Hollywood’s Glow Can Dim Parental Judgment

“You make me do things that I ought not do.” Sunnyland Slim

It’s blinding sometimes, this Hollywood glitter.

Ask the wanna-bes who have bedded down a producer, shared a joint with an actor, tooted lines with a recording star or otherwise let slip their innocence with the hope and/or promise that their actions might land them somewhere special, only to find themselves nowhere in particular.

The morning after, they are left only with the empty refrain that they were “at the party.”

To be honest, that is what lured so many of them in the first place. They wanted to be at the party, or in the movie, or in the TV show, or in the music video, or in the recording studio, or on the set or just in the photograph. And how they got there is not always so terribly important.

Why else, for example, would mothers decide it was appropriate for their young sons to sleep--no matter how innocently--with a 35-year-old man? Yes, we’re talking about Michael Jackson, but not about whether he did or did not do what one youngster claims he did. What we’re talking about is how parents, otherwise conscientious, can temporarily set aside basic parenting skills when drenched in Hollywood’s glow.

More specifically, we’re talking about how the father of a 13-year-old girl named Cynthia let down his guard.

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Cynthia and her friends belong to a little dance troupe started by Gloria, a concerned mother who wanted to keep her daughter and the neighborhood girls busy and out of trouble.

“I wanted to show them an alternative, that they didn’t have to join a gang or hang in those cliques,” she says. “If I could change a few of them from the path that they were on, it would be worth it.”

Helping Gloria is Paul, Cynthia’s father, who with his wife of 20 years is raising three youngsters in their middle-class Hawthorne home. The children practiced their routines, performed before various crowds and won a number of awards before they got their big break--a performance in a music video for rap star Dr. Dre.

The song was “Dre Day,” from his platinum-selling CD, “Chronic”--the street name for marijuana.

The video, widely played on MTV, Black Entertainment Television and other music video shows, is a verbal assault in which Dr. Dre and his partner, Snoop Doggy Dogg (who was recently arrested on murder charges), boast of how they would love to stick a gun and their genitals into the mouths of two rival rappers, as well as “rob you in Compton and blast you in Miami.”

Paul and Gloria say they didn’t notice those passages when they pushed to have the kids appear in the video.

“I don’t pay attention to the words,” says Gloria. “I can never really understand what the music is saying.”

Even now, after the video has aired hundreds of times, Paul claims he still has never tuned into the words to which his daughter was dancing. Nor, says Paul, did he know that Cynthia would be appearing in a “chronic” video. Hell, he insists, he didn’t even know the word had anything to do with drugs. And if he did, “my kids wouldn’t have been involved. That’s the bottom line.”

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But the fact is that dad knew more than he let on in our phone conversation--as his daughter disclosed when I got her on the line.

“Chronic means drugs,” she said as her father listened in on the extension. “My daddy told me what it meant.” She also recognized the aroma when it swept across the set before filming started that night in Pasadena.

“Before the video, all they were doing was like smoking and stuff,” she said. “The people who were in the video, some of the dancers, were smoking weed. It wasn’t right around us, but you could smell it. . . . It made me kind of nervous because they started acting different, like they were lazy or something.”

Drugs on the set. What’s a parent to do?

“If I had taken my daughter and left at that point when I suspected it, it would have been unfair to the other girls,” says Paul.

As for Gloria, the troupe’s creator, all she would say about the matter was: “I want to thank Dr. Dre for the opportunity for the girls to be seen.”

All in all, the video worked out quite well for the girls. They have since gone on to do another music video. No drugs this time. There was only one catch. The parents of most of the children intentionally weren’t told where their children were being taken for fear that too many might show up. So they sent their children off without a clue as to where they were going--because it was Hollywood, the glitter.

It can be blinding sometimes.