Over cigarettes and Diet Cokes at Segafredo, the most famous female DJ of the moment talks about her life, her musical influences and, well, what it feels like for a girl.

What was it like playing Madonna’s wedding?
(laughs) Everybody danced. It was a great party and an honor to do it, but um, I don’t know, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t talk about it. If Madonna wanted to talk about it, then she should be the one to talk about it, you know what I mean?

OK, you don’t have to tell me who was there or anything, but  just in terms of how it felt to play?
It was an honor. I mean, the energy was incredible and everybody was in a good mood and everybody had a good time. It was quite an honor to do it, I mean, out of all the DJs in the world, she chose me. But it was definitely one of those things you’ll never forget, you know, so…

How did you learn to mix?
Self-taught. With the influence of my ex-boyfriend, who was a DJ. When I would go visit him, I would just play on his turntables and practice, and he was like, ?You have a natural talent for this, you should do it,? and I was like, ?Come on, Kenny, there’s no females doing this.? He really supported it, and when we broke up I kind of forgot about it, but it was always in the back of my head. When I started dating this other guy, it was all I was talking about, and he went out and bought me the whole turntable system and everything and that was it. I just locked myself in a room and from what I learned from Kenny, just the simple things, I just practiced and practiced and practiced, and then I got a club in D.C.

That’s sort of similar to Madonna’s story, right?
Um, yeah, and it’s funny you brought that up, because she was always kind of my inspiration that way. I always admired that she had a dream and just went for it, so in the back of my head, when a door would close, I’d be like, ?Well, if Madonna can do this I can.?  So I always admired her, and to work with her now is an honor

You’ve said in other interviews that it’s really sort of difficult to be a woman DJ.
Not so much now, but it was, especially ten years ago when nobody was doing it. I mean it’s a male-dominated business, but there were a few women club owners that I knew and they gave me the shot, but most of the men were like, ?You don’t know how to DJ; you can’t mix.? I got that a lot, and then I realized that it wasn’t happening in the clubs, so I went to a radio station, WDGC in D.C., and they saw it as a novelty. They were like, “That’d be cool, a woman DJing on the radio,” so that’s kind of how it took off. I did the morning show with Donny Simpson, and he helped me a lot in D.C., and I  started getting a lot of club jobs through the radio, which is backwards; usually you get radio jobs from being in the clubs!  They were like, “We want Tracy,” because I was popular on the radio. And then I met Ingrid around the same time, and she was opening Liquid, and, the female supporting the female, she was like “I want to fly you down.” So I started playing in Miami and then other people were like, “Wow, you’re playing in Miami,” so one thing just led to another.

How did you meet Ingrid Casares?
Oh my god, seven years ago. I became really close friends with her sister, who lived in D.C. I went to University of Maryland and Ingrid actually went there too, so it’s kind of weird, but I went to New York one weekend and her sister introduced me to Ingrid. I didn’t really know who she was, and she’s talking about Madonna and K. D. Lang, and I’m like, “Are you talking about the Madonna,”  you know? It was kind of a surprise. We hit it off, and we had a lot in common. She’s an awesome girl and she’s done a lot for my career. Tons.

Do you date other DJs now?
I have tried to date people in the music business, and it’s just too much competition. And I’m not competing with anybody, really, I’m just trying to do what I love, so people kind of compete with me because I’m a workaholic. I’m single!

You said you played for a lot of lesbian clubs in the beginning?
I’m bisexual. I don’t usually like to label myself but, if I have to, I consider myself that. Yeah, I started in the girl-clubs. And I got pigeonholed. That’s what I mean, the females kind of supported me in what I was doing more than the men. Even though I was dating women at the time, I couldn’t get a job at a gay man’s club. Nowhere. Even before the Madonna record came out, I couldn’t work at Salvation. I did a couple of nights, but it was impossible. I’ve always played for straight clubs, which I love to, you know, they’re really open to the music and stuff down here so it was always rewarding but, as far as the gay male population, they didn’t support me until Madonna. Which is an interesting thing, you know. That’s how it is. But now I play for everybody and I like it that way cause it keeps me in touch with what people want to hear and I get more of a well-rounded idea of what’s going on.

