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Upstairs, after dealing with the HOB’s baroque security gauntlet, we nabbed a couple of spots in the special seating section. We weren’t supposed to be there, but our press passes looked enough like the VIP ones. For a while, anyway: after waiting around for another hour, looking at the photo of Mary projected on the screen in front of us and comparing notes on how much plastic surgery each of us thought she had done, we got booted. We ended up off to the side of the VIP area, behind three flamboyantly gay best friends. (It turns out that watching flamboyant gay men react to Mary J. Blige performance is roughly one-third of the entertainment value of a Mary J. Blige concert, so we were lucky.) Mary came out, shouting out Citibank right off the bat, surrounded on all sides by giant, backlit photos of her album covers and a collage of photos: toddler Mary, teenage project-chick Mary, more Marys onstage than members of her band.
Between songs she talked about the kind of trials that every person — and specifically every woman — goes through, and she explictly connected them to the words she sang. But she also talked about her success, and the struggle she went through to attain it, and the problems it causes her in the same way — as if all of us in the crowd can relate to how hard it is being a wealthy, gorgeous woman. And somehow, most of us do. At one point she’s doing the realizing-your-potential seminar bit and she starts invoking the journey her life has been, the journey that we are all taking by being alive on this earth. That’s when I wondered how it is that she can manage to turn the tritest cliche into an emotional epiphany the way that she does. And I also wondered if Citibank gave her a bonus for working the event’s ad copy into her lessons.
