the time was 5:35 am. we had just camped out at a bluegrass festival. the bakery wasn't open yet.

On this date in music history, lots of stuff went down…

September 8th

2020 - Ronald Bell

American composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, producer, saxophonist and co-founding member of Kool & the Gang, Ronald Bell died age 68. He wrote and produced many of the Kool & the Gang’s songs, including ‘Celebration’, ‘Cherish’, ‘Jungle Boogie’ and ‘Summer Madness’. He said his favorite song was ‘Celebration’, which he wrote after picking up a Bible in a hotel room.

2005 - Rod Stewart

Rod Stewart was ordered to pay a Las Vegas casino $2m (£1.1m) for missing a New Year concert in 2000. Stewart had said he was unable to play at the Rio hotel and casino because his voice disappeared after an operation to remove a cancerous thyroid tumour. The singer said his voice only recovered in time to begin a world tour in June 2001 and he had since performed 150 shows.

2004 - Robert Plant

Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant was guest of honour at the unveiling of a statue of 15th century rebel leader Owain Glyndwr at Pennal church, near Machynlleth in Wales. Plant, who owns a farmhouse in the area had donated money towards a bronze sculpture of the Welsh prince.

2003 - David Bowie

David Bowie performed the first interactive concert when his performance was beamed live into 21 cinemas from Warsaw to Edinburgh. Members of the audience talked to Bowie via microphones linked to ISDN lines and took requests for songs from fans.

2002 - Bruce Dickinson

Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson started his new job as an airline pilot. The heavy metal singer qualified as a £35,000 - a year first officer with Gatwick based airline Astraeus who took holidaymakers to Portugal and Egypt.

1997 - Derek Taylor

Derek Taylor the publicist for The Beatles died aged 67. Taylor had been responsible for many of the legends surrounding their career and had also worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds. In 1967 he helped organise the Monterey Pop Festival together with Lou Adler and John Philips. He helped launch the Beatles Anthology trilogy in the 90s.

1990 - Jon Bon Jovi

Jon Bon Jovi went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Blaze Of Glory', a No.2 in the UK. The track appeared in the motion picture Young Guns II, for which it was originally recorded.

1984 - Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder had his first UK No.1 with 'I Just Called To Say I Love You'. Taken from the film 'The Woman In Red', it was 18 years after Wonder's chart debut in 1966. The song stayed at No.1 for six weeks.

1979 - Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin scored their eighth UK No.1 album when 'In Through The Out Door' went to the top of the charts for two weeks. The eighth studio album by Zeppelin, was their final album of entirely new material.

1977 - Wings

Guitarist Jimmy McCulloch left Wings to help re-form the Small Faces. McCulloch had played with Paul McCartney band on the Venus and Mars and Wings At the Speed of Sound albums, as well as on the Wings Over America tour. He died two years later at the age of 26. Drummer Joe English also left Wings at this time, joining Sea Level.

1973 - Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye Gaye started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Let's Get It On', his second US No.1, only reached No.31 in the UK.

1968 - The Beatles

The Beatles were seen performing ‘Hey Jude’ on the UK television show 'Frost On Sunday' in front of an invited audience. The song was the first single from The Beatles' record label Apple Records and at over seven minutes in length, 'Hey Jude' was, at the time, the longest single ever to top the British charts. It also spent nine weeks as No.1 in the United States—the longest run at the top of the American charts for a Beatles' single.

1957 - Jackie Wilson

Reet Petite' by Jackie Wilson was released for the first time, it became a UK No. 1, 29 years later. During a 1975 benefit concert, Wilson collapsed on-stage from a heart attack and subsequently fell into a coma that persisted for nearly nine years until his death in 1984.

1956 - Eddie Cochran

Eddie Cochran signed a one year contract with Liberty Records, Cochran went on to give Liberty three top 40 hits over the next several years including ‘Summertime Blues,’ ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’.

1952 - Ray Charles

After Atlantic Records bought Ray Charles' contract from Swingtime, Charles recorded his first session for Atlantic, cutting four songs. Over the next seven years, he would record such classics as ‘Mess Around,’ ‘I Got a Woman,’ ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’ and ‘What'd I Say.’

Kashmir

Chapter One, Part One: Kashmir (The Trick is to Keep Breathing)

Author’s notes: co-written with @nature-and-music, beta-ed by @lady-jane-revisited

I had fallen asleep listening to KIashmir as I fell asleep. It was all I could think about after that strange woman had told me that I would find myself in a distant place, that I would hold the fate of three hearts in my hands. I tried not to think about it much, but as the day grew later, that was proving more and more difficult, until I finally fell asleep.

