Melik Brown finds a home, Lansing finds a champion

Photographs by Melik Brown

Dec. 7 to 8 at Casa de Rosado, 204 E. Mt. Hope Ave., Lansing, (517) 402-0282

Melik Brown doesn’t need a stage. The hood of his sweatshirt is a proscenium arch. His face and his voice supply the humor, drama, tenderness and anger, the lights and the shadows.

Lansing’s one and only Metro Melik is the guiding force of LansingMade, a multi-pronged barrage of positive promotion and merchandise meant to shake Michigan’s capital city out of its deep-seated inferiority complex.

But Metro Melik is only one facet of Melik Brown. He’s been in plays and movies, had his own cable TV show, took a turn as a rapper and might have served you a chowder at the Soup Spoon Café back in the day. In a series of disturbing and funny one-man performances at the Robin Theatre, he shares his experiences as a black man living in America.

He often recedes into his hoodie and poses as the regular guy who’s just like you and me — his least convincing role. “People tell me I have a theatrical way about me,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know what that means.”

To get a deeper feel for Brown and his love for Lansing, go to Casa de Rosado, the cozy community gallery on Mt. Hope.

There, you’ll find a display of photographs he’s taken over the past several years. They tell the story of a restless soul who has been to Paris, New York, Puerto Rico and many other places, but has decided, with open eyes, to settle in Lansing.

That’s “settle in,” not “settle for.”

“People talk about, ‘Lansing sucks,’” he said. “What do you mean? Get out of your house. We’ve got two rivers, we have a River Trail, four seasons, a Big 10 university and museum, an award-winning community college that’s pretty much an art museum in itself.”

The topic draws him out of his hood, stage front.

“Everything is here except marine biology,” he said with a grin. “Equity theater. All kinds of music. You want to see a Broadway play without having a Manhattan apartment? You can get home by 11. You’re 10 minutes away from a park, at the most, an hour away from a Great Lake. The secret of Lansing is it’s all here, you just have to look around the corner.”

Up in the sky

In a luminous photograph by Melik Brown at Casa de Rosado, downtown Lansing is awash in silver light. Even though the familiar Capitol dome and Boji Tower dominate the view, people ask Brown where the photo was taken. The angle is unusual and the city looks like a metropolis.

“It took me a year to get this picture,” Brown said.  “Planning, thinking, waiting for the perfect sunrise, getting permission and access to the roof. I’m on Ottawa Street, straight up in the sky.”

The feeling that Lansing is home ripened gradually for Brown.

As a kid, he bounced around the country, living wherever his Air Force dad was stationed. His family ended up in Oscoda in northern Michigan.

A short stint at MSU studying hospitality management didn’t work out. Textbooks and tests didn’t suit his brain patterns.

“It wasn’t my bag,” he said. “My blood alcohol was higher than my grade point by the time I left.”

In the 1990s, he stuck around the Lansing area and worked at various service jobs. He sums up his 20s as “restaurant work, bad relationships, evictions from apartments — regular life stories.”

How old is he? “We don’t talk about that,” he said, making himself plural to shut the question down extra hard.

One day in 1993, he spotted a notice for a Riverwalk Theatre production of “West Side Story,” with open auditions. “I thought, maybe I’ll get the part of a tree,” he said. “I didn’t know it was an inner-city story. That’s how ignorant I am.”

Part of Brown’s message about Lansing is that it’s a city that gives you a shot, leaves you space to spread your wings. He wanted to try out for a show since his high school days in Oscoda, but never had the opportunity.

He showed up alone for auditions, with no idea what to expect. He watched more experienced applicants hand sheet music to their accompanists.

“I thought, ‘So that’s how you do it,’” he said.

In lieu of a prepared audition, he sang a pop tune he liked, Shai’s 1992 ballad “If I Ever Fall in Love.”

“It was years since I’d been in choir,” he said. “I could hold a note once I found it.”

But nobody warned him about the dancing.

“I’m looking at ladies in leotards, dudes stretching, and I’m like “I don’t belong here,’” he said.

Encouraged by jovial Riverwalk director Jeffrey Brenner, Brown gave it a try.

“It was jump, jump, turn around, jump,” he said. “They had a French name for it.”

He stumbled the first time and asked if he could go again. “The choreographer gave me a great welcoming smile and told me, ‘Sure,’” he recalled. “It wasn’t much better, but I felt a sense of accomplishment.”

When the cast list was posted, he was shocked to see his name in the chorus, just like people do in the movies.

It sounded like a perfect gig — stay out of the limelight, fake it if you need to.

But Brown has a knack for being in the right place, with eyes open. The actor cast as Pepe, friend to gang leader Bernardo, dropped out during rehearsals.

Meanwhile, Brown read the script and learned that the play was about racial conflict. He was already getting sucked in when Brenner asked him if he wanted to play Pepe.

“I wanted to be a lamp post, and now I’m Pepe,” he cracked. After a rehearsal, he mentioned to Brenner that he had written a poem, “Rhythm of the Streets.”
Brenner asked him over to his house to read the poem. He was so impressed he asked Brown to read it before each night’s performance, in addition to playing Pepe.

“All 12 performances,” he said. “I had a ball. I was terrified the whole time.”

Taking root

In the early 2000s, Brown put on rap shows at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, with dancers, DJs, a video crew and full-on choreography. In Lansing, he produced a public access cable show that featured standup comics, musicians and oddities like a man who built a hot rod tractor.

“We took a camera out into the parking lot and it shot flame,” he said. “I love that kind of stuff.”

He made industrial films. He took acting classes from C.L. Adams, who ran a modeling and acting school in the same East Side building on Michigan Avenue where Brown’s LansingMade merchandise “nook” is now nestled.

