Fraudulent Dreams

With their luggage full of their best clothes, and their imaginations brimming with dreams of America, 40 of Tequililla’s most optimistic citizens waited for the bus they had been told would take them to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez where they believed they were to pick up their entry visas. But the scheduled arrival time of 1 a.m. came and went. And with each passing hour, the group cursed, cried and, eventually, decided to bring Anthony Steve Bonilla Roman to justice. 
It’s easy to see how the well-meaning people of the small tequila-producing rancho that is home to more livestock than people could have bought into Bonilla’s elaborate plan to get them visas to enter the United States. On Wednesday, he greeted a reporter and photographer from this newspaper to his jail cell in Acatic as if they had arrived for Sunday brunch. The 24-year-old, U.S.-born former Marine is quick to laugh, has an answer for everything and is surprisingly candid for someone facing serious charges of fraud and deception.
Bonilla said he first drifted into Tepatitlan, a medium-sized town in Los Altos de Jalisco, on the advice of a friend after fleeing from the FBI in California in March of this year. He settled into the slow-paced pueblo lifestyle and eventually met a group of friends that included “Chuy,” a businessman who made his money by selling fake U.S. entry visas.
Bonilla also met Maria, a pretty girl from Tequililla, a nearby rancho. She claims that he impressed her with a picture of him and his good friend, George W. Bush. (It was actually taken at the Guadalajara wax museum, Bonilla admitted.) Nonetheless, the two got along well and she invited him to come and live with her family.
According to Bonilla, people started showing up to Maria’s house with money for him to hand over to Chuy. He liked what he saw and began to devise a plan of his own. 
“I was like, what’s wrong with these people, are they stupid?” he said.
Bonilla began to spread the story that he was the vice consul at the Guadalajara consulate and that he would be happy to help them get work or travel visas, for a price. He charged anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 pesos a person for his services. Neighbors, eager to avoid the costly and dangerous process of crossing the border illegally with a coyote, lined up to pay him.
After collecting his fees, photos and birth and marriage certificates, Bonilla presented his marks with letters that promised their visas were on the way. He admitted paying an Office Depot employee 10,000 pesos to help him create the phony U.S. documents. They looked official enough but were full of blatant spelling errors, such as the inclusion of a misnamed “General Consult Edgard Millet,” and an absurdly large homeland security logo that was clearly a fraud to even the untrained eye. But the citizens of Tequililla were so accustomed to the mutual trust of a close-knit community that they say they had no reason to doubt him. He was Martha’s boyfriend after all.
When months passed and no visas appeared, people started to ask questions. That’s when Bonilla got the idea for the bus. He told them that they would need to go to Ciudad Juarez to pick up their visas but that he would arrange for housing and transportation for an additional 3,000 pesos. The bus, of course, never came.
“I don’t feel that bad because I think if they had the chance they would do it again. Most of the people came to me because they were bad people and had bad records in the States and couldn’t get back legally,” Bonilla said from his jail cell.
While it’s true that some of the people who came to Bonilla for help had experienced trouble with the U.S. border patrol on previous trips, there were also upstanding folks among those who were taken in. They included the village schoolteacher and 57-year-old Benjamin Amezquita, a cattleman who lives with his family about a five-minute walk from the bus stop that never was. Amezquita said the cost of his wife’s cancer medication had set him back financially in recent months.
“With 20 good cows I usually live just fine,” he said. “But we had had an especially tough year so I thought I could make some money in the States to buy some more animals.”
Amezquita was not among those crying at the bus stop. As is typical for the people of his generation in this region, he’s able to see the positive in a seemingly hopeless situation.
“I’m just glad we’re all still alive and we didn’t end up left on the side of the road somewhere,” he said. “However, it does makes me sad because we were caught in his web and we were caught so innocently.”
Amezquita said he’s happy that the authorities were able to track Bonilla down, but one can’t help but wonder how this middle-aged man would have felt if he had gotten away.
“I really do admire his intelligence,” he said. “But his biggest mistake was being in love with that girl.”
While the visa seekers waited in vain for the non-existent bus, Bonilla and his brother were speeding down the highway to Aguascalientes in his girlfriend’s Volkswagen Pointer. They scarcely had time to set down their bags before Bonilla received a tearful call from his girlfriend. She wanted him back and could he please come and get her. He told her it was too dangerous and it would be better for them to meet up at the bus station in Guadalajara.
Instead of her loving embrace, Bonilla was met by state police officers.
When the bus never showed up and her car went missing, Martha finally saw the light. She convinced a group of her neighbors to give testimony in the nearby municipalities of Tepatitlan and Acatic.
Bonilla is being housed in the small jailhouse in Acatic while investigators continue to gather testimony from his victims. Even after all that has happened, it’s still difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. A photograph of a group of soldiers in front of a Saddam Hussein poster on his MySpace Internet site titled “my potton” (presumably meant to say “platoon”) is so blurry that it would be impossible to identify Bonilla or anyone else. News reports say that he is 26 years old, but he told this newspaper he was born in 1983. He does say one thing that seems undeniably true.
“I’m only sad because I’m still in love with that girl.”

