Stacy Lattisaw was outside playing with her friends on the day she turned 16 when her mother called to her. “Stacy, someone’s on the phone for you.”
She wasn’t expecting anybody. “I’m like, who in the world’s calling me?” she said in “DECADES”, a mini docuseries from WHUT, Howard University Television, that premiered on March 15, 2024.
She was no ordinary teenager, even if she still spent her birthday out with her friends. Born in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 25, 1966, she recorded her first album at 12. “Let Me Be Your Angel” reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1980, and “Love on a Two-Way Street” got to No. 26 a year later.
Then came an offer most young singers would have grabbed with both hands: opening for the Jacksons on their 1981 Triumph Tour. She was 14, and her first answer was no.
“I immediately said no,” she told WHUT, “’cause I knew I did not want to be on the road for 13 weeks, 36 different cities, absolutely not.” The numbers are hers.
Her mother saw it differently. She told her daughter the tour would jump start her career, Lattisaw recalled, “and I was like okay.”
So she went, and she got to watch Michael work up close. “Michael in my opinion was the greatest entertainer of our time,” she said. “I think watching him perform helped me a lot.” What stayed with her was the way he connected with the audience. “He just had such an awesome stage presence.” She says she still has pictures with him.
Stacy Lattisaw talks about the Jacksons tour and her 16th birthday
This is WHUT’s own upload of her “DECADES” episode. She starts on the Jacksons tour at about 2:58 and gets to the birthday at about 3:49.
The tour ended, and some time later the birthday came around. “I remember a few things that will always stay with me,” she said. “When I turned 16, Michael called me and wished me a happy birthday.”
She went to the phone with no idea who was waiting, and this is how she tells the next few seconds: “He’s like, ‘Hi Stacy.’ I’m like, ‘Hello?’ ‘This is Michael.’ I’m like, ‘Michael who?’ He’s like, ‘This is Michael Jackson, wish you happy birthday.'”
She didn’t thank him. She didn’t say another word.
“I slammed the phone,” she said. Her reason was simple. “I thought it was somebody playing on the phone. I did not think that it was him.” She had opened his family’s shows as a 14-year-old, but that didn’t make it any easier to believe he’d remembered her birthday and picked up a phone himself. So the singer she’d watched perform on that tour introduced himself, wished her a happy birthday and got a receiver banged down in his ear.
That wasn’t the whole of his birthday greeting, though. “I just cannot believe that Michael Jackson took the time to wish me a sweet 16 birthday,” she said, “and he sent me some flowers.”
She doesn’t say what kind they were or when they reached her, and she doesn’t say whether she ever got to apologise for the phone. Her reaction is the part she gives: “I was like wow.”
Lattisaw kept recording through the 1980s. “Where Do We Go from Here”, her duet with Johnny Gill, went to No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1989. She left pop music in 1992 to raise her family and has sung gospel since.
More than 40 years after that birthday, in front of WHUT’s cameras, she finished the story in five words: “I will never forget that.”