Again, I was having major trouble deciding who would be my November Girl Crush; given I’m still madly in love with my October flame (Lizzy Caplan anyone?) 

And then, today happened. Today is November 26 and it’s Tina Turner’s 73th Birthday. First, I want to say: Wow!!! Because, she still looks amazing. Then, only her could follow in the footsteps of my babe. She is, after all, my original girl crush. My parents always had an awesome taste when it comes to music and I’ve been listening to Ike and Tina being A Fool in Love, Rocking and Rolling and thinking It’s Gonna Work out Fine ever since I was born (I went “Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey” with my tooth brush on the first one and had a sick choreography for the second). Then, in 6th or 7th grade, we had to write a paper on one person we admired and tell the class why we admired them. Pretty much everyone went the obvious road and wrote about Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Napoleon or Gandhi (not a lot of females as you can see). I wrote mine on Tina, because she’s rad, I brought my boombox and played The Bitch is Back. I thought -and still think- Tina was admirable because she had to struggle every day of her life: growing up Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee and St-Louis, Missouri. I don’t need to tell you what it was growing up a Black girl back then. She then met Ike Turner and married him and he was notoriously abusive and beat her regularly. And then, she made it on her own. She divorced him in 1976 and became the star she’d never have been had she stayed with him. One of the things I learned about her back then was that she left him all the money she they won, she only wanted to keep her stage name. What is not admirable about Tina Turner: she is not only  the Queen of Rock ‘n Roll, this talented singer with an incredible voice; she is a courageous woman. She had to start all over, and she did it brilliantly and gracefully. And today, she is 73 and still full of life and laughter and energy. Because, to me that’s who Tina Turner is: someone who takes the bad and turns in into good, and gold. That, and a sick pair of legs!