Death Wears a Dress

Followers of Mexico’s cult of death are upset at an extreme makeover that has seen the saint’s image change from a creepy-cloaked skeleton to an angelic Elvira look-alike in a golden gown.
Santa Muerte (Saint Death) has adherents across Mexico and Latin America but is not recognized by the mainstream Catholic Church. They visit her shrines leaving offerings of tequila and roses, and pray for miracles such as the return of a stolen car or kidnapped relative. And for decades they have been coming to see an image of death personified. 
“People will continue to believe in the skeleton image of Santa Muerte,” said Juan Ambrosio, an expert and author of a book on Santa Muerte. 
The closest thing the cult has to an official leader is David Romo, the archbishop of Traditional Mex-USA Church. Last Sunday, Romo revealed and “canonized” the new saint in front of a packed crowd in the Santa Muerte sanctuary in the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City.
“In following our tradition of not imposing any kind of doctrine, we will be granting a three-year grace period in order for our faithful to incorporate the new image into their consciousness,” Romo told Milenio newspaper.
“It’s not as simple as changing the image from one to another,” Ambrosio said. “We’re talking about religion and that’s why people who believe in the (original) Santa Muerte will continue to do so.”
Some worshipers at the unveiling expressed positive reactions to the change.
“It’s a lot better,” Mabel Lopez told the Associated Press. “She’s not as scary now.”
The makeover may be part of an effort to soften the cult’s image and regain favor with the government. In 2005 the Mexican Interior Ministry refused the group status as a religious institution, thus blocking it from owning property or accepting donations.
Romo denied the change was part of a publicity stunt, but told reporters that the new image appeared to one of his parishioners in a dream.
While many followers welcome the change, many more have reservations. 
Maribel Lopez, who helps maintain Santa Muerte Web (www.santamuerte.galeon.com), said: “To many of us she looks more like a mannequin than an angel. I see this image as unacceptable, especially for the people who have lived their lives within the cult.”