I had no idea how right that woman was and I wondered if she was psychic.

I woke in an alley, laying flat on my back and I felt like I wanted to scream. I didn’t know why it even fazed me anymore. Three, three times now… Did the universe hate me that much? Who was I going to meet that I would get my heart broken over this time? Who knows, maybe I wouldn’t this time, but I was not holding my breath. In both previous times I had found myself in a different universe than my own, that was exactly what had happened. I fell in love and just as I was ready to accept that I wasn’t going anywhere, the universe had other plans.

I picked myself up from the ground and found I wasn’t far from the mouth of the alley. Dusting myself off, I sighed as I noticed my already threadbare Zeppelin shirt now had a couple of tears in it, I headed out of the alley. I wasn’t paying as much attention to my surroundings as I should have been, trying to just keep my head down and find a place to stay and worry about everything else in the morning. But I ran into someone as I rounded the corner. I quickly apologized, but the person had my arms in a gentle hold.

“Are you alright, love?”

The familiar-ish English accent made me look up. Holy crap! Jimmy fucking Page! He chuckled at me, letting go of my arms.

“While it’s good to be recognized, I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.”

“Dear God, I said that out loud… sorry. I’m Anjelika,” I replied, my heart starting to slow down.

He chuckled again, smiling at me. “It’s quite alright, love. Come to the studio with me, at least get you a new shirt.” He tilted his head as he took a better look at the shirt I was wearing. “I see you’re a fan, but I don’t recognize this design.”

Shit! “I, uh...made it myself. One of my many talents.”

“Ah. Well, shall we?” He asked, gesturing to a building a little further down the street. I nodded and we walked together in silence, feeling Jimmy’s eyes on me now and then, until we reached the building. He opened the door for me and followed me in. “Straight down the hall and the first door on the left will take you to G’s office. You can wait there while I find you a clean shirt.”

“G?” I asked half distractedly. I was busy taking in my surroundings in awe when I heard Jimmy chuckle. “What?”

“Nothing,” he chuckled again. “G is our manager, Peter Grant. He looks intimidating, and I admit, he can be when needed. But for the most part, he’s just a giant teddy bear.”

“Alright. I’ll see you there, yeah?”

“Yes. G might already be in his office, I’ll go with you to make an introduction. The rest of the band should be showing up soon as well.”

I nodded and headed down the hall to the first door on the left, as instructed. As I entered, sure enough there was a large man sitting at the desk in the middle of the room. The man I assumed was “G” looked up at me with a confused expression until Jimmy came in behind me.

“Jimmy! You’re early and I see you’ve brought a guest. Welcome, miss!”

“Please, call me Anjelika.”

“Morning, G! I came across this poor girl about a block away. Offered to get her a clean shirt at the least. I’m going to go find one, figured she’d be safe with you. Just keep Robert away from her.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible, but I can try.”

After that exchange, Jimmy left to find a clean shirt as promised. I started to look around the office, a bit fascinated by all the gold records. As I look around, Peter silently takes stock of me. The man towers over me, though I’m of average height.

“Anjelika?” He called to me, getting my attention. I turned to face the large man again, humming in acknowledgement.

“Forgive me saying, but you look like a sturdy woman. If you’re interested, we have an opening for a roadie. Specifically, someone who knows their guitars.”

“Well, I’m far from an expert, but my dad taught me quite a bit growing up. I know how to tune and play acoustic, electric and bass guitars. As for my interest, how about an enthusiastic hell yes!?” I wouldn’t mention that it was basically a lifelong dream, plus, this took care of how I was going to live while here.

Peter’s face lit up with a bright smile and stuck his hand out to me. “Welcome to the crazy life we call Rock n’ Roll!”

I laughed and took Peter’s hand to shake it, but before I could respond, another voice came from the doorway. “Did I hear right? You found the last roadie we need?” The accent was light and soft even in excitement. It was that and the feeling of another of my kind present that made me turn toward the door. There stood Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, a.k.a. Bonzo, who seemed to be eyeing me. Robert was as well, but their expressions were quite different. Bonzo was curious, if a little cautious, Robert had a clear interest in me, like a lion sizing up its prey.

I smiled to myself as I observed each of them. Bonzo’s cautiousness was a little surprising, but everything else about them was everything I had heard.

