Tina Turner

The nice thing about being sick with a sore throat is that when I sing I sound like Ruth Pointer of The Pointer Sisters.  My voice doesn’t naturally go that low, nor does it have any kind of shading.  It just sort of sits in the middle somewhere, beige and boring.  So I try to sing as much as I can when a sore throat sets in.  It’s worth the pain.  

I was in the car with my father in early 1984 when “Automatic” first came on the radio.  It’s one of the few songs on which Ruth, with her deep, guttural voice, sings lead.  “That’s The Pointer Sisters?” my father said.  “I thought it was a man.”  I had the same reaction when I first heard Tina Turner.  I was thirteen years old and completely unaware of her troubled past when she released her “Private Dancer” album in 1984.  They called it a comeback, but from what I had no idea.  The only thing I knew about Tina Turner was that my father, apparently, had once said he thought she was attractive, and my mother used this as a reason to question his judgment.  About anything.  “Dad thinks I should buy this one,” I’d say about something and my mother would say: “Yeah, well, your father thinks Tina Turner is attractive.”  

When I first saw Tina on TV in 1984, I was fascinated.  That hair, her mouth, that hoarse, emotional voice.  I couldn’t believe this was an actual person.  At first glance she was like a train wreck, and as they say about such things, you can’t look away, and the more I looked the more I noticed.  Tina Turner was one one of the most interesting people I’d ever seen, a complete character, unquestionably unique and entirely worth imitating.     

November 25, 1984

1.  Better Be Good to Me, Tina Turner

2.  Cool It Now, New Edition

3.  You’re the Inspiration, Chicago

4.  Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Wham!

5.  I Just Called to Say I Love You, Stevie Wonder

6.  I Feel For You, Chaka Khan

7.  Hello Again, The Cars

8.  All Through the Night, Cyndi Lauper

9.  The War Song, Culture Club

10. We Belong, Pat Benatar

Once a year my high school would hold an assembly during school hours for those in a band.  A concert.  The bands would play on stage in the gymnasium and the rest of us would sit and watch, whether we wanted to or not.  One band would play a few songs then clear the way for the next.  To keep the crowd entertained between setups, someone had the idea to hold a lip-sync contest.  Except it wasn’t a contest; it just was.  People got up, lip-synced, then left, never to be heard from again.  

The first year this happened I was a sophomore.  I watched the lip-syncing and thought to myself:  Amateurs.  Where’s the choreography?  The attention to detail?  Where’s the surprise?  The following year, Janelle Scarcelli, a senior, was in charge of the tryouts and carried around a sign-up sheet, so I stopped her in the hallway between classes one day and told her to add my name to the list.  “What song?” she said as she finished writing the wood of Southwood.  “Better Be Good to Me,” I said.  “Tina Turner.”  

I’d already had the choreography all worked out, beginning with my back to the audience then turning for the slow reveal.  In a perfect world I would rise from beneath the stage on a hydraulic lift.  I would have dry ice and pyrotechnics at just the right moment.  At the very least I would have a spotlight.  But we were a Catholic school with limited funds, so were lucky to have a curtain.  It was old and faded and patched in places, the kind of thing Dolly Parton would write a song about.  I knew that to rise above it all I had to pull out all the stops as Tina Turner.    

As I talked about my plans with one of my teachers, she said nothing for the longest time then finally, quietly, said:  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  She thought people would say I was gay.  And? I thought.  I didn’t see the problem.  For all I knew people already said it.  She rattled off a list of names, boys from the senior class, who she was certain would harass me.  “Don’t you care?” she asked, marveling at my stupidity.  It’s not that I didn’t care. Who wants to be harassed?  It’s that the thought of caring never entered my mind.  In the first place, I was never picked on in school, never harassed, and nobody ever bothered me, and in the second, I certainly didn’t think that getting up on stage and doing a spot-on imitation of Tina Turner singing “Better Be Good To Me,” of all songs, was going to turn the tide against me.  Honestly my only concern was finding an affordable pair of fishnet stockings. 

I had spent years in front of the mirror studying every nuance of Tina’s mouth.  Every twitch, every curl, every syllable she formed.  I knew the position of her arms, the movement of her legs, the way she tilted her head and swept the hair from her face.  The thought of caring never entered my mind because I was completely confident that when I got done with that stage people would be too stunned to even consider harassing me.  

“Ian, could I see you in my office a minute?”  The principal was leveling her eyes at me from just over the rim of her glasses.  Miss Moira A. O’Day was a former nun with short white hair and a thin, blunt voice.  I followed her into the office, and she gestured toward a chair.  She was wearing a shapeless tan skirt with a matching blazer over a white silk blouse with a bow at the top.  As I took my seat she closed the door and sat opposite me.  She had gotten wind of what I was planning to do and told me that under no uncertain terms could she allow me to do it. 

“Why?” I asked.  "Because," she said.  "If you remember, last year, five of the junior boys got up on stage in blackface and wigs.  People were offended.”  I was one of those people.  Not only were they in blackface but their lip-syncing skills were terrible.  I asked Miss O'Day what this had to do with me, and she said: “Well, Tina Turner’s black, isn’t she?”  I assumed the question was rhetorical.  Even when I knew nothing about Tina I knew at least that much.  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m certainly not planning on getting up there in blackface.  And besides, those guys weren’t being anyone specific, they were just being offensive.  I’m being Tina Turner.”  How could she argue with that?  I thought.  She had always seemed like a reasonable woman.  Not the friendliest, and certainly not the most fashionable, but reasonable.  

“Let me ask you a question,” Miss O'Day said.  She settled back into her chair.  We were sitting alongside a table with the chairs turned toward each other and she had one leg crossed over the other at the knee.  Her foot hung in mid-air, encased in a basic black shoe, and I was analyzing the size of the heel, thinking how much larger I’d want mine to be as Tina Turner.  “Why do you want to do this?”  she asked.  It seemed like a strange question because the answer was so obvious to me.  “Because it’s there,” I said.  “It’s there to do.  And I can do it better than anyone.”  She pressed on.  “But why do you want to imitate a woman?” And then I realized.  Tina Turner’s race wasn’t the issue at all.  It was her sex.  And mine.  “I don’t,” I answered.  “I want to imitate Tina Turner.  She just happens to be a woman.”  Miss O’Day wasn’t nearly as impressed by the answer as I was.  

My friends tried to convince me to be someone else.  Someone white.  Samantha Fox was popular at the time with songs called “Naughty Girls Need Love, Too” and “Touch Me,” but in the suggestion they were making the same mistaken assumption Miss O’Day had made, that I simply wanted to put on a wig and dress up like a woman.  But unlike Miss O’Day the possibility of it didn’t scare them.  I knew that no matter what I chose to do, if it wasn’t as a male I’d never be allowed on stage.  And I just didn’t see the point in being what I already was.  Where’s the surprise?  I thought.  

I like to think that somewhere, perhaps in a bar with her friends with a drink in her hand, Miss O’Day is looking over the rim of her glasses at a drag queen, lip-syncing a song, and thinking to herself what was the name of that boy?  The one who wanted to be Tina Turner?  Now that I would pay to see.