Boss Lady (9 page)

Maddy said, “If they can have some damn
Cheetah Girls
then I know we can have a
Flyy Girl.”

“I know,” Jasmine agreed.

Petula said, “I like the
Cheetah Girls.
We needed something like that.”

“We need
Flyy Girl,
too,” Maddy insisted. “I mean, you ever notice how they always wanna do that safe-and-sound shit but never the real?”

“Because safe and sound sells more,” Sasha stated. “PG always outsells R.”

I spoke up on that myself. “No, it doesn't. Especially not in our community. If you look at the majority of the classic black films, or even Asian and Latino films for that matter, the majority of them are dramas that really meant something to the people, and that's why we still watch them. Like,
Cooley High
has always been a classic to watch in Philadelphia. And now we have Spike Lee movies, John Singleton movies, the Hughes Brothers. And they were all dealing with mature content.

“So that PG shit doesn't work for us,” I told them.

“But it works for Hollywood. And they don't care about any classics. They care about making their money right now,” Alexandria argued.

“Well, that's why we can't make
Flyy Girl
then. We have conflicting interests,” I responded. Our argument about the movie went back and forth.

“But you don't think
Flyy Girl
would make any money. I think it would,” Petula spoke out. “Because American girls are very materialistic, and they like looking back in time at other fashion statements. I mean,
Flyy Girl
is all about the eighties, right?”

“I thought we were supposed to be talking about starting an urban girl's club,” Tonya asked us. “How did we all of a sudden start talking about
Flyy Girl
again?”

Jasmine said, “Because I think Flyy Girls is a better name for us than some Urban Miss. I mean, what if they're not even from an urban area? It just alienates people. But anybody can be a flyy girl. You can be a flyy girl and live on a farm.”

Maddy said, “No, you can't. You can be a damn
cowgirl
if you live on a farm, but not a flyy girl.”

Alexandria agreed with her. She said, “I know. You just make it seem like any girl can be flyy.”

Jasmine said, “Being flyy is just a state of mind to me.”

I told her, “My cousin Tracy said that, in her day, you had to be flyy in attitude, your clothes, your man, everything. You just didn't throw that word around on anybody, you really had to
be
flyy.”

“That's what I'm talking about,” Alexandria agreed. “And you tell your cousin that if she need me for the movie, I'm right here.”

Jasmine said, “Here we go. Just because you have rainbows for eyes does not mean that you fit the part. Because you're way more stuck up than she is.”

Alexandria looked appalled by it. She said, “Stuck up? Why, because I don't get all excited about everything like you do?”

“I don't get excited about everything.”

“You don't? Oh, you could have fooled me. ‘There's Tyrese! There's Tyrese!' ” Alexandria mocked her from a past visit to the Beverly Hills Galleria where we spotted the singer/actor shopping with his boys.

Jasmine smiled and said, “Well, I happen to like Tyrese.”

Petula said, “I have a younger brother who looks just like him. But he's too young for you. Onan is only sixteen.”

“She'll take him, as long as he's jet black,” Maddy joked. “She loves herself a dark-skinned black man.”

“Shut up!” Jasmine told her.

“So, how are we gonna do this, Vanessa?” Tonya asked me again, concerning the membership.

We were getting way off the subject.

I said, “Again, I think setting up a website is the best way. And we can post all of our ideas, discussions, and events, and have all of our members respond to them.”

All of a sudden, Tonya shouted, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, they're about to show Fifty Cents' crib!”

Maddy said, “You like him? He is not cute.”

“His money is though,” Tonya responded with a laugh.

“Yeah, and he just got that yesterday,” Maddy told her.

Tracy walked in the door on us in the heat of everything.

“Hi everybody,” she said in passing. She headed straight past us and right up to her room.

My friends were all in silent shock.

“Should we ask her about using the name?” Sasha asked us all.

“I'll ask her,” Jasmine dared.

I said, “No, if anything, I'll be the one to ask her.”

“Well, ask her then,” Maddy instigated.

