05/15/2026
Shanice is 53, alive, and still singing. The woman who sang I Love Your Smile in 1991 fought eight months in 2024 to get her own smile back. She got it.
This is how.
In May of 2024, two days after her fifty-first birthday, Shanice held her phone up to her face in a Los Angeles hospital bed and tried to make her voice steady. She was about to go into surgery to have both her breasts removed. Stage one breast cancer.
The video she recorded that morning is short and unsteady. "This is the hardest thing I've ever had to face in my life," she said, "but I know God is with me and everything is gonna go well."
She kept her word. Five months later, on Good Morning America, she would tell Michael Strahan, "When I had my surgery and they told me I had cancer, I literally lost my smile. But I wanted to come on the show to encourage women that you have to keep smiling. I got my smile back."
For thirty-three years, the world has known her for one thing. A song called I Love Your Smile, released in October of 1991, when she was eighteen years old.
The single hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in twenty-two countries. The video was Shanice in bright colors, hair pulled up, smiling at a camera as if the world were not breaking.
Shanice Lorraine Wilson was born in Pittsburgh on May 14, 1973. Her father Carl played the guitar.
Her mother Crystal sang behind Luther Vandross and Jennifer Holliday. The story Crystal used to tell about her daughter was that the little girl had been singing since she was seven months old.
People who heard that story laughed the way people laugh when a mother brags. Then they heard the child.
When Shanice was six, her parents' marriage ended. Crystal packed up their life in Pittsburgh and took the little girl west.
She brought her sister Penni with her, the two of them sharing the drive to Los Angeles. Crystal and Penni had their own dreams when they got there.
The two sisters from Pittsburgh had come to California to make it as singers. They wanted the kind of careers Crystal had once tasted standing behind Luther Vandross on a stage.
What happened next is the part that almost never gets told. The two grown women looked at the little girl living with them, listened to what was coming out of her, and made a quiet decision in a Los Angeles apartment that reshaped three lives.
They quit. They quit their own singing dreams, fused their names into a management company they called Crystal Penni, and turned all of it toward their daughter and niece.
That is the first scene to sit with. Two Black women in their thirties, in a rented apartment in Los Angeles, deciding that the voice the world would remember would not be theirs.
It would be the child's. They never told her it was a sacrifice, they just rearranged their lives around her like furniture.
When Shanice was nine years old, in 1982, a casting call went out for a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. They wanted a Black girl who could sing on camera opposite a jazz legend.
The legend was Ella Fitzgerald. The first lady of song, twelve Grammy wins, the voice that helped Frank Sinatra reshape American popular music.
Shanice walked onto the set, looked at the older woman she was about to share a microphone with, and felt nothing in particular. "I had no idea who Ella Fitzgerald was," she told People magazine years later.
"It was nice, but everyone around me was more excited than I was."
She was nine. She did not know she was standing next to a piece of Black music history that ran from Harlem in the thirties straight into her own throat.
She would learn what it meant later. The way every child eventually learns what their grandmother was carrying.
In 1984, at eleven years old, Shanice walked onto the stage of Star Search. She sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow and The Greatest Love of All back to back and won the junior vocalist title and a check for five thousand dollars.
Within months, an A&M Records executive named John McClain caught her performing in a Los Angeles musical called Get Happy. He signed her to her first record deal at eleven years old.
By the time she was fourteen, A&M had released her first album, Discovery, with two top-ten R&B singles on it. She was a teenager at South Pasadena High School with a record contract in her name and a mother and aunt who had folded their lives around hers.
Then came the phone call that changed her direction. Michael Jackson called the house one afternoon in the late eighties because he had read in a magazine that Shanice wanted to meet him.
She told the story later to Newsday. "They picked me up in a limo and I watched him do his moonwalk video."
"It was an exciting day for me."
What he said to her in that studio shaped the next decade. He told her she had to start writing her own songs, that the singers who lasted were the ones who owned the words.