Mighty Macau

The story of Macau is a story of East meets West - meets East and West again. This peninsula and surrounding islands in the heart of the Chinese Pearl River Delta were inhabited by native fishermen before being returned to China as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) in 1999. Now, as Macau is gearing up to become the home of Asia’s own Las Vegas strip, complete with Western backing including Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Wynn Casinos, the Macanese are hoping their cultural legacy will play a vital part in their success in the 21st century.
Exploring Macau is like walking through the pages of a history book, each step is a new chapter. The centerpiece of town is the Ruins of St. Paul’s where images of dragons and merchant ships accompany images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the facade of what remains of the Church of Mater Dei, built in 1580. Just around the corner sits the Na Tcha Temple were worshipers have come to burn incense and recite incarnations since 1888. It is common to see tourists attempting to capture both buildings in one photograph.
Even the modern casinos pay homage to Macau’s cultural mix with luck 888 on the slot machines (in Cantonese the word for “8” signifies luck) and Japanese toilets and Karaoke rooms in the high-roller suites.
“Macau has always been very popular westerners from Hong Kong or other parts of the world looking for a place of escape to a very different world in Asia,” explains Jennifer Welker, who lived on Macau’s small Coloane island for a year while writing a travel/history book, “The New Macau.” “Where else in Asia can you go to find such a beautiful mix of European buildings, culture and people? Where else can you go to hear Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese and English spoken on the streets?”
The people of Macau began to realize the importance of protecting their unique cultural landscape as far back as 1953 when then-Governor Marques Esparteiro appointed a committee responsible for registering architectural heritage, The ongoing effort paid off and in 2005, the Historic Center of Macau joined the ranks of such mainstays as the Statue of Liberty, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Wall of China when it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The monuments in the Center are a testament to Macau’s unique cultural history; they include a Moorish barracks, Buddhist temples, Catholic churches and a Protestant cemetery.
“This means a lot because we want to show (these places) to the world and we also want to promote a city of culture and heritage,” explains Annie Wong of the Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau.
Meanwhile, the area between Macau’s outlining islands, Coloane and Taipa, seems decades away from the Historic Center. Developers have literaly changed the landscape of this new area dubbed Cotai. What was once deserted marshland has now been covered with enough reclaimed land - brought in by barge from China and dredged from the Hengqin/Taipa channel - to build one of the great pyramids of Egypt. According to Las Vegas Sands Corp., the strip’s master developer and future management, this land will soon be home to 20,000 guest rooms, seven resort hotels and more than one million square feet of casino space on an area of 200 acres - and that’s just the first phase.
Since the Portuguese government first gave licenses for gaming houses in the 1950’s, Macau has been known for gambling and is already home to 19 casinos. However, developers are expecting the number of visitors to grow from the current 16.7 million to 38 million by 2010. And with one billion people within a three-hour flight radius, these numbers could conceivably be met.
But what then happens to the efforts to preserve China’s oldest Western colony? For some, the changes already appear evident and there is hesitation and caution. Eric Miller lives in mainland CHina and recently visited Macau.
“For many, the casinos will be the main draw, but the real interest of Macau is its history, food and culture,” he says. “Hopefully, the revenue from the casinos will be used to restore and maintain the old Macau. But development could easily destroy what is left of old Macau and it doesn’t feel as if there is a lot of careful planning in the development.
Despite all the changes, Macau is working with a 400-year legacy and experts like Welker remain positive.
“I think that UNESCO’s protection over a number of Macau’s heritage sites is a strong indicator that Macau can hold on to both its historical and cultural distinctiveness while it grows into one of the world’s most attractive entertainment destinations,” Welker says. “The people of Macau are very proud of their rich history and will be sure to preserve it well. That, I am sure.

The Hoagmeister

Bob Hoag loves to rip on Nickelback.

"They suck!" shouts Hoag, high-profile Valley producer, musician and Technicolor oddball. He whips off his horn-rimmed glasses, flares his nostrils and launches a dead-on impression of Chad Kroeger, the grunge band's dawn-of-man- looking lead singer.

"And this is not for real, you're wasting my time!" Hoag screeches, unmistakably imitating Kroeger for two captive audience members at Flying Blanket, his Mesa studio. "But you gotta keep your nostrils flared the whole time like this." He points his index and middle fingers to his face like an angry Mafia dad.

If a mainstream man of the moment gets such a rise out of the 29-year-old Hoag, who has crafted albums for rising Valley bands such as the Format, Before Braille, Fifteen Minutes Fast, and his own accomplished band, the Go Reflex, it's likely due to the fact that Kroeger, at least on the surface, is everything that Hoag is not. It seems like a mortal sin these days not to use editing software like Pro Tools. Hoag, though, still records everything on an automated 1970s Amek mixing console.

While MTV is saturated with shizzolated rap and nefarious lip-pierced rock, the Go Reflex remains discordant, bashing out happy keyboard-heavy pop songs with choruses like, "Everybody's happy in California." And while folks like Kroeger wouldn't step out of the house without at least a one-to-one pleather-to-leather ratio, Hoag won't go anywhere without one of his signature gabardine (defined by the dictionary as "a sturdy, tightly woven fabric of cotton, wool, or rayon twill") jackets.
Hoag, a Pittsburgh native, is a preternatural character and, upon meeting him, it's tough to decide which outlandish personality makes for a better comparison. His horn-rimmed glasses look like they were stolen from Lyndon Johnson, his fedora from Indiana Jones. His sandy brown hair has Elvis' flopability. His wardrobe of mid-20th-century buttoned-down checked shirts and twill pants would make Cosmo Kramer jealous.

Yet when Hoag performs for an audience, he unquestionably plays a part unique to himself. At a CD release party for power-pop troupe Fifteen Minutes Fast at Nita's Hideaway last month, Hoag was so enraptured by his performance that his glasses flew off his face. At three separate Go Reflex shows, he blew his nose between songs.
"Wait a second, I still gotta do the other side. Honnnk!" he'd say as the befuddled crowd wondered if the guy was for real, or just a keyboard-playing Kodachrome slide come to life.