What about you? Are you gay or bisexual or straight?

I’m straight.
Oh, really? I’m sorry (both laugh). Well, my brother was here, he’s a straight guy and he was always looking for… not a connection with a person… but a connection to somebody like him.

Did he find that?
No, he moved! He said it was hard to meet a girl here, and I don’t know—it’s hard to meet anybody, I think. I mean it’s easy to meet people, but it’s hard to connect.

I hated Miami at first. I mean, I liked the weather, but I found it really hard to connect with people. It’s a different mentality here. Up north, it’s like, if they don’t like you, they don’t like you, you know what I mean?  You know. And here you never know where people are coming from.

What do your parents think of what you do? Do they get it?
My mom does; she’s like a product of the 60s, very spiritual, almost too spiritual, where she’s not realistic, like, “Oh, God’ll take care of me,” or “Give all your money away and it’ll come back to you.” And my dad is the conservative white man with a real estate company, so he wasn’t as supportive until now when he realized okay, there is a future in this. My mom was always like “Go with your heart, do what you love, and the money will come” and I kind of listened to my mom growing up, and thank God I did.  I understand now that I’m older that my dad just wanted me to have a stable life and a stable future and now he’s happy with what I’m doing, he’s very proud

How do you choose songs to mix?
Doing a compilation is really, really difficult and I don’t think people see how difficult it is because I might want a record, a big record that I love, and you have to go through getting it cleared and copyright and publishing and the label has a say in the direction of the compilation. Basically you start with a track listing and you submit it to the label and the label says, ok we have to contact everyone of those labels and get permission to use it. And the way you get permission is by paying. They can’t just throw a whole bunch of records on a CD and sell it, that’s Napster. A CD can go in a total different direction from what you intended depending on whether the labels will give you permission to use the songs. Inside My Head, it started out as a filtered type of compilation, meaning a lot more vocals, and it just turned out we weren’t getting the records, so it shifted.

What’s your original music like?
If I’m going to compare it to a vibe—like Moby,  strings and keyboards. I’ve got like five tracks finished for it. It’s going to be an eclectic mix of music, just from my heart, and experimenting with different things and different sounds.

Where do you want to go from here?
I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like being up until 6 or 7 a.m. Sometimes I start at 2 a.m. and go until 11 a.m., and it’s just such a night life, and I’m getting old so? (laughs). [She’s 30.] I want to write a book, I want to do a documentary, I want to take it to the mainstream, I want the Midwest to know about what DJs do and the life and, of course, more production. I want to take it to another level. Definitely movies interest me, and videos, and short films. There’s not a lot of literature about being a DJ from a woman’s perspective.

What’s a typical day like for you?
What most people do in a week I probably do in two days. Let’s see, I get up at probably 8 or 9 a.m., I check my e-mail, I walk my dog on the beach, kind of get myself grounded and ready for the day. Then I either have interviews or returning phone calls, or working on my Web site, djtracyyoung.com, meetings, go to the gym—try to anyway, and then I go to the studio around 8:30 at night every day, and I work until about one or two in the morning. If I’m traveling, it’s a whole different thing.

Do you get enough sleep? It doesn’t sound like you do.
No, actually I do, cause I’m so energized with what I do and it gives me motivation and sometimes I collapse but most of the time I can’t wait to start my day. I can’t wait to get out of bed, I feel like I have so much to do. I’m blessed.

Perhaps nowhere was the postwar craving for the futuristic more evident than on Miami Beach where, during the 1950s and 1960s, wildly inventive hotel designs emerged to satiate the requirements of the prosperous new middle-class on vacation. Resort area architects attempted to realize through their buildings what we of a more cynical age now concede to be science fiction. These architects created a unique futuristic look in Miami Beach that became known as Miami Modern — MIMO.

