As a child, it seemed that grown-ups could do whatever they wanted to do. I very quickly surmised that this kind of freedom is what it meant to be an adult. This became my mission: to grow up, to leave my parents’ jurisdiction, to be independent. Unconsciously, I spent my entire childhood refining this idea. When things would happen to my disadvantage, I would begin to imagine my adult life and what it would be like, to be able to do whatever I wanted.

When I would daydream this way about the future, there were a myriad of things that simply didn’t matter anymore. Being a hopeless tomboy. Being the middle kid. Being four eyed and painfully shy. Being the only girl out of six boys. Constantly being called a white girl by my black schoolmates because I loved to read, and also because my mother only allowed grammatically correct English from all of us. I remember demanding to know why I couldn’t talk like everyone else in the neighborhood. “Because,” my mother said, in a quiet measured tone, “if you talk like a servant, they’ll treat you like one.” She probably doesn’t remember telling me that. Needless to say, I’ve carried it with me ever since. Later, I learned that there’s way more to being black than the way that you talk. But that’s another conversation…

I knew that I would walk away from all of it one day and no one would stop me. But where in the world would I go?

One sleepless night, I sneaked into the den and watched “The Panic in Needle Park.” I was transfixed. New York City became my lodestone. I began to fantasize about what it might be like to live there. Over time, what I imagined became very specific. I would live in Harlem (where else?) and I would live alone. I would have vintage clothes and antique furniture and lots of beautiful green plants. I didn’t know what I’d do for a living but I knew that it would be something that made me happy. Time marched on. I would spend my afternoons watching screwball comedies, Bugs Bunny cartoons and The Mike Douglas Show, pretending to be an unemployed superstar, reading history books and mentally rearranging the furniture in the cool apartment I’d have someday.

Musically, everything from the Allman Brothers to The Clark Sisters was floating through the ether in my world like ticker tape. What’s important at this juncture is that no one was there to tell me that it was wrong for me to like Conway Twitty or that I shouldn’t be listening to Journey or that Mandrill sucked. I knew what I liked and didn’t like and I didn’t care what anyone else thought about it. I sang things like Andre Crouch in the choir at church and I sang things like Puccini’s Messa di Gloria in the choir at school and when I wasn’t running around in the woods that surrounded our house, I sat around watching The Lawrence Welk Show and Soul Train and Hee-Haw and Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert. God help me, I loved it. I loved taking it all in. All that television and all those movies and all that music were distilling my artistic sensibilities. I knew what I liked and didn’t like, and I didn’t care what anyone else thought about the aesthetic choices I made.

I was doing my homework as an artist and I didn’t even know it.