Growing up in the fifties, I am given more freedom than I deserve. My distracted mother, a recent widow with three young children to raise, ignores my adolescence. I explore far and wide. I pal around with boys and the girls. I am athletic years before Title IX. I am crazy about music. I teach myself guitar. We write plays and perform musicals at my little high school. We sing and play music on our bus rides home, me playing bongos on my math and English textbooks. We know all the moves of those girl groups and can mimic and even embellish their dances. I can harmonize. It is magic for me. 

I don’t give this up at eighteen. In my twenties and thirties, I find another group of women friends who also love to do this. It was a heady time for the women’s movement. We want to be in and celebrate each other’s company. We sing and dance for our friends and perform at women’s conferences. We perform Aretha, the Shirelles, the Supremes, the Dixie Cups, Gladys Knight and the Pips. We never tried to do a Tina Turner song She was too far a reach for us. Which of us white working-class girls imagined dancing like Tina did? None of us. I had seen her on TV with Ike and the Ikettes. She was too sexy. Too crazy. Too beautiful. Unreachable as an icon with those long legs and warrior woman body. She was just too hot.

That all changed. She survives her abusive relationship with Ike Turner and returns to the music scene with ground-breaking album Private Dancer, with the hit What’s Love Got to do with it?  She rises strong, confident, strutting. A music critic writes that this album “reeks of attitude.” I can’t read that as adoration. George Bush awards her the Kennedy Center Honors and notes that she has the “most famous legs in show business”. They still don’t understand what Tina is all about. At 44, she becomes the oldest woman to receive a Grammy for Best Solo performer. That doesn’t sound that old to me. 

I see her anew. She is just ten years older than me. In my youthful eyes, I saw her a giant. I learn that she is a tiny 5’ 4” tall and weighs 120 pounds. That is exactly me. In her emergence, Tina gives me strength. I am finally ready to bust out of my good girl, Catholic obedient, uniform wearing, background singing self.  Tina creates the space for me to come out to my friends. To feel flirtation for the first time in my bones. I let myself be attracted and attractive. And maybe for the first time, I think, “That can’t be love. What’s going on? We just met!” But there is something powerful and worth paying attention. 

And not just me. Liberation is recognizing that is always time for re-birth and reinvention. My troupe is done with happy songs about “Going to the Chapel” and waiting for that boy to call. We’ve been burned and are ready to claim power and respect. Turner steps out and we follow. We sing Tina Turner in our comfortable shoes, with our short legs and choreographed moves until my group falls apart, with heart aches, broken marriages, wayward children, cracking voices, slower paces. One of us has cancer. Another, a husband certain to die with a brain tumor.  We are well prepared for the next transition.