Hoag revels in the fact that seeing a Buddy Holly look-alike jump around at a punk rock show seems incongruous.
"I need to feel like a punk rocker," he says. "It gives me some satisfaction when, in a room of people with weird piercings, too-tight tee shirts, and black-dyed hair, I still look like the biggest freak."
By most accounts, Hoag likely wasn't putting on a funky song-and-dance for a video camera at the Fifteen Minutes Fast show. Associates cite his random acts of wackiness.
"If Bob sees something that's missing in a song, he'll run in [from the mixing room] and jump around and scream into the microphone. He loves to pretend he's playing the guitar," says Jason Sukut, FMF keyboardist . "He's a ball of energy... like an evil genius."

While it may be too early to classify Bob Hoag as a bona fide genius, let alone an evil one, for the time being, he certainly possesses telltale symptoms. Thomas Alva Edison, for instance, worked a 112-hour week, even at age 65. When Hoag started recording his friends' music in Pittsburgh, he would work from noon until 10 p.m. - and then work another eight hours overnight with his own band, Pollen.

Hoag continues his breakneck pace today. Oftentimes, he's fueled only by Easy Mac, SpaghettiOs and quadruple lattes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he grew up doing spazzed-out little kid things like meticulously recreating a full Ghostbusters uniform, dressing up in it, and battling ghosts at the local grocery store. Other days, he would pretend to be Indiana Jones and "bury crap in the woods, try to forget about it for a couple a' days and go dig it up again."

As he grew older, Hoag channeled most of that fantastical creativity into music. Besides producing and playing keyboards, he also plays drums and writes music for his bands, first Pollen, which had more of a thick '80s guitar prevalence, and now the Go Reflex, which relies more on amp-filtered piano.
He began recording his own music with Pollen before the group relocated to the Valley in 1994. The band had been recording with Bill Stevenson and Stephen Egerton of western PA stalwarts the Descendants. They told Hoag he would be better off recording his own stuff because he had a better grasp of the desired sound than they did. Hoag took their encouragement and ran with it.

"There was a great place in Pittsburgh where you could rent a little makeshift studio for, like, $300 a month, so we would rent it to record our demos," Hoag explains.
Eventually Hoag and fellow Pollen member Kevin Scanlon (a contributing photographer for New Times), who followed Hoag into the Go Reflex, began recording demos for their friends' bands. When Pollen moved to Phoenix in 1994, the guys brought the equipment from the Pittsburgh studio with them.

Musicians say they are drawn to Hoag's work because of his attitude toward studio time. Hoag does not charge by the hour. Rather, he charges by the recording, since he feels time limits impede creativity. Plus, Flying Blanket is like a nostalgia trip back to high school, like walking into your best friend' s basement. It features a couple of beat-up couches and a plentitude of guitar magazines and Weekly World News tabloids in scattered piles. The mixing room ceiling has wood shingles reminiscent of a tiki bar.

"Everything is organized in his own way in that place," explains Kelly Reed, the drummer for Before Braille, burgeoning Mesa faves. "If you ask Bob to find you a CD, he'll look around for two hours and finally find it underneath a couch." Despite the clutter, the environment has proven instrumental to some stellar production feats.

The EP Hoag recorded with the Format, simply titled EP, may well be one of Phoenix's greatest recent success stories. Hoag helped the pop duo arrange its harmonies, played the drums, added background vocals, and wound up producing what was originally intended to be a five-song rough edit, a first draft. The ridiculously catchy EP burned through its first 1,000 local copies and helped bandmates Nate Reuss and Sam Means land a major-label deal with Elektra Records.

"It was pretty awesome to see them do well," Hoag says. " I'm happy to hear that those guys are getting the opportunity to do things in the big leagues."

"We recorded with him as a full band and it was awesome," says Reuss. "He did his job and a very good one, at that."

Yet like other eccentric minds, Hoag can be a nonconfrontational dude, like when he wanted to watch E!'s Celebrity Dating and his live-in nephew would turn to sports instead. Hoag wouldn't fight, and would retreat to his room. Sometimes this passivity transfers into Hoag's professional life. When the Format posted the following comment on the journal section of its Web site, he hesitated at first to comment: "last nite we finished up the first single minus harmonies and some stuff in the bridge... it sounds sooo awesome... im shocked... I didn't know the song could be this good... we changed the vibe of the song and added a lot of guitar and synth layers... and a disco bass line... its really cool... to me its 10000000 times better then the original . . . Walt [Vincent, who also produced albums for Pete Yorn and Fastball] sure knows a thing or two about producing. ouch."

