Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
There I stood, the great Jenifer Lewis, voiceless in front of fourteen hundred people in the Neil Simon Theatre. To add insult to injury, as I coughed and gasped through this train wreck of a performance, a woman front row center turned slightly to her excited son, who looked to be about ten years old and who was clearly gay. Without taking her eyes off me, the woman said to her son in a voice that was quite audible over the music, “This is not how it’s supposed to be.”
Thank God it was the end of Act I. The curtain came down, I ran up the concrete staircase in that old theater, fell into my dressing room, and sobbed uncontrollably. To add more insult to injury, Marc Shaiman, Hairspray’s co-lyricist and composer, had been in the back of the house and witnessed the entire catastrophe. He walked into my dressing room and said, “Your contract says three months, not three performances.” It was a brilliant line, but I was in no mood to laugh with my best friend. Asshole.
When I first hit town, fresh from college, I was sobered by the competition, especially in dance class. Y’all, they came from the four corners of the nation and they were the best—the motherfuckers of the motherfuckers. They danced like Shakafuckingzulu’s children; like kings and queens. They were long and they were graceful—the Adonises and Aphrodites of Juilliard, Alvin Ailey, and Carnegie Mellon. They strode across the dance floor like Thomson’s gazelles on the Serengeti. They stared at themselves in the wall mirrors like they owned the world. They walked in first position. They wore tights to show their perfectly formed muscles. They were beautiful, gods almost.
I felt doubt, concern. Okay, I was fucking losing it and called my mother, sobbing, from a pay phone behind the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street: “Mama, Mama, everybody wants to be a star up here in New York!” Who knew all these other people were gonna be here, chasing the same dream as me? “Oh my God. It’s all too big, Mama,” I wailed. “There are so many of them and they’re all so good.” Part of me wanted to give up and run home. But quit? Me? Fortunately, the bigger part of me knew I was on the right track.
One of my first auditions was for an out-of-town production of Daddy Goodness, starring Clifton Davis. It was a musical based on a play by Richard Wright, the brilliant author of Native Son. At the audition I met Sheryl Lee Ralph, the wonderful actress and activist, who remains a good friend. At age twenty, Sheryl was strikingly beautiful. And she still is today at age ninety-three! After the audition we went off together to Howard Johnson’s in Times Square to kill time before contacting our answering services for what we just knew would be a call-back. I ate apple pie à la mode. Sheryl ate a banana split. Neither of us got the gig, but we bonded that day, vowing that we’d become stars on Broadway and in the movies. Years later, I was one of Sheryl’s bridesmaids when she married her eighth husband (okay, it was her second husband!).
I was living temporarily with my college boyfriend, Miguel, and his mother in Brooklyn, in their fourth-floor walk-up above a karate dojo on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and St. Marks. Miguel was, perhaps, to this day, the one true love of my life. We had been together during my first two years at Webster, but it was off and on because my love life in college had a lot of moving parts.
But I always found my way back to Miguel. He was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. He was a brilliant man who held two master’s degrees, and when we met, Miguel was at Webster working on his PhD—in math no less! I loved Miguel for his intelligence and his delicious accent, especially the way he said my name: Yenifer. He was about ten years older than me but a very healthy man. And ladies, I do mean very healthy. I recall how his skin tone blended with mine—together we were a beautiful caramel macchiato. Miguel was the first vegetarian I’d ever met. I found him fascinating.
Once he got his PhD, Miguel went back to live with his family in New York City while I finished my last two years of college. We maintained a long-distance relationship, and I stayed with him a few times during my junior and senior years when I went to New York for auditions.
After we’d been a couple for some time, Miguel said something that stayed with me: “Yenifer,” he said, “joo have theezs great ability to get zee attenshoon of zee people, but den, joo say nothing.” I thought, “So what? I am an entertainer, not a teacher.”
Miguel’s mother, Andrea, did not speak much English, but she treated me like a daughter and sure could cook her ass off. She made plantains and concón, a traditional Dominican dish of the delicious crust of rice scraped off the bottom of the rice pot. If you’ve ever had concón, you understand why thinking about it still makes my mouth water after all these years!
Miguel and I went into Manhattan a lot. He’d play chess in Washington Square Park. I loved that he won most of his games, being a genius and all. But with my short attention span, it was tough for me to sit and watch something as boring as chess, so I would wander off and go watch the street artists in the middle of the square. I liked their raw, natural style. It was there that I first met Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, who later played my daughter Alline in What’s Love Got to Do with It. She was so captivating, talking politics in her red, black, and green turban. I have always been attracted to intelligent people. I find them fascinating because I just didn’t pay as much attention in school as I ought to have; if it wasn’t about music or movies, I really didn’t see what it had to do with me.