Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968

There in the little one room apartment on Leland Way Jesica lay on her mattress, low enough to have Daily Variety spread out on the floor next to the phone, on the floor. Just to the left was a stucco balcony where the breeze blew in through from the parking lot next door. Every night people arrived to go see HAIR! at the Aquarius theater which is what the parking lot is for, but in the day it was a quiet back street, not a lot of sound but for the wind through the palm trees and construction at Sunset and Vine half block away with one of the first high rises in Hollywood going up.

An ad for Miss Soul Queen contestants ran in Variety classifieds. The ad stood out because it was two columns with a big border. In these same columns were ads for Pretty Girl International modeling agency, whose whispered italic words let you know here is where you get the new porn jobs that were showing up in town. Out of work actors were simulating sex in movies for 50 to 100 dollars a day. The movies were being shot in 35 mm and showing up in real movie theaters.

Jesica read the Pretty Girl International ads and passed for now. But she phoned in and signed up as a contestant for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.

Then taking the bus into a south L.A. neighborhood which was unfamiliar, Jesica showed up in the Watts theater with her little suitcase. She packed an “evening gown” and a bathing suit, as the ad had requested, both purchased hastily at second hand stores. She was the only white person in the building and probably for several blocks around, but

Here is where the mania was showing up even early in her life. Here is where the PTSD driven behavior was already showing up in her life.

She plowed right on in to the audition this blond upper-middle class white girl, totally out of place, totally in the wrong place, she still plowed on through as through driven by some invisible force. Her eyes would light on the obvious weirdness of the scene, like being in the dressing room with all these hot sexy black women as they changed into their very, very brief bikinis. Jesica unpacked her little suitcase and put on her one-piece bathing suit. It was a beauty contest, right, so Jesica, totally on her own in Hollywood, no agent or close relative or friend to bounce the idea off of, just Jesica responding to an ad in classifieds of Variety, thought she needed a one-piece bathing suit to be in a beauty contest.

Probably as she tried on the bathing suit in a Goodwill store she imagined herself on a runway like for Miss America in Atlantic City. Only this was Miss Soul Queen in L.A. in 1968 just north of Inglewood.

When Jesica arrived at the old theater all she saw were the fiery ends of cigars and other things being smoked in the front seats of the audience. The lights were half-lit so the audience was half-lit.

A dark man with a 40s style Harlem hat held his cigar halfway to his mouth, the mouth was half open in astonishment, looking at Jesica. He and the other producers of the talent and beauty competetion all stopped with their mouths hanging open, staring at the blond Jesica arriving in the middle of the ghetto to compete for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.

“What the hell makes you think you can win the Miss Soul Queen contest?” one asked.

Jesica looked into the dark and she carried all the truth of Martin Luther King and the 1950s civil rights marches she’d watched as a kid on the news in her gait as she walked across the stage. Her passion matched Joan of Arc standing at the foot of her pyre as, blond hippie hair frizzing and forming a hazy halo around her head in the smoky theater, she took center stage and stated, “Soul isn’t about the color of your skin, it’s about a passion that comes from inside.”

They still stared.

She continued, “I’m going to sing, Since I Fell For You.”

One of the more soulful producers of the Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968 beauty contest dropped a big ash from his cigar and said, “You’re going to stand up there like Lenny Welch and sing Since I Fell For You?”

Mm-hmm, Jesica said because she wasn’t really sure who the singer was, she just channeled the song, she’d been singing it in auditions now for a few months.

The very bemused and skeptical black guy, said “You going to get up here in a theater full of black people here in South L.A. and sing Since I Fell For You?” or something to that effect.

Jesica nodded. And she did it. The night of the beauty contest she ignored all the guffaws and outright laughing out loud that happened as she walked across the stage in her one piece bathing suit. Then in her second hand store “evening gown” she sang the hell out of the song.

She stood at the microphone under a spotlight with some accompaniment, I think there was a small band there, with her frizzy hippie style untrimmed halo of hair and a full theater of black people from South L.A. watching her and she sang Since I Fell For You with soul and passion.

At first the guffaws and shouts were louder than her voice, but slowly the audience quieted down, made little breath “huh?” sounds, then got quiet. Jesica was really into the song, moreso than usual, I mean this was a Soul Queen contest, so she really poured her heart into it. Even the skeptical producers, now the judges, had their cigars halfway to their wide open stunned mouths as she continued to sing the song.

See Jesica really had a lot of talent, especially as a singer. No training, little advice even, she just opened up and took on the persona of singers she’d seen before, and poured it out. Once in about fourth grade she’d stopped the talent show at her grade school standing there snapping her fingers singing “Fever” a capella as in with no accompaniment, just her snapping fingers. Jesica even made her voice sound exactly like Peggy Lee’s on that occasion.

This time she was just channeling herself, her own heartfelt pain from all the weird things she’d already experienced in her 20 years of life, all the confusion and passion and aroused sexuality confused with spirituality and the resulting mistreatment that she’d lived through since age five -- now she could open her mouth and sound like Billie Holiday on one of her saddest but most poignant songs. But it was Jesica’s own voice, her own soul.

She won the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent competition.

She put it on her resume.
I was standing on the corner of Sunset and Vine last week running to make a metro transfer on the way to the medical marijuana dispensary when I looked up and realized I was just a block away from 6235 Leland Way where Jesica lived in 1968 - 1969. The little apartment building is long gone, torn down as the parking lot expanded. The Aquarius Theater, which itself was the old Moulin Rouge, is now Nickelodeon Studios. The first high rise ever built in Hollywood has recently been torn down and they’re about to finish building the new one.

I stood there coming unstuck in time. Right there at Sunset and Vine Jesica, ever resourceful, often stood on the corner selling L.A. Free Press, back in 1968. She would go into Silverlake and pick up a stack of papers for 11 cents each and then sell them on the corner for 25 cents. Sometimes a redneck would drive by and holler something like, “If it’s free then why does it cost 25 cents?” Jesica much like Joan of Arc here again would say, “Because freedom isn’t only about money.”

I stood there and looked up at the new high rise wondering how it’s any different from the one they tore down and remembered what happened to Jesica after winning the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent prize. She got a little trophy and an appointment to meet with a music producer in that very same office building when it first opened. But instead of a recording contract the fat black man had gotten Jesica to sit on his lap. She was so naïve that at first she did sit on his lap and his boner was really big and hard and poked up through his pants. She jumped -- gasped and was across the room then running down the hall and out of the building.

See Jesica would screw just about anybody in those days. In 1969 she made a New Years Resolution to have sex with 69 men in '69. By June she'd lost count but gone way past that number. It was a compulsion placed in her at age five when a deviant priest taught her to talk dirty in confession and showed her how to get aroused, then turnred her out into the world like that -- aroused since age five. . . .

Yeah I would screw just about anybody in those days but I wasn’t going to screw for a job. That wouldn’t be holy.

Continued. . .