Reuss says "the paragraph in no way has anything to do with Bob... it's in regards to Walt, our producer, and some of the experiences he's had, as well as the other producer's perception of The First Single.'"
Still, Hoag says he feels slighted. "I wish I could believe [that it wasn't directed toward me]," he says. "If he hadn't put that ouch' in there, I might believe it... but I feel like I've been betrayed by friends."

Regardless of that touchy subject, Bob's methods continue to pay off with other bands. After he recorded an EP with Before Braille, the band signed with independent Aezra Records and negotiated for Hoag to do its full-length album.
"If he charged by the hour, he would have no business," jokes Reed. "He always spends the first couple of hours you're in there talking to you about the Beach Boys."

Hoag is notorious for diatribes. Don't even get him started on reality television.
"I really like the dating shows," he spews in an infectious, ultra-long detour. "I get really angry, like, Why is she buying his crap?!' I love Dismissed, especially when they have three dudes all on a date. I started watching Star Dates. I watched Screech and his date. They got along great. He was really nice, regular guy, genuine fella."

Another of Hoag's latest obsessions is Burt Reynolds. Yes, Burt Reynolds. Hoag recently acquired a 1970s tell-all book about the former Cosmopolitan centerfold. His favorite picture shows Burt leaning against a Corvette with a glass of champagne in hand. The caption, which Hoag finds hilarious, reads, "Burt is a class act."

"One day I'm gonna find Burt and have him autograph it," he says. "I don't know, though. I think he'll want to fight me."
Either that, or Burt'll cast him in Cannonball Run IV.

Dance Revolutionizer

Atkins, Jenny Craig and Simmons can take a hike; DDR is here

published in The State Press on Thursday, November 13, 2003


Richard Simmons had it wrong all along, and I'm not just talking about those sparkly Hooters shorts he wears all the time. I'm talking about Sweatin' to the Oldies: What a boring waste of time. Perhaps if he'd met Mike Rak, Richie would have learned that Oldies ain't got nothin' on Dance Dance Revolution.


Since Rak started playing the Japanese arcade dance game in the Memorial Union a month and a half ago, he has lost 17 pounds!


When I first saw Rak performing/playing DDR, I was blown away by his mastery of the craft. Not only was he keeping up with all of the blinking lights beneath him, he also was incorporating all kinds of crazy moves - including leaping over the handle bar onto the dance floor and doing a "Matrix Walk" across the game console. And when I found out how he lost all that weight, I was even more amazed. It seems DDR is the antithesis to other video games that are played indoors and lead to hemorrhoids and stomachs big enough to rest cheese doodles on.

SPM: Don't I know you?


Rak: I'm the guy who goes freestyle, but my friends call me Sora.


SPM: Do you ever get a big audience down here?


Rak: I have been known to get a couple people down here. It's mostly just my DDR buddies.


SPM: How did you get started on this?


Rak: I first saw it about two years ago. I tried it, and I lasted about three seconds. I never danced ever. I tried it again a month and a half ago. I tried it, and I just kept going - and eventually I added some fancy moves.


SPM: What sets you apart from other DDR dancers?


Rak: I know I'm not the best, but I'm the only person that puts as much into the freestyle.


SPM: Are those your Vienna cookies over there?


Rak: Yeah. Since I started DDR, I've lost 17 pounds and all of my pants are too big for me now, so I had to pick up a belt on the way to school. After that I stopped to pick up the cookies for a snack.


SPM: Holy Moley. I think you might be on to something: the Dance Dance Revolution diet. You could have your own videos and everything.


Rak: Actually, the home version of the game has a workout mode, and I was looking on the Internet and some guy lost 50 pounds.


SPM: Have you ever worked out before?


Rak: In high school I did some weightlifting and running, but I never went above or below 190 pounds.


SPM: Do you play other video games?


Rak: I like all of the popular ones like Final Fantasy, Tony Hawk and Metal Gear Solid.


SPM: Is the video game aspect part of the appeal?


Rak: Yeah, that and since I was never really able to dance, this compensates for it. Before this, the only dance I ever knew was the Macarena. Now I've even learned a little bit of hip-hop style.


SPM: Has this helped you adjust to your freshman year?


