The Diva Rules Page 10
Find the good guys
Just because it’s a big boys’ club out there, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some truly fantastically amazing members of it. Goumba Johnny and Hollywood Hamilton, the first guys I worked with at WKTU as their “girl on the street,” taught me tons about radio. I came in knowing nothing. That egomaniacal crazy dude, Magic Matt, whom I hated at first but grew to love, helped me get a radio agent so I could renegotiate my contracts. And when, after six years on the air, WKTU declined to renew my contract (“flat ratings,” they said) four days before Christmas and when I was seven months pregnant, Goumba immediately picked up the phone and helped me get an audition for a gig in LA. I landed it on the spot, and two months later, when my second daughter, Lola, was only nine days old, I moved my family to sunny California, where I cohosted the morning drive with Sinbad for six months. When he decided that morning radio was not the right fit for a comic who does shows at night, he quit and I carried the show on my own for another six months, and then my radio dream came true: They let me have a female cohost. Any man in radio will try to tell you why the female/female morning shows never work, but luckily my talented cohost Diana Steele and I got to prove all the big boys wrong. We kicked butt on the morning drive in Los Angeles together for two and a half years before said big boys fired our amazing female program director to bring in a male one. His first priority? Split up our all-female morning show by adding a male. That male was Mario Lopez, the cutest guy ever, but almost too sweet to be my dream cohost. I am way more of a Howard Stern type of chick, so, later, in 2005, when Mix 102.7 came calling with radio legend and my real radio mentor, Frankie Blue, at the helm, you better believe they were able to lure me home. They also lured me with a repairing of RuPaul and myself in AM drive again, just as in the old WKTU days. Tripling my salary helped too. Which is all to say, there are good guys out there who will recognize you for your talent, not your tits. They’ll want to help you because it’s the right thing to do, and when they offer, the smartest thing you can do is accept.
Do what it takes to get shit done
First of all, when I say screw The Penis Club, I want to reiterate that I do not mean literally having sex with them. Screwing your boss (or all the men in your office) is sure as hell not the way to earn respect. Instead, you’ve got to be smarter about it. Read the room. Figure out what, or whom, you’re up against. Then plan your fight strategy. As you watch far less talented men repeatedly get promoted faster than you, and you learn that those below you are earning more than you, you may feel the overwhelming desire to become a raging bitch. I get that. And you know what? That works for some women. Wendy Williams has a famously low tolerance for sexist bullshit and a famously hot temper when she calls someone on it. This has undoubtedly helped her in her career. I tend to take a different tack. I schmooze, using my feminine wiles. Is it manipulative? Hell to the yeah! What’s wrong with that? I see nothing wrong with it. It’s one tool I have in my arsenal that no guy can either withstand or compete with. So, when a program director tells me I have to play twelve songs in an hour, leaving me zero time to do my thing on air, I will not hesitate to put on a low-cut shirt, walk into his office, and ask in my sweetest voice, “Please let me show you what I can do with eight songs. Won’t you just let me try it?” A diva does what she needs to do get the shit done. You don’t have to be a bitch, though I fully support you if you want to go that route. You just cannot be passive.
Stay true to yourself
I’ve watched some women actually try to join The Penis Club. They just start pretending they’re one of the guys, as if taking up golf and dressing in a suit will magically make their pay gap disappear. It’s a mistake. Not only will it not help you, but you may lose yourself in the process. Had I done that, I could’ve been some sort of asshole shock jock, but it’s not me. Instead, I stayed true to who I was. For example, I covered my headphones with pink fur and crystals, so if anyone walked into my studio, they knew who they were getting right away. I hung a sign on my office wall that said, “What would Madonna do?” I wore my leopard prints to work every day. Every boss I’ve ever had has seen my headphones and has said, “Of course you have pink fuzzy headphones,” and that was it. I love that I am who I am, and everyone else should too.
