This is Me...Now that JLO’s Tour is Canceled
Plus: How Challengers could have went from good to great
The core memories discourse seems to have very online Xennial parents in a chokehold for the moment. As silly and unscientific as it is to think one can determine how another’s brain will prioritize experiences and sensations, I understand the appeal of wanting your choices to mean as much to your kids as you intended. I doubt my Boomer parents were motivated by curating my future perception of them when they bought tickets to my first arena concert: New Edition, Bobby Brown, and Al B Sure at Madison Square Garden. It is just as unlikely that they would have predicted what I would remember most about that night: (1) I was so excited about my outfit, and (2) I spent the entire show resisting the urge to dance.
My grandmother always used to say that even as a small child, I moved through the world like a “little adult.” I would keep my hands folded on my lap and my colored pencils in a neat row. I was a serious observer. Nothing appealed to me more about adulthood than the ability to feel in control. When it came time to pick my outfit for the concert, I was thrilled at the opportunity to choose what I wore. This was a rare departure from typical special events in the city when I typically wore an outfit purchased by one of my grandparents.
I picked out a pink and grey striped sweatshirt with a crest over my heart, dark jeans (or dungarees as my mom would say), and penny loafers. That outfit made me feel like I could have been a character in A Different World. Watching that show as a family piled up in my parent’s bed = core memory. The only part of my look that made me feel like a nine-year-old was my cornrows fastened with plastic barrettes on the end. In those days, hair was a dividing line between life stages. Braids were for kids, and grown women wore pressed or relaxed styles.
I wanted to be a grownup so badly that I watched my mom and my aunt, her twin, closely for cues on how to behave. So when lights dimmed in the Garden and the opening beats blasted over the speakers, I glanced over at the two of them before deciding how to react. They were seemingly still, except for a barely perceptible single finger tapping to the beat. The corners of their mouths upturned in the slightest possible smile. They were the epitome of cool, calm, and collected.
I trusted their example more than my gut, so I stayed still rather than follow the instinct to leap out of my seat and cheer. In the intervening 35 years, I’ve attended many shows in small-to-medium clubs. I’ve skanked like a proper rude girl to countless ska bands and pogoed to pop punk’s finest, but I haven’t come close to avenging my missed opportunity to bust a move in a stadium with the biggest stars of the day.
I had high hopes that this would be the summer to heal my inner third-grader and dance in my seat surrounded by thousands of folks doing the same thing. As soon as Jennifer Lopez’s tour was announced, I made plans to attend. Even though her last album was more skips than hits and she’s not the strongest vocalist among legacy pop divas, I was confident she could put on a show that would get me up out of my seat. I wanted the sequined catsuits, the hair flips, the over-the-top backup dancers, some good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle.
It should have been a red flag that I secured seats on Ticketmaster in only eight minutes. That same week I spent *72 minutes* registering my kids for summer camp on my town’s crash-prone parks and rec department website, so I was primed for a harrowing ticket-buying experience. I chalked up the speedy transaction to the presale code from JLO’s Instagram story.
The next item on my list was to choose an outfit. The green v-necked jumpsuit with gold sparkles I planned to wear was more than a modest homage to JLO’s dress that brought Google Image search to life. It was also a callback to my college-era pregame routine of applying body glitter to flashes of skin revealed by my favorite Going Out Tops while listening to “Waiting for Tonight.“ That look let me steep in the nostalgia of the late 90s and early aughts when I first let myself hit the dancefloor with abandon.
I was ready to boogie. I was ready to celebrate that my natural hair was no longer incongruous with being a grown-ass woman with two kids and a retirement plan. And then the album flopped. And then the long-form music video feature-length narrative musical experience was panned. And then Bennifer went 47 days without being photographed together. And then…
It’s time to make a new plan. To find a new outfit. To jump out of my seat and dance before the temperature starts to drop again. Any suggestions? Should I take my Ticketmaster refund to see Usher instead?
Tasha Duncan could have been That Woman
Seeing Challengers in the theater gave me almost everything I wanted out of the experience. The music drove the story forward in such a delicious way. The mid-aughts hairstyles were on point. The voluminous beads of sweat were a story unto themselves. The ending made me gasp. The only problem was the film didn’t deliver on the promise of this most meme-worthy line of dialogue included in the trailer.
I know a thing or two about being the only Black woman in spaces dominated by white men and trying to figure out platonic, professional, and romantic relationships in those contexts. When ads popped up showing Zendaya snarling “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys,” I expected to see more of that experience reflected. An interview with the screenwriter suggested as much.
Kuritzkes says that although none of the characters is based on a real player, it was important for Tashi to be a Black woman. “The story of American tennis is Black women for the past however many decades,” he says. “I also knew that I didn’t want to not specify the races of the characters. That always feels to me like you’re avoiding something. Her being a Black woman informs a lot about how she navigates her situation and how she navigates her relationship with these guys.”
I would be stunned if anyone who has seen the film picked up on how Tashi’s race affected how she dealt with Patrick and Art. I certainly didn’t see it. And I’m not the only one who felt this way. In this Vulture chat, critic Angelica Jade Bastién affirmed my view.
It’s kind of weird for Challengers to have that white-boy line because it’s a movie that doesn’t actually give a shit about race. Do you think white people are comfortable with Black women’s actual, fully embodied anger? Of course not. It would turn to them.
Unfortunately, this let-down is not a new experience. Even though I loved the first season of HBO’s Big Little Lies, I knew better than to watch the second because of the unlikelihood that they would treat Bonnie’s perspective with care.
In all of Bonnie’s agonizing over the murder, we are never given the indication that Bonnie’s distress has to do with the thought of a Black woman handing over her fate to the justice system in America. In all of the scenes in which Bonnie seems like the Black sheep of the Monterey Five, we’re never told that some of those feelings are because she’s Black. Ask any Black woman who lives in a predominantly white space and we’ll tell you that there are daily microaggressions (I know Madeline went straight for Bonnie’s braids the first time they met) you have to mine, and that race comes up every damn day, whether you want it to or not.
What else do Challengers and Big Little Lies have in common? Both lacked Black women in the writing room. Would the representation have been better if they had controlled the story? Or would it have been moot because they never would have made it to the screen in the first place? Am I the only one who cares about the inner monologue of the Token Black Girl?
All the rest…
You may remember that I recently tried to manifest a collaboration between Kacey Musgraves and Beyoncé. Now there is news that it almost came true! A songwriter/producer who worked on Cowboy Carter went to Nashville at Beyoncé’s behest and made five songs with Kacey, but none ended up on the album. Fingers crossed that they make it out of the vault sometime soon!
Give us the tracks!!! After watching Queen Charlotte, I wrote about my frustration at the lack of happily-ever-afters for Black women of the ton. In an unsurprising turn of events,
seasonseries three of Bridgerton, focusing on the friends-to-lovers romance of Colin and Penelope, hasn’t made much progress at its halfway point. Luckily, the social media marketing team at Netflix has stepped up. Bridgerton superfans Tiffany and Shanti, an adorable couple from Brooklyn, were selected to receive a wedding themed after the show. When I tell you I am one thousand times more invested in this couple than I am in #Polin!
The most recent Vibe Check podcast episode has an interesting discussion about this summer’s canceled tours. I’m not the only fan mourning the loss of plans made. And the reasons are more complex than celebrity marriages potentially falling apart.
We increased our rating of the film in the lobby- I think from a 6 to 7.5. I have since listened to the score, it’s a badass soundtrack