20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music
Day #5: Ben Harney & Sheryl Lee Ralph—“When I First Saw You”
by Mark Anthony Neal
What I remember most about high school, was that I was a bit of an outsider. Part of it was the Bronx cat traveling to BK everyday but also the fact that I was a nerd. Being a nerd wasn’t the worse thing to be in a school of future engineers and biologists—always knew that I wasn’t dude in the corner with the slide-rule. My future wife, though, was one of the cool girls. Granted she was two classes behind me, so I got some points for being older, but I’m sure a bunch of her girls were like “really?” when I started showing up on the regular, with my Sperry top-siders, pink polo shirts and matching pink socks. Rest assured weren’t too many wanna-be preppies (as it might have been described then) in my hood.
Nowhere was my outsider status more pronounced than in my taste in music. Still have vivid memories of one of those girls—you know gum popping, bad-ass girls—who were never inclined to pay me much attention, but gave me a little shine one day ‘cause I was listening to my first generation Walk-man. “What you listening to?” Gave her the headphone and while Ronnie Dyson’s “If You Let Me Make Love to You,” played in the in the background, a she blurted out to all who could hear “This is what you listen to?”
Yes, I was that dude, going to school in urban America in the 1980s when all of my peers were listening to The Furious Five, The Funky Four-Plus One, and The Crash Crew (which featured one of our classmates) and I was listening to ten-year-old show tunes. What specifically caught my fancy that spring was, not surprisingly, the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Dreamgirls.
Dreamgirls opened in December of 1981 and I had heard a little buzz about the show from some adults. In fact, I was a little ticked off when my mom got tickets to see the musical and didn’t take me. But she brought home that soundtrack. At the time I knew little about the history of Motown or anything about the fact that the original musical was a metaphor for the marginalization of Gay men in the arts. All I knew was that one song, “When I First Saw You,” sung by Ben Harney and Sheryl Lee Ralph in their roles as Curtis Taylor and Deena Jones. And indeed every-time that song came on I was Curtis Taylor and “Peaches” was Deena Jones.
Years later “When I First Saw You,” would be one of the songs I included, on series of cassettes tapes that I would occasionally give my future bride, each with a detailed, nuanced playlist and a little romantic picture, usually cut out from Essence Magazine, that I placed in the back of each cassette case. Dude was never a player, but you couldn’t tell him that he wasn’t the most romantic cat in the world.
