tighter.]
JENIFER
[sheepish]
“Uh, uh, okay, two.”
MRS. CHEN
[growling]
“You listen to me very carefully. Two man. With one wo-man. Make one wo-man poison!”
How the hell did Mrs. Chen know I had sex with two men on the same day? I ran out of there as fast as I could. Years later, after reading Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, I learned that some people have the skill to just look at you and know where you are sick. It’s in your body language, your face, and, most certainly, the eyes.
I was thrilled to be part of the Eubie! national tour and grateful to be working with a wonderful cast of talented, fabulous gypsies. Touring companies are like unconventional families. We were young and energetic, dancing and singing through eight shows a week. Our stamina equaled that of any Olympian.
The show was getting rave reviews, and I felt blown away by the effusive praise my performance received from the newspaper critics:
“Half laser beam; half lava flow . . . vibrant stage presence.”
“Meteoric voice.”
“Could hold the note from here to September.”
When the show moved to the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, my father’s family bought out a couple of rows. My parents had separated when I was two weeks old. Daddy lived in St. Louis, but there was a huge contingent of Lewises in Chicago. These were South Side family people—you know, Patty, Pinky, Popo, Minkie, Keesha, Junior, and dem. I felt proud. These were the aunts and cousins who had heard me proclaiming my stardom since childhood. For them to see me on the stage of the Studebaker was exhilarating. They were so supportive and happy for me. “G’on Jenny!” they shouted from the audience, clapping and whooping as I belted “Roll, Jordan, Roll” and shook my money-maker.