By the 1980s, this romantic future had already proven itself an abortive dream emanating from a nostalgic past. But after WWII, in an era of prosperity and optimism since unparalleled, the dream was only beginning. Automobiles with soaring fins tacitly sliced through the air with graceful ease; sparkling new appliances promising to alleviate housework appeared in every kitchen. The combination of affordable automobiles, increased disposable income, and more leisure time proved irresistible, and Americans began to vacation as never before.

The name MiMO was created two years ago by Randall Robinson, a planner with the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation, and Teri D’Amico, an interior designer and adjunct professor of hotel design at Florida International University, to refer to the hotel architecture of Greater Miami built between 1945-1969.

The LA Times, which referred to the MiMO style as “Miami Modernist,” praised Mitch Glazer’s Magic City series for its stunningly beautiful set designs, and retraced its origins with the most famous architect of the style, Morris Lapidus, whose Fontainebleau, Eden Roc, Seacoast Towers, Deauville, and Di Lido (now the Ritz-Carlton South Beach), set the stage for MiMO.

Naturally, the idea of MiMO did not spring up from the sea full-fledged; it has its roots in the Bauhaus movement of early 20th-century Germany, as propounded by architects and designers whose ideas soon made their way overseas: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer. Their conception was in its own way also nostalgically futuristic: they dreamed of streamlined, non-ornamental buildings that were comfortable, functional, and could be enjoyed by the working class, whose values, the Bauhaus school sentimentally believed, had not been corrupted by the overwrought aesthetic of the bourgeoisie. How wrong they were.

The pure Bauhaus vision failed in the United States on every level: working-class people certainly didn’t have the means to engage the services of a Bauhaus architect, and the booming middle-class was intent on showing off its money with as many flourishes as possible. After WW II, elite college campuses clamored for the Bauhaus style, known as Modern (Le Corbusier designed a building for Harvard, Breuer for Vassar), but elsewhere architects began adapting Modern to the prevailing mood of their clients. In Miami, this meant ornamentation galore, but in clean, geometric forms: Tropical Art Deco, a combination of streamlined moderne and the art deco of 1920s Paris.

At first glance, it can be difficult to differentiate MiMO from Art Deco. “We fall into a little bit of a trap when we make these distinctions,” admits Robinson of the MBCDC. “Anything old and vaguely decorative is called Art Deco.” Although there seem to be many similarities, MiMO comes closer to Modern in its use of certain features like asymmetry; kidney-bean and oval shapes and curves; carports with angular, amoeba-like, or winged shapes; semi-circular driveways at the entrance rather than front porches; and brise-soleils (sun shades).

Although South Beach is almost exclusively filled with examples of Art Deco, some MiMO buildings do exist: the Miami Beach Fire Station Number 1 (11th and Jefferson), the 1688 Meridian Building, The Penguin Hotel (1418 Ocean Drive), The Shore Club (1801 Sunset Harbor Drive), The Di Lido (155 Lincoln Road), and Burdines (17th and Meridian). For the most part, however, MiMO architecture tends to congregate in mid and North Beach, Sunny Isles Beach, and Bay Harbor Islands.

One architect who bridged the Art Deco-MiMO gap was Albert Anis, who created such Art Deco South Beach landmarks as the Clevelander, the Savoy, the Leslie, the Waldorf Towers, the Avalon and the Winter Haven before he moved on to his equally dramatic yet more organically shaped MiMO hotels of mid-beach, the Royal York (5875 Collins Ave.) and the Bel-Aire (6515 Collins).

Both hotels were recently the subjects of community protests against developers and calls for preservation, to date without success — the Bel-Aire’s fa’de has already been destroyed. Although preservationists are fighting the good fight, they are hampered by three harsh realities: (1) the current building code allows for far taller buildings than are currently standing, which is a boon for developers (2) The National Register of Historic Places, which would need to certify MiMO buildings in order to protect them from the wrecking ball, is unlikely to list properties younger than 50 years old unless they show “exceptional significance,” and (3) MiMO architecture is not universally considered to be of “exceptional significance.”

