Tell us about the production nu- numbers in 'School Daze.' Those are, those are some of the great, really--$$Yeah. They were, they were, I mean great movie productions. Otis Sallid was our choreographer. And, you know, Otis was from--I knew him from Ailey's [Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater]. He had done Broadway. And, you know, Spike [Spike Lee] really studied those MGM [Metro Goldwyn Mayer Inc.; Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios Inc.] musicals because he had to edit them a certain way, you know, for them to flow. He worked very closely with Otis. And, Otis also choreographed 'Malcolm X.' The--all that jitterbug series. So, when we went into rehearsal for "I Don't Wanna Be Alone Tonight" ["Be Alone Tonight"] really young, Tisha [Tisha Campbell-Martin] is maybe seventeen. She's younger than I am. And, we're supposed to ooze sensuality. So, we got the steps early and we looked good. But, Otis spent so much time on bringing out our sensuality. And, at first it was so embarrassing. Like, how you gonna teach me how to, you know what I mean. And, it was something that, you know, I don't think we knew yet. We just didn't know it yet; what he was talking about, and how to emulate that, which didn't have anything to do with the steps; the music or the choreography. You're talking about an approach. You're talking about a motivation as an actor. Once you, once you access a certain emotional key then you don't worry about making a face or ooh, ooh. You just feel it and those things naturally happened when you have certain thoughts in your head. So, acting wise, "I Don't Wanna Be Alone Tonight" I think was a little challenging. And, as I said before, he let us add our little steps and our choreography in there because, I think by then, we realized that cameras were only gonna get you when the camera was on you. As opposed to being on Broadway where you can see everybody at the same time. So, we tried to get in on Tisha's shots whenever we could. So, that it wouldn't be, you know, Tisha and the three backup singers and they end up splicing a lot of our choreography out of it. So, that's why you see us, you know, traveling and doing things around her and breaking out as a rose, you know. It's like, "Otis I have a good idea, what if we stand behind Tisha and you can't see us and then we, you know." "Yeah, that's good, let's try that," so. I think ultimately it did make it very interesting, but you know, I do give Otis all that credit for letting us have our little input, you know. And, Tisha sharing the stage with us. But, that was my big lesson in that number; accessing your sensuality. And, then for "Good and Bad Hair." I mean, first of all we had musical rehearsal to learn that song for days with Spike Lee's father [Bill Lee]. And, I remember staying on cocka-bugs for about ten minutes 'cause we didn't know what a cocka-bugs was. And, he wanted to say it like a cocka-bugs, cocka-bugs, and we were like, like Coke--cocka-bugs. (Imitates accent), "No, cocka-bugs, cocka-bug." And, now I know what they are. They're those little our spiky seeds, I guess, that fall from pine trees.$$That stick in your--$$Yeah, that stick to you. And, our line was (singing), "Where you got cocka-bugs standing all over your head." I mean, every line that we learned, it's not like learning a pretty song. Every line is so derogatory and, and vice versa, you know, back at 'cha kind of thing. But, when we did it and we were in each other's face all day, I think we had fun on "Good and Bad Hair" 'cause by that time, we had gone through the worst filming day, which was the day of the big fight. And, it was the step show. Gammas [Gamma Rays] come on and the fellas bust in and do their own kind of mocking step of what the fellas believe. And, at the end of it, and we didn't know what they gonna do. They made up their own thing; the real actors. They unzipped their pants and hot dogs came out of it, in our, our faces. But, we didn't know that was gonna happen. It was not scripted. It was so profoundly offensive that one of the actors actually hit another actor, or grabbed him. And, a real fight ensued. And, Spike had it on film. The tension was so high because all day we had been going back and forth with the wannabes and the Gammas against the jigaboos. And, it was improv and people were saying horrible and nasty things. And, they were saying, you know, you're, "You're just an ape in the zoo." And you're just a, "You don't know you're black and you're a white--." I mean, and I couldn't improvise anything. I could say the lines that were scripted but I, you know. And, I felt like maybe I'm not a good actor 'cause I can't do this. I can't go there. I can go there, if you tell me what I'm supposed to say, but you know. And, then at the end we started, when we went to the parking lot to get on the bus, we started crying. 'Cause a lot of my friends were on the other side, and it was just very hard for us to do that with that kind of intensity.$Then my, and then my issue was, you know, how do I organize this so that the reader can, can flow, you know? So, I wrapped it around the times I would see her. Because I, you know, I lived in New York [New York]. I had an apartment in New York and a, and a house in L.A. [Los Angeles, California] But, I didn't always, we weren't always in the same city. So, some times those conversations were in New York. Sometimes they were in Marin County [California] where she lived and had house boat. Sometimes those conversations were in Atlanta [Georgia] where she lived in Stone Mountain. So, I tried to wrap around where we were in our real lives and what was going on. I think the greatest compliment that I have from people about the book ['Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary,' Jasmine Guy] is that it just sounds like me. Like it just, my, my friends that know me say, you know, "I just felt like it was just you talking. Like, it didn't feel like you were writing." And, that to me was the greatest compliment because I wanted it acceptable, you know. But, during the course of writing the book, I would sidetrack. Like she would mention something to me, and I didn't wanna stop her, her flow. But, sometimes I didn't know what she was talking about. Like, what was that, bembe? I think it was bembe. They were the drummers that would be in Central Park [New York, New York].$$Djembe, yeah, djembe.$$Well, the djembe, but it began with a B.$$Oh, okay.$$And, I don't, I, you know, but I didn't wanna stop her.$$Was that the name of the group that--?$$Yeah. And, then, another time she said her husband's father was a Garveyite. And, I didn't know what that was but I didn't wanna stop her. So, I go back and do research about Garveyites, which of course are from--followers of Marcus Garvey which--also, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the Panthers [Black Panther Party]. So, now I'm starting to see this.$$See the lineage of all the groups--$$The lineage, yes, of these three ways of thinking; Du Bois [W.E.B. Du Bois], Garvey, and Wash- and Booker T. Washington. You know, 'cause people think all black people think the same way, but it depends. And, it depends on class and culture and, you know, I just saw a documentary about the Panthers and it feature Stoke- Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] and how bright he was, and how brilliant he was. And, you know, what, what his friends were saying is that they missed that you don't see his personality in the footage. It's always him, you know, speaking in a public way. But, you didn't get to see how funny he was, how witty he was, how easy he was to be with, you what I mean. And, I wanted to, to make sure I gave Afeni [Afeni Shakur] that flavor that, you know, when I visited her home, and it was her first home, it was the first home that she owned and Tupac [Tupac Shakur] had bought it for her and, and they were in this area in Stone Mountain where the family was all near. And, she had this huge screened in back porch that overlooked woods and she was so happy. And, she talked to me about land and the importance of owning land. So, then when I got home, I started looking up landowners, black landowners and what happened. What happened to shar- why, why did we become sharecroppers? What happened during Reconstruction? So, all of that is just to say that, she would say something to me that I now have to ex- tell other people, so I had to do my research so I knew what I was talking about. I couldn't just throw, you know, he was a Garveyite in there and not know what a Garveyite was, and what that meant for that time of that generation.
