Madonna dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1978 to pursue
her dreams of being an artist in New York. What greeted her was a city
that was harsher than she could have imagined.
“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be,” the pop icon
wrote in an essay in the current issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “It did not
welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint.
Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my
back, and had my apartment broken into three times. I don’t know why; I
had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time.”
The pop-icon-in-the-making found her new home to be exhilarating, but
also the sort of place her childhood in the suburbs of Detroit hadn’t
prepared her for.
“But I was also scared sh–less and freaked out by the smell of p— and
vomit everywhere, especially in the entryway of my third-floor
walk-up,” she wrote.
She never gave up on trying to become a professional dancer, doing
what it did to chase her dreams, including working as a nude model for
art classes to pay her rent.
“I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard
and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going,”
she wrote.
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