33 Things You Should Know About Mary J. Blige

1 SHE COULDN’T HAVE A MORE ALL-AMERICAN NAME.
Mary Jane Blige. “My sister, LaTonya Jenae Blige, she got the cool name,” Blige says. Mary’s mother, Cora, raised her four kids the best she could. But money was too tight to mention, and the family ended up moving from the Bronx to Schlobohm Gardens, a housing project in Yonkers, New York — a place so rough it was nicknamed “Slow Bomb.”

2 GEORGIA WAS ON HER MIND.
She spent summers with her grandparents in Savannah, Georgia. “We used to crab, pick beans, clean fish and run around in the thousand-degree heat,” she remembers.

3 JESUS IS HER MAIN MAN.
Blige doesn’t like to “ram my religious feelings down people’s throats,” but she does say that she needs “spiritual assistance.” It wasn’t always that way. “I grew up in the Pentecostal church — you know, the kind where everybody’s running around, jumping and hollering. I really didn’t get anything much out of the church; I just loved singing in front of a bunch of people.”

4 MARY WAS ONE OF THE BOYS.
“I was not a girl. Not that I was a dyke or anything like that; I just didn’t have what all the other kids had, and I never fit in with the girly stuff. But all the guys were really cool. They didn’t judge me, and they’d pass me a blunt or whatever the case may be.”

5 MRS. MICHAEL JACKSON?
The first record Blige ever bought was “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. But her heart belonged to the future King of Pop. “I used to think I was going to marry that man,” she remembers.

6 MARY’S FIRST TIME WAS FORGETTABLE.
Blige didn’t have a lot of boyfriends, and she says that her first sexual experience “looked like something that felt really good on TV but felt like someone had sliced me in half with a knife.”

7 SHE CAN FOLD CLOTHES, BUT DON’T ASK HER TO.
Her first paying job was at a department store on Central Avenue in New York’s Westchester County. “I worked there folding kids’ clothes for $3.75, or whatever the minimum wage was back then. I hated it — three weeks and I was outta there.”

8 SHE NEVER GOT HER “GOOD ENOUGH DIPLOMA.”
Blige, now 32, dropped out of school when she was 16. “The only part I liked were the talent shows and spelling bees. My attention span in there was zero. The teachers, everybody, just made me sick. I think that if I had finished school, I would have no common sense right now.” She has talked about getting a General Equivalency Diploma. “I don’t take pride in my ignorance,” she says.

9 KARAOKE MADE HER FAMOUS.
Once, when Blige was hanging out at a mall in White Plains, New York, she went into a recording booth and sang Anita Baker’s 1986 hit “Caught Up in the Rapture” to a karaoke track. Her stepfather passed the tape to a friend at Uptown Records, who gave her a job singing backup vocals for such rappers as Father MC.

10 SHE TOOK MEETINGS IN A LAUNDRY ROOM.
When she was 19, Blige signed her first proper record deal — on the top of a dryer in the housing project where she was raised. “That’s called wanting to get out of the projects!” she says.

11 SHE KNEW DIDDY WHEN HE WAS DADDY.
At Uptown Records, there was an intern named Sean Combs, who called himself Puff Daddy. He was the guy who crowned Mary “the queen of hip-hop soul,” and he produced songs on her first record, 1992’s What’s the 411? They parted ways after her second album (My Life, 1994) but recently reunited on her latest LP, Love & Life. “We both had a lot of growing up to do,” Blige says. “It was like we never separated. I call him Puff — I ain’t going for the Diddy!”

12 SHE HAS MIXED BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE.
Blige once dated Cedric “K-Ci” Hailey, of Jodeci. It was a stormy affair that led her to cover such heartbreak songs as My Life’s “I’m Goin’ Down.” “That’s a whole other book that we closed,” she says of the relationship. “And we gonna keep that one closed.”

13 “EVER SINCE I WAS 16, I’VE BEEN IN HELL.”
You name the vice, Blige has done it: booze, drugs, abusive relationships, depression, suicidal tendencies. “My Life should have been named Help, because I was ready to go! Like, get out of here, planet Earth, goodbye, die. I was so suicidal I would draw men to me who wanted to kill me, too. I didn’t think I was pretty or smart. I thought I was a piece of shit,” she says with a laugh. “A piece of shit with a nice weave and makeup.”

14 MARY INVENTED “GHETTO FABULOUSNESS.”
At first, she dressed like a dude, not a lady. But she soon discovered that she could sing for her bling, and ended up a “label girl” in designer clothes. She was fond of sunglasses to hide the ravages of late nights, and was famous for showing up to work late or high, or both. “I definitely thought life was one big party,” she has said.

15 SHE HAS SPENT SOME TIME IN TATTOO PARLORS.
“When I was in L.A., I had nothing to do but get tattoos. I have seven. I can’t even begin to show you all of them.” She has her name on one arm and a cross on the other, two angels above her booty, a butterfly, a rose and the Japanese symbol for strength. “I wouldn’t do it again, because they really hurt. But it was all about pain!”

16 IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
Oh, definitely, Blige says, and she isn’t talking about that David Bowie song. “I think they’re here. And nobody told us about it yet, or it might be invisible or some shit.”

17 SHE’S NOW CLEAN AND PRETTY MUCH SOBER.
She used be down for a line or 200. “I didn’t need rehab to recover from drugs,” she says. “I’ll tell you what the gift was: knowing. It’s like, a light comes on, and then you’re done with whatever has been holding you back.” She used to smoke cigars and cigarettes, but she doesn’t anymore. “I might occasionally one day. I might have something to drink, too. But it’s not a priority. I used to be an alcoholic, to be quite honest.”