THE
TOPPLING THE PENIS CLUB is all about perseverance, sticking it out. When you’re faced with year after year of sexist bullshit, it’s easy to get discouraged. In fact, a lot of women will get so worn down that they quit. They walk away from their dreams, disillusioned, saying they can’t take it anymore. They’re just not cut out for it. But let me ask you this: How the hell are you going to prove yourself if you just give up like that? I know it sucks that you have to prove yourself all the time, but you do. And you can. You’ve got what it takes to succeed, and once you get that through your gorgeous head, no one can take that away from you. Now, diva, get out there and show me your stuff.
Help a sister out
Oddly, the first radio relationship I ever forged was with a radio chick who tragically went by the name of Powermouth Patty. She auditioned for the gig with WKTU, and I beat her out for it. When I landed the gig, she called me up and said, “You are so good. I just wanted you to know that.” She didn’t have to do that. Most people never would, and yet I’ll never forget her for it. She even went on to give me some great advice in general about the radio biz. Women generally don’t help other women in business out, and I think it’s a travesty. And I understand why it happens. We’re all constantly being pushed to the bottom, and we’re worried that if we use our one magic bullet to help a friend, we won’t have that favor to call in when we need it for ourselves. But by not helping one another, we’re actually hurting one another, and ultimately ourselves. There is room for more than one woman to be successful. There is room for all of us at the top. We just need to stick together. We need to be one another’s allies. We need to lift one another up.
rule no. 18:
NEVER TRUST A MAN IN DOCKERS.
You certainly can’t tell everything about a man by the way he dresses, but you can tell some things. For example, if he’s wearing pleated, wrinkle-free khakis, belted so high above his belly button that you can see his moose knuckle, you can be almost certain that he’s kinky as hell (which normally I’d say is a good thing, but not necessarily here) and his mind is utterly void of creativity. After all, there are a lot of different ways to look professional in an office, and Dockers are the most disconcertingly nondescript option. I guarantee you, the guys who wear these pants are the same ones who call Two and a Half Men their favorite TV show of all time. Real-life translation: They basically worship maleness above all else, even when it’s grotesquely mediocre. Therefore, what I’m telling you, divas, is that when you see a man wearing these hiked-up pants, just proceed with caution. That’s all.
And to be clear, this is not about me being a fashion snob, because I’m not one at all. (Hello, I get half my wardrobe at Hot Topic and Forever 21 wedged right between the Orange Julius and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels in the mall!) It’s about reading the signs people are giving you and using them to inform the way you move forward. I certainly don’t expect every man to look as sharp as Ru does, when he dresses in a suit and visits the Drag Race workroom. (By the way, he looks that good all the time, even when he’s in his trackies.) I just appreciate a man who chooses an actual style and owns it. If he’s a dandy, fab. If he’s a slob, also fab. At least it’s a choice. One of my favorite radio bosses of all time was a gay man with a nose job (love), a porn mustache (love), bonded teeth (love), and a toupee (OMG yes), and he wore a flannel shirt to work every single day. I loved everything about his look, even the flannel, because at least it was interesting. A gay in a flannel is always an enigma, and I love a good puzzle. A straightie in wrinkle-free khakis never is. You pretty much know whom you’re getting, and it’s rarely someone as sparkly or rule-breaking as you may prefer.
I learned this from my time at SUNNY 104.3 in
West Palm Beach. Working in radio is a little like working for the military in that you’re constantly picking up your entire family and moving to where you’re needed. Or just, you know, wanted. In radio, every December, all the DJs anxiously wait to see if their contracts will be renewed. And if they are, hooray, you stay put another year. If they’re not, then it’s “Honey, list the house and pack up the kids. We’re heading west. Or north. Or south. Or somewhere else that’s not here.” In 2007, a year after my short stint at the identity-crisis-plagued Mix 102.7 in New York City, I was offered something I’d never had before: a five-year radio contract in West Palm Beach. I had one daughter in second grade and another in preschool, and a five-year gig meant that for once my kids could make—and keep—some friends for a little while, so I jumped on it. At last, I could give my family some sweet, sweet stability.
