Chapter 9 Filthy McNasty #2
While he smoked his smokes, we did our thing.
I remember dancing to the Eartha Kitt track “My Discarded Men.” The Dolls were very old-school Fosse, making people think that they were seeing something risqué, when they were really seeing only the magic of dance.
We had rhythmic gymnasts in our group and ballet dancers on point.
There was one girl named Sia who would do her entire performance on point while holding a cigarette, taking her leg up high above her shoulder.
“This is so fucking cool,” Johnny said when we were done. “This is why I opened this place. This is so Thursday.” And that was it. He loved it. We were part of the Viper Room’s Thursday-night entertainment for the next decade.
We quickly became a phenomenon. It got so big that we would feature guest stars like Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera.
Back then we were still lip-synching for fun, dancing to 1940s songs.
So many women wanted to be part of it. It was empowering.
They wanted to do new things, unexpected things.
They wanted to feel something that they had never felt before without it being blatant or for someone else.
And then the next thing we knew, we were at the legendary Roxy nightclub, and we were selling out shows everywhere we went.
That’s when Jimmy Iovine told Robin that the Pussycat Dolls should really be a singing group, not just a dance group. And Robin, the businesswoman that she is, took the idea and ran with it.
We’d gone from playing the Viper Room to the Roxy. If you can create a singing group that becomes number one on the charts, hell yeah, Robin, go for it. I’m proud of her. I really am.
But I was also disappointed. The dancing had subtly changed—suddenly, there was a lot of butt, if you get my drift.
The line to see us would be around the corner.
I remember saying to Robin during one Christmas performance, “There’s a lot of booty-touching going on.
” Things were off, but empire’s got to empire.
Robin arrived places in a Bentley now. Good for her, but it wasn’t what I’d originally been a part of.
But hey, man, we got “Don’t Cha” (“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me”). This was never a sentiment I thought of for myself, but Nicole Scherzinger and a few OG Dolls dominated. How cool is that?
By my mid-twenties, things were changing everywhere I looked. Being free and single and doing your thing was one thing but going to a club most nights was something that didn’t entirely appeal anymore. Many of us left and never went back.
My life was altogether way too complicated by my mid-twenties for me to even think much about the Viper Room. I was all over the place, veering from dating to tending to my mother’s health to God, of all things!
February 15, 1996
Wow, it’s been a long time since I took the time to reflect.
Since the last entry I’ve been through a lot.
Men, shit, etc. I’ll start with the name list. Derek, Richard, Ryan, Dennis, Reo, Ashley…
Once again I might have gotten myself into a bit of a drama.
Not too bad, though. Oh yeah, Troy NYC New Year’s.
There might be one more. Although I can’t really remember.
…
Mom went through a lot with the cancer but she’s okay now. I found God and it’s the best thing to ever happen to me. AGAPE! My life, my breath.
I take too many classes, do too many things. I think I’m happy. I don’t really know anymore. My house is beautiful. Can’t think.
As the 1990s continued, my diaries chart my growing relationship with spirituality and God.
I discovered the Agape International Spiritual Center, which had been founded in 1986 by Dr. Michael B.
Beckwith, a charismatic and brilliant man.
The center is not traditionally “Christian” in that it draws from multiple sources, multiple faiths, and often from the more esoteric, Gnostic traditions, all in the service of “[teaching] how an individual may cultivate their own unique relationship with this ineffable Presence and live in conscious connection with It.”
Agape resonated with me because my mom had always raised me to believe in an interconnectedness, an idea that God and I, and I and God, are one.
June 13, 1996
I trust in God. I surrender—I am one in the spirit around me. It’s okay, God, I get it. I heed my own words. Know you are there. Amen.
This surrender I was feeling pushed me into a fresh perspective on my life, one I’d struggled to find in the past. For me to tell my diary that I loved myself, as I did in June 1996, was such a different song from the one I’d been singing for most of my life.
But sometimes the gains I had made could ebb within a day. Such was the trauma I carried with me, and such is the struggle the faithful have when God seems absent.
June 18, 1996
I know you are present, I know you are present, but I feel so sad confused and tired today.
I have faith in you and in me. Help me let it all go.
You don’t have to move the mountains, you just have to give me the strength to climb.
You don’t have to move the stumbling blocks, but lead me on, God!
Pull me through. I know I must embody the truth about you and myself but why do I feel so shitty?
Is it because I lost faith today? Is it because I became fearful?
I don’t want to fuck this up—I AM THE I AM I AM GOD I AM DIVINE I AM LOVE I AM RADIANCE I AM SUCCESS I AM WHAT YOU ARE. Amen.
Back and forth I went, feeling filled with faith, and then feeling lost to doubt. Yet the underlying sense from those years was that faith had stripped away the worst excesses of my self-hatred and had begun to give me a glimmer of self-esteem.