Madonna and Me (2 page)

—MADONNA

 

I’D LIKE TO think I knew exactly where I was the first time I heard her. It was 1984, so I must have been around six. I was in the backseat of my grandmother’s clangy old navy-blue Cutlass, driving through Rock Creek Park in my hometown of Washington, D.C. It was hot outside, and the backs of my sweaty knees stuck to the faux-leather seat.

Because I was a budding pop-music aficionado, my parents let me listen to D.C.’s trendy pop radio station, Q107, whenever we were in the car. I knew nearly every word of nearly every song played that year, and as I listened to the lyrics from the back seat, I would stare out the window, daydreaming. I loved almost all of it—even the questionable stuff, like Sheila E., Scandal, and Corey Hart.

And then it happened. A new song appeared between the usual suspects, one that struck me with its sweet, plaintive, but optimistic opening keyboard notes. These were followed by a voice I’d never heard before—thin but throaty, with just a hint of darkness seeping through. I broke out in chills: I felt magnetically drawn to the song with laser-like focus. “That was Madonna, with her new top-ten hit, ‘Borderline,’” rasped the announcer after the song ended.

I was hooked. “Borderline” stuck with me for days. I immediately memorized all the words, singing along joyfully in my head (I was too shy to croon aloud, at least when other people were around) whenever it played on the radio, which was often. I imagined the frustrating off-and-on relationship Madonna was singing about; I conjured up an image of the bad-boy heartbreaker she was singing to. In my daydream, she looked like a cute, spritely teenager. (Oh, how I longed to become a teenager! The freedom, the independence, the romance, the danger . . . Sigh.)

My fixation only grew when I finally put a face to that gravelly voice via Madonna’s “Lucky Star” video on MTV—the messy hair, the mesh tank top, the jelly bracelets, the crucifixes. Whoa. My world was rocked. She was, by far, the coolest woman I’d ever seen. (Admittedly, I hadn’t seen many. I was six, and my world was pretty tiny then.)

I was the only child of busy but accommodating, well-to-do parents, and I had a small circle of close-knit friends from the private school I attended in D.C. The girls in my class (all ten or fifteen of them) were smart, small, sheltered creatures. We were sometimes shy, sometimes bratty and brash, and all well loved. But as kids tend to be, we were powerless—especially as girl children. We lived firmly under our parents’ thumbs. Adult women—like my mom, and the moms of my friends Lisbeth and Nelly—were gainfully employed at respectable office jobs. They had short, sensible haircuts in warm neutral tones (and if they dyed or “frosted” their hair, they took great pains to avoid anyone knowing it—it was
never
bleached or showed dark roots). They wore slacks, not jeans. They came
home at night, cooked dinner for their families, and were in bed by 10:00 PM. They didn’t wear black—and certainly never black lace.

Madonna’s glittery ascent to stardom hit me hard. In a good way. She was so powerfully different from everything I’d seen, heard, or observed about womanhood. And to the six-year-old me, she was a fascinating hybrid of a twenty-six-year-old grown-up and a rebellious teenager. She was adorable but raw. She was a challenge; she always seemed to say, even without words, “I dare you to dare me.” Even in her overtly sexual songs (“Like a Virgin,” “Burning Up,” “Physical Attraction”) her eyes bore the tiniest glint of coy naïveté—was that real or was it faked? Was she just playing us, toying with us, trying to make us want her more?

“The Girlie Show,” indeed—she reveled in her femaleness, rolled around in it, slathered every inch of herself in its essence. She made no apologies for what she wanted (“to rule the world,” as she explained to Dick Clark on
A
merican Bandstand
) or how far she would go to get it. And she wouldn’t be caught dead in slacks.

Totally infatuated, I not only begged my parents to buy me her album, I convinced them to buy me mesh tops, neon socks, and crucifix necklaces. I wore a lace rag in my hair, lace gloves on my hands, and stacked black jelly bracelets up my arms. My friends and I made puffy-paint T-shirts proclaiming our devotion, and then posed in ridiculous homemade photo shoots, sprawled across my bedroom rug like clueless little Lolitas. I even went to school dressed like her.

