This R&B and soul singer from The Bronx has come along way in her career since she recorded "Caught Up in the Rapture" with a mall karaoke machine in 1989. There will surely never be a need to use a karaoke machine for recording purposes, unless of course she chooses to. Mary J. Blige is a 3-time Grammy award winner and even has the distinction of being named the "Queen of Hip Hop Soul". Our personal favorite period of her career was with the 2001 release of her album "No More Drama". Even more significant was the fact she was coming to town in support of this very album, so of course we were going to be out on the town to try and meet her.
Arriving on time is about the only thing we did right on this autograph outing. We had just seen her recently in an interview and knew that her hair was blond, so that's what we kept looking for. Unfortunately a lot of her back up vocals also have their hair dyed blond and it resulted in a couple of false alarms. There were dancers and back up singers all over the place and it really kept our attention away from someone that was much more important in our quest, Mary J. Blige herself.
Looking back at this autograph outing we realized that we saw her a good majority of the time we stayed there. Mary J. had just dyed her hair red and we surely weren't looking for someone with red hair. We didn't give her so much as a glance, especially because this individual didn't seem like a diva in the least. All of the sudden Sterling took more notice of this "dancer" and realized that this wasn't a mere dancer but Mary J. herself! He told Earl about this and when we looked closer it was definitely her, boy did we feel stupid.
Mary J. was deep in conversation with her crew so we waited for a good moment to ask, didn't want to interrupt. Right when it looked like we could walk over she pulled out her cell phone and took a call, crap. We really didn't want to intrude while she was talking so we stayed back and hoped we would get a chance to ask her for an autograph. Our chance would never come unfortunately, as she suddenly jumped up on the bus and we let a perfect opportunity pass us by. The engine started up and it soon took off down the street to a venue that is impossible to collect autographs at.