Amateur Night, the Apollo Launchpad

One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street, Harlem's central thoroughfare, is a chaotic mix of popular culture filtered through African American lenses. On both sides of the wide boulevard, street vendors sell scented oils, homemade body butters and faux mudcloth dresses silk-screened with the image of President Obama. The street rolls past the modern glass front of the Studio Museum of Harlem, where black socialites pull out their designer frocks for fancy fundraising, and hip-hop clothing emporiums that keep the cool hunters informed of rising trends. Mass-market merchants like Starbucks and M.A.C. connect the neighborhood to middle-class, modern American sameness.

But towering over it all is the famous marquee of the Apollo Theater. The theater is celebrating its 75th anniversary as it continues to serve as a symbol of African American history and its legacy in modern America. The theater, with its name lit up in red, links the disparate pieces of the street: the spirit of the first-generation entrepreneur, the pride in community, the energy of urban life, the politics of blackness and the commonality of dreams and aspirations.

The celebration, which will last more than a year, includes the launch of a touring production of "Dreamgirls," an oral history project at Columbia University and an exhibition curated by the National Museum of African American History and Culture that is scheduled to open in April 2010 at Washington's National Museum of American History.

At a recent publicity event, stars reminisced about performing on that stage way back when and why it was such an awe-inspiring place to be. Singer Dionne Warwick shared the bracing and encouraging reviews she received as a young performer. Dancer Savion Glover considered all the ghosts in the building and how extraordinary it was to stand on the same stage that had played host to folks such as the Supremes, James Brown, Sarah Vaughan, Josephine Baker and so on.

The theater is "a symbol of the trajectory of African American aspiration," noted Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the deputy director the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

And the Apollo's most important ongoing contribution to popular culture is arguably its Amateur Night held on Wednesdays.

Amateur Night has been a tradition since 1934, when the Apollo traded in its burlesque history and became a vaudeville-style theater that was attentive to the neighborhood's growing African American community. Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were contestants in that first year. And the theater lays claim to being the stage where Ella Fitzgerald shoo-bee-dee-doo-whopped for the very first time. Vaughan won the weekly Amateur Night contest in 1943; Brown won in 1956; and the Jackson Five won in 1969.

Over the years, Amateur Night lost its prestige as fewer stars were born on its stage and the rise of hip-hop and its young moguls gave aspiring entertainers new routes to success. But folks such as Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo and Miri Ben-Ari still found value in appearing on the Amateur Night stage.

Each week, performers bravely put their talent on the line in front of an audience that is not known for being patient, tolerant or especially kind. Before Simon Cowell was deflating the dreams of cruise line singers on "American Idol," the audiences at Amateur Night were booing folks off the stage with so much rabid derision one would be forgiven for thinking the poor performers had insulted someone's mama -- and their grandma, too -- instead of merely belting out a Whitney Houston song off-key. "And I-I-I-I-I will always love YOU!!!" Cue the howling dogs. Anyone who ever watched "Showtime at the Apollo" -- the broadcast of Amateur Night -- is familiar with the level of humiliation that is always possible. No one gets by on cuteness. The audience would boo toddlers if they weren't up to par.

Success on the Amateur Night stage means something. What makes it unique is not simply the juxtaposition of seasoned performers and bona fide stars on Tuesday nights and performers who have never sung outside church service on Wednesdays. It is the audience response. It's the kind of tough, familial love that began 75 years ago and continues today.

There are no designated talent scouts functioning as judges, leaving the audience free to be an encouraging -- and enabling -- support system for the performers. The audience -- right there in person not via text message or toll-free call -- is telling the performers if they are ready for the big time, if they are ready to be seen outside of the community. In the "trajectory of aspirations," Amateur Night, through its history and its harshness, reflects the audacity of the dream, the hurdles to achieving it and an audience that takes its task seriously and will not have its time wasted by dabblers.

To wrap up the morning of Apollo memories and talk about the theater's future, a young man who calls himself Chanj -- Was Audacitee taken? -- stepped on stage. He was a past winner of "Showtime at the Apollo" and he sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." He had the audience from the first long mournful note. And for a few minutes on a Tuesday morning, an amateur was the star of the Apollo stage.