This is why I love doing this column. If you haven’t read it before, the idea for the column started when I was at a party for QFest. As I was chatting with a group of acquaintances, I realized how often we have casual relationships with people but never really get to know much about them. I wanted to change that. Case in point … Stephanie Acevedo used to work at Sisters nightclub, where I host karaoke on Thursday nights. Any time I needed a burst of energy, I’d look for Stephanie on the floor and no matter what she was doing — working the door, helping the bartenders, in coat check — she’d always be smiling and dancing. It wasn’t until we were talking about the column at Pride this month did I find out that she was a muralist. And a great storyteller …
PGN: Were you born and raised in Philly? SA: Yes, I’m from West Philly.
PGN: Tell me about growing up. SA: It was a little difficult. I’m the oldest of eight kids so I was the designated babysitter. I kind of raised my brothers and sisters while my dad and mom worked and did their adult things. They were young so they still enjoyed going out a lot. On the good side, I earned a lot of money as a kid.
PGN: You got paid for babysitting? I wasn’t smart enough to think to ask for money. SA: [Laughs.] I demanded it. I had a whole list of demands! I told them, “Your kids are horrible, so I need big bucks for this. I need candy and I need access to the master bedroom and the TV so I can watch ‘Nick at Nite,’ and I want an extended curfew.” They went for it! I was always a good student and responsible so they trusted me. And it was hard keeping up my grades because I got bullied a lot.
PGN: Why was that? SA: I was really chubby. I was a chubby kid and really nerdy. I was into reading and playing chess so I got picked on.
PGN: What do the parents do? SA: My mother is an artist. I don’t have the skills that she does; she can draw anything. I’m very abstract and known for my creativity with colors and she’s more realistic. Her work just pops out. We are opposites but I definitely got my artistic talent from her. My dad is a man of all trades. He taught me how to do construction when I was young. When I was 14, I was like, I like money. I’ve got to do something to make more because the babysitting and chores aren’t cutting it. So he hired me under the table and taught me how to do floors and roofs and all that stuff. When I got to the age where I needed some privacy away from all the other kids, he had me build my own room and bedroom set in the basement.
PGN: Other than art class, what was a favorite class at school? SA: I actually hated art class! It was so boring to me. They always wanted you to color inside the lines. English was my favorite class. It was so creative and you learned so many ways to use your mind and your words. And you got to read great books and learn about how other people think. I loved reading “Of Mice and Men” and “Catcher in the Rye” and “Star Wars.” Our teacher had us read all different kinds of books with different kinds of imagination. It was cool.
PGN: Schools are so important, it’s crazy to me that we’re closing them left and right. We seem to have no regard for education. SA: In my opinion, I think it’s all about corruption. If you look at the administrative finances, a lot of people who don’t actually teach children, who aren’t in the schools, are making more money than the teachers who are entrusted with actually educating the kids. I feel it’s all about politics and these people are worried about money over the welfare of the kids.
PGN: Back to something happier, you mentioned your best friend … SA: His name is Jim Jordon. I’ve known this guy since ninth grade. He liked me, thought I was going to be his girlfriend, until he found out that I was gay and then we were like Dora and Diego. We were inseparable and always on adventures. Once we figured out everything going on at school for the day, we would cut and travel around the city and explore. We made all sorts of fun and crazy discoveries.
PGN: What was one of your favorite adventures? SA: One time we walked all the way from William Penn High School to Upper Darby. I don’t know why but somehow, someway, we always got rescued by Aquafina water. We could be thirsty, dying of dehydration and it somehow always showed up. It’s the craziest thing. In this case, we’d been walking for hours, it was hot and we were trying to find someplace, anyplace to get some water when a guy sprung out of nowhere from an alley way, as if it were magic, carrying a case of Aquafina! He was like, “Hey, what’s up?” and we were like, “Can you help us out, please? We haven’t had water for five hours and we really need something to drink.” He gave us a few bottles and then we found a little creek behind a row of houses and found a secret tunnel. There was a mini waterfall too. It was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. I couldn’t even tell you where it was, we used to just walk until we got lost and then we’d find the most amazing things.
