Download Love Letters and Heart Break from award-winning DJ’s Lissa Monet and P-Plus. It is the first mixtape to have a version exclusively for your iPod. Click here to download OR if you need more convincing, click our informercial.

A couple of weeks ago your pals at ThoseGirlsAreWild.com brought you a contest from award-winning DJ’s Lissa Monet and DJ P-Plus for their new joint-mixtape, Love Letters and Heart Break. DJ Lissa Monet chose the winners herself so congrats to Shayla Duval and Jonny Kates

I miss Lauryn Hill sooooo much! I listen to this album regularly as if it came out last week. She’s the best! Her music speaks to my soul like no one else can! If I could say anything to her I would just let her know how amazing and inspirational her music is and if I had a genie in a bottle I would wish to bring her back 10 times better than she ever was before. Music misses her, I miss her. Lauryn Hill WILD girl fah true!

My favorite

Share the links to your fav candid camera videos please and thanks!

1. Grape Stomp
2. Evil Hamster Look
3. Charlie Bit My Finger
4. Serious Baby Stare
5. Recycle Punch

Andrea’s Bonus

Shannon’s Bonus

Thanq, thanks you, thank yas!

“Stop right there Ma’am,” says the security guard with stiff features and a long arm.

“Yes,” responds the shopper.

“Were you not planning on paying for that camera in your hands?”

“No,” says the shopper surprised. “See the thing is I don’t really have a budget and I just thought the camera manufacturers would be flattered I even chose it at all. So if you will excuse me…”

As stupid as this story sounds, imagine that it happens every day, not with materials, but with real people. Favours are great, they are wonderful and amazing, they make the world go round but favours are for friends and family – for everyone else, just imagine that the word doesn’t even make sense.

The best advice my mother ever gave me on writing proposals is to answer this question off the bat: what’s in it for them? This is the advice I would like to pass on to you all today! Before you talk about how great you are or how greatful you would be for the opportunity – let the person know what you can offer in return.

Being on the right side of life (the arts) I just know too many people who do not receive compensation for their craft. Photographers, videographers, dancers, performers, models, spoken word artists, motivational speakers who are hand picked for their excellence but told they should want to work for good faith.

If you are looking for someone with experience, you should be looking to give up some goods and if you don’t have any goods, then don’t ask someone good!

So this is my plea to change the game and the minds of both sides involved. To my fellow arts folk – stop accepting free jobs (the only free jobs you should accept are those that promise you will make double your asking fee in future gigs). Models, stop being the only person in the room who is not being paid – because at 9/10 shoots I do this is the case. Create a culture of expectation and encourage those in your field to do the same!

To anyone asking for someone else’s time, start thinking of that person as an item in the store that you would not dare pickup unless you had something great to exchange for it! Remember, you contacting that person because they have worked hard to create something deserving. And when I say compensate, I don’t necessarily mean money – but you gotta offer something: a special audience, extensive exposure, a good investment, a tax refund.. you get my drift! The fun thing about compensating is that you can be creative with the truth! And here is the absolute best part about giving something for something – you are not at the mercy of anyone! You have a deal that is based on an agreement not a “please, please, please.” so if things aren’t up to par, you have the right to complain. And the right to complain is the single greatest power tool known to man, so please don’t take that lightly!

The point of this Think About It is to reiterate something that I have learned the long way from being on both side of the coins: in life, you will have little success asking favours from strangers because as the old saying goes, you can’t get something for nothing. And if you can… be concerned or deliriously grateful.

Shannon – gimme the goods – Boodram

This week was really hectic for me! A lot of meetings, making CRAZY skits and then I had a lot of songwriting deadlines to meet! None the less, everything worked out and the album is going well!

Shannon’s NEW Journey to #GetLaidOnTheView

Big thanks to everyone who took part in my poll last week to find a new journey. I chose The View because they are all moms AND not to mention that Barbra Walters is one of my heroes. PLUS we all know that show isn’t going anywhere. This week is about finding as many contacts as possible for the show. I want to know for sure that someone on the crew is aware of my journey! Okay away I go Next week is where the REAL work comes in!

Our Reader’s Journeys

We want to wish Carissa a VERY happy 19th birthday! For all of you guys who don’t know, Carissa is the wonderfully WILD woman who runs our Facebook Fanpage and @ThoseGirlsRWild Twitter page. She is an integral part of our team and we are happy to celebrate her today.

To the lovely, talented, outrageously, awesome, tall Carissa!