She listened. By 1991, signed to Motown and paired with producer Narada Michael Walden, she had co-written half the songs on the album that would change everything.
The album was called Inner Child. The lead single was I Love Your Smile.
She told the music site Urban Bridgez years later what she had been trying to do when she wrote it. "When I went in to record Inner Child I wanted to record an album that would bring joy to the world."
"At the time there was so much sadness in the world, due to the war," she said. "That's why we had songs like I Love Your Smile, Peace In The World and Silent Prayer, because those songs were uplifting."
She was eighteen years old, writing songs to comfort a country in the Gulf War, reaching for a sound that would make people feel less afraid. The song hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in December of 1991 and went number one in twenty-two countries.
She got a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance in 1993. The smile in the music video became her trademark.
For one season of one year, every car radio in America was carrying her voice. The Black kids in the back seats were learning every word.
She kept building. In 1993, she sang Saving Forever for You on the Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack and watched it hit number four on the Hot 100.
In 1997, she made another quiet piece of history. Shanice became the first Black performer ever to play Eponine in the Broadway production of Les Misérables.
In February of 2000, she married a comedian and actor named Flex Alexander. They had a daughter named Imani in 2001 and a son named Elijah in 2004.
The hits got smaller after that. The records got fewer.
The family hit hard times and filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The smile that had launched a career did not pay the bills the way the world thought it had.
Then, sometime in her mid-forties, doctors thought they saw something in her breast tissue on a mammogram. It turned out to be a cyst, nothing dangerous.
But the scare lodged itself somewhere she could not reach. The fear of going back, of the next phone call, of having to sit in that paper gown again and wait, kept her away from the next appointment, and the one after that.
She skipped her mammograms for eight years.
In March of 2024, she felt a lump. She went back to the doctor.
The mammogram showed something. The ultrasound confirmed it.
The word everyone fears came in over a phone line.
The doctors thought at first it was ductal carcinoma in situ, an early form of breast cancer that lives inside the milk ducts. Stage zero, treatable, manageable.
She chose to undergo a double mastectomy anyway. The surgery happened in May, two days after her fifty-first birthday, in the same month she was born.
When the surgery was done, doctors told her the tumor was bigger than they had thought. One centimeter, stage one, not stage zero anymore.
She had waited eight years. She would name that, on national television, in front of millions of Black women who were doing the same thing.
On Good Morning America on October 30, 2024, she sat across from Michael Strahan and said it plainly. The diagnosis had taken her smile. She had fought to get it back. She wanted other women to hear that they did not have to wait the way she had.
She kept going. Black women die from breast cancer at a thirty-eight percent higher rate than white women in this country, according to the American Cancer Society.
Black women also have worse outcomes at nearly every stage of the disease. Shanice came on television to say it out loud, with her smile still tender on her face.
She told women across the country to put their fear aside. She told them early detection meant the diagnosis was not a death sentence, that going in early was how they would live.
The recovery was slow. Flex helped her clear her surgical drains in the bathroom.
He helped her into the shower and made her meals while she sat at the kitchen table and watched her hands shake. Her son and daughter sat with her in the long afternoons.
Her mother Crystal, the singer who had given up her own dreams in a Los Angeles apartment forty-five years before, sat with her grown daughter in a Los Angeles hospital room.
Crystal Penni. The company name they had built around a little girl in 1979.
The two women who had folded their lives into hers and never asked for anything back. They were still there in 2024, holding the same smile up to the world.
Today, Shanice is fifty-three years old. The voice is still there, the same coloratura soprano and whistle register and three and a half octaves that producers used to put scared singers next to so they would learn to stop being scared.
So is the smile. She lost it for a season and fought eight months to get it back.
That is the part of the story the original post missed. Not the smile that hit number two on the charts in 1991, but the other one, the one she had to fight for in a Los Angeles hospital room with her mother sitting beside her, in the same month she was born.
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