Since that fateful day when I first found her on the radio, it’s been “Madonna and me.” Sure, it’s about admiration—I loved how she danced, sang, and gyrated her little diva-punk-princess heart out. But it wasn’t just a pop-star crush or a fascination with her incredible fashion sense; it was deeper (“and deeper and deeper and deeper”) than that.

Really, Madonna changed everything—the musical landscape, the’80s look du jour, and most significantly, what a mainstream female pop star could (and couldn’t) say, do, or accomplish in the public eye.

A shiny new world unfolded before me, and suddenly my expectations about girls and women—what we were supposed to be—were shattered. Suddenly, sex was on the table. And money. And power. And artifice. And teen pregnancy. And “boy toys.” And—
gasp!
—masturbation.

As many of the writers in this book describe in their essays, Madonna’s been dramatically different people throughout different stages of her life. Who could forget the spoiled superficial material girl, the kooky Kabbalist, Dita the sexual deviant, the married Primrose Hill matriarch, the “ohm Shanti” desert guru? So many Madonnas! But like most women, including me, this is why we relate to her: she’s a walking knot of contradictions. When I’ve needed answers in life, I’ve turned to my image of her, like an invisible little angel on my shoulder.
What would Madonna do?
I’d ask myself in all earnestness, when faced with tough decisions throughout my teens and twenties. (In her piece on page 14, writer Shawna Kenney recalls asking herself that same question.)

Watching her career evolve has been like watching a parallel version of me do the things I’ve only dared to dream about. We’ve grown up together. As I write this I’m thirty-four. At fifty-two, of course, she’s a whole new version of herself—necessarily much more grown up than the ragamuffin twenty-six-year-old lucky star we met in 1984. She’s gotten married, had babies, adopted babies, gotten divorced. Her sexuality has become a bit quieter, more refined.

It’s hard to explain all the ways she’s impacted me.
Madonna and Me
is homage to that impact. Her influence is just so
big
—
she’s
so big. (Not physically, duh—we all know she’s made of steel, or “gristle,” if you ask Guy Ritchie). In a way, it feels like she belongs to me—and to you, and to all of us women. She’s like a celebrity version of the proverbial Bohemian aunt who lives across the country (or across the
pond). She’s unconventional, unpredictable, sometimes even infuriating; sometimes we want to disown her. But we’ve also enviously tracked her every move, waiting for updates on her next outlandish antic, jealous but proud that we know some woman, somewhere, who has the gall to do exactly as she damn well pleases. Her freedom is our freedom.

In these pages, thirty-nine talented writers explore how Madge has changed their lives, both for good and for bad. They describe her influence on their notions of family, youth, celebrity, self-love. It’s all here. Enjoy it.

“Kids were quite mean if you were different. I was one of those people that people were mean to. When that happened, instead of being a doormat, I decided to emphasize my differences. I didn’t shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like. So of course I was tortured even more, and that further validated my superiority, and helped me to survive.”

“Children always understand. They have open minds. They have built-in shit detectors.”

Courtney E. Martin

 

 

 

 

 

MY MOM HAS an endearing habit of saving “television programs,” as she calls them, on her DVR for me to watch when I come home for holidays. Sometimes it’s a Tom Brokaw special or a segment from CBS
Sunday Morning
. Usually it’s a particularly touching moment on
Oprah
—a family reunited, John Travolta crying, free refrigerators for everyone. My mom, weathered by my impatience, very conscientiously cues the program to just the moment that she’s decided I’ll be interested in.