“Not right now,” I told them. “I mean, you can tell that she's busy right now.”

Sure enough, Tracy headed back down the stairs with a bag of her things and headed straight for the front door.

“Be good, Vanessa. Bye everybody,” she told us on her way back out.

Maddy said, “I bet she has a hot date out there waiting for her. You can see his headlights still on.”

We all chuckled at it.

Tonya said, “A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.”

Jasmine said, “Well, she's not a girl anymore. She a real woman now.”

Petula smiled. She said, “We are all girls at heart, we just have to make women's decisions when we get older. But even an old woman can be a girl. My grandmother in Nigeria taught me that. She said a girl's heart keeps a woman young, and so does a boy's heart in an old man.”

It all made sense to us, so no one argued about it. Because we were all girls at heart.

*  *  *

As much as I hated to admit it, I was growing out of my eagerness to continue sweating my cousin about turning her book into a breakout film. It was really wearing me out, and like she said, I had my own life aspirations to figure out. I couldn't live my life through her. So I was not pressed about asking her if we could use FlyyGirls.com for our new website name and membership emails. It looked like another long, uphill battle. I still liked my own idea of UrbanMiss.com anyway. However, I did recognize that an already popular name would
maximize our efforts to attract members. But Tracy just wasn't ready to go there.

I considered her procrastination a waste. I mean, you get all that power and name recognition and then you sit there and do nothing with it just because someone else says it won't work. I couldn't believe that. My cousin had me losing respect for her. We all looked up to the flyy girl who would just get up and go for it, not the one who wouldn't even try. We knew plenty of people who wouldn't try. What good was that? So I was steadily thinking about finding ways to make things happen for myself.

I was in my room just about ready for bed after reading another chapter of
The 48 Laws of Power,
when Tracy walked in on me.

“Okay, you got me,” she said out of the blue.

I was confused. “I got you?”

I didn't have any idea what she was talking about.

She said, “I'm gonna start writing a screenplay for
Flyy Girl,
and you're gonna help me to set everything up for a casting call. You've been asking me for this workload, Vanessa, so don't start whining when I give it to you.”

I sat up in bed and got excited. I said, “Oh, bring it on then.”

“That's exactly what I'm about to do,” she told me.

I said, “So what made you change your mind all of a sudden?”

“It wasn't all of a sudden. I've been thinking about it,” she told me. She grinned and said, “Probably not as much as you have, but I have been thinking. And it's only a matter of time before I have to start putting this thing together anyway. It's either now or later. It's not gonna go away. And since I haven't decided on my next project with the studios, I figure I may as well get my own fire burning again.”

I asked her, “So the production companies are totally against
Flyy Girl
as your next movie?”

Tracy said, “After
Jump-start,
they are not feeling the black woman's issues right now.”

I said, “But that's a totally different kind of movie from
Flyy Girl.”

“Nevertheless, it was a multiple black women vehicle that didn't work.”

I went hard on my cousin and said, “Well, who asked for that movie? I mean, I felt like you did it to connect to me, but no one really wants to hear a sob story about a relative taking in a sibling unless it has some major drama in it. The sibling would have to be in some type of big trouble or create big trouble.”

To my surprise, Tracy began to laugh at my frank comments.

She said, “Yeah, like you're creating trouble for me right now. But you know what, Vanessa, I think I needed you. After these last two films bombed, it took a lot out of me. Now I'm turning back into the public school teacher who complains about people not getting how hard I work.”

“They don't care,” I told her. “That's just the way people are. They want what they want and that's it.”

Tracy took a look at the book I was reading. She asked me, “What are you doing with that?”

It was her book.

I smiled and said, “I was reading it.”

“How far did you get in it?” she asked me.

“Well, I wasn't reading it straight through. I was kind of jumping around to the different chapters that I was interested in.”

“What are your favorite chapters so far?”

“Umm . . .” I had to remember them. I said, “Well, I just got finished reading Law Twenty-nine, to plan all the way to the end. That was pretty good. And the one before that one, to move with boldness, was good, too.”