He popped up in a few movies, including “Eight Mile” (as an extra) and “The Elevator,” a TV production by Blind Squirrel Productions. Elizabeth Berkley of “Saved by the Bell” was also in the cast. When a bit player didn’t show up one day, Brown was promoted from extra to speaking role. He was handed a notebook and shouted out a question as part of a scrum of reporters being whisked into an elevator.

Little by little, he took root in Lansing. He bought a house, worked at the Soup Spoon and pursued his side projects. He was doing a routine shift at the cafe when a stranger fixed a penetrating gaze at him.

“You’re Melik, right?” the man said.

Brown was used to being recognized from his cable TV show and from his appearances on WLNS-TV, but this was different.

“It was like he was peering into the deepest, darkest recess of my soul, which was terrifying,” Brown recalled.

“You should meet my cousin,” the man said. “She’s ready to meet people.”

“Well, I’m not.” Brown had just gotten out of a bad relationship. “I had gray hair. I was done.”

But he made a date with the cousin, Jessi Yeargin, anyway.

“I wasn’t used to normal and it scared me,” he said. Not too much, though. They have now been partners for three years and live on Lansing’s west side with their 2-year-old son, Raiden, and Yeargin’s two older kids, Gabriel and Evelynn.

While Brown and I talked in the LansingMade “nook,” Yeargin and Evelynn popped in to visit. Brown handed Yeargin a bouquet of flowers he had stuffed onto a shelf crammed with Lansing sweatshirts. No occasion. There was a prolonged, soft rustle of hugs and murmurings in the hallway when Yeargin left.

“Dude, she lit up the room, right?” Brown said when he came back.

A photograph of Yeargin sitting in the window of an apartment in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, is featured in the Casa de Rosado show. Her white dress glows like cream against the ancient stucco. There is a fort in the middle ground and a wall of dark thunderheads in the distance.

Comes the storm

One of Brown’s most personal projects is his series of one-man spoken word performances at the Robin Theatre.

He tells the story of Yeargin’s troubled pregnancy with Raiden, not for its own sake, but as a vivid lesson in what it’s like to be black in America.

While pregnant with Raiden, Yeargin had a few serious health scares. One night, Brown went home to join them after his shift and he found her on the floor, unconscious.

In a flash, he thought: is she dead?

“Did I just meet this wonderful person, and then I have to go back and tell her kids Mommy’s not here anymore?” he recalled.

In the same instant, a second needle of panic pierced his primary pain.

“And I’m black,” he said. He laughed, but the laughter had an acidic burn.

“And I’ve got these cute little blond-haired kids sleeping in my apartment, with a white woman, possibly dead on my floor, and I got to call the police at 11 o’clock at night. I said to myself — and I’m being very frank — ‘Nigger, you’ve got to get your story straight.’”

He tried to revive her. She stirred. He dialed 911.

“Hi. My name is Melik,” he said, re-enacting the call. He barked the words as if the hearer were deaf. “I. Live. At. Such-and-such. It’s my house. I found this situation. Send help I live here. I’m a black guy. This is where I live. My house. I live here.”

He paused.

“Now here’s another advantage of living in Lansing,” he said. “I’m pretty sure some of the horrible things happening across the country aren’t going to happen here. However … .”

The acid laugh bubbled back up.

Yeargin was prescribed bed rest. The night she went into labor, a wave of thunderstorms and tornadoes swept through the area.

Brown searched his phone for baby names that mean ‘thunder and lightning.’ He found Raiden, the god of thunder and lightning in Japanese Shinto mythology.

He found out later that it’s also the name of a character in Mortal Kombat.

He shrugged. There was less acid in his laugh.

Time and chance

Brown’s reputation as a storyteller has grown to the point where people ask him on short notice to do all kinds of public speaking gigs, often on short notice, because someone didn’t show up or bowed out of an obligation.

He’s not crazy about that.

“I’m not a jester,” he said. “I don’t show up and go ‘durp de durp’ for your entertainment. I’m comfortable in my house, sipping whiskey and watching a movie in my own dimly lit space.”

Besides, LansingMade is spreading a lot of tendrils, with promotional videos, a network of partnerships with area businesses and more merchandise on the way, and the project is taking up more of his time.

But he will, with good cause, talk your ear off. He will gladly walk you through the photography exhibit at Casa de Rosado (providing Raiden is up from his nap), offer commentary on each image and “stop when you say stop.”

One of the most striking pieces at the show is “Face of Rock and Roll,” a concert photo of Verdine White, the original bassist of Earth, Wind and Fire. White played at the Lansing Promise dinner at the Lansing Center a few years ago.

Brown had no interest in what he called “up the nose with boogers” views typical of concert photos. He captured White head on, in mid-riff, kicking up on one leg, with his hair whipping across his face. It’s a dramatic image in its own right, but to Brown, White’s hair-covered face symbolized his underserved obscurity in music history, and that of many black pioneers of rock.

Being in the right place and spotting opportunities others miss is Brown’s formula for photography as well as life.

“It’s a curse,” he said.

“Don’t” is a dark panorama of ice floes on Lake Huron at the exact moment the sun appeared over the horizon. The title refers to a sign warning people not to walk on the ice, which, of course, he did.

“Time and chance,” he said. “You’re driving down the road and you go, ‘That’s it.’ You start driving crazy, you don’t care where you park the car, you don’t care if you get a ticket. ‘I’ll talk to you later, we’ll have all day. I’ve got to do this.’”

Another photograph depicts a discarded note full of expletives left by an angry motorist in Detroit: “You fucking douchebag asshole, learn how to park your P.O.S. truck.” Brown framed the note lovingly, as if it were a bouquet of roses.

By now, his laughter had brightened into a supersonic wheeze of pure amusement.

“Good luck editing all this.”