Even MiMO architect Morris Lapidus has weighed in against preservation; he was quoted in The New York Times as saying of the Bel-Aire, “Try living in a hotel like that. They were nice hotels for their time, but that time has passed.” Architect Norman Giller, who designed The Carillon (6801 Collins Ave.), lamented to The Miami Herald, “I think something needs to be done. It’s a crime the way [The Carillon’s] just sitting there. It’s an eyesore.” This particular eyesore won a Hotel of the Year award in 1957 for its distinctive glass facade and accordion wall in the ballroom. More than 40 years later, it stands abandoned.

Fortunately for Giller, Robinson, D’Amico, and other would-be MiMO saviors, Miami Beach has a history of vigorous design preservation, and many of its most staunch preservationists are also politicians. The fight to save Art Deco is still relatively fresh in the minds of many commission and city council members, and they are likely to look with a favorable eye on pleas to save the old MiMO buildings.

In the meantime, nostalgia for the future lives on in Miami Beach, where we have the good fortune to be living in our very own Gernsbach Continuum.

“I see things, that’s why I do what I do,” says Dupoux, owner of the design firm Sculptors of Space. Serious, intense, very French, and very prolific, Dupoux is responsible for the interiors of virtually the entire French-expatriate-owned nightlife scene in South Beach. Opium, Cafe Tabac, Touch, Nikki Beach Club, The Living Room, and The Strand are all by the hand of Stephane Dupoux.

Dupoux associates the ambiance of Pearl with classic 1960’s movie set designs such as A Clockwork Orange and Barbarella. “Orange light is best for the skin,” Dupoux avers, and indeed, Pearl’s guests are bathed in an eerily lovely light reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. With fur-lined walls awash in waves of white and orange, the precise degree of care and originality that have gone into making Pearl such a lovely space isn’t readily apparent at first view. It may take several visits before one is sufficiently attuned to Pearl’s design to notice special touches like the swing, a signature feature of the man responsible for Pearl’s celestial splendor.

“Neon is associated with tackiness,” Dupoux admits, “but I wanted to use it, because it gives an even glow.” The room is lit by a succession of floor-to-ceiling linen drapes imbued with silver threads; the drapes are trimmed in white fur at the top and bottom, which mutes the orange at the top and purple neon at the bottom.

Round hanging mirrors that complement tables nearest the walls are designed to enhance and soften the space. What’s not so readily apparent, however is that these mirrors are precisely positioned so that diners facing the walls need only glance a few degrees upward to have a complete view of the main lounge and all that transpires behind them during the course of the evening.

Hanging rings through which video projectors display trippy visuals and film snippets; bubbled walls; a sunken, circular champagne bar, all leave first-time visitors in awe of Pearl’s design.  The locally made, signature white epoxy tables with large orange polka dots, were recently loaned out to Moda in Miami for the Fashion Week of the Americas tent. And the linchpin of this confederacy of roundness is a giant linen pearl—cable-suspended and filled daily by an electric fan—that hangs directly over the lounge area.

Dupoux’s boundless inspiration springs from a myriad of sources, even including a prior trip to the Everglades. One of the most interesting aspects of the décor is the way images and even actual elements of the outdoors are interwoven with kitschy or manmade materials: a terrazzo bar top is lined with vinyl on the face of the bar; conch shells cut in half are the inspiration for the tall bar chairs, covered in white shag which was shipped to Italy to be dyed orange. Vinyl (the menus, the face of the bar) and white leather (chairs and barstools) abound, but so do found natural objects. The lounge sofas are framed with “Bahamian-Key Westy” wood painted white, and an actual piece of driftwood serves as the reception table. “I’m always trying in my work to bring the outside in,” says Dupoux, who spends his free time in sporty, outdoor activities like windsurfing and kiting, ‘so you always feel [a connection to] outside.”

The rest rooms (whose function is most closely allied with nature) also feature unique touches that the average guest, unfortunately, is likely to miss. The ceiling is bamboo; the eggnog-colored walls get their stucco-like texture from a mix of plaster and hay (as in horses) and the sink is an old, epoxied canoe.

