Madonna: I knew her when she was Flaca

Here's a nice story, about a guy, Lamont Clarke who used to know Madonna when she was just starting out. When she was still Jenny From The Bl... no, hang on; that wasn't her. When she was our Madonna. The one who made the first records. The one who didn't make all those movies.

He's - apparently reluctantly - told his story to the New York Post because his fellow convicts (oh, yes, his story wasn't quite so rags-to-riches) spotted him in a picture:

“I’m a humble guy and never told no one that I knew Madonna,” Clarke, 44, told The Post in an exclusive jailhouse interview at the Eastern Correctional Facility upstate in Napanoch, NY.

“But fellas kept coming to me with the paper and asking if one of those kids was me. I couldn’t lie and told them the truth.”

The details of the time when a pre-Sire Madonna - they called her Flaca or Sis - was looked out for by his group are really sweet.

“We were tough dudes, and you didn’t want no one to see your weak side, but Sis listened to me,” says Clarke. “I got into a lot of arguments with Danny, and she’d say, ‘C’mon fellas,’ and calm it down.

“We were poor. We didn’t have the latest fashion or the latest jewelry, but she liked our style. We didn’t have much, but we had a whole lot because we had each other.”

And once Madonna hit it huge, do you think she was going to forget the gang she used to hang with?

Yes. Yes, she did. Dropped them like an oiled herring:

“One day, Junito was sitting on the stoop and the dude looked down,” he recalls. “ ‘Sis broke out,’ he said. ‘Sis left.’

“I tried to cushion the shock, saying that maybe she’d be back. Maybe one day she’d come in a limousine, and the door would open, and she’d say, ‘Get in,’ and give us tickets to her show.

“As a kid, you hope for that kind of thing. But none of it ever happened. We just went on with life.”

Not even a handful of tickets to a gig. When her New York pals knew Madonna was going to be successful no matter what, they didn't realise that "what" that was no matter included them.