Wyclef Jean knows he’s not the only important person from East Orange. So yesterday, when the former Fugee returned to his childhood home to shoot a video for his new single, “Hendrix,” he figured he’d up the wattage by asking a more recently minted East Orange celebrity to participate.
“How are you, darling? Where’s your mother?” Wyclef asked Kyemah McEntyre, a willowy 19-year-old in long braids who arrived at the shoot mid-afternoon followed by a camera crew.
She was shepherded into the backyard, where publicists, security guards and a few dozen visitors mingled over a catered buffet arrayed near a battered Jeep that lives on the property. Inside and still off limits to the assembled was the place where history was made 20 years ago: the cellar, known as “the Booga Basement,” where the Fugees conceived their landmark 1996 album The Score.
McEntyre is an up-and-coming fashion star. She was soared into the spotlight last year, when magazines like Cosmopolitan made note of the dress she designed for her senior prom at Cicely Tyson Community School of Performing and Fine Arts. She’s now a student at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and the founder of the label the Mind of Kye. And she’ll be one of two stars of the “Hendrix” video.
“I’ve never acted before. I’m really nervous,” said McEntyre, whose mother, Fatimah, was greeted by Wyclef with a hug.
Wyclef discovered McEntyre after enlisting local high school students to help create the concept for the “Hendrix” video in July.
“This is where I’m from, and I wanted to keep it local. I wanted their voices to be heard,” he told this reporter before being hustled away by a cameraman.
Connie Jackson, East Orange’s public information officer, offered further explanation: “Wyclef was really upset right after the shootings in Dallas, and he wanted this video to be about kids making the right choices. So he reached out to us and asked if we would help him pull something together. We all got together in the mayor’s office about a month ago, Wyclef and about a dozen kids from our three East Orange high schools,” she said, fanning herself fruitlessly on the hot and humid afternoon. “They came up with ideas. I can’t begin to express what a powerful experience it was. Not only for the kids, but for all of us.”
Those kids, chosen by Iqua Colson, supervisor of arts for the East Orange School District, were also on set in East Orange. Reva Rutherford, 17, who’ll be a senior at Cicely Tyson in the fall, was one of them.
“Basically, I didn’t know any of my other fellow students who were there that day at the mayor’s office, but I knew it was massively good opportunity,” said Rutherford, who offered a one-sentence summary of the video concept: “It’s about a troubled boy who gets into a conflict, with crime, in his neighborhood, and he eventually gets to make a change in the community by saying the right things.”
McEntyre plays the boy’s girlfriend. She encourages him to make the right decisions.
“I’m on the straight and narrow,” she explained. “I’m the good influence.” She had yet to meet her co-star, a teen actor from New York who was roaming the property. But she was less concerned with that encounter than with making a favorable impression on Wyclef once the cameras started rolling.
“When you’re growing up in East Orange, he’s a huge influence. Still. Even though he started out so long ago,” said McEntyre. “And he comes back, which is what’s so impressive. And he’s willing to give me my shot at acting. To me, that’s just incredible. So yeah, I’m nervous. But I’m going to give it my best shot.”
The shoot was to wrap today.