What would we do without you? No seriously, I have no idea! Thank you so much for all of the love and support that you have given and continue to give to our individual careers and as well as this blog!! You’ve become our 3rd partner in crime and whenever we’re unable to post something on the blog, I think of you!! Ash Shannon, I never want to let you down! lol Have a great birthday girl!! xoxo

Love,

Andrea Lewis 

Carissa,
I want to raise a big glass of strawberry milk (my fav) to you on your special day. At the risk of sounding cliche, words can’t express how much we appreciate your support, work and friendship. My mini-me, I am so glad that the internet brought us together and I can’t wait until both of our successes lead us to share a big  hug in real life! CAKE IT UP TODAY MANNNNNNNN!

Love,
Shannon

To our fav smarty pants: Happy B-Day Carissa

Thanks to comedian Mike Mizzel and actor Rob Vincent

The REAL video

follow @nigel sylvester and @13thwitness on Twitter

Shannon’s Pick

Andrea’s Pick

We hope to high waters that our love for singer Melanie Fiona isn’t news! This young lady is not only our fellow WILD GYAL but she is also a Toronto native just like us As luck would have it she shot her video for Ay-Yo yesterday, so since we were both in LA we hit it up with our boy Simon Curtis! All photos by Shannon

**said in our best corner bootlegger voice** We got dat EXCLUSIVE first look at the NEW Melanie Fiona vide-yo for AY-Yo!

@shannontboodram, @simoncurtis, @melaniefiona, @missandrealewis

Kardinal Offishall and Mel F – MORE FIYAH TORONTO!

Popcorn

Shandrelanie!

Where’s Waldo was de orignial hipster zeeeeeen

grrrr

la-da-dee-dee-dee-daddi-di AY-YO AY-YO

perfect sky 4 a sunset roof party right?

dang, this girl is wild

what are your thoughts on this video?

Frizzy. Headed. Freak.

By the time my mother discovered the army fatigued-patterned backpack filled with hair, it was too late. She put her hand to her mouth leaving enough space for her lips to manage a “what have you done.” I eyed the ground speechless thinking the answer to my amused self, “oh mommy, I did what needed to be done.”

At my elementary school, all of the boys liked Lisa – even Devon, the boy I had a major crush on since senior kindergarten. Lisa was white with thin wavy strawberry-blonde hair and bird-like features. She always wore her hair down; she didn’t have to put it in braids, or buns, or messy ponytails just so it wouldn’t block the chalkboard for any student sitting behind her. She didn’t have to scatter a handful of bobby pins near the front to chain-down fly aways. This is why (to my understanding at age 11) all of the boys liked Lisa and none of them liked me at my predominantly white suburban elementary school. But I have always been a girl of action so I devised a plan to turn my love-life and popularity around: I completely cut the entire middle portion of my hair out. I pinned up one layer stretching from ear-to-ear and then braided another thing layer along the nape of my neck. The rest of my hair I’m afraid didn’t make the cut, or I suppose in this circumstance it did: snip, snip you ugly poufy cool killer. I watched fistfuls of curls drop to the floor with sheer delight. When my homemade makeover was completed to my liking, I jammed almost an armful of my hair into an unused school bag.

Finally, I too, had thin hair.

Hi my name is Shannon T. Boodram and I am a mixed woman. It took awhile to say that with absolute confidence, which is odd seeing as how I’ve had a lifetime of practice with the question so what exactly are you? but for so many reasons, it has in fact taken me this long to feel good about that statement. I am not mixed in the traditional half coffee/ half cream manner though, both of my parents are mixed as well and to this many people have declared me officially mixed up. My mother is half black and half white, my father is East Indian with some Portuguese. They both have lovely wood-coloured complexions even without sun, I however am the colour of weak coffee and look like a frizzy-haired European if I don’t get some sort of tan in over one month’s time. My mother’s father is from Ireland but he left my grandmother for good when she showed him that blue line on the ivory stick… so consequently I have never met the white side of my bloodline, which by the way, officially made me the lightest person in all of my family.

Who. Brought. The. White. Kid.

“Mommy, how come you, dad and Lauren are all mostly brown and a little peach but I am mostly peach and only a little brown?” I didn’t like looking different, especially with my random green eyes that caused my cousins to make my official theme song play that funky music white girl.

My dad was born in Guyana and our family spent most of our time with my his side so I grew up seeing myself as an East Indian with West Indian culture. The problem is that I don’t really look Indian at all; I actually look half black and half white, so there were innumerable family gatherings where I would get odd stares until someone finally introduced me as Brian’s daughter

“Ooh!”