Last Christmas, I sat down on the leather couch with a glass of Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck to await my mom’s customized montage. She was armed with her remote (the only piece of technology she seems truly comfortable with these days) and a mischievous smile. When she hit “play,” it wasn’t Oprah’s mantras or Charles Osgood’s stately voice that greeted me, but a grainy image of my eight-year-old self standing remarkably still while the unmistakable lead-in to Madonna’s “Vogue” began to play. My late-’80s habit of
choreographing underwhelming dances to Madonna songs had come back to haunt me.

Oh, the jazz squares! Oh, the midriffs! Oh, the bossiness! I had clearly strong-armed my less assertive friends, Emily and Katie, into being my backup dancers. As they hopped backward, I strode forth, dressed in a sports bra and puffy mini-skirt, mouthing the words with sassy aplomb. Sometimes, and I am embarrassed to admit this, I scolded them when they missed their cues.

Poor, gangly Emily, who’d come from a strange faraway land called New Jersey and whose parents were very Christian and probably didn’t allow Madonna songs to be played in their home—so pure it had wall-to-wall white carpeting. Poor Katie, whose mother had thought it a good idea to cut Katie’s hair very short and then perm it until she resembled a mousy brown Orphan Annie without the endearing freckles. They each had enough to deal with. They didn’t deserve me. More specifically, they didn’t deserve Madonna and me.

What was it with Madonna and me? I wonder this as I watch the damning footage of my own personal homage to her. What sort of appeal did the Material Girl have for a second-grader growing up in Colorado Springs, Colorado—the motherland of the Evangelical Christian movement, home of the Air Force Academy, test city for
Fast Food Nation?

The too-easy answer is, well, sex. Even at that young age, a neighbor boy and I had discovered my dad’s stack of
Playboy
magazines in the attic. On Barbie breaks, we’d flip through them, marveling at the bushy vaginas and big breasts in soft focus. I wasn’t turned on by them so much as curious about their power. They were hidden, after all. My parents—old hippies—were the kind of people that considered very few things off limits.

Madonna
was
undeniably sexy. She had that flirtatious beauty mark, that two-toned hair, that lacy glove. She let men hold her up and carry her around. She wore bras as outerwear. But as I watch myself—scantily clad and comically skinny, prancing around and
striking poses—I don’t remember Madonna’s sexiness being what inspired my performance.

I was undeniably a child trying on a sort of adult persona, but it wasn’t the sexuality that I was compelled by. In the same way that I sometimes tried on ambition as a pretend “career woman”—purse thrown over my shoulder, always in a rush, heading to very important meetings with very important people—I sometimes tried on confidence, as Madonna. Ambition, as I’d come to understand as an adult who paid rent and pitched stories, is much more complex than the purse and the rushing, just as confidence is much more layered than a midriff and bold lyrics. But at the time, it was all just one big game of pretend.

Since then, lamenting the era of “too sexy, too soon” has become a big business. My sports-bra-wearing and hip-shaking (sans actual hips) of yesteryear actually has a name these days: early sexualization. Miley Cyrus—that sweet country daughter—posed seductively in
Vanity Fair
and suddenly radical feminists and Evangelical preachers stood on common ground, both lamenting the end of young girls’ innocence. Viral videos of little divas, dressed to the nines, rocking out to Beyoncé’s hit “Single Ladies” caused furious typing from both the nation’s progressive “mommy bloggers” as well as from church deacons. Suddenly little Lolitas were turning up everywhere—exploited, objectified, and eliciting the fury of the strangest bedfellows.

And even though Madonna, unlike Miley, was well into her twenties by the time she inspired little girls like me to vamp in their living rooms, perhaps she can be marked as the first pop figure to usher in an era of early sexualization.

I can’t help but wonder—would I be seen as another tragic casualty of our highly sexualized culture were my little video to go viral today? I think there’s a good possibility that I would be pitied and protected, that my gyrations might be interpreted as evidence of inappropriately early maturation. Though I might wonder why the hell my mom let me wear that sports bra, I can’t help but think the embarrassing scene
would be wildly misunderstood if it were characterized as something salacious.