Rak: I've become relatively good friends with a lot of the DDR guys like Fluff and Jeremy.


SPM: Do you have any signature moves?


Rak: Nobody else really does any moves. I have two moves. One is on dynamite rave: I go underneath the bar, jump up and click my heels together. And the other is the spinning Matrix walk where I jump up and kick off of the console.


SPM: Are there any misconceptions about DDR?


Rak: Especially for beginners, it's definitely harder than it looks, but it's easy to pick up if you keep at it.


SPM: Do you have any tips for beginners?


Rak: Loosen up - you gotta feel the beat.


SPM: Has Dance Dance Revolution changed your life?


Rak: I'm a relatively shy, introverted guy. With this, you gotta work yourself up to try different moves in front of different people. I've found that everybody's pretty cool about it.


SPM: Do you ever dream about Dance Dance Revolution?


Rak: Once or twice I've heard the beats in my head, and it's gotten to the point where I know the words to some of the Japanese songs.

Sham-on

Don't I Know You? Party Thrıller
This skinny white guy sure can move
published on Thursday, September 25, 2003


Ryan Britt, party crasher extraordinaire, shows off his "Bad" moves.

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If stealing attention is a crime, Ryan Britt is the smoothest criminal of them all. Britt, a Mesa Community College student transferring to ASU in January, spends his weekends crashing parties with Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits in hand. With great stealth and dexterity, he makes his way to the CD player and pops in his CD. And, in the amount of time it took for Jacko's hair to catch on fire in a Pepsi commercial, Britt has made his own dance floor and gathered his own crowd to watch him moonwalk, spin around, hump the floor and grab his crotch. OWWWWWW! Sometimes he'll stick around to shake hands or talk about his techniques, but other times he moonwalks outta there before you can even say, "Sham-on."

SPM: Don't I know you?

Britt: I'm the King of Pop.

SPM: What's your major?

Britt: I'm transferring to ASU in January, but right now I'm studying secondary education with an emphasis on history.

SPM: As in, the history of pop?

Britt: Or, the history of being bad? Nope, just regular history.

SPM: How did all of this MJ madness begin?

Britt: In high school, I was in speech and debate, and Michael Jackson was sort of our inside joke. We rented Moonwalker for someone's birthday, and I just started dancing around. After that, we had a Michael Jackson party in the summer, and we had a dance off. After that, I just started doing it at parties.

SPM: What are some of your favorite songs?

Britt: "The Way You Make me Feel" is my favorite because the video is hilarious because you can't figure out what the hell is going on. All of these guys are just chasing a girl around in an alley. "Smooth Criminal" is the best as far as improvisation, and in the video you have the lean that is so awesome and his outfit with the suit, and the sweet hat is actually one of the most normal ones he ever wears.

SPM: What about the one where the gangs are fighting, but it's not "Bad"?

Britt: That's "Beat It." Michael won an award from Ronald Reagan for that song being anti-drugs, so he decided to teach real gangsters how to dance and put them in the video.

SPM: Sweet! Why do you enjoy doing it so much?

Britt: It's fun. Nobody dances like Michael Jackson. I always like to spice things up at parties because people want to laugh and have a good time.

SPM: You do a lot of party crashing. Do you ever contribute and throw parties of your own?

Britt: Yeah, I love having theme parties. We had a pirate party at my house a couple of weeks ago, and another time we had one called "The Future."

SPM: Has anyone ever tried to show you up?

Britt: At Club Rio one time, a guy tried to show me up, but he was cool. In all honestly, I just do it to get a kick out of it.

SPM: Do you dance anywhere other than clubs and parties?

Britt: When I worked at Bank of America, I used to dance on my desk. That was a boring job.

I've done the full costume for birthdays.

SPM: Since MJ has, shall we say, metamorphosed, has his new skin color helped you to pull off his look?

Britt: Obviously cause I'm white it allows me to kind of get away with it. One time, my friends and I were thinking of wearing a surgical mask, but we didn't because I don't want to diss on him. He's a freak, but he's a great performer.

SPM: How do you feel when people make fun of Jacko?

Britt: I laugh when people make fun of him, but I don't think he's a child molester.

SPM: Do you have any other favorite performers?

Britt: I love Justin Timberlake because he is the new white Michael. Let's face it. "Rock Your Body" is just a remake of "Rock With You." I like a lot of legit music, but if pop music makes you laugh and makes you want to dance, I'm all for it.

