Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. ![]() Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. ![]() Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. That said, Kodiad holds nothing back in this remembrance, which includes some graphic medical details, and he manages to pack a lot of candor into a brief book.Ī frank, but sometimes-disorganized, account of mental and physical illnesses.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. However, this same energy leads him to jump around in time and go off on tangents, and, as a result, it can be hard to follow such basics as where people live or when certain events happened. Kodiad asserts that it must have been “divine intervention” that drove him to tell his story-a term that gives the work its title he says he wrote it while feeling inexplicably like “an eighteen-year-old on an eight ball of cocaine.” The prose does have tremendous energy, especially in early chapters detailing his breakdown, which he narrates swiftly and with sharp, self-deprecating wit. Kodiad’s brother, Robert, moved to Georgia from North Carolina, but soon suffered a life-threatening vertebrae injury-one of several excruciating medical ordeals that befell the author and his family members, including his mother, his father, Kanyon, and Kanyon’s daughter, Brayly, the last of whom dealt with a dangerous misdiagnosis after a scan discovered a spot on her brain. ![]() Following those dramatic events, the author moved permanently to Georgia and gave his wife “what she really wanted and deserved-a divorce.” The two remained friends, however, even after Kodiad fell in love with and married Kanyon, a local teacher and cheerleading coach who had two young children. ![]() The two-year period ended with the author having a mental breakdown and threatening to jump off of a 13-story building, with police and news crews nearby. A memoir of one family’s struggles with numerous medical issues in the mid-2000s.įrom 2005 to 2007, Kodiad worked stressful, 18-hour days as the owner of an orthotic/prosthetic facility in South Florida, traveling back and forth from his home in the small town of Jasper, Georgia, where he’d moved his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law to give them a calmer life than they found in Florida.
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