Boss Lady

by Omar Tyree

  “So, you actually want a football game going on up here with parents and fans?” one of the crew asked.

  “And cheerleaders,” Tracy told him. “You didn’t get a chance to read the script yet? This is where you get to meet the lead character in her cheerleading uniform and pompoms.”

  Tracy looked at the older guy with graying hairs as if she was disgusted. How could he miss that in the first couple pages of the script? I was confused by his comment myself.

  He said, “Okay, but from the basketball court to the football field, you’re looking at shooting an entire week on this one opening scene.”

  Tracy said, “And? If I’m going to do this movie, then I’m going to do it right! It’s been ten years now since the book first came out, and if it takes a year to shoot it right, then so be it.”

  “That’s right,” Robin agreed. “There’s no sense in waiting this long just to fuck it up.”

  Tracy and Robin both told him what time it was, so he shut his mouth and finished listening. Most likely, a lot of those people wouldn’t be on the real shoot anyway. Tracy was just scouting everything to take back to the money players at the Hollywood studios.

  “So, we introduce Tracy in her cheerleading pose . . .,” Robin stated.

  Jasmine jumped into position again with imaginary pompoms, and started chanting with her hips swinging left and right.

  “Go team go / That’s the way you take ’em down / Go team go / That’s the way you shake ’em.”

  Tracy said, “What the hell kind of cheers were you doing?”

  We all started laughing again.

  Jasmine said, “Oh, I just made that up.”

  “Don’t lie,” Maddy told her. “You know that was your high school cheer.”

  “I didn’t cheer in high school.”

  “Anyway,” Tracy told the camera guys. “We want to follow the running back on a long touchdown run to win the game from the perspective of our cheerleader.”

  “You want to shoot from the cheerleader’s view of the field. That would be a shallow angle,” the camera guy stated. He seemed cynical about the whole process.

  Tracy said, “No, we don’t have to shoot from her angle of the field. We just do cut backs to keep her viewpoint with the audience. That’s in the script as well,” she told him.

  He smiled it off. “Looks like I’m gonna have to reread the script.”

  Tracy said, “No, I just thought we’d make all of this up as we went along.”

  She was really letting him have it, but he deserved it. If he didn’t read the script right the first time, then he needed to shut his trap and just listen.

  She said, “We end the scene with everyone happy with the win, and our lead cheerleader eyeing the running back while moving closer to him.”

  My girls and I were all excited. We could see Tracy’s vision of the film with clear movement and activity. It was the correct way to shoot an eighties film. You give it the pulsating energy of hip-hop.

  We moved along from the playground and took a walk down the street that cut across Germantown Avenue.

  “We don’t have a pair of homes to shoot from yet, but we want to follow our lead and the running back down one of these nice streets. And that sets us up for the entrance of Raheema and Mercedes.”

  We all walked down the clean Mt. Airy street like a herd of sheep following the shepherd. But none of us minded. It was Tracy’s show. I was just glad she was back to business and moving past the distractions.

  * * *

  After Tracy showed us a good amount of the neighborhood scenes where she wanted to shoot, we drove over to Cheltenham Mall.

  “Are we going shopping now?” Sasha joked.

  Tracy smiled and said, “This is where we did clothing and boy shopping.”

  Jasmine asked, “How do you shoot a mall scene, with a whole lot of security?”

  The lead camera guy answered, “No, you would have to shoot early before the mall actually opens.”

  “Before the mall opens? But what about the stores?” Alexandria asked him.

  “You talk to a few of the store managers to open up early for you,” Tracy told her. At least she was still willing to talk to the girl.

  Alexandria nodded. “Is that what they do with all movies?”

  Shamor grinned at her. He said, “You’d really be surprised how a film crew is able to create the illusion that a location is full of people. It takes a lot of extras sometimes, but the locations are usually secured. You have noise issues, lighting issues, and countless setup hours to make sure everything is shot just right. Some of those scenes can take a week to shoot.”