All in all, the lounge, formerly an unassuming burger joint atop Penrod’s (the outdoor deck is the only feature of the old space that’s been retained), required $1,200,000 and six months to blossom.  Owner Eric Omores left Dupoux and his team pretty much to their own devices. “Eric gives me free rein; it’s one of my conditions,” says the designer, who radiates a strong individuality and singularity of purpose as well as a gentle courtliness. “I trust myself more and more,” he says of his design choices, one of which was to have the DJ booth elevated and facing the room. “The DJ is the [life] blood of a space; he has to see entire room, feel the crowd,” Dupoux says, and in fact the music, which ranges from 1960s French yeye music, to new romantic, to electronica, is one of the major elements of the space’s presentation.

And then there’s the food. Dupoux, who had a hand in choosing the menu, finds that seafood perfectly complements the décor: “Airy foods adapt well to space.” His particular favorites are the lobster beurre fondue with shaved fennel and asparagus salad on a chive potato pancake with white truffle vinaigrette, and the miso-marinated chicken sea bass with lemongrass, crab wonton, grilled shiitake salad, and carrot-ginger emulsion.

The chef could hardly fail to heed Dupoux’s suggestions, as the designer hails from Provence, where food was invented. He grew up in a family of artists, was oil painting by age six, and is now married to a furniture designer for residential spaces. Like many of us, he came to South Beach a few years ago for a vacation that turned into his life.

Dupoux tries to complete one project every three months, and these days he’s hard at work on several new ones: an as-yet-unnamed space (we promised not to tell) expected to open mid-August on Lincoln Road across from 320, and another Pearl in Las Vegas—with a completely different design. “I had a vision of cactus, riders on the storm, skulls—but done in a different way.”  Naturally.

What was it like shooting your first feature film?
It was a surprise for me, because I wasn’t really planning to make movies. But Barry offered me this part [he saw her presenting at the 1999 American Comedy Awards], and it’s been great. Actually, I was just looking at the poster for the movie, and the only ones not famous in the American market are me and the frog!

Did it gross you out to have to kiss Puggy (Jason Lee’s character, a longhaired, tree-living vagabond)?
No, he wasn’t dirty in real life! The dirt under his fingernails was makeup. It was great working with him; he’s such a calm, relaxed actor.

Is Puggy the kind of man you could go for in real life?
Well, I don’t know that I’d like living in a tree; I think I’d prefer a condo. But with love, you don’t know. You never know when you’re going to fall in love. I prefer men with dreams, successful people, but I guess you never know. I hope not.

Are you in love with anyone now?
There is someone in my heart, but, he’s not my boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend.

Can you tell me who it is?
No.

Is it Luis Miguel? You know that’s what people are saying, that that’s what drove Mariah into the nuthouse.
No! No, now you make me feel bad! (laughs) No, no, Luis and I are good friends, and I feel very sorry about what’s happened to the two of them.

Do you think Miami is as crazy as it’s portrayed in the film — goats running loose, hallucinogenic toads squirting people?
Crazy things do happen here, maybe the sun is too hot on the heads of people, I don’t know.

Crazy things like having your toes sucked? You were so funny in the scene where Stanley Tucci was sucking your feet. Were you wearing prosthetics, or was he really doing it?
Yes, he was really sucking my toes. Oh, I felt so bad for him! We had to do several takes, and of course right after there’s a scene where I have to run, so each time I would wash my feet.

Last time we talked you were also working on a singing career, and obviously you met Heavy D while making the film. Did the two of you talk about doing something together?
No, we mostly just had fun sitting around the airport [where much of the film is shot] making jokes.

Do you plan to make more movies?
I would like to make another movie with [director] Barry Sonnenfeld, he’s so nice! I really enjoyed this, especially for my first time. It was not too much responsibility, and I’m in a few short scenes, so it was great. And I love that I’m not dressed sexy. Right now I have a good agent in L.A., and I’m taking acting classes and going on castings and meeting people, so yes, I hope so.