Hot Chocolate

I'm sitting on the back porch eating Ruffles and drinking some pinot grigio right now, Drum's working late, and I've finally got some me time. So what am I doing? Relaxing with 'Bourgie, Bourgie: Vol. 2,' a CD compilation--graciously made for me by dear friend Ouizer--of R&B music from the '70s and '80s that falls into the musical category known as Quiet Storm. To put it simply, Quiet Storm encompasses what we children of the '80s know as "slow jams." When I was growing up, my very favorite radio station in the history of ever used to play a good mix of current pop hits, Latin freestyle (don't even get me started on this one), and Quiet Storm.

Ouizer helpfully separated the twenty-plus hits on this CD into two distinct periods: one covers the mid-'70s to early '80s, and the other covers the mid-'80s to late '80s. To distinguish, Ouizer placed a small photograph of the absolutely MAJOR and sorely missed Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis on The Jeffersons, on the first one. For the other, I got a nice picture of Tony-winning actress/bourgie earth mother Phylicia Rashad (better known during most of the Quiet Storm years as Phylicia Ayers-Allen). :)

It's been said that most gay men have a big ol' black woman somewhere deep inside, and I think that if my inner black woman were to show herself someday--no, and really, gurl...if you want to meet, just come on by!--she'd look something like Anita Baker when she's gettin' all up in some "Sweet Love." Maybe she's rocking a retro look to go with the tunes, like Sharon Bryant on the cover of Atlantic Starr's album In the Name of Love (see gurl in haneous dress, above). Or perhaps she'd look like Patti Labelle, looking out onto the city skyline and singing about how life will be better when I'm "On My Own." By the way, that song BLOW!s at approximately 4:01 if you want to lip sync along. What? I do it all the time.

And if I ever met my inner black woman, I think I'd take her out dancing on one of those 'round-the-harbor sunset cruises that always seem to be blasting this music from the water. Seriously! She and I would hit the dance floor in our pantsuits, glasses of wine in hand, and jam to some "Slow Hand" by The Pointer Sisters or "Saturday Love" by Cherrell and Alexander O'Neal. We'd get a little too tipsy on the dance floor and make asses of ourselves by doing The One Dance that you can do to Quiet Storm music. What's that? Oh, just tilt your head back, close your eyes, and make something that resembles a grin crossed with a grimace. Then just thrust your pelvis back and forth, wobbly-like, and shake your head slowly, like you're testifying. There. Done.

Me? I like doing that to "Juicy" by Mtume. Literally, it's a midtempo beat with folks whispering things like "Juicy!"...it's totes Soul-Glo commercial from Coming to America. Then I'd slow it down a bit and get all serious-like and look for some menses when the hit "I Miss You" by Klymaxx begins. Which, incidentally, may be one of the best slow songs of all time. Especially since it comes from the same group that gave us "Meetin' in the Ladies' Room," a song I'm more apt to prefer at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday night in some dark dance den. (Yeeeeeaaaahhh.)

This is one serious CD. OH, my God, Ouizer! YOU SHOULD HAVE PEDDLED THIS TO OPRAH'S LEGENDS BALL!!!!!!