Happy 80th, Diana! How Miss Ross, the O.G. diva, turned pop upside down

nypost.com:

Diana Ross.I will never forget mini me waiting with my dad where she was expected to make her grand entrance through the audience and to the rotating stage at Valley Forge Music Fair in the Philadelphia suburbs.Seeing the Supreme One come out in a flurry of feathers and sequins to “I’m Coming Out” — the 1980 Chic-produced classic and enduring LGBTQ anthem that she recorded without realizing that “coming out” was a declaration of queer liberation — it was like witnessing a real-life goddess on earth.

Right there in Devon, Pennsylvania.For me, the love for the artist, the legend born Diane Ross 80 years ago on March 26, 1944 — her birth certificate was mistakenly filled out with the name Diana — has been an endless one.She had me from the moment I got my little hands on my dad’s 8-track tape of her eponymous 1976 album, as her meticulously beat face stared out at me before enchanting me with her No.

1 hits “Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” and “Love Hangover” — plus all those deep cuts the real fans know.And while I have had other diva love affairs over the years — from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé — she’s the O.G.

I’ll never get over.My earliest memories of Miss Ross — as, rumor has it, she famously liked (or demanded) to be called — included her movies as much as her music.Although it would be years before I could watch the full, unedited version of her film debut as a drug-addicted Billie Holiday in 1972’s “Lady Sings the Blues” — for which she and the great Cicely Tyson (“Sounder”) became only the second and third African-American women to ever be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar — it has always been a symbol of black excellence.And so were 1975’s cult classic “Mahogany” — which would once again.