West Palm Beach had fewer listeners than I had in New York or LA, but I loved it there, and I was still pulling in a solid six figures. And I knew so many New Yorkers who’d moved down there that I felt like it was the sixth borough of NYC, only with palm trees and without MetroCards, two major plusses in my book. The station’s general manager was a guy named Lee Strasser, a real old-fashioned radio guy who believed in talent. He loved everything about the format, and I loved everything about him. To make our bond even stronger? He was a Jersey boy. After I finished doing the morning drive every weekday, I’d go sit in his office and we’d just shoot the shit and laugh and laugh together.
By 2008, to everyone’s shock and dismay, Lee was let go after twenty-two freakin’ years of hard work and devotion, and they brought in a heartless numbers guy from Minnesota. He looked like an overweight Bill Murray with a thinning flattop, and literally every single day he wore tan Dockers to the office. I swear the guy must’ve had forty pairs of the same exact boring pants, which, at the time, I noticed enough to clock, but that’s about all. Anyway, despite his uninspired fashion, he wrote inspiring mass emails. (Yes, emails, which, in retrospect, now seems so shockingly impersonal.) He somehow convinced us all that there was more money to be had in sunny Florida, and if we just followed him, we’d all find it together. Dockers wanted us to believe that he was our messiah, and for a very short while, we all became his hopeful disciples.
In retrospect, I wish I’d paid closer attention to the clues he was sending that something was just not right about him. There were other warning signs. Like, I was one of his biggest talents, and he never once met with me in person, or as far as I know, with any of the other on-air personalities. I worked with him for months, and I’d never once been in his office. And soon enough, the promises he’d made to us about gaining bigger numbers started to crumble. “Stay positive,” he’d tell us. “It’s just going to get better.” And then one day in passing, my extremely talented, wonderful (and so wonderfully wholesome that I used to call him “Beav” as in Leave it to Beaver) morning-drive cohost, Rick Shockley, mentioned that he saw Dockers at his church, and I was actually relieved by this news. I thought, OK, he may not be in touch with his fashion sense or maybe even with the realities of running a radio station, but he’s in touch with his spirituality. That’s good. (Whether you worship Jesus, Allah, or a tree, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s just nice to be able to release your drama to someone or something.)
Then, one day out of the blue, I got a phone call that changed my life. Or, at least, should have. I was sitting in the driveway of a teacher’s house, waiting for my daughter to finish her math-tutoring session inside, when I answered the call. It was Randy Barbato from World of Wonder on the other end. He was an old, dear friend. My former manager and he (and his company) produced The RuPaul Show on VH1, where I had the best time of my life. He said, “Look, Michelle. We’re trying out this new show with Ru called RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s got huge potential.” He did not have to say another word to convince me to work with my best friend again. I was so in.
Now, as a rule, if you work in radio and your first name isn’t Howard and your last name isn’t Stern, then you get exactly two weeks off a year, and not in succession. To tape season one of Drag Race, I’d have needed three weeks. So I made a foolproof plan in my head, and then I made an appointment with Dockers to discuss the opportunity. It was my first time in his office, and when I walked in, my heart was suddenly beating out of my chest. Authority figures always make me a bit nervous. I’m a pleaser, so maybe “anxious” is a better word. Hello? I’m a Virgo, and we like everyone to be happy at all times. So, I just took a deep breath and said, “Listen, I have this opportunity that I’d really like to pursue. Do you know who RuPaul is?” He nodded, but I wasn’t even sure if he heard me; still, I went on. “Well, Ru and I worked together for years on TV and radio, and he’s got another TV show that he wants me to do with him. It’ll only take three weeks to tape, but it’s in LA. I’m not asking for any time off at all. I can wake up at three a.m. and do the morning-drive show live every day with Rick via ISDN line. No one would ever know I wasn’t sitting right next to him in the studio.” Dockers waited until I finished, and then said, “I’m going to have to say no.” That’s it. Just “no.” I protested, “What? You didn’t even think about it for a second.” He said, “OK, I’ll think about it more and let you know tomorrow morning.”
