Once Upon a Meeting: Amber Rose & Helena Andrews

‘This is too ironic for it to be a coincidence,’ I thought as I flipped through my camera phone and stopped at a picture of myself…and Amber Rose. Yes, Kanye’s former flame pursed her lips as her publicist immortalized our meeting. The irony comes into play as we rewind just a few hours prior to ATL’s La Bella Vie boutique. In my customary writer’s pose, I stood with my blackberry shoved in the face of author Helena Andrews. She’s the irresistibly witty D.C. writer who just recently released her first memoir, Bitch Is the New Black.

It was like I took a trip to bizarro world (See: Seinfeld). Did I really just interview what I would consider to be the oil and water of Black femininity? One famous for being smart. One famous for being sexy. To each interview I brought my pre-conceived notions. Some good. Most expected. Helena, a tall, beautifully brown-skin beauty, delivered exactly what I already expected from her. She was funny, confident, well-dressed but not style- consumed, easy-going with a lingering claw waiting to scratch if provoked, and overall, a pleasure to speak with. We talked with ease. After all, I’m a part of her audience – a special little audience of Black women that “get it.” We get the media. We get the men. We get the agenda. We get the patriarchal slant (of everything). We get the afro. We get the lace front. We get it. Got it? Of course her following spans across many cultures, but there’s always something special about us big-brained brown girls. There’s a common ground that is unspoken and unshaken.

Now as for dear Amber, I honestly felt unprepared. ‘What are we going to talk about?’ I was writing the piece for the BET Beauty Lounge so it wasn’t brain surgery. Blonde hair, pink lip gloss, Louis Vuitton shades. Mission accomplished. After sauntering around the hot box that was BChic’s shoetique (I’m sure it’s cool now), the store’s owner paraded Amber through the store and straight over for photos. She was dressed in a tangerine orange dress that hugged her body so tight I could see her belly button. Janelle Monae has her uniform and Amber does too. She’s a beautiful girl. Nothing to hate about there. Not just “on camera” beautiful, but ‘Seriously, you just wake up looking like THAT everyday’ beautiful. I suppose that I understand the weird fascination with her. Her melding of ethnic backgrounds (she told me she was West Indian) renders her face a racial mystery. Like an alien, you’re going to spend half of your time visually poking and prodding her face for some kind of cultural response. You won’t find one.

My “Kamber Rose” impersonation later that eve.

And the interview begins. She’s pleasant. Her thick Philly accent seems weird considering how she looks. You can practically smell the cheese steaks when she speaks. But I dig accents of all kinds (except for Sprint employees), so I appreciated the East coast flavor.

The entire time she was in the store, along with the time she stood outside – at night – she rocked a pair of designer shades. I inquired why and she said that they made her “feel protected.” She likened the sunglasses to a “wall she could always keep up.” As I removed my blackberry from in front of her glossy pink pout something strange happened. She hugged me. Genuinely. She wanted me to like her. A few moments after the interview she walked back over and said, “Please don’t write anything bad about me,” in a pleading tone. Because when you feel – no scratch that – when you know that the weight of your celebrity status  is solely measured in how fly you can look from day to day, you become very vulnerable. Helena, neither arrogant nor presumptuous, could have cared less if I liked her or not. Her self-worth wasn’t vested in my opinion of her. She’d already created her identity. You see, that’s the stark difference between the Ambers and the Helenas of this nation. Both time and “fans” are thieves of beauty. Just as soon as they endow you with their adoration they remain in a position to snatch it right back. As for the bookworms? Well, being smart just requires you to open your mouth every once and while to reaffirm what you’ve already established. And I prefer lyrical longevity to tickling unfamiliar fancies just waiting to give me the boot.

Til we read again,

-Kimberly