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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, February 21, 2003

Tiffany 'the mall girl' sheds teen-queen image

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer

 •  Tiffany

8:30 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Monday

Gussie L'Amour's

$15 Saturday, $12 Sunday and Monday (advance); $20 Saturday, $15 Sunday and Monday (at the door)

836-7883, 622-6928

Tiffany would be the ideal professor for a college course on the highs and lows of teen-pop stardom. If she weren't still living with some of the aftershocks herself, that is.

Tiffany Renee Darwisch burst into the American pop-culture consciousness in 1987 — a red-haired, Gap-bedecked, girl-next-door precursor to Britney Spears' jailbait Catholic schoolgirl get-up, then still more than a decade away.

Almost overnight, Tiffany went from warbling over backing tracks for appreciative shopping-mall throngs to topping both the Billboard album and Hot 100 singles charts. When Top 40 radio listeners weren't chewing on bubblegum hits from arch-rival Debbie Gibson, they were gobbling up Tiff's bouncy synth-pop remake of Tommy James and the Shondell's "I Think We're Alone Now" and the grade-school heartbreaker "Could've Been." Both songs went to No. 1 in late 1987, as did Tiffany's self-titled debut album, which eclipsed 4 million in sales the following year.

By the end of 1988, Tiffany's sophomore disc — though a 2 million seller — had been labeled a failure, having spawned a single Top 10 hit and peaked at a lowly No. 17 on the Billboard album chart.

Tiffany ran away from home, suing her mother for mishandling her finances. Calling Tiff's career all but officially over, the music press began heaping praise on Gibson, who, unlike Tiffany at the time, wrote, produced and called the shots on her music. Weary record buyers simply moved on from both.

Tiffany was just 17 years old.

"I think, to some degree, it's kind of human nature to glorify, glorify, glorify, and then tear down somebody," said Tiffany, now 31.

"It's OK to ... poke fun at some of the dorkier things that you went through because times change, people grow, fashions change and recording techniques change. But to really degrade somebody's talent ... to say they don't have it any longer, or that they can't make it into the future ... is really unfair."

So after an even more dimly received third album, our Tiffany got married in 1992, had a child the next year and ended full-time pursuit of her receding music career.

"I never abandoned the music business," insisted Tiffany. "But I definitely saw that music was changing. And I didn't have all the answers."

Even when she thought she had them, her solutions fell on deaf music industry ears.

"I just couldn't find my footing here in the U.S.," Tiffany said. "If you mentioned my name, people would go, 'Oh ... the mall girl!' And I was, like, 'That was a while ago, you know?' "

Her first real shot at a serious adult music career arrived in 2000, with the release of the self-financed, self-distributed "The Color of Silence" — her first American CD release in more than a decade. Tiffany wrote or co-wrote seven of the CD's 13 tracks, showing off a fiercely intelligent and revelatory songwriting style drawing on her life experiences, good and bad.

Music critics raved — Billboard even called the CD "one of the finest pop albums" of 2000 — but record buyers either ignored "Silence" or couldn't find it in record stores, thanks to a distribution snafu.

"Major TV (talk) shows wouldn't book me because of my name ... and this stigma of 'the mall girl,' " Tiffany said. "So basically, what I did (next) was a business decision."

That "business decision" was "getting nakey" (her words) for Playboy's April 2002 issue. Though she was paid somewhere in the six-figure range for her shoot, Tiffany said her decision wasn't money-related.

"I really didn't think that it was going to save my career, or break my album or anything like that, but I knew it was going to break that (teen) image," Tiffany said. "That's what I wanted, and that's what we accomplished."

Good thing, too. Sales of "Silence" hardly improved in the wake of the Playboy spread, but Tiffany was welcomed on talk fests like "The View," and became the subject of an entire VH1 "Behind The Music" hour. Also tracking upward in the wake of her Playboy venture: the percentage of men showing up at Tiffany's semi-regular concert appearances.

Suddenly, Tiff's three shows at Gussie L'Amour's this weekend begin to make a lot more sense.

"Men, mostly, who had never bought a Tiffany record in their entire (lives) now come out to see the bunny that's in Playboy," admitted Tiffany, who, separated from makeup artist husband Bulmaro Garcia, remains a full-time mom to her 10-year-old son, Elijah. "But they also get a chance to get to know my music. And they like it!"

Children behave? Indeed.