SPM: Do you have followers?

Britt: I guess you could call any of my friends followers. Most of them are from speech and debate. When I worked at Bank of America, I had all of these middle-aged women who thought I was cool. I went to one of their going-away parties downtown in full costume. It was pretty scary.

SPM: So do you think all of this dancing and partying will ever pay off?

Britt: I always joke that if I get hard up for cash I'll go to Casino Arizona and take that guys job. I can't really sing very well, though, so that might be a problem.

SPM: What would you do if you ever met someone like MJ or even JT?

Britt: I would just try to play it off like I was one of them. I met Marilyn Manson because he was in Borders [where I work], and we talked about Lionel Ritchie. If MJ came in, I could probably just talk crap about Paul McCartney or something.

Bend it Like Beckham Review

published in the State Press on Thursday, April 3, 2003



Where was Bend It Like Beckham when I was 10 years old?

In 1991, I was an awkward-ass, softball-playing tomboy. I had thick bangs, I was about a foot taller than my best friends in our fourth-grade class, and my favorite thing to wear to school was a manly pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt that read, "Snickers, reach for satisfaction!"

I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I blame Hollywood.

The only movie out at the time to depict girls' sports was Ladybugs. If you don't recall this cinematic masterpiece, please let me fill you in. The movie starred Rodney Dangerfield as a struggling businessman who tries to impress his boss by coaching his daughter's soccer team. The girls on the team are so inept that Dangerfield has to put his girlfriend's son into a wig in order for the girls to have a chance in hell on the soccer field. What kind of message was that supposed to send to little tomboys like me?

Perhaps if I had seen a movie like Bend it Like Beckham, I would have had a healthier idea of what it means to be a female athlete.

This charming movie, directed by former BBC reporter Gurinder Chadha, follows Jessminder "Jess" Bharma [played by Parminder Nagra], an 18-year-old British-Indian living south of London, as she defies cultural norms and pursues her dream of being a football [aka soccer everywhere except America] player like her hero, Mr. Posh Spice...er David Beckham.

When Jess begins playing football, she doesn't have much hope for a serious career. She comes from a family of orthodox Sikhs who feel that it is important for young girls to stay home and learn how to cook traditional foods like Aloo Gobi. Activities like football are considered profoundly unfeminine and a waste of time. Also, unlike America, England does not have any professional opportunities for female footballers.

Jess is aware of these cultural dilemmas and is resigned to playing casual games in the park with her mates. She has a natural talent and one day catches the eye of Juliette "Jules" Paxton [Kiera Knightly of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace] who plays on a local women's team. Jules invites Jess to try out for the team and Jess accepts the offer even though she knows her parents will disapprove.

Some of the film's finest acting comes from Jess's concerned parents. Veteran Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, in his British-film debut, plays Jess's warm-hearted father. He remains diligent about keeping his daughter off the playing field. It is revealed that he was a champion cricket player in his youth in India, but when he moved to Britain, the white blokes wouldn't let him anywhere near a wicket. He loves his daughter and doesn't want to see her hurt like he was. Her mother [played by Shaheen Kahn] continually asks what she could have possibly done in her past life to deserve such a strange daughter.

Jess makes the team and befriends Jules, who faces similar at-home tension. Jules' silicon-enhanced mother, Paula [Juliet Stevenson of Nicholas Nickleby, Emma] is paranoid that playing sports will turn her daughter against the opposite sex. When she takes Jules shopping and she opts to buy a sports bra, Paula tells her, "There's a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a man."

When Jess's parents find out she is spending her afternoons playing on a real team, they forbid her from going back. Jess is devastated, but with Jules' help, she sneaks out of the house and continues to play.

Nagra takes on her role with confidence and grace. Although her character is a lot older than most girls beginning a sport, she possesses the same heart and passion of any athlete. The plot may be a bit convoluted at times [Jess and her coach, Joe, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, end up falling for each other] but Chadha creates a film that leaves you rooting for Jess the whole way through.

If there are any 10-year-old tomboys defying our demographic by reading this movie review, you should consider yourselves lucky. Nowadays you have films with real inspiration.

Bend It Like Beckham was released in India in 2002 and has already had a profound effect on the culture. According to a BBC article, this month India will launch its first-ever girls football league.

Fairly impressive, considering that in my day the only thing a sports movie ever did was inspire pre-teen cross-dressing.