“Yes,” Peter replied. “Jimmy brought her in, but yes, I asked her if she would be interested in the job and she accepted. Anjelika, meet Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham. Boys, meet Anjelika.”

John Paul was the first to step forward. “I trust Peter’s judgment, but have you ever played guitar before?”

“I have, granted, it’s been a few years, but I think I remember a thing or two.” I responded with confidence.

“Don’t worry Jonesy,” Peter said. “I’m sure Jimmy will want to test her skills.”

“Who’s skills will I want to test?” Jimmy asked as he came back with a clean shirt, walking in and handing said shirt to me.

I took the shirt, my cheeks burning in embarrassment. “Mine, apparently. Mr. Grant offered me a job.”

“Well then, what are we waiting for? There’s a party tonight and the American leg of the tour starts tomorrow.” He announces and starts back out the door.

“Tomorrow?! That’s cutting it a bit close, don’t you think?”

Robert approached now, taking my hands in his. “Sometimes that’s just how it works out. If you need anything let us know, for now, we should join Jimmy in the studio.”

I nodded , slowly pulling my hands out of Robert’s and followed Jimmy until we reached a recording room. “Alright, let’s see what you can do, love.”

Without a word, I picked up the acoustic guitar and tuned it with ease, then I did the same with the two electric guitars. Finally, I turned to the bass guitar and tuned it, but I didn’t stop there. Something in me needed to sing too, to show them all of the talent I had to offer. Even if the song wasn’t my own. I stood up, pulled the guitar strap over my head, and stepped in front of the microphone.

I began a strong bass line and then, feeling a combination of nervousness and excitement , I began to sing.

“She’s not the kind of girl

Who likes to tell the world

About the way she feels about herself.

She takes a little time

In making up her mind

She doesn’t want to fight against the tide.

Lately, I’m not the only one

I say never trust anyone

Always the one who has to drag her down

Maybe you’ll get what you want this time around.

Can’t bare to face the truth

So sick you can not move

And when it hurts

He takes it out on you.

Lately, I’m not the only one

I say never trust anyone

Always the one who has to drag her down

Maybe you’ll get what you want this time around.

The trick is to Keep Breathing.”

I was about to continue when I saw five shocked faces looking back at me. Jimmy seemed to recover faster than the rest, Robert soon after. “Oh, we’re keeping her,” The singer announced.

Jimmy shook his head at his friend. “She’s not a pet, Rob. But yes, I think she’ll do nicely for the job.” He turned his attention once more to me. “Congratulations, you’re hired!”

I couldn’t help myself as I did a little dance before setting the bass back in its place and rejoined the others. In my joy, I ran up and hugged Jimmy and then Peter. “Thank you! But, if you all don’t mind, I’d really like to change my shirt now.”

“I’ll show you to the bathrooms.” It was Bonzo who spoke now, holding out his arm like a gentleman for me to take.

As we walked down the hallway, my eyes wandered at the sight before me. The studio environment was unlike what I had ever seen, the space was brimming with creativity as the sounds of instruments filled my ears. I could have only imagined what sorts of sounds would materialize here within these walls.

My attention was brought back when Bonzo spoke to me, “‘Ere you are Anjelika, love. I’ll wait for you out here since the studio is a bit big and well it’s your first day.”

“Thank you,” I said with a smile.

I looked at myself in the mirror after replacing my shirt. The material fit snugly against my torso and the design was so colorful with the band’s logo printed in bold letters that practically jumped off of the garment. Aside from admiring the clothing, I couldn’t help but stare at the woman looking back at me with a sense of wonderment and confusion. A new life was about to begin for me: accomodations taken care of, decent pay, and an opportunity to work alongside one of the biggest, if not the biggest, bands in the world right now. I felt happy and yet, something was lingering inside of me. Doubt? Worry? I was jolted from my thought process by the sound of hard knocking.

Bonzo’s voice was muffled, “Everything alright?”

“Coming,” I answered back.

Jonesy was fiddling with a mandolin when we returned to the recording space. Long fingers turning the tuning keys as his other hand made use of the strings. Jimmy was beside Grant going over the business aspect of the tour and Robert was occupied with his novel.

Bonzo leaned over the lanky singer, “How goes the little fellowship Percy? Are they about to fight a dragon again?”

Robert’s eyebrows quirked from over the pages, “Wrong book there Bonzo, this is the one where they venture out to destroy the One Ring. That is until everything goes wrong for the group-”

Jonesy butted in with a chuckle, “What is this, the tenth time you read the book this week?”

