Diddy, meet Lil’ Dee Dee.
The hip-hop impresario knows her as Tiffany, one of the singers struggling to become a star on his create-a-girl-group MTV reality show, “Making the Band 3.”
“My name is Tiffany, and I’m 21,” the young woman said on the series premiere, introducing herself to the Beyonce wanna bes who would share a trendy New York City loft and a life of limos, clubs and show biz. “I like singing and having fun. I’m from Virginia, Virginia Beach.”
Trouble is, she’s not any of those things. Well, except for the part about singing.
She is Dav’rielle Smith, a Chesapeake resident who has performed for years at local fairs and festivals as “Lil’ Dee Dee” And she is “Lil’,” or at least a lot littler than the rest of Diddy’s pretties.
Dav’rielle is a sophomore at Western Branch High School. She is 15.
Dav’rie lle – pronounced Dah-vree-el – skipped school to crash auditions at an Oceanfront nightspot. She used a cousin’s fake ID to get around the 18-and-older age limit, which forced her to adopt cousin Tiffany’s name.
When she aced the audition, she mustered up a whole lot of moxie for a six-week whirl in Diddy’s world.
“I felt like I was just in a movie, playing a part,” Dav’rielle said Wednesday at her family’s modest Chesapeake town house. “I just wanted to get in front of Diddy, to show him what I can do, to prove to him that age is just a number.
Diddy is no stranger to
re-invention. Born Sean Combs, he has called himself Puffy Combs, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy and now just plain Diddy.
“I wasn’t using my own name or my own age,” Dav’rielle said, “but everything else was all me. The voice, the dancing – that was all Dav’rielle.”
Although the show premiered Oct. 6 and is now running weekly, Dav’rielle’s charade is over.
Here’s how the un-real world of reality television works: Dav’rielle and her housemates lived for about six weeks in the loft, working daily with Diddy’s crew on singing, dancing and that looking-good-for-video thing. Diddy cut women from the cast at random, ending up with a girl group he could turn into hitmakers.
So, will Lil’ Dee Dee be fronting Diddy’s girl group?
“I really can’t discuss that,” Dav’rielle demurred. “I’m not allowed to say what happens on the show. Why would people want to come home at 10 o’clock on Thursdays and tune in if they already knew what was going to happen?”
The next question: What were her parents thinking, letting a 15-year-old fake her way into living with 17 grown women in New York’s Soho?
“Sure, I was nervous,” said her mother, Glenda Smith, who works a 12-hour shift as a nurse at a retirement home. “But she’s my oldest, she has a good, responsible head on her shoulders.”
More important, Glenda Smith said, her husband’s family lives in the city. “She visited them every day. She was there with them anytime she wasn’t working or sleeping.”
Curled up on the couch beside her mother, Dav’rielle looks far from the poised young lady of the first “Band” episode. She’s wearing jeans rolled up to her knees, multicolored sneakers with rainbow laces and green plastic sunglasses. “It was Geek Day at school,” she said.
“She’s a little kid,” said her mother. “What you see, that’s who she is. She’s not one for the high heels and the stomach poking out of her shirt.”
Her age actually gave her an advantage.
“A lot of the women, they’d be going out clubbing,” Dav’rielle said.
“I’m not old enough to do that, for real, so I’d stay home and work on the music. The next day, they’d all be hung over and holding their heads, and they’d say, 'Tiffany, you sing.’ And I’d blown them all away.
“I was always on top of my game.”
On the show’s premiere, Diddy said that 10,000 women auditioned in eight cities around the country. When the crew came to the Virginia Beach Oceanfront on May 25, about 800 women showed up to audition.
Out of that talent pool, 38 were flown to New York to audition for Diddy himself.
He cut the field to 18, plus three women from the last season of “Making the Band 3 ,” to live in the loft and compete for a spot in the group.
Frankly, the teen’s parents never thought “Tiffany” would go so far. Glenda and her husband, Nate – they have three other children, all boys, Dajon, 2; Natequane, 4; and Dominique, 12 – figured she’d audition and that would be the end of it.
“She kept saying, 'I know I can do it. I know I can do it,’” Glenda Smith said. “I finally said, 'Go for it.’ I didn’t want her to look back, when she got older and say, 'Oh, if my mother would have supported me, maybe I would have made it.’ My mom worked two and three jobs, and she would have wanted better for me, too.”
Reach Roberta T. Vowell at (757) 446-2327 or
roberta.vowell@pilotonline.com.
), if Diddy sent all three of the girls from last season packing. 
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