The piece I most love wearing is Mother’s gold brocade cocktail dress with matching jacket… It’s ‘flip and flirty,’ as my mother prescribed. It’s crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I’ve put on made-to-order armor. My mother’s armor. Armor that helped shield me from exclusion. Armor that helped shield me from inferiority. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
What’s often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
I’m always aware of various audiences, as a part of my training as a journalist and as part of my training as a citizen of Negroland. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn’t done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can’t just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
You’re supported by everything in New York if you want to be a performing artist. You come here, you can change your name. You leave home, you come here, you’re severed from family obligations – the old identity drops away as soon as you come to New York because you’re coming to New York, if you’re an artist, to be someone else. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
I was nearing the end of childhood when I started to pay real attention to jazz singers. Women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the men. Black women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the whites. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Michael Jackson loved epic symbols. In his shows and his videos, he always destroyed or salvaged worlds; he was the hero of parables about street violence, sexual combat, war and natural disaster. It was always apocalypse or apotheosis now. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Michael Jackson was one of popular culture’s greatest artists. Nobody danced better. Few sang more compellingly. No one understood more about stage spectacles or music videos. He was an innovator. His reach was global. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