“Sod off,” Robert replied, “Just because you don’t find it interesting, doesn’t mean it’s a bad story.”

I glanced over and saw that he was reading The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien, a favorite of his judging by the tone in his voice, “What part are you on now? Have they just left Rivendell?”

Robert’s eyes lit up as he put his book down for a moment, “Yes, they have actually. You’ve read Fellowship?”

I smiled, “All of them, including The Hobbit.”

“Looks like you’ll have someone to talk nerd with you Percy,” Bonzo chortled as he grabbed his drumsticks.

Grant cleared his throat, “Alright settle down everyone, come on you lot have more to record. Bonzo get in there.”

Like an excited schoolboy, the man rushed in and made himself comfortable at the drum kit. Lightning fast reflexes created the thunderous booming of his instrument. I thought the glass was going to shatter from the sheer force of his playing alone. To hear him through headphones was one thing, but to actually see the man at work was something else entirely. He was like a beast letting out everything within himself, the raw power echoing from the percussion instruments. He was swift in his ability to move from one part of his set to the next, his fists holding on tightly to his drum sticks as he went from cymbal to snare to Tom. His footwork on pedals was quick as his entire body followed a musical rhythm.

As the boys began to record their song, Peter approached me once again, sitting in the chair beside me. “You know, what Percy said earlier…if you need anything, just ask. I know this was a bit sprung on you.”

I smiled a little and nodded. “Literally everything I own right now, I’m wearing. And technically, the shirt is borrowed.”

“Nah, you keep it. We can provide you with some shirts that were made for the tour. They’re for the roadies. As for anything else you might need, I can give you a small advance on your pay.”

“I…don’t know what to say. Thank you!”

He patted my hand and stood up. “It’s no problem at all, love. Wait here, I’ll be right back.” He left the room and I turned my attention to the boys. I recognized the song and couldn’t help but sing along from my side of the room.

“It is the springtime of my loving

The second season I am to know

You are the sunlight in my growing

So little warmth I've felt before

It isn't hard to feel me glowing

I watched the fire that grew so low, oh

It is the summer of my smiles

Flee from me, keepers of the gloom

Speak to me only with your eyes

It is to you, I give this tune

Ain't so hard to recognize, oh

These things are clear to all from time to time, ooh”

I had to hold back the tears that threatened to fall. I did not need Robert, or any of them really, to see me cry. Peter returned shortly after and handed me $100. I was in a bit of a shock, to say the least. “This is too much,” I said.

“Nonsense. Get yourself what you need, maybe a couple of dresses for after-parties. Anything left, consider it to be spending money.”

“Thank you, again, Mr. Grant.”

“Please, call me Peter. Or G, if you prefer.”

“Alright,” I smiled up at him, “thank you, G.”

The boys finished up the song and Peter stopped the recording. “I think you boys got it this time.”

“What did you think of it, Anjelika?” Robert asked, sounding a little shy.

“You all did wonderfully, it’s beautiful.”

Robert beamed like a ray of sunshine and the others seemed to approve of my opinion as well. Setting their instruments down and joined Peter and I on the other side of the studio.

“The party starts in a couple of hours, love. You should probably get your shopping done, there won’t be time for it tomorrow. I’m sure one of the boys will be happy to go with you, New York is a large city.”

“A guide seems like a good idea, especially since this is my first time in New York.” I turned to the boys only to see four sets of eyes looking imploringly at me. It seemed they all wanted to get out for a little while. I chuckled and shook my head. “You all look like lost puppies. Come on, let’s go. Robert, you can be my fashion consultant.”

Jonesy laughed. “You’ll regret that.”

“At least she didn’t give the job to Jimmy,” Bonzo laughed back.

Jonesy raised his hands up, “Fair point.”

“Oi!”

* * *

The city of New York was truly the picturesque place of all that was new and grand, while simultaneously being the same location that would change its image once the sun began to set. While not exactly a local and there was still a fair amount of daylight left, Robert insisted that I should stay close to him

“It’s a short walk from here, come on.”

“Robert, I think I’ll be okay. Besides, we'll go in and find a couple of dresses, some jeans and such. Shouldn’t be that hard,” I noted.

