Show Some Love for the World Famous Apollo Kids!

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Up the stairs, up the stairs, the ushers point and nod, letting us know to keep going, don’t stop, that there are no seats available between here and the nosebleeds. We snagged free tickets to a taping of Showtime at the Apollo and I can hear them pump Marvin and Tammi, above us, around us, setting the mood. I’m happy, no matter how hot August is outside, no matter how many red-carpeted flights of stairs they tell us to climb, keep climbing, still in lockstep behind those we stood behind in that line that stretched from the door to Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

Finally, the last steps, the last balcony. The usher motions us into the chamber: a clamshell containment of sound and black—no, American history, house-lit dim, with walls of gilt on cream. We downstep and try not to slip to get to the two seats near the aisle, two rows from the drop to the main floor. We sit, so aware of our heat as our bodies rest, our hearts still pounding, and we smile—for we’re here, and the rows fill up fast with we, the people. The we, you could have just opened up the theater doors and waved-us-in people. Not just the fortunates who can regularly afford concerts and Broadway nights in NYC, and not packs of kids in matching t-shirts getting one of their yearly field trips—no, we the regular folk who happened to be walking through Harlem when hawkers gave out tickets, though maybe I’m not regular folk anymore, maybe I’m too long out of the inner city, maybe too half-white to have ever really qualified. I just know I’m part of the we who know the amateur hour that used to be broadcast late on Saturday nights, who know the lucky stump and Ms. Kiki Shepard’s liquid walk, who anticipate that when the performers take the stage, if they can sing, if they can stun, they will get the praise they deserve. But if they falter, we get to call out the truth: we never have to pretend that the offering is what we want when we don’t want it. This isn’t charity. This is honesty. We get to wave our arms and scream what we’d scream at the TV: get off the stage!

C’mon, show some love, everyone, we need to feel the energy! says the warm-up man who is coaching the audience from the stage. He tells us the show depends upon us, upon all of us, the families, the couples, the teens, and even the little kids bouncing up and down these red seats the camera will never sweep.

I used to watch Showtime at the Apollo as a young adult and I clapped from my bed if a contestant nailed it, if a singer did Luther or Mariah and made me tingle inside, made my mood soften or brighten just like that. I can’t sing well myself, but if I could, that’s all I’d do. To be on that stage, piercing the Teflon-coats of a thousand hearts—that’s the life. That’s power and love. The power of love. Though I’ve been around long enough to know that it gets complicated. Brutal. That at this level, you can’t remove commerce from the equation. But even if we did, somehow remove commerce from the equation, and zoomed in on the men and women having their moments in the audience, drinking you in, trying to drink you up, trying to take that magic home, magic that is infused through you, you blessed vessel you, what happens when the song is over? Do they look at you like you’re The Lady in Red from For Colored Girls, with your rhinestones soaked off and studding the bottom of the tub?

C’mon on y’all, show me whatcha got! And we all go ahhhhhhh!

I’m thirty-three and new to the City, to Harlem. Tonight I...