PGN: What was the craziest adventure? SA: One time we found a half-built house in the middle of the woods. It looked abandoned and as we started to explore it, this guy with a long beard and a shotgun came out of nowhere and started chasing us!
PGN: Woah! SA: [Laughs.] Yup, my parents never knew about our adventures. We’d leave school and make sure we were home by 4 p.m. and walk in as if nothing had happened. No one knew Jim and I had traveled half the city when we were supposed to be in class. He was my partner in crime and we’re still friends!
PGN: What did you do after graduating high school? SA: Oh, I got into partying a lot. I met a bunch of kids that I used to hang out with at FDR Park. We’d skateboard and spray paint and chill. It was fun at the time but then I had a near-death experience that turned me around.
PGN: Do tell. SA: We were all drinking — of course we were still teenagers, so we weren’t supposed to be — but we were getting wasted and one kid, Chris, and our friend Kristen got into a friendly argument over who was the better driver. They were going back and forth and then Chris decided they should do a challenge to settle it. He had his mom’s car so we all jumped in. I got in the back with two of our friends because we were like, “Aw, this is going to be good, we gotta see this!” Chris took off and started speeding around the park, he’s jumping bridges and going ridiculously fast. He came back to the starting point and was like, “Yes, four minutes and 30 seconds, try to beat that!” So she got behind the wheel and took off. She was going faster than him and hitting the bridges even harder and at one point she hit one of the bridges and went too high. We hit the ground and started spinning uncontrollably, we were in the back seat screaming our lungs out, “Ahhhhhh, we’re gonna die!” We were spinning towards the highway pillar and got so close that the side mirror broke off on the side where I was sitting! The car stopped so close I couldn’t open the door. My life flashed before my eyes and my heart practically jumped out of my chest. When I got out in one piece I said, “That’s it, enough of that stuff.” I completely changed after that night, I stopped drinking, I changed my entire life. It was like, “Goodnight, that’s a wrap, so long everybody.”
PGN: What did you do? SA: I started working at GNC [General Nutrition Center] and learned all about vitamins and nutrition and herbal remedies and healing. I learned about healthy living and building muscles and exercising.
PGN: When did you go from being a chubby kid to being a fit kid? SA: I was really back and forth a lot when I was a teenager. I was at about 250 at my heaviest and about 190 at my lowest. Then when I turned about 23, I was feeling really crappy about myself and I ballooned up again and then something just snapped in me and I said, “What the hell am I doing?” So I went into a totally positive mindset where I would run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, I started dancing all the time, everywhere I went. I started the Subway diet; I’d have two footlong subs a day, 6 inches every four hours. And I stopped a lot of the unproductive things I’d been doing, like sitting around eating junk food all day. I gained a little back last summer when I broke my ankle and couldn’t dance as much.
PGN: Who’s the funniest in the family? SA: Ha! Probably me … and my brother Will. He’s a pain in the butt, but he’s funny, I’ll give him that. He’s a joker. [Grins.] But I’m the prankster. I love to pull pranks on people. I love the classics like a hand in warm water — that really works! — and putting whipped cream on someone’s hand and then tickling their nose. And I enjoy that ink that you squirt on people which comes out blue but then turns invisible.
PGN: Best prank? SA: Oh boy, one time at the end of the school year, I slipped some Viagra into my teacher’s drink. He had a boner the whole class. He didn’t realize it at first until everyone started laughing. Now I feel bad about it, but as a teenager it was great.
PGN: Where did you get Viagra? SA: I found it in my dad’s drawer, which was a little scary. Like, “Uh, Dad?”