THE
WHEN I TELL YOU TO NEVER TRUST A MAN IN DOCKERS, it’s just my way of saying that you should always try to get a read on people sooner, rather than later. Every man in nondescript khakis surely isn’t an asshole, but if you find something about someone that unsettles you or makes you feel like something is just slightly off, even if you don’t know what that something is yet and even if you otherwise like the guy, put a pin in it and stick it to the bulletin board in your mind. Listen to your gut, because your instincts are never wrong. In work and life, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but keep your trust until you’re sure it’s been duly earned.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, but I couldn’t figure out a plausible reason why he would say no. If it was good for me, it’d also be good for the station, especially if the show took off the way everyone thought it would. So the next morning, after my show ended, Dockers called me down to his office. He said, “I still have to say no.” And that was it. I was stunned. “Can you tell me why?” I said, to which he responded, “I just don’t think it’s the right image for our station.” I just stood there, staring at him with my jaw on the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I snapped. And he just started pecking at his computer’s keyboard, pretending that I wasn’t still in the room. Eventually, I turned on my heels and stormed out of his office. I made it to my car before I burst into tears. Dockers single-handedly crushed my dreams and there was nothing I could do about it as I was in the beginning stages of a five-year contract, bound to this hateful asshat.
Because I’m the sole breadwinner in my family, there was no way I could risk getting fired, so I called Randy at World of Wonder and broke the terrible news to him: I was out. The show would have to go on without me. Even worse, I couldn’t be there for my best friend, and that nearly killed me.
rule no. 19:
PROJECT POSITIVITY, EVEN WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE SHIT.
There will be times in your life when nothing seems to go your way. You can do everything right—plan ahead, work hard, dream big, get straight, go forward, move ahead—and still get whipped. It’s a lifelong struggle for most people, me included, to come to terms with the idea that, as much as we’d like to believe it, we are not really in control of everything in our lives. Some things, sure. But not all things. Like, for instance, other people.
When my boss at the West Palm Beach radio station told me that he would, under no circumstances, allow me to take my rightful seat next to Ru on season one of Drag Race, I was completely devastated. Ru did not take the news well either. He knew I was supposed to be a part of the show, he felt the blow of the reality that I wouldn’t be able to join him every bit as much as I did. My absenc
e caused the first (and only) real rift our relationship has ever seen. Ru is a Scorpio, which means when he’s hurt, he just shuts down, so after I told Randy I couldn’t do the show, I didn’t hear from my best friend for a long, long time. It was the saddest, loneliest year of my life. I was gutted.
When season one of Drag Race finally aired, I forced myself to watch it in the same way you force yourself to get a dental cleaning. You know you need to and it will make you look and feel better, but you really don’t want to because it makes you uncomfortable. I wanted to see Ru kick ass, and of course I was rooting for his success harder than anyone. And yet the show made me cringe, only because it was just so difficult to see another woman sitting in my seat. My seat! Now, at that point I didn’t know Merle Ginsberg. Never even met her. But it was clear from Episode 1 that she wasn’t me, and—no T, no shade—she could never be me. She was a sweet, pretty, straight fashionista, which is fine and lovely, but she lacked, in my opinion, the gay fabulosity that one needs sitting next to the Grand Dame on RuPaul’s Drag Race. That and the fact she couldn’t come close to delivering Ru like I could, but let’s be honest, no one can, so it’s not her fault. Meanwhile, I sat at home, sulking, feeling like a pathetic loser who apparently had so little power in the world that I just couldn’t get off of work for three weeks. But that was the truth.