My cousin continued to smile at me. She said, “A lot of those laws are dealing with natural personality traits. I've always been bold. But are you trying to be a leader by reading that, or are you just reading to be reading?”

I smiled back at her. I said, “Actually, I'm already like a leader.” I decided to keep it at that. Tracy would tell me what she thought about it anyway. So I waited for her to do so.

She nodded and said, “Law number one, never outshine the master, or you'll find yourself out on your ass. Anyway, I have a lot of things I want to go over with you,” she told me.

She said, “I know this girl Charmaine Dearborn who asked me about starting an urban girl's fashion line a while ago, and at the
time I just wasn't thinking about it. I was too busy making movies.

“Well, I'm gonna put you in contact with her to start coming up with ideas for Flyy Girl minitees and ponytail hats,” she said. “I want bright, summer colors like orange, lime green, hot pink, sky blue, and a rust color. I don't want any yellows. Yellow is weak, so we'll use rust instead. And you and your girls will be the first ones to wear them.”

As my cousin continued to talk, I felt like I needed a pen or something to jot it all down.

I said, “Wait a minute. Let me get something to write this down with.”

Tracy told me, “You'll write it down later. I just wanna get some of these ideas out while I'm thinking about them.”

I was conflicted. I still wanted to write them down, for both of us. But at the same time, Tracy was on a roll and I didn't want to break her flow.

I said “Okay” and planned to use my memory instead.

She stood inside the room at the foot of the bed and told me, “I'm gonna get my lawyers to copyright Flyy Girl Ltd., and we'll design the logo off of my
For the Love of Money
book jacket pose, where I'm all glammed out and holding the purse at my side.”

I stopped her and asked, “You want an image as a logo instead of just the words. That's old school. Nobody does that anymore.”

My cousin told me, “Exactly. I am old school. I'm from the eighties, and I'm about to bring it back. Now, you have to understand that if we do this movie right, then we'll have to talk to Jordache, Sergio Valente, Gloria Vanderbilt, Coca-Cola, Gucci, Lee Jeans, Laura Biagotti, Members Only, Izod, Le Tigre, Aigner, Guess. And if you think for one minute that I'll have any of these old designers in my movie without having my Flyy Girl Ltd. out first, with a logo that young girls
and
old can lock in their minds on
sight,
then you gots to be crazy.”

She said, “I don't even need words in Japan, just my logo. I don't need words in Germany, just my logo. I don't need words in Brazil, just my logo. And then when I show up, looking flyy as usual, they know it's me without any spelling or language barriers.”

I started smiling. My cousin was just running off at the mouth. It
was like she was back from the grave, man. The dark cloud had passed her by.

She said, “So what we do is this: I finish writing this screenplay, and instead of us calling up Hollywood actresses, who may or may not have the drawing power to pull this movie off at the box office, hell, we roll up our sleeves and go on the road to find our own flyy girls for a multitude of purposes; extras, co-stars, models, assistants, you name it.

“And we can take it from city to city, starting with Philadelphia,” she told me.

I said, “That's how J. Lo got her start, while casting for the role of the Mexican singer Selena.”

“That's also how your favorite film icon, Spike Lee, discovered a lot of people,” Tracy told me.

“He's not my favorite,” I told her. “I just talk about him a lot because he deserves respect for starting it all.”

“Actually, Melvin Van Peebles started independent black films fifteen years before Spike Lee.”

“Yeah, and it was someone else doing black films fifteen years before him,” I argued with a grin. I was sure happy to see Tracy back, though. She hadn't been her spunky self in my opinion for
months.

She said, “Anyway, getting back to what I was saying. I can hire cameramen and photographers and start up the clothing line with a hot buzz and limited sales in the cities where we host the flyy girl casting calls. That'll help me to break even with our travel and setup expenses while we build the hype. And by the time we're done, any production company that would not take advantage of the momentum we build would be insane.”