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— by James Montgomery
Sometimes it's hard to be R. Kelly.
Like right now, for example: Seems he's just woken up in a strange bedroom in a fifth-floor apartment, next to a woman he thinks is named Mary (but is actually named Cathy) who, unbeknownst to him, is married to a pastor named Rufus, who, unbeknownst to the both of them, is about to barge into the apartment, forcing Kelly (who is actually named Sylvester) into hiding in the couple's closet, where he will soon be discovered by an irate Rufus thanks to a pesky cell phone not switched to vibrate, forcing Sylvester to pull out his Beretta, which, in turn, will force Rufus to reveal his homosexual love affair with a man named Chuck, which will deeply upset Cathy and lead to a series of events in which Sylvester fires a warning shot into the air and flees the scene, but not before he calls his wife, only to be horrified when an unidentified man answers the phone, which will cause Sylvester to believe that his own wife is cheating on him, which, in turn, will cause him to receive a speeding ticket, confront his wife about her alleged infidelity, discover that the man who answered his phone was actually his wife's brother, 'Twan, make passionate love to his wife in lieu of apologizing for his accusations, discover a used condom in his bedsheets and finally realize that his wife was, in fact, cheating on him.
And you thought your day-to-day life was complicated.
Of course, it's more than likely none of this really happened (though with R. Kelly, you never really know). What you've just read is simply a convoluted recap of the action in the first five chapters of R. Kelly's mini-opera, "Trapped in the Closet," a half-hour-long slab of melodrama that's either the work of an honest genius or an honestly crazy megalomaniac, depending on who you ask.
Seems people either love it or hate it, and who could blame them? After all, the song's ambitious scope, deft storytelling and thoroughly human characters seem to point to the "genius" reading of it, though you also could argue that all those things (not to mention the dreadfully acted "motion picture" that accompanies it) also point to the "crazy person" assessment. No one really seems to know what to make of it, which just might be the whole point.
And things are set to get a whole lot more confusing. Because on November 1, after months of promising to expand on the original "Trapped" storyline, and fueled by the public's reaction to his truly bizarre one-man performance of chapter 6 at the MTV Video Music Awards in August, Kelly will foist chapters 6-12 upon the masses, via an "unrated" DVD.
So why can't people seem to get enough of the antics of Sylvester, Cathy, Rufus and Chuck? Well, we're not really sure. So to try and get to the bottom of the "Trapped" phenomenon, we've turned to our panel of experts, a motley crew that includes everyone from hip-hop moguls and emo-punk heartthrobs to gay comedians and, uh, "Star Wars" enthusiasts. Here's what they had to say about R. Kelly's opus ...
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Illustration: Karl Heitmueller
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