Twenty-five years after the first queen of hip-hop was stiffed on her royalty checks, Dr. Roxanne Shante boasts an Ivy League Ph.D. – financed by a forgotten clause in her first record deal. “This is a story that needs to be told,” Shante said. “I’m an example that you can be a teenage mom, come from the projects, and be raised by a single parent, and you can still come out of it a doctor.”

Her prognosis wasn’t as bright in the years after the ’80s icon scored a smash hit at age 14: “Roxanne’s Revenge,” a razor-tongued response to rap group UTFO’s mega-hit “Roxanne, Roxanne.”

The 1984 single sold 250,000 copies in New York City alone, making Shante (born Lolita Gooden) hip hop’s first female celebrity.

She blazed a trail followed by Lil’ Kim, Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah – although Shante didn’t share their success.

After two albums, Shante said, she was disillusioned by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company. The teen mother, living in the Queensbridge Houses, recalled how her life was shattered.

“Everybody was cheating with the contracts, stealing and telling lies,” she said. “And to find out that I was just a commodity was heartbreaking.”

But Shante, then 19, remembered a clause in her Warner Music recording contract: The company would fund her education for life.

She eventually cashed in, earning a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell to the tune of $217,000 – all covered by the label. But getting Warner Music to cough up the dough was a battle.

“They kept stumbling over their words, and they didn’t have an exact reason why they were telling me no,” Shante said.

She figured Warner considered the clause a throwaway, never believing a teen mom in public housing would attend college. The company declined to comment for this story.

Shante found an arm-twisting ally in Marguerita Grecco, the dean at Marymount Manhattan College. Shante showed her the contract, and the dean let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money.

“I told Dean Grecco that either I’m going to go here or go to the streets, so I need your help,” Shante recalls. “She said, ‘We’re going to make them pay for this.’”

Grecco submitted and resubmitted the bills to the label, which finally agreed to honor the contract when Shante threatened to go public with the story.

Shante earned her doctorate in 2001, and launched an unconventional therapy practice focusing on urban African-Americans – a group traditionally reluctant to seek mental health help.

“People put such a taboo on therapy, they feel it means they’re going crazy,” she explained. “No, it doesn’t. It just means you need someone else to talk to.”

Shante often incorporates hip-hop music into her sessions, encouraging her clients to unleash their inner MC and shout out exactly what’s on their mind.

“They can’t really let loose and enjoy life,” she said. “So I just let them unlock those doors.”

Shante, 38, is also active in the community. She offers $5,000 college scholarships each semester to female rappers through the nonprofit Hip Hop Association.

She also dispenses advice to young women in the music business via a MySpace page.

“I call it a warning service, so their dreams don’t turn into nightmares,” she said.

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons said Shante is a shining role model for the rap community. “Dr. Shante’s life is inspiring,” Simmons said. “She was a go-getter who rose from the struggle and went from hustling to teaching. She is a prime example that you can do anything, and everything is possible.”

The L Word spin-off: It will star The L Word’s Leisha Hailey and will be a “very different, substantially different show” from The L Word, he says.

Hailey’s character Alice Pieszecki goes to jail, where the new show would be set. While The L Word, which will conclude as a series after its yet-to-premiere sixth season, focuses primarily on a community of lesbians, the spin-off would involve a broad spectrum of characters, including some lesbians, Greenblatt says: “It’s a big group of characters and there’s a few lesbians in that group, but it isn’t the exact makeup of what The L Word was.”

When asked if it is a “female Oz,” he says that was “not a bad description,” though it would not be as dark as Oz, the gritty, former HBO series.

Three guest stars appear in the pilot and may or may not go forward on the series should it get picked up: Melissa Leo (Frozen River), Famke Janssen and Laurie Metcalf.

Greenblatt says he expects to make a decision about the pilot, which he has not yet seen cut together, in the next couple of months.

Can someone tell me why Showtime is determined to spoil the entire sixth season of The L Word? If the writers were going for a mystery thriller based on who killed Jenny, and now we know Alice lands in jail, is there really any suspense for the last eight episodes? Oh my, do I see a shark down there?

The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman. Full article

Fall energy was definitely in the air eventhough the economic situation was somewhat apparent while glancing into stores or neighborhood restaurants. My local market (Jefferson Market) closed down. They were behind on their Con Ed bill. This place was an institution in the West Village. A place to get great veggies, gourmet cheeses and stumble into the neighborhood celebrities like Julianne Moore or Elvis Costello. Once Citarella opened up down the block, they just could not compete. Sad to see them go. We need to support these local shops. Otherwise, the big corporate chain businesses will just gobble them all up.