  “Like our opening playground scene,” I commented.

  He nodded to me. “Yeah.”

  I was sure glad he wasn’t chasing after me anymore. I guess he finally got the point that I wasn’t interested in his advances.

  I listened to all the filming details and took mental notes to add to what I already knew about the film game from Tracy’s acting roles. But I hadn’t actually spent that much time on the production and direction side before. So it was still a fresh perspective for me, as it was for Tracy.

  “So, you’re just going to film one store, half of the mall, or what?” Maddy asked.

  “We’ll probably do an exterior walk-in, one of the hallways, and then a store or two, yes,” Tracy answered.

  Robin said, “You’ll probably need to talk to at least a hallway of stores to open for you to create coverage for the walk-in.”

  “We’ll work it out,” Tracy told her.

  “And you’re still thinking about directing, right?” Robin quizzed her.

  I looked at Tracy for her answer. I still didn’t think of taking her seriously on the direction end. She had her hands full as a producer. Directing would be even more work. I had nearly forgotten that Tracy had asked me about directing.

  She looked at me before she answered Robin. “We’ll have to see.”

  She was being careful and diplomatic about it.

  I exhaled after I heard her answer. Then again, if Tracy did decide to direct, then I would be assured that she would be right in the middle of things to make sure that the film was executed correctly.

  We all walked through the Cheltenham Mall, sizing things up, with Philadelphians doing their normal shopping and walking, and the guys started looking and hollering at every last one of us.

  “What are y’all, models?” a guy asked us. He had a full beard, growing long. A lot of guys in Philly were wearing their beards long, particularly the young Muslim guys.

  “Yeah,” Maddy told him. “What’s it to you?”

  He grinned and said, “You just looking good, sis’.”

  “Thank you.”

  “All of y’all looking good,” his taller, smooth-faced friend added.

  “We know,” Jasmine bragged to them.

  I had to laugh it off as we walked away.

  Then I warned Jasmine, “You better stop talking that conceited stuff in my city.”

  “People like when you’re confident,” she argued.

  “But not when you throw it all up in their faces,” Sasha told her.

  “I didn’t throw it in his face. He already said we looked good.”

  “Then all you need to say is ‘Thank you,’ ” I advised her.

  Tracy turned to address us all. “Look, you got exactly one hour to look around the mall and shop or whatever, and then we’re meeting back in the first hallway where we entered.”

  “What if we get lost?” Jasmine joked.

  “Don’t,” Tracy told her. “And that goes for all of you.”

  * * *

  We had a good time at the mall before we left and drove around the streets of Mt. Airy, West Oak Lane, and Germantown. By the time it was dark, we were all falling asleep inside the limo.

  “What do you think?” Tracy asked me before we arrived back at the hotel. We had stopped for ice cream on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough. It had been a very full day.<
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  “Hunh? What do I think?” I asked my cousin. I was barely conscious.

  “About the locations?” she asked me.

  I sat up straight and nodded my head to her. “They’re all good. You made a lot of good choices,” I told her.

  We had even visited a YMCA building off Chelten Avenue where Tracy wanted to shoot one of the hip-hop parties in the film. She told us that DJ Jazzy Jeff was once the talk of the city, and much more popular than the Fresh Prince, a.k.a. Will Smith. She said that the Philadelphia DJs were more popular than the New York DJs, who started it all. She was really giving us a history lesson in the roots of hip-hop.

  “I’m just presenting the real places that were spectacular at one time,” she told me. She was very excited about it all. She said, “Germantown Field was where we played the annual Thanksgiving Day game against Martin Luther King High School. You couldn’t get any bigger than that. We had one of the strongest football rivalries in the city.

  “And downtown on Market Street, there used to be blocks of jewelry stores, clothing stores, record stores, penny arcades, movie theaters. Going downtown was a real adventure back then.”

  Just talking about it was bringing back great memories for her.

  I said, “So, you think the eighties was way better than it is now?”

