All I ever wanted was to be a Spice Girl.
During recess in elementary school, my four girlfriends and I (I didn’t play with boys until I started playing with their dicks a few years later) would play Spice Girls every single recess. Being the blonde one in our group, I was automatically Baby Spice, which I was quite happy about. My mommy is my best friend, after all.
I had my first nervous breakdown when Geri left the group. I remember my mom’s boyfriend showed me the newspaper, which had a picture of the Spice Girls on the front with a lightning bolt between Geri and the other girls. As he passed it to me he looked me over warily and said, “I don’t want to upset you . . .” But it was too late. I was already clawing at my nine-year-old wrists. When Spice World ended, mine did too.
After watching the Spice Girls movie in the theatre, I was so jealous of those two little girls who win the contest and get to hang out with the group that I came to school and told everyone that I had won a similar contest and played with Baby and her stuffed animals for hours. I went all out with my lie (I consider my Spice Girls delusions the start of my inflammatory writing career), and some kids even believed me. I got in a screaming fight with my best friend, Sporty Spice, when she said her mom told her that the Spice Girls had never come to our hometown, so it was impossible that I had hung out with them. The fight got so bad she ran home crying, and so commenced my evolution from Baby to Bitch Spice.
Unfortunately, I never got to see them perform live anywhere, except in my hyperbolic imagination, but I did get to see the next best thing: five Spice impersonators performing to a sold-out crowd at the Rio Theatre.
For my review of Spice World at the Rio and Electric Circus: ’90s Brit Pop Invasion, check out Blitz & Shitz in the next issue of Xtra, in boxes May 8.
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