Mary Kay Spryte

Spryte the whole story:
Shuffling between family members in rural Pulaski, a small town in Wisconsin laying claim to nearly two thousand people, Mary Kay was swayed by the beat at a young age. As an impressionable child she was captivated by pop stars on music television and rap music soon took hold.” What really turned me around was RUN DMC talking over beats... I was hooked,” she remembers. At the formative age of nine a family friend drove her to bustling Milwaukee to see Run DMC perform at summer fest. “After that, all I could think about was rhyming, Id rap at home, I’d rap at school I remember in sixth grade, my friend Nicole and I did an oral report on the Egyptians. I got the instrumental for the Beastie Boys Paul Revere and rapped about King Tut,” Mary smiles as she remembers. Mary Kay spent most of her Middle School years buying cassette tapes and practicing her timing and delivery over the instrumental b-sides. A barn was her stage, her brother and sister her adoring audience, and a pilfered screw driver her utilitarian microphone. She memorized verses and would recite them for anyone willing to listen. Ice Cube, Too $hort, Tone Loc, the Pharcyde, Beastie Boys, Slick Rick, DJ Jazzy Jeff,The Fresh Prince, and EPMD blared through her headphones. She had fallen in love with words; the way they fall off of your tongue, the way you can add to the music and the quicker she could rhyme the better. She trusted her Adidas shell tops, baggy jeans, and gray hoodies to eliminate her femininity in the hip hop game. She was going to be a rapper, and MC Spryte was born.

After her parents divorced, she spun uncontrolled and unchecked. She began to doubt the existence of a higher power in her life, after the death of five friends at the young age of 12, and insisted on testing her own limits. “I started running away from home, smoking cigs, hanging out at night clubs, smoking grass and doing whatever I could to get away from the situation at home,” she recalls. By her sixteenth trip around the sun, she had been arrested a number of times. She was running drugs, getting in fights and quickly learned the cold ways of the streets. She earned her place within the family structure offered by a group of Gangster Disciples, from Milwaukee and Chicago; their home became her safe place. She was comfortable as the only white face in a crowd because her brothers had her back and her front. “They taught me how to keep myself respect while hustling and be