Never Would Have Made It by Childs Melvin

Author:Childs, Melvin [Childs, Melvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2012-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter

10

Hold the Curtain

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

—Matthew 19:24

I realize I probably raised a few eyebrows earlier when I suggested that hard work and faith were not the keys to making it in the entertainment industry. I’m sure, to many of Tyler’s fans, that sentiment borders on blasphemy.

Well I have to stand by those words, and not because I question the virtues of hard work and faith. I have to stand by them because I know that the fruits of success in the entertainment business are not of God and anything not of God cannot be obtained through His grace. The excesses and ego gratification that come as part and parcel to celebrity are things of the world and in order to achieve worldly reward you have to submit yourself to things that, by definition, fall short of the glory of God.

This is not meant as an indictment of Tyler’s character as much as it is a statement of fact. You do not achieve what Tyler, or any other celebrity, has achieved without being incredibly committed. People tend to toss around phrases like “meant to be” or “born to do this” lightly, treating them as meaningless anecdotes to mask the mundaneness of our daily lives. For someone like Tyler, these are not tired clichés. They aren’t clichés at all. They are honest depictions of what lives inside.

To ascend to that level of celebrity, you have to want it to the point of desperation. It has to consume and dominate your every waking moment. It has to be the first thing you think of in the morning and the last thing you think about at night. And if you want something, anything, that badly you will be willing to do just about anything to get it. Show me someone as famous as Tyler Perry and I will show you someone who, at some point, sacrificed his or her integrity at the altar of fame.

What does any of this mean? Well I can state to you, unequivocally, that NONE of us; not myself, not Nia and not Tyler Perry had any illusions whatsoever about how Chico made his money. None. We didn’t care—we couldn’t afford to. All of us desperately wanted to get this show back up, and we were willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. Taking money from a drug dealer was never questioned. We saw it as a blessing because to us, he was that dude.

Now if you were to look up “that dude” in the dictionary you would probably find a picture of Chico. He had it all— designer suits, five hundred dollar shoes, expensive cars and a stable of beautiful women at his disposal. Everything about the man absolutely reeked of money.

Nia met him through a woman named Sonya Taylor. Apparently they worked together on a Lil’ Kim concert Chico funded and Nia reached out to her to see if he might be interested in working something out with us.

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