Sure enough, we made it to the boutique in no time. The place had all manner of outfits that were either displayed on their mannequins or hung from the racks. A number of the garments seemed to appeal more to the current generation with its float patterns, striped pants, button up blouses and skirts, big collared shirts, sweater vests, and corduroy suits. The shoes were something to marvel at as well. Robert had a big smile across his face and was about head to the nearest rack, that is until I cleared my throat.

“Right, dresses, sorry love.”

I raised a brow with a smirk, “It’s fine, I just have no clue where to start… Excuse me, ma’am?”

An employee turned my way, “Yes, how may I help you?”

“Could you help me find a couple of dresses for a party tonight?”

She answered with a smile, “Yeah, follow me to get your measurements first.”

She had me stand before a mirror, using her measuring tape to get my exact numbers. I noticed Robert’s eyes in the reflection examining me as she wrapped the tape around my bust. He bit down in his lip and tried his best to hide his smirk as I scowled at him. After the measuring was finished, she brought over a small collection of dresses and led me to the changing room.

She moved the curtain aside, “Just leave whatever you like inside the room and let me know if you need anything else.”

“I also need some work clothes. Jeans, mostly, under-things…and work boots.”

After thanking her, I made sure to keep the curtain closed up keeping my eyes out in case I see those ocean blue eyes peering at me. Everything looked really lovely, yet my perception changed the moment each time the outfits were on me. Everything seemed in place and the colors were beautiful, but nothing looked right to me. Even when I lifted my hair up in a makeshift ponytail and turned around, it hardly made a difference.

Robert cleared his throat, “Anjelika, how are you doin’ in there?”

“Um, well…”

“Come on, let me see you. I haven’t seen you in any of the dresses yet since we got here,” Robert mentioned.

“I don’t know, I don’t think… maybe…”

“Please, come out,” he begged.

I stepped out wearing a thin strapped red dress, the flowing skirt piece reached down to my knees and was cut asymmetric.

Robert eyed my look, “You look beautiful in red.”

“You think so? Thank you. What else should I get?”

Robert walked over and examined the other ones, holding up each one by the hanger’s metal hook. Positioning them in a way so that he could see what they looked like on me. He handed over the orange dress that was a bit longer and had a low v-neck cut. I was skeptical to wear it again, but tried it on once more and showed him.

The boutique employee returned with a small pile of jeans, a pack of underwear and a few bras, handing them over to me. “What’s your shoe size, dear?”

“9 ½ to 10, depending on the shoe.”

The woman nodded and left again to find shoes for me. I went back into the dressing room to try on the jeans and found they actually fit. As I came out once more, I found Robert had followed the woman to the shoe section. So I sat with my items until they returned. I tried on the work boots first, finding that the 10’s fit better. Robert had apparently picked out a pair of heels to go with the dresses. In that case, it was the 9 ½ that fit.

When we got to the register, the woman had also managed to fish up some makeup and jewelry to go with the dresses as well.

@salixfragilis @brownskinsugarplum76 @firethatgrewsolow @lady-jane-revisited @princesspagey @tremble-and-shake @tangerine-page @m-faithfull @jimmys-zeppelin @timetraveller4 @callmethehunter @tophats-n-lespauls please let me know if I missed anyone or if you would like to be added.

📜Today I Music History 📜(RHC)

Hello Rockers 🤘 Welcome to Backstage Chatter🤩

What Happened Today In Music:

June 22nd

1956 - Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley started a three-day run playing 10 shows at the Paramount Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. The stage manager was told; “Pull all white lights. Presley works all in color, Presley act has no encore. When he leaves the stage, immediately close curtains.”

1963 - Stevie Wonder

13-year old Stevie Wonder first entered the US singles chart as Little Stevie Wonder with ‘Fingertips Parts One and Two.’ 'Fingertips’ which featured a young Marvin Gaye on drums was the first live, non-studio recording to reach No.1 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart in the United States since Johnny Standley’s 1952 comic monologue 'It’s in the Book’.

1964 - The Beatles

The Beatles played their first ever show in New Zealand at Wellington Town Hall. The local Chief Constable refused a police escort for The Beatles leaving just two policemen to control over 5,000 fans.

1968 - Herb Alpert

Herb Alpert started a four week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'This Guys In Love With You’. His first No.1 plus first No.1 for the A&M label and the writer’s Bacharach and David’s first chart topper. A No.3 hit in the UK.

1968 - Rod Stewart

The Jeff Beck group featuring Rod Stewart made their US debut at the Fillmore East, New York.