PGN: How did you get into the art world? SA: I was a very inquisitive kid, the kind who always asked, “What’s this, what’s that? Why?” I’d never shut up, so my mother found that the easiest way to get me to stop talking was to give me a little corner with some crayons and a coloring book. You would not see me for hours. I would make backgrounds for the pictures and do shadowing and add in things that weren’t in the original picture. She saw that it was something I loved so I got countless coloring books and art supplies. I went to an art charter school but didn’t like the classes; they were too rigid for me. Still life is soooo boring. I was like, “OK! We’ve been staring at fruit for three hours! I don’t want to do this!” And then they’d give us blocks of art class so it was great, now we’re staring at one pear for hours instead of a bowl of fruit. I’d try to incorporate my designs in the still life and it wasn’t particularly appreciated. I’m not good at conforming so I was at war with a lot of teachers, even as a kid. I’m left-handed and I had a teacher who used to try to make me write with my right hand. She’d grab the pencil out of my left hand and stick it in my right hand. So I started holding pencils in both hands!
PGN: That’s really funny. I’m a fellow lefty but fortunately never had to deal with that. SA: Yeah, so then I got into music. I took piano and dance class, every arts class but art. Until I graduated and then I started getting inspired to start doing a lot of symmetrical artwork. I started experimenting with a lot of color combinations. I’m really into a lotta, lotta color. Designs within designs.
PGN: And the mural arts? SA: My mom actually was involved first. She was doing murals and they were showing some of her artwork at a gallery in New York. She couldn’t make it and asked me to read a speech on her behalf. I’m not a big public speaker but I went and on my way there I was with some of the people from the Mural Arts Program—Jane Golden, Robyn Buseman—and they saw me drawing and said, “You’re hired.” I worked on the “Taste of Summer” mural across from the William Way Center. I took the muralist training program and started networking and met Ernel Martinez, who did “The Roots” mural. I volunteered to help on that and put in about 100 hours of free time. They saw how hard I worked for nothing and so they hired me to do a teaching job, teaching young men from 18-24 how to make murals, how to draw from an image, how to graph them, how to build greenhouses and do carpentry. And now I’m working on two murals. One is going to be at 55th and Chester and another that’s going to be on a rec center at Eighth and Lombard.
PGN: That’s amazing. You must be really proud. I forgot to ask you about coming out. SA: I never really got a chance to come out. I was more so kicked out of the closet! It was very awkward. I had my first girlfriend in high school and we used to cut school to hang out in her room. One day her sister burst into the room while we were in the middle of “hanging out,” if you know what I mean, and it was terrible. She gave us a whole speech on God and I took off. When you have a lot of siblings in a big house and you come home and the whole house is dark and quiet, you know that something’s up. I was terrified. There was no music on, no TV, no loudness, it was trouble. Apparently, she called my dad and told him everything. He freaked out. He was totally against it. As I was standing in the empty house the phone rang and it was my dad. I knew I was in trouble when he full-named me! “Stephanie Nicole Acevedo! We have to talk!” That scared me all the way down to the bone. [Laughs.] I was thinking, I’m going to die! I’m gonna die! He asked me about my friend and what kind of friends we were. He wanted to know if I got it from my mom. He told me it was a disease and all that craziness.
PGN: From your mom? SA: Yeah, my mom is gay, but I was scared to come out to her because I thought she would blame herself. But I knew I was gay from the beginning. To my surprise, my mom was like, “Yesss! That’s so cool! I didn’t know you were gay, now we can be even closer!” And we are, we’re good friends. I was 16 when that happened and it took my father until I was about 22 to come around.
PGN: And how did you know you were gay? SA: I remember in kindergarten there was a girl I had a crush on. We would hold hands and we had those butter cookies with the hole in the middle. I’d put it on my finger and we’d nibble it off together and we’d sneak kisses behind the teacher’s back. I didn’t even know that it was gay until I got older. [Laugh.] I know now, though!
PGN: I bet you do!
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