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Richard and Vernon are doing one thing, me and Wendell will be doing the opposite. I have my own ideas, plus I borrow from the old
Temptations. I have even borrowed things from female artists. See, most groups just dance and do steps with no conception of what’s going on, but we try to tell the story. The way I figure it, the way we move isn’t ordinary, it’s out of this world. It’s kind of magic, really.”
    After that, Ted Mills told us that though Blue Magic was part of the W.M.O.T. Productions Family in Philadelphia, the group itself is a corporation known as Mystic Dragon. We asked him what W.M.O.T. stands for, and why a corporation is called Mystic Dragon. He said, “W.M.O.T. stands for We Men Of Talent, and they are responsible for our record production. Mystic Dragon means that we own ourselves. It means that Vernon will not just design clothes for Blue Magic or Keith choreograph only for Blue Magic, and Wendell can arrange voices for other people as well. Richard is our accountant, and I can handle corporate business. We are very smart. I was studying law when I first joined the group, and we each read at least one book every four days. We chose the name Mystic Dragon because it reflects Blue Magic. We are in tune with the harmony of man itself. We are what happens when the limited seeks the unlimited. One day, through us, I hope to reveal the secrets of Blue Magic.”
    Just before we left, we told them that Blue Magic’s performance was so appealing it made us wish we had lots of miniature sets of Blue Magic to carry with us wherever we go. They laughed, and Vernon Sawyer said, “That’s such a nice idea we just might start working on it.”
    â€” August 11 , 1975

A Commercial Party
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    The other evening, Revlon, the big cosmetics company, threw a party in the first-floor-accessories department (hats, gloves, scarves, cosmetics, things like that) of Bloomingdale’s, to celebrate the opening of the movie Mahogany, starring Diana Ross, and to introduce a new line of “Orient-inspired” colors, called China Bronze, in their Touch & Glow makeup. Since Miss Ross is the model for Touch & Glow in the movie, we naturally assumed that China Bronze was another line of colors for black women. Great. Black is beautiful, true, but it never hurts to try to be more beautiful. Well, we were wrong.
    At the party, we walked in and immediately had our picture taken by a couple of photographers from Polaroid, who then pasted the photograph on a black piece of cardboard and told us that this framed picture of us was taken by the SX-70 camera. We checked out a rumor that Diana Ross might make an appearance and were told that she was in California, about to have a baby. We looked around and saw Tony
Perkins, who also stars in the movie, wearing a denim shirt and denim pants; Ben Vereen, wearing a handsome black velvet suit, which he told us was designed specially for him by Jacques Bellini; Jacques Bellini, wearing a handsome black velvet jacket, which he told us he had designed for himself; some unrecognizable well-dressed, smiling people eating Chinese-style spareribs and fried chicken; lots of other unrecognizable well-dressed, smiling people drinking champagne; and more unrecognizable well-dressed, smiling people watching scenes from Mahogany, on a color television set. What we didn’t see were any black women who looked as if they might be wearing the new China Bronze colors.
    Just as we were about to inquire what, exactly, was going on, a slim, pretty, non-black young woman, wearing a cluster of yellow flowers in her hair, a brightly colored shirt, and black pants, came up to us and said that her name was Kathy Fields, that she was a makeup consultant for Revlon, that she was with the China Bronze “collection,” and that she was actually wearing one of the new hues. We took a good look at her face. It was cherry red, as if she had just stuck it in a hot