Even while watching her daughter Mecca Madison appear on television—petite, comely and irresistible, like an exotic little bird, with black hair slicked upon her left cheek in spidery curls, an enticing evocation of the age of Betty Boop and of all that jazz, standing there before a nation of American Idol fanatics, in front of judges Randy and Paula and, the formidable one, Simon, about to sing her way into the show's next round, in Hollywood, and then into the good graces of critics everywhere, even insurmountable ones like Howard Stern—her mother did not exclaim victory.
For she had no reason to. American Idol in many respects is a sterile medium, she says, evidenced by the few contestants to have success beyond the show; and ever since dreams for Mecca's musical stardom eclipsed the dreams for her own, it has been her singular mission to get her daughter a record deal.
Instead, Moca Dominguez, an endless conversationalist and master astronomer, hoped the light that shined on and out of her daughter on the January 28 show would attract desire toward her Mecca. She was ready that very day to tell the world all about her little girl, and she believed herself to be the best person to do so, not just because she has been promoting Mecca's career for the past decade, but because she has been an omnipresent force behind Mecca's every move, ever since Mecca came into this world 19 years ago under the secretive sign of a Scorpio.
Here's what she had to say:
"She was 9—just 9 years old she was—and she said to me, 'We gotta go to Las Vegas, Mamma. Showbiz is in Las Vegas.' She did, I promise she did! She was singing gospel in Chicago back then, and I put her in some contests. She was a little small thing, but forceful. They called her 'Baby Peaches.' Called her it because we had just been in Atlanta. She was in the Atlanta city choir, o-kay. She had walked right in there and belted out her song, and you know—the baby girl had some rhythm. Ummm-hmm.
"She was just 4 when she started. You know, I was a performer myself—jazz, Billy Holiday impersonations, contests, featured acts, too many open mics to count, uh-huh—and I had no baby-sitter; so I put the 4-year-old in the front seat, o-kay, I put her right in front of me and one day she gets up and says, 'That—that's what I wanna do.' Ummm-hmm. That's when I put away my dreams for showbiz and put 'em all into my baby.
"Now, Las Vegas is her city; it ain't my city. She was born right here, November 3, 1986. Conceived in Chicago, born in Vegas. Ummm-hmm. My father—or the man who was most like a father to me, o-kay—he was in Vegas, and he only had a little time to go. So I ran—I ran through the airport with the baby in my stomach, and uh-huh I made it in time. Doctors told me it was gonna be a boy. But then, on Halloween—my favorite holiday—I had a dream, and I dreamt that my favorite deceased uncle came to me, and he said the baby in my stomach was a girl, and I argued with him, I said, 'No, the doctors already told me it was a boy,' but he said, 'No, it's a girl, and you gonna name her Mecca.' The next morning I woke up and went into labor—76 hours. And when she came out—ooohhh a big baby she was! Wouldn't know it lookin' at her now—but when she came out, I knew she was the Mecca of my love.
"And she came out with so much culture in her, from her family, I swear she did! Italian, Jewish, Jamaican, African-American. She's got a lot of artistic people before her: my aunt, she was a belly dancer; my grandmother was a gypsy who partook in Indian Festivals and traveled with psychics; and, you know, I'm a singer. My mother gave us no gospel—only music. Gave me Billy Holiday, and I fed it to my baby. And Mecca listened. She's got sensitive ears, and an open mind, and she's connected with the stars and the planets. O-kay. She listens to all the family's stories, and she takes it in. And you know—she's all they never was.
"Uh-huh. I took her across the country—a year in Michigan, two years in Atlanta, two years in Chicago—and we did this with very little. I home-schooled her most of her life. We got our bumps and bruises—my mother thought we lost our mind—but we've come a long way. We've been shooting for a record contract since she was 9, and that's still our mission. She's so versatile, can sing pop and R&B and soul, Mariah Carey and Sade, and you know—she combines the generations. She does, I promise she does! It doesn't really matter what happens with American Idol. I had heard the advertisement for it last year on the radio, and we were cautious about it. I mean, record companies don't want the stigma that comes with having an American Idol contestant on their label, o-kay, but we went anyway, said 'What do we got to lose?'"
The American Idol auditions in Las Vegas took place last October, and Mecca shined. So much so that producers from the show came out to her home in Southwest Las Vegas and constructed a brief biographical package on her, which they aired on the January 28 show, just before her performance.
"I'm grateful for American Idol, but I don't want to be held down," says Mecca, who in her own modern tone often picks up the thread of her mother's bewitching tales without a pause or discrepancy. "I don't want to be an artist who is their puppet."
She has just returned from taping the Hollywood shows, the performances of which viewers will be able to vote on in the upcoming weeks; and nothing, she says, has altered her sole, unflagging focus:
"My short-term goal is to get a good record contract, and from there I'd like to have some longevity in the music business—like, 10 to 20 years," says Mecca, who, after spending more than a decade in her mother's household classroom, attended Las Vegas Academy, where she learned the introvert's art of keeping a diary in her head, and graduated without any real close friends.
"My mother is everything to me," she says. "She's my best friend, my mother, my father, my coach, my manager. She's all I know."