1968 - Otis Redding

The Otis Redding album Dock Of The Bay went to No.1 in the UK. The posthumously released album, and his sixth studio album contained a number of singles and B-sides dating back to 1965 and one of his best known songs, the posthumous hit (Sittin’ On The Dock) Of The Bay.

1969 - Judy Garland

American singer, actress, Judy Garland, died of a barbiturate overdose aged 47, she was found on the floor of her rented Chelsea home, in London, UK. Made more than two dozen films, played Dorothy in the 1939 film 'Wizard Of Oz’, sang 'Over The Rainbow’ in the film, (voted the 'Song Of The Century’ in a 2001 poll published in America). 1961 US No.1 comeback album 'Judy At Carnegie Hall’.

1970 - Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin appeared at Laugardalsholl Hall, Reykjavik, Iceland on the group’s one and only visit to Iceland. It is suggested that Robert Plant was inspired to write the lyrics to 'Immigrant Song’ during this trip.“

1971 - David Bowie

The second Glastonbury Festival in England took place. Held over 5 days to coincide with the summer solstice, (the weather was, for a British 'summer’ very good). Acts who appeared included: Melanie, Quintessence, David Bowie, The Edgar Broughton Band, Pink Fairies, Terry Reid - with David Lyndley and Linda Lewis, Gong, Hawkwind, Arthur Brown, Brinsley Schwarz, Fairport Convention, Family and Traffic. Over 7,000 fans attended the event.

1971 - Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell released her fourth studio album Blue. The album is now generally regarded by music critics as one of the greatest albums of all time. In July 2017, Blue was chosen by NPR as the greatest album of all time made by a woman.

1980 - Don McLean

Don McLean had his second UK No.1 single with the Roy Orbison song 'Crying’. The song had been a No.2 US hit for Orbison in July 1961. In 1987, Orbison re-recorded the song as a duet with k.d. lang as part of the soundtrack for the motion picture, Hiding Out. Their collaboration won the Grammy Award.

1981 - Mark Chapman

Mark Chapman pleaded guilty to the charge of murdering John Lennon in 1980. He was later sentenced to 20 years to life.

1985 - Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Heaven’, his first No.1 single, it made No.35 in the UK. The song had been featured in the film 'Night In Heaven’.

1988 - Jesse Ed Davis

American session guitarist Jesse Ed Davis died of a heroin overdose after collapsing in a laundry room in Venice, California, aged 43. Worked with Conway Twitty, The Monkees, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Leonard Cohen, Keith Moon, Jackson Browne, Steve Miller, Harry Nilsson and Taj Mahal.

1990 - Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder and David Lindley, The Cure, Happy Mondays, Sinead O’Connor, Deacon Blue, De La Soul, Adamski, Blue Aeroplanes, Julian Cope, Del Amitri, Jesus Jones, James and The Pale Saints all appeared on the first day of this years Glastonbury Festival. A three day ticket cost £38.

1992 - Kurt Cobain

Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was rushed to hospital after a gig in Belfast, Northern Ireland suffering from acute stomach pains brought on by ulcers.

1992 - MC Hammer

Three members of M.C. Hammer’s tour crew were wounded in a drive in shooting incident, three days later Joseph Mack, a dancer in Hammer’s entourage was shot on stage during a concert in Nevada.

1996 - Arthur Ross

The brother of singer Diana Ross, Arthur Ross and his wife were murdered by suffocation in the basement of their rented Detroit home. The badly decomposed bodies were discovered after neighbors complained of a foul odor coming from the house. Two men were later charged with murder and robbery. Arthur Ross had written songs for Marvin Gaye, The Miracles and Madonna.

2002 - The Edge

U2 guitarist 'The Edge’ married his girlfriend of ten years Morleigh Steinberg in Eze in the south of France. The couple first met when she was a belly dancer on the bands Zoo TV tour. Guest’s included Bono, Eurythmics Dave Stewart and Lenny Kravitz.

2003 - Clay Aiken

Clay Aiken, runner-up in the 2003 US American Idol went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'This Is The Night.’ Luther Vandross was at No.1 on the US album chart with 'Dance With My Father’.

2008 - Coldplay

Coldplay went to No.1 on the UK singles chart with 'Viva La Vida’, their first UK No.1. History was made by this single, as it had no physical CD-single release in the UK, being available by internet download only. The song won a Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 2009.

