Alicia, you used to be my homegirl.

Dear Alicia,

I saw you in Milan back in 2008 - and you rocked the house. I saw you last Friday in Ottawa, and you delivered an outstanding performance. You've given us album after album of pure, honest, emotional immersion. In your vocals, you've carved out perspectives of how to view love, women, friends, memories, and pain. In your musical discipline, you've created original pieces whose ebbs and flows fall under your direction. Your excellence as an artist is supreme.


Of all the female performers, pop stars, and Hollywood figures, I've depended on just a few - but you especially - to represent independent, thoughtful, responsible, and righteous women everywhere. It's a standard that you set easily back in 199? when I first came across your music.


I understand, however, that you've committed an Angelia Jolie sized offense and are quite content with your homewrecking tendencies. Whether Swizz was separated, divorced, or trying his luck at fooling you to believe either, I just wish you would have waited until he was completely and unquestionably unattached before you let him put a ring on it.


I admire women like Jada Pinkett Smith, whose marriage to Will Smith brought her a "bonus son". That marriage, held in high regard, also has the experience, growth, and maturity made possible by an unsuccessful first marriage. Things don't work out - that's life. But the Smith couple, honest in their intentions, found the right puzzle pieces to create a marriage based on real life circumstances, fulfillment of responsibilities (to Will's former wife and son), and 13 years later, their marriage is one that others look to for inspiration.


As you opened last Friday's show with a personal expression of how "everyone has the right to be loved," I agreed with you, wholeheartedly. I cannot refrain from expressing any longer, however, how dissappointed I am in your decision to accept a ring from a married man. I don't have the right to judge you, but if you were my homegirl, I would have tried to steer you to a different decision, or at least a prolonged one.


You've now shown millions of girls, who model their lives and decisions after celebrities like you, that you think it's acceptable to intervene in someone else's marriage as the other woman. You've shown your audience of adoring teenagers that you think it's alright to covet what is someone else's husband (in paper, in theory, what EVER....).


Quite simply, it's not right. It's not admirable, respectable, nor honorable - all the things I once associated with you. Yes, you do have the right to be loved. But by a married man? Come on, A. I wanted more for you.


Cordially,
Allyson