Stephanie Mills
In 1974, a seventeen-year-old from Brooklyn stepped onto a Broadway stage as Dorothy Gale and began a run that would last five years. That production was The Wiz, a musical that went on to win seven Tony Awards, and Stephanie Mills remained at its center from its opening through 1979.
Mills was born on March 22, 1957, in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Erasmus Hall High School before her career took shape in the theater. Her years in The Wiz established her as a stage presence, but the production also gave her something that would follow her well beyond the footlights. The song "Home," drawn from the show's score, became a number one R&B hit in the United States, and in time it became the defining song of her career.
From the stage, Mills carried her work into recording, working as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist rooted in soul music. Her range of occupations — musician, songwriter, recording artist, and film director — reflects a career that moved across more than one medium. The signature status of "Home" endures as the most concrete measure of the reach her work achieved: a song that began inside a Tony Award-winning Broadway production and crossed over to top the R&B charts, cementing a connection between her name and that single performance that neither her stage work nor her recording career would entirely displace.
Quotes by Stephanie Mills
This is something I love to do. I’ve never had any other job. I love singing and entertaining.
It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It’s a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.
Respecting beings, places, and life ways would be a basis for a worthy systemic analysis. And such an analysis would be inherently conservative, assuming that technology – from the fire stick to the silicon chip – is apt to do more harm to the Whole than good.
Enjoying the least things – a chill glass of water, a moment of play with the cat, the sight of sunlight caught in the frost spangling the locust twigs – is a form of prayer.
Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology – from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb – why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they’ll employ a technological innovation?
It’s the artist’s duty to have an artist’s life, somehow to obtain time and freedom and then to muster the desire and discipline to make good work out of the life, whether that goodness is in the world’s aesthetics, its radicalism, its candor, its singularity, or its universality.
What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization’s war upon it.