  She said, “Of course it was. And in my day, we didn’t hang on the coattails of New York, like so many rappers do in Philly now. We had our own sound and identity. We had a whole posse of Philadelphia rappers: Cool C, Steady B, Schoolly D, EST, Larry Love.”

  I started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked me.

  It was funny to hear her talking so enthusiastically about hip-hop. Once you reached a certain age, it seemed that hip-hop music was no longer viable.

  “That’s all old school,” I told her.

  She said, “What, I know about Fifty Cent, Eminem, and Ludacris. And I know about Beanie Siegel, Freeway, and The Roots in Philly. I’m hip.”

  That only made me laugh more. Even some of my girls began to laugh as they listened to our conversation.

  I said, “Of course you know about them. They’re all over the radio, the clubs, and the news. How could you not know?”

  Tracy said, “But I’m gonna tell you who’s gonna be the next big star. That Beyoncé girl from Destiny’s Child. I can tell she’s waiting to break out. I can see it in her every time I see those girls perform. And I know her daddy’s gonna push her to make sure it happens, too. So they’re all doing solo albums now. Well, watch when her album comes out.”

  “I like her,” Jasmine stated.

  “What about Ashanti?” Sasha asked. “Is she yesterday’s news already?”

  “It depends on where she takes it,” Tracy answered. “Because that Irv Gotti camp is falling down just like Suge Knight’s did with Death Row. So she might want to find a new label to deal with. That criminalistic stuff doesn’t pay off in the long run. It eventually catches up to you.”

  “Yeah, especially after those Fifty Cent songs attacking Ja Rule,” Maddy added to the discussion. “Their camp may not be able to recover from that. Fifty was going at ’em hard.”

  It seemed that everyone was joining the discussion about the latest in hip-hop.

  “So, who do you want on the soundtrack, Tracy?” Jasmine asked out of the blue.

  I hadn’t even thought of that yet.

  Tracy said, “Missy, of course. She still has that old-school flavor. She still knows how to have fun with the music. Then I’d invite my girls MC Lyte and Queen Latifah.”

  “All on a song together? That would be hot,” Sasha commented.

  “Yeah, we can call them the Flyy Girl Crew,” I joked.

  Tracy shook her head and said, “We’re gonna have to stop using that name for everything. We don’t want to wear it out.”

  Sasha looked at her and said, “I disagree. If you look at the most successful products, they say their names all of the time: McDonald’s, Pepsi, Nike, Sprite, Def Jam.”

  “Yeah, they got Def Jam everything now,” Jasmine agreed.

  “It’s a strong name,” I told them, “just like Flyy Girl is.”

  “At first, you didn’t want us to use it,” Alexandria reminded me.

  “That’s because I didn’t want her to,” Tracy responded. “Those companies still control how, when, and where their names are used, just like I will with Flyy Girl.”

  I put in my two cents. “Well, once you have it trademarked, it’s nothing but free advertising for you when people use it.”

  I still didn’t get why Tracy didn’t want to push the Flyy Girl brand more, like we all wanted her to. Was she plain scared of heights or what?

  She said, “There is such a thing as overkill. And sometimes less is more. Like Polo. They are always in the cut with what they do.”

  “But they advertise all the time in men’s magazines,” Alexandria noted. “They just know where their audience is.”

  “Yeah, if you chose like Essence magazine or something, and did a consistent ad, it would connect to a loyal audience,” I suggested.

  Maddy frowned at me. She said, “Essence? What kind of audience are you after? They’re not really into designer clothes. Them people look like they make their own clothes.”

  “It was just an example,” I told her.

  “The wrong example,” she argued.

  “Yeah, you would try something more like Vibe. It’s not too street like XXL, but it’s not all stuffy like Essence either,” Alexandria explained.

  Tracy looked at her and said, “You look like an Essence reader yourself, talking about stuffy.”

  We started laughing again. Alexandria did seem like an Essence magazine woman.