2011 - Bono

It was reported in the Irish press that Bono’s wandering peahen was causing havoc for some south Dublin residents. The peahen the less spectacular-coloured female partner to a male peacock had arrived in the Ard Mhuire housing estate in Killiney near to where the singer lived. One newspaper ran the headline: "Bono’s cock drives me nuts”. Local woman Susan McKeon said she first noticed the bird at night. “It had a tiny head and a huge body. It was actually quite ugly but I don’t think it’s fully grown.”

2012 - Isle of Wight Festival

MP Andrew Turner called for a review of procedures after thousands of rock fans were delayed for hours heading to the Isle of Wight Festival. After heavy rain cars were unable to park on waterlogged fields - leading to gridlock as about 55,000 people headed to the site. Some fans were stuck in traffic for up to 16 hours on the way to the festival. Elbow, Lana Del Rey, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam all appeared at this year’s festival.

2013 - Robin Thicke

'Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke started a 13 week run at No.1 on the US singles chart. Featuring American rapper T.I. and American singer and producer Pharrell Williams, the video was made in two versions; the first video features models Emily Ratajkowski, Jessi M'Bengue, and Elle Evans being topless, the second features them covered. The topless version of the video was removed from YouTube for violating the site’s terms of service regarding nudity, though it was later restored, but flagged as inappropriate. 'Blurred Lines" peaked at No.1 in 14 countries.

2015 - P Diddy

P Diddy was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles. The alleged incident occurred on the University of California campus where his son was on the football team. The weapon in question was a kettlebell, which is used for weight training. Diddy - whose real name is Sean Combs - was released on $160,000 (£101,000) bail.

2016 - Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant told a court hearing the 'Stairway To Heaven’ copyright dispute that he had a dim memory of the time the song was written. Plant also said he could not remember meeting the band Spirit, who claimed the band stole their guitar riff for Stairway to Heaven in the 1970s. “I don’t have a recollection of almost anyone I’ve hung out with,” Plant said, causing roars of laughter in the court. The case was brought on behalf of Spirit’s late guitarist, Randy Wolfe. His estate claimed the opening riff of the 1968 song Taurus is fundamentally the same as the iconic opening bars of Stairway to Heaven.

2019 - Elton John

Sir Elton John was awarded France’s highest civilian award, the Legion d'Honneur. The British musician was presented with the award by President Emmanuel Macron during a ceremony at the Élysée Palace. President Macron’s office praised Sir Elton as a “melodic genius” and as one of the first gay artists to give a voice to the LGBT community.

2019 - Jerry Carrigan

American drummer and record producer Jerry Carrigan died age 75. He first achieved widespread recognition by being part of the first wave of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and later as a first-call session musician in Nashville for over three decades. He recorded with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, Kenny Rogers Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Stevens and Dolly Parton.

Born Today In Music

June 22nd

1936 - Kris Kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson, musician, actor, and writer, known for such hits as 'Me and Bobby McGee’, 'For the Good Times’, 'Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’, and 'Help Me Make It Through the Night’. In 1985, Kristofferson joined fellow country artists Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash in forming the country music supergroup The Highwaymen. In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

1944 - Peter Asher

Peter Asher, Peter &Gordon, who had the 1964 UK & US No.1 single 'World Without Love’, written by Lennon & McCartney. Asher was a producer and Head of Apple Records in late 60s and went on to become James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt’s manager.

1947 - Howard Kaylan

Howard Kaylan, from the The Turtles who had the US 1967 No.1 single 'Happy Together’ and the 1967 hit 'She’d Rather Be with Me’. He later worked with Frank Zappa, alongside his friend and partner Mark Volman who used the stage names of Flo & Eddie.

1948 - Todd Rundgren

American multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and record producer Todd Rundgren. Member of Nazz and Utopia. Had the solo 1972 US No.16 & 1973 UK No.36 single 'I Saw The Light’. Rundgren engineered / produced many notable albums for other acts, including The Band’s Stage Fright (1970), Badfinger’s Straight Up (1971), Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re an American Band (1973), the New York Dolls’s New York Dolls (1973), Hall & Oates’s War Babies (1974), Bat Out Of Hell’s Bat Out of Hell (1977).

1949 - Alan Osmond

Alan Osmond from American family group The Osmonds. They had the 1971 US No.1 single 'One Bad Apple’, the 1974 hit 'Crazy Horses’ and the 1974 UK No.1 single 'Love Me For A Reason’. They had their own 1972–1973 Saturday morning cartoon series, The Osmonds, on ABC-TV. The Osmonds have sold over 75 million records world wide.