I can still see the light bulb flick on in their eyes.

When I was in senior kindergarten we moved from the city to the suburbs and that is when the mirror began to play tricks on me FOR REAL.

Ugly. Black. Girl.

I was stripped of being Indian pretty early on, my teachers regarded me as black and before I knew it I was getting entirely too much eye contact during those special history lessons in February. I made friends with Amanda, the only other black girl in my grade and together we imitated our shared West Indian culture in joyful solitude. In grade five, the difference in my ethnicity from the majority of my peers transformed from happy-distinction to outright detest. Frankly, I don’t remember anyone having a crush on me in elementary school, ever. Yet despite my obsessive knowledge of this fact, that didn’t stop me from having crushes and secretly hoping that Devon, the school hotty, secretly had eyes for me too.

“I have his list! I have his list!” Megan, the fattest girl in my school who majorly kissed the asses of the pretty-thin-and-thin-haired girls squealed as she burst out of the school doors and into the yard. “I have Devon’s top ten list!”

The list, incase you’re lost, is a numbered order of people you like and would like to date thus obtaining Devon’s authentic list would easily be like the hugest deal like ever! I thought Meghan was a complete dipstick and I was usually pretty good at tuning her out but this piece of news rang like bells in my ears and before I could think twice I yelled out, “Let me see, let me see!”

Meghan stopped short and looked at me like I had just asked if our next class trip would be at a Unicorn ranch, “Why do you care? It’s not like you would ever be on it.”

A few days later I cut my hair into a style too ridiculous to have ever earned a name. My mother forced me to cut all of my hair to even it out and for a year or so I had learned my lesson. Then in grade seven I had another groundbreaking idea: if I could only get rid of the halo of frizz at the front, my hair would look normal. So I took my dad’s electric razor and shaved all of my baby hair off, giving my forehead an extra inch of ground that it really didn’t need. I kind of looked like Uncle Fester from the Adam’s Family but to me this was an improvement so I continued to shave the frizzy front of my hair off until grade 8 when my mother agreed to let me chemically relax my hair if I promised to leave it alone.

Can you imagine that after all of my beautifying and Devon still never came around? To this day when I drive by his house (which I’m sure he’s probably moved out of by now) I still slow to see if I spot him mowing his lawn or taking a call outside… After all a girl never forgets her first heartbreaker.

Shannon - workin progress – Boodram

Andrea’s Journey to Creating an Album

More from the stairwell series to come!

Shannon’s Journey to Get LAID on Tyra

Created by an incredible TGAW Reader!

Thank-you everyone for your encouragement, great advice and kind words from last week’s video (honestly the photo above made me smile so hard I teared up). As you advised I went a little harder to get the “absolute no” before throwing in the towel and guess what…. I got it. Producer Becky Cohen-Fortune wrote me to say thanks for my hard work and she wishes me luck BUT They Tyra Show is infact finished taping for good. Definitely a major disappointment  BUT I think the best piece of advice I got was: it doesn’t matter where people hear about the book, it’s about who you want to hear about the book. I really think the Oprah Show would be incredible BUT with her show set to cancel in 2011, it may be a mistake to set my sights on another show with a narrow timeline (especially since the Oprah Show tapes most of its shows in advance).

I’m kind of torn on what show to begin My Journey goal on next so I’d like your help!

Our Reader’s Journey’s 

you WISH you took the stairs instead of the elevator this day huh!

BMX Bullies deh

boom boom pow

Venice Skate Park the only place where the homeless steeze is cool

AL

we saw a few 10-year-olds here. Would you send your kid to this kinda park?!?

I puts da petal to da metal then scrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrch

Guess who’s together? And this time we taking over the land of sunshine and glamour!! Shandrea Lewdram is in LA! Let the mawdness begin! 

Andrea’s “Journey To”

This week, I was terribly sick but I still had to work work work! As a singer the worst thing that can happen to you is getting a cold or flu especially when you are required to perform! But I bit the bullet and got rid of it as much as possible and went into the studio with my good friend Simon Curtis he is my  cast mate from “Spectacular” the Nickelodeon movie I did last year. His producer and good friend Jeff Wells produced a fantastic track for me and we recorded it yesterday! I can’t wait for you guys to hear!!

Shannon’s Journey to #GetLaidOnTyra

It’s definitely not the way I dreamed things would turn out, but then again we can’t always steer our dreams in our desired direction. So what do you think? Keep pushing #GetLaidOnTyra or move on to #GetLaidOn…?

Our Reader’s Journeys!