  She said, “I do read it, but not like I do with Vibe. I flip through a lot of Essence to see what they’re talking about first. But with Vibe, I think a lot more about what they’re wearing, their makeup, their hair, and what they’re listening to because it’s closer to my age. But my older sister will do the opposite. She reads her Essence, and then she’ll flip through my Vibe.”

  “Well, the Flyy Girl brand is definitely for a younger audience, because a lot of older readers try to act like they read it a long time ago, so I know they don’t want to wear the clothes,” Jasmine assumed.

  “Not necessarily,” Tracy told her. “We do plan to have a more elegant line to balance out the commercial line.”

  “Yeah, but with the word Girl in the name, a lot of mature women just won’t go there,” Alexandria argued. “Like my sister, she called it ‘cute.’ And when she uses the word cute, what she’s really saying is that it’s below her.”

  “Oh, you don’t say. Sounds like somebody else we know,” Maddy mocked her.

  “But I’m not all that bad,” Alexandria said with a grin.

  “I’m learning a lot listening to you girls,” Tracy commented to us.

  “Anytime,” Jasmine told her.

  “So, what do you guys all think about the locations we visited today?” she asked all of us.

  “All thumbs up to me,” Jasmine spoke up first. “I mean, once you have the people there with the music, and color, and action, it looks like a movie that hasn’t been done in a while.”

  “It’s just real. Like when I watch Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society,” Maddy commented. “It’s just real. I mean, you really feel it.”

  Sasha said, “I like street movies because they feel more like actual life. With Hollywood movies, you know you’re just watching a movie. But with street movies, you don’t know if you’re really watching someone’s life or not.”

  “I know. They do seem that way,” Jasmine agreed.

  “That’s exactly how Flyy Girl will feel,” I told her.

  Tracy took it all in. She said, “Well, the first trip to Philly is just about done. Next time we go into more detail with the budget, licenses, schedules, and the works. Tomorrow it’s back to L.A.”

  No one said anything.<
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  Then Jasmine said, “It seems like we just got here. I mean, I know we did a lot of work here, but . . .”

  She sounded like she was sad to leave.

  “Aw, don’t cry, girl. If you make it as a production assistant, you’ll be back,” Maddy told her.

  “Not if you guys plan on fighting in the damn hallway again,” Tracy warned all of us.

  Just like that, she shut us all up inside the limo. We were all as quiet as a whisper and at my cousin’s mercy. And as much influence as I thought I could have on her, the reality was, Tracy was still the boss lady.

  Withdraw

  I sat up on the bed in Sasha and Jasmine’s room while they packed up their clothes. We were all glum, realizing that our excursion to Philly was coming to an end.

  Jasmine shook her head and said, “I can’t believe we’re leaving. I mean, it’s like I’m ready to do this movie right now, and I’m not even in it. I just want to be around it.”

  Sasha nodded to her while folding a pair of her jeans. “We all feel that way.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked her. I was thinking about Maddy and Alexandria. But I already knew they were both full tilt for the film. I just wanted to hear someone else say it.

  Sasha never wavered. She said, “Yeah, I’m sure. It’s not every day where you get this close to a dream being turned into a reality.”

  I asked her, “But do you think this movie will feel the same for all girls? White girls don’t seem to watch our movies. It’s like we’re all outsiders to them.”

  “They watched Mulan,” Sasha joked.

  “And they watch the cartoon Dora, and the Disney show Taina,” Jasmine added.

  “Yeah, but not like they watch Hillary Duff in Lizzie McGuire,” I told them. “I mean, this is a black-girl movie. Will they watch a black girl from inner-city Philadelphia?”

  “We have to make it and find out,” Sasha concluded.

  Someone knocked on the door and we all looked around at each other. It was close to eleven at night.

  “Okay, who’s gonna go get that?” Sasha asked.

  Jasmine said, “Vanessa, you’re the guest, you go get it.”

  “But it’s your room. You should be the one to greet a visitor, not me,” I argued.