Creator/producer and Huckapoo manager Brian Lukow is unapologetically attached to that name, defending it offhandedly with a couple of specious arguments like the URL was available and it’s easy to Google. “It’s a totally made-up word,” says Lukow, not even bothering to add that there is no connection at all to the fashionably regrettable disco-era clothing line, Huk-a-poo.
“I know I’m not in the majority here,” he adds. Lukow talks without punctuation or paragraphs, charging from one thought to the next like a good-natured bear in the woods. “Even the girls hated it,” he says. “I tried to convince them that it meant ‘peace and love’ in Swahili. They didn’t fall for that.”
Although the five girls who make up the group are real flesh-and-blood teenagers, all between ages fourteen and sixteen — Brittney Segal, Brittany Lahm, Jordan Price, Lindsay Nyman and Westporter Brooke Mori, who at fourteen is the youngest — their PR material portrays them as cartoon characters, which, incidentally, is the goal here. “I wanted to make them larger than life,” says Lukow. “I wanted to create something with its own attitude.”
Brooke wrinkles up her nose. “We all hated it, so we decided we’d go ask him to change it.” She talks briskly and business-like. She doesn’t say, “So I go … and then he goes …” nor does she pepper her sentences with “like.” Interviewed recently in the kitchen of a comfortable house on a dead-end street where she lives with her mom and dad and her big brother, John, Brooke looks and acts years older than she is. She has long, straight blonde hair and big green eyes, and she’s movie-star pretty. “We asked if we had a choice about the name, and he said, ‘Sure you do! You can choose not to be in the group!’ ” She laughs at that, shaking her head. “He tells us all the time, this is not a democracy.”
To read this article in its entirety, please purchase this month’s issue of WESTPORT magazine. If you’d like a listing of local newsstands where WESTPORT magazine is sold, please click here. Or, to subscribe click here.