Rant #2,663: Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud

Happy May 26!
 
I don’t know what I am so happy about; it’s just another day for me.
 
But somebody celebrates a birthday today that is at least worst mentioning, and it is the lady with the picture at the top of this Rant, and just looking at it makes me and a million other guys happy.
 
Can you believe that Pam Grier is 72 years of age today?
 
For kids that grew up in the 1970s—and I mean primarily boys who became teenagers during that decade—Pam Grier was IT.

 
I don’t care if you were black, yellow, white, brown, orange, purple or any other color in the spectrum, Pam Grier was IT, certainly one of the great sex symbols of her generation.
 
She has since gone on to become quite an accomplished actress, and is probably one of the busiest “older” actresses in Hollywood today, but everybody has to start someplace, and Grier had her first screen role in—
 
A Russ Meyer movie, which based on her exquisite, voluptuous figure back then, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

 
Back in 1970s, she had an uncredited role as a partygoer in Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” and that minor role propelled her to starring roles in a whole slew of blaxploitation films in the early to mid 1970s that made her a favorite of guys like me, just sowing our oats, so to speak, as young teenagers who were enraptured not just by her beauty, but by her incredible figure.
 
Just reading off a couple of movies that she was prominently featured in at the time really reads like a “Who’s Who” of blaxploitation films of the period, movies that featured every stereotype imaginable to get their points across, but these were also among the first widely distributed and seen films starring black actors in generally leading roles.

 
Look at the list of blaxploitation films that she was in from 1972 to 1976 or so:
 
• Hit Man
 
• Black Mama, White Mama
 
• Coffy
 
• Scream, Blacula, Scream
 
• Foxy Brown
 
• Sheba Baby
 
• Bucktown
 
• Friday Foster

 
And that doesn’t even include the straight-out exploitation films that she was in, including “The Big Doll House,” “Women in Cages,” and “Drum.”
 
And in just about every one of these, her incredible body was shown off to its fullest possible extent.

 
And even though these were true exploitation movies, she generally played strong women in each one of these films, using both her fists, her legs, and any available weapon to her advantage.
 
She rapidly became one of the top sex symbols of the era, with boys like me, of every stripe, waiting for her next movie to come out to see how much skin she would bare--and how many people she would splatter.
 
But as those types of films pretty much played themselves out of existence as drive-ins also went down the tubes, Grier might have been in some zero-star films, but she was learning her craft in those movies, and she went on to much better fare, and really, has never looked back.

 
In 1997, she was the star of Quentin Tarantilno’s “Jackie Brown,” and this one-time exploitation star actually was in a film that paid homage to her previous acting persona.

 
During the last 25 years, she has appeared in numerous TV and movie roles, including in Showtime’s “The L Word,” an ahead of its time show about lesbians that featured both gay and straight actresses in the lead roles.
 
And if you have wondered about it, Grier never married, although she has been rumored to have had affairs with everyone form basketball’s Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to comedian Richard Pryor, from whom she has acknowledged that she got a cocaine-related disease from during her sexual relationship with the known drug user (that is the politest way I can describe it; look it up for more details, but what she got from him was pretty ugly).
 
She is, herself, a cancer survivor, and looking back at her career, I guess you can call her a survivor in general.
 
Even all these years later, I can distinctly remember going to a drive-in around here to see a triple feature of her films “The Big Doll House,” “Women In Cages,” and the “Big Bird Cage,” and when HBO just started, they used to show just about all her movies during their late night fare, so I probably saw all of her movies, one way or the other, through 1976 or so.

 
So happy birthday to Pam Grier, a movie icon who really lifted her game to another level as the 1970s went into the 1980s and into the 1990s, all the way to today.
 
She is a piece of just about all male Baby Boomers’ lives, in particular us kids who were becoming teenagers in the early 1970s.
 
And we have all aged with her, but we still marvel at those early movies …
 
Absolutely incredible!