Had dinner at a cozy, fun, new restaurant  Cafe Select. Located in Soho at 212 Lafayette. Cafe Select, a Swiss cafe is the latest venture of downtown restaurateur Serge Becker. A good variety of small plates and salads. The puff pasty with mushrooms was divine. Entrees range from veal sausage to seared marinated steak over arugula (yummy) and of course Schnitzel. Cute crowd and decent selection of Swiss wines. After we headed to Apotheke in Chinatown. A speakeasy/cocktail bar at 9 Doyers St. The spot’s marked only by the Gold Flower Restaurant sign in an alleyway off Bowery.

Like an apothecary, the bartenders/mixologists mix and concoct all sorts of drinks from glass jars lined up along the bar and on shelves. We tasted a Pisco drink, something with Rose-water and some Scotchy thing. All incredibly satisfying. Suprising since I really don’t drink anything but wine.

Just when I thought I had seen it all, along comes a pedi-cab with a pole dancer.  This rentable stripper rickshaw’s comes equipped with pole, boom box, neon-lit platform, and video camera for capturing the sweet dance moves and onlookers befuddled titillation. Only in New York!

Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.

Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994. [via NYT]

“The Rachel Maddow Show,” her left-leaning news and commentary program, has averaged a higher rating among 25- to 54-year-olds than “Larry King Live” on CNN for 13 of the 25 nights she has been host.

Ms. Maddow’s regular appearances on “Countdown” and her popularity on the Internet has certainly helped her ratings. Ms. Maddow, a former AIDS activist, was also presumably helped by her four years on the Air America radio network. (More)

The World Unseen

In 1950′s South Africa, apartheid is just becoming institutionalized. Free-spirited Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional Indian community, and the new apartheid-led government, by running a café with Jacob her “colored” business partner. When she meets Miriam, a young traditional wife and mother, their unexpected attraction pushes Miriam to question the rules that bind her. When Amina helps Miriam’s sister-in-law to hide from the police, a chain of events is set in motion that changes both women forever. The World Unseen is a captivating human drama, based on the highly acclaimed, multi award-winning novel by Shamim Sarif.  Opens November 7th at the Quad Theatre in NYC

I Can’t Think Straight

In the upper echelons of traditional Jordanian society, Reema and Omar, wealthy Christian Palestinians, prepare for the marriage of their eldest daughter Tala.

But back at work in London, Tala encounters Leyla, a young British Indian woman who is dating Tala’s best friend Ali. The women have an instant effect on each other.

Tala sees something unique in the artless, clumsy, sensitive Leyla who secretly works to become a fiction writer. And Tala’s forthright challenges to Leyla’s cultural foundations begins a journey of self-awareness for Leyla.

As the women fall in love, Tala’s own sense of duty cause her to pull away from Leyla and fly back to Jordan where the preparations for an ostentatious wedding are well under way. As family members descend and the wedding day approaches, the pressure mounts.

When Ali and Leyla’s feisty sister Zara help throw Tala and Leyla together again, Tala finds that her own preconceptions of what love can be is the final hurdle she must jump to win Leyla back.

Screening November 7th @ 9:00 pm at the Museum of Arts and Design and November 9th @ 12:00 noon at the Tribeca Theater, NYC.

The scene plays out in immigrant neighborhoods across New York, providing a key source of employment for immigrant women and a haven for men seeking to stave off the loneliness of being far from home. It is a perfectly legal form of entertainment — there is no stripping, but plenty of hand-holding.

But some of the women say the clubs have a darker side. They complain about exploitative management, sexual advances from clients and even violence. A dancer was recently shot and killed in Queens, and one of the city’s largest dollar-dance venues is now the target of a federal lawsuit.

For many dancers, the stigma of working at the clubs is the most trying problem.

“Sometimes people or clients say we’re prostitutes, but we’re not. We dance,” said Tania Zarate, a dancer at one club in Queens. Full Story

Following Governor Palin’s address to the Republican National Convention, strains of Heart’s classic “Barracuda” filtered through the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., in deference to the first female GOP vice presidential nominee.

After Palin made such a forceful and at times biting debut on the national political stage, the song seemed a dead-on choice to symbolize the GOP’s brash new political star.

Heart front women Nancy and Ann Wilson were so aghast by the GOP ticket’s use of their music to promote Palin that they publicly issued a cease-and-desist order asking the McCain campaign to stop using their song, posthaste.

In a statement to Entertainment Weekly , the Wilson sisters even went so far as to say that ”Sarah Palin’s views and values in no way [their emphasis] represent us as American women.”

Heart’s website states: Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart have informed the McCain/Palin Campaign that Universal Music Publishing and Sony BMG have sent a cease-and-desist notice to not use one of Heart’s classic songs “Barracuda,” as the congratulatory theme for Sarah Palin. The Republican campaign did not ask for permission to use the song, nor would they have been granted that permission. “We have asked the Republican campaign not to use our music. We hope our wishes will be honored.”

According to CNN.com, the campaign has said that it had paid for and obtained all necessary licenses before using “Barracuda.” [Advocate]

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