18 SHE USED TO THINK ABOUT BEING A EXOTIC DANCER.
“My dream back in the day, when I was drinking, was that I wanted to be a stripper.” There was just one thing holding her back — the same thing that today keeps her from posing in Playboy. “It stops being a mystery when I’m naked,” she says. “Then it’s like, ‘Ah, Mary, we don’t want to see you anymore!’”

19 MARY IS BUFF.
“I work very hard in the gym and the results are incredible, so yeah, I want to show it off,” she says. “But I won’t get caught out there with my nipple hanging out of my dress. If I choose to have my cleavage out, you still take me seriously. I might be a brick house, but you respect this brick house. ’Cause this brick house does her job well.”

20 OH, NO, NOT I…I WILL SURVIVE.
By 1997, with the release of Share My World (produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), Blige was coming out of her emotional tailspin. The album debuted at number 1. “If you can survive all of that, you definitely want to find out why,” she says. “What is your destiny? I found out that my job is to give.” She gave until it hurt in confessional songs that made her a legend. “I didn’t want to tell people my business,” she says now. “I just had no choice.”

21 MARY KNOWS OF WHAT SHE SINGS.
“Women deal with something at a certain time of the month, and you need to really take it easy on us,” says the author of “PMS,” a song from her 2001 CD, No More Drama. “Just take it easy on us if you love us, because around that time every woman is not peaceful.”

22 SHE ISN’T WRITING THOSE FEELIN’-LOWDOWN, HURTIN’-BAD SONGS ANYMORE.
“Artists shouldn’t be obligated to live for the public,” she says firmly. “My personal life is mine. If you don’t want to be my fan anymore just because I’m happy, then to hell with you.”

23 MRS. MARY J. BLIGE!
She has been engaged since December 2001. “I have to have a reasonably long engagement, because I have to get to know people,” she asserts. Her fiancé is Kendu Isaacs, whom Blige calls “the other half of my brain.” They met in a recording studio when he was helping to produce Queen Latifah, and Blige did a song with her. “I saw him, he saw me, and it was like, ‘Hmmm?’ ” she remembers. Then Isaacs came to a party after one of Blige’s concerts. “And that’s when it was like, ‘Oh.’ Then ‘Oooh!’”

24 MR. MARY J. BLIGE?
The strangest rumor Blige has ever heard about herself? “Are you ready for this? That I was a man. Like, I’m some kind of transvestite or got some kind of operation. If I’m a man, I feel sorry for men! I mean, really — we’re in trouble if I’m a man.”

25 STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN WHEN MARY MEETS PEOPLE.
Blige has a lot of famous fans. Annie Lennox, for instance. “It was something else meeting her,” Blige says. “She’s beautiful inside and out. When you meet people, you get to see who they really are, and it was like our souls were sucking each other up.”

26 MARY MEETS A LOT OF PEOPLE.
Everyone wants to work with her. For Love & Life, Blige recorded a track with Eve and Dr. Dre (“Not Today”) and did duets with 50 Cent (“Let Me Be the 1”) and Method Man (the album’s first single, “Love @ 1st Sight”).

27 SHE PLAYS ELTON JOHN’S PIANO.
Blige has a guitar, but she’s much better on the 88s. Elton John gave her a piano as a housewarming gift. “Elton is my friend. People don’t believe that. They think I’m just using it as a marketing tool or some shit, but this man is my friend. He keeps it real.”

28 SHE’S also AN ACTRESS, KINDA-SORTA.
Blige did an episode of the Lifetime series Strong Medicine and also made her film debut in 2001, in a low-budget movie called Prison Song, which also featured rapper Q-Tip. “I got to do a lot of screaming and stab one of the correction officers with a pen in his neck.”

29 DO NOT EVEN SUGGEST WATCHING THE EXORCIST WITH HER.
“It was the first movie that I had ever seen. I was 8 years old, and it scared the living daylights out of me. You still can’t get me to watch that movie today. I will not do it.”

30 MARY WOULD LIKE TO BE SPIDER-MAN. EITHER THAT, OR BE ABLE TO FLY.
“I can’t save the world, that’s for sure. But I would love to fly.” She’d certainly save money; she hasn’t been on a commercial airline since September 11, 2001. “I’m not dealing with public transportation. I’ll take a private plane or my bus.”

31 ON THE BLIGE BUS, IT’S ALL ABOUT TIVO.
“I record Twilight Zone episodes. I have all of them, from 1 to 156. My favorite is ‘To Serve Man.’ It’s about aliens reading a book that turns out to be a cookbook for preparing humans. Freaky!”

32 MARY IS THE IMELDA MARCOS OF HIP-HOP SOUL.
When she goes shoe shopping, sometimes she gets so overwhelmed, she’ll start testifying. “I walk in a store, and I’m like, ‘Whooaahaay!’” She has so many pairs, she’s lost count. She has also begun designing boots, but she isn’t going to go all Sean John just yet. “One day I’ll do a clothing line, but it’s all about me right now. I’m not selling anything — let me wear it all first!”

33 WANT A HUG? SEEK OUT MARY.
Ms. Blige would most like to be known not as a singer or an actress or even a footwear designer, but as an approachable person. “When people remember me, I want them to think, ‘She was eye-to-eye, and she didn’t let her career define her. She was a person like us.’ When you see me on the street, you can give me a hug, like, easy.”