"We are definitely all about breakdancing and getting lite right now," says Adler, "but we are very open and very brave. We'd try anything. What sets us apart is that we are also interested in carpooling, basketball practices, lunch boxes, dental appointments, and all the other stuff motherhood brings into our lives. We also have careers of origin. There's a masseuse, a decorative painter, and a psychoanalyst among us."
Since forming in the late '90s, MOMZ-N-DA HOOD has evolved into a trademarked organization with a publicist, entertainment lawyer, and renowned choreographer, Lancelot Theobald Jr., whom they share with the New York Knicks City Dancers. Adler calls their story "mildly gigantic"; since getting serious around 2003, the foursome has appeared on QVC, CBS, and NBC, and performed in Nashville, Canada, California, and at Madison Square Garden during the New York Liberty's WNBA season opener in 2006.
Looking forward, Adler says her comrades are determined to work with younger, more urban, and less suburban b-boys and b-girls. She's not joking about their willingness to "try it all": Adler recently initiated talks with Jamal "Mally Mal" Weaver about collaborating with his outfit Status Quo, the Boston ensemble that took second place in the hugely popular first season of MTV's America's Best Dance Crew. "When this sort of thing happens to you at this stage in life," she says, "you just have to grab on and go. You just have to take really good care of your body — and eat a lot of Advil."
Ghetto grannies
While breaking is more than just a workout for them, the women ushering South Bronx nostalgia into neighborhoods like Sudbury are different from other hip-hop dancers in that they are hardly competitive. Their goal is to perspire and inspire — not to serve opponents. According to Lino Delgado, who founded Boston's legendary Floorlords crew in 1981 and has scouted the city's top talent ever since, the popularity of hip-hop dance among older women in general has emboldened cats across the planet to step up. Last year, while judging the annual Notorious I.B.E. Dutch break showdown in Amsterdam, Delgado witnessed a first in Crazy Granny: the 62-year-old grandmother who shocks crowds at major breaking events around Europe and Asia with her conniption-esque shimmying and encore headstand stalls.
No doubt the zeal is spreading. Even in Beijing, a gaggle of 60- and 70-plus year olds who call themselves the Hip-Hop Grannies have made headlines as far as America for their atypical senior interests, such as, well, breakdancing. Much like Bernstein's Mamas, the appeal of hip-hop dance for much older women is rooted in the same attractions that lure kids who animate urban corners: the music, the unique exercise experience, and interest in hip-hop subculture. Of the established breakers contacted for this article, the common sentiment was that, if groups like Bernstein's and Adler's are not just co-opting but paying homage, then that requisite should earn them acceptance into the typically exclusive world of breakdancing.
Through hip-hop movement, they're legitimately connecting with a genre that's often flippantly mischaracterized by cheap Saturday Night Live rap parodies and white-collar cornballs who think they're funny with mock rhymes that start with: "My name is (fill in the blank), and I'm the (fill in the blank)." And while nobody should expect or even want hip-hop to gain full acceptance by all aging suburban Caucasians, it is hopeful to see the subculture properly represented by the picket-fence crowd.
