Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Janet Jackson - If (long version)

This one is a special request, so here's to you my forever friend. I got the long video, 'cause it's good and we only got to see it once or twice before they replaced it. Shout out to DLSA class of '94 and especially my girl Chika, my choreographer and co-conspirator.

For those of you that have no idea what any of that means, here's the short story.
For a school performance when I was in 8th grade, the girls that lived in Queens (and thus commuted together regularly) decided to perform "If". We watched the video and learned the choreography, then we held auditions. We didn't have enough boys for all of the girls, so Chika choreographed steps for the background dancers that didn't include guys, but fit seamlessly with the choreography that we learned from the video. We went to a small private middle school in the city (oh, that's Manhattan for those of you that don't know) and this caused QUITE a stir. The lyrics are a little more sexual that most of the adults thought was appropriate. (Okay, maybe they are a lot more sexual than was appropriate.) And then, Ms. Bunn (our vice-principal) discovered that there was some hand-genital and hand-chest contact as part of the choreography. We were told to edit those parts, and we did - sort of. LOL. Imagine a bunch of 13 year olds doing this dance, yes, the entire thing. And us in middle school...lets just say that we were a mature bunch - mentally, emotionally and physically. We wore all black, and we had black bandannas on our heads (that was the style at the time), and the guy doing the lighting made it flash during the instrumental part in the middle- HOT. Oh, and by the way, I was Janet.

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