1949 - Larry Junstrom

Larry Junstrom, a founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd and longstanding bassist with the band .38 Special. Junstrom played bass with Lynyrd Skynyrd from its formation in 1964 until he was replaced by Leon Wilkeson in 1971. He then joined .38 Special in 1976 with Donnie Van Zant, the younger brother of the Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant. He died on 6 October 2019 at the age of 70.

1953 - Cyndi Lauper

American singer, songwriter Cyndi Lauper, who had the 1984 US No.1 single 'Time After Time’, and the UK & US No.2 single 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun’, (first recorded in 1979 by American musician Robert Hazard). The song received Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

1956 - Derek Forbes

Derek Forbes, bassist with Scottish rock band, Simple Minds, who had the 1985 US No.1 single 'Don’t You, Forget About Me’, and the 1989 UK No.1 single 'Belfast Child’, plus over 20 other UK Top 40 singles.

1956 - Green Gartside

Green Gartside, singer, songwriter from British band Scritti Politti, who had the 1984 UK No.10 single 'Wood Beez, Pray Like Aretha Franklin’, and the hit 'The Word Girl’, as well as a US Top 20 hit 'Perfect Way’.

1957 - Gary Beers

Gary Beers, bassist from Australian rock band INXS, who had the 1988 UK No.2 & US No.1 single 'Need You Tonight’. Their 1987 album Kick has sold over 10m copies in the US alone and features four Top 10 singles; 'Need You Tonight,’ 'Devil Inside’, 'New Sensation,’ and 'Never Tear Us Apart.’ INXS has sold over 55 million records worldwide.

1959 - Alan Anton

Alan Anton, bassist with Canadian alternative country/blues/folk rock band, Cowboy Junkies.

1961 - Jimmy Somerville

Jimmy Somerville, UK singer, who with Bronski Beat had the 1984 UK No.3 single 'Smalltown Boy’. With British pop duo The Communards had the 1986 UK No.1 single with a cover version of the Thelma Houston hit 'Don’t Leave Me This Way’.

1962 - Ruby Turner

British Jamaican R&B and soul singer, Ruby Turner, who scored the 1987 UK hit single 'I’d Rather Go Blind’. As a session backing vocalist, she has worked with Bryan Ferry, UB40, Steel Pulse, Steve Winwood, Jools Holland and Mick Jagger.

1964 - Bobby Gillespie

Bobby Gillespie, guitar, vocals, from Scottish rock band Primal Scream who had the 1994 UK No.7 single 'Rocks’ and the 1991 UK No.8 album Screamadelica.

1964 - Mike Edwards

Mike Edwards, vocals with English group Jesus Jones who had the 1990 US No.2 hit with 'Right Here Right Now’ and the 1991 UK No.7 single 'International Bright Young Thing’.

1965 - Tom Cunningham

Tom Cunningham, drummer with Scottish band Wet Wet Wet who formed in 1982. They are best known for their 1994 cover of The Troggs’ 1960s hit 'Love Is All Around’, which spent 15 weeks at No.1 on the UK charts.

1970 - Steven Page

Steven Page, guitar, vocals, with Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies who scored the 1998 US No.1 & UK No.5 single 'One Week’. The group has sold over 15 million records including albums and singles, and were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in March of 2018.

1976 - Sally Polihronas

Sally Polihronas, Australian singer from Bardot, winners of the Australian Popstars reality show, who had the 2000 Australian No.1 single ‘Poison’, and 2000 Australian No.1 self-titled album.

1981 - Chris Urbanowicz

Chris Urbanowicz, guitarist, with English rock band The Editors, who had the 2007 UK No.1 album An End Has a Start and earned the band a Brit Awards nomination for best British Band.

Eye of the Storm, Ch 3

Here is the next part of the story. Here's the link to the master post for the first two chapters.

This chapter continues to look into Robert and Maggie's feelings and their past, and where things might go between them in the future. No smut, but there is innuendo, verbal and physical. 😉😎

Thank you so much to @firethatgrewsolow for the sanity check and advice. ❤️❤️❤️

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maggie parked and found herself staring at a small building with windows for walk-up orders. Lines of people were patiently waiting their turn. Anyone driving by would have known in an instant that it was an ice cream shop, by the large statue on top of the building. It was an ice cream cone with cartoon eyes, a Cheshire grin, and gangly arms and legs, a frozen confection caricature that was frozen in a dancing pose.

“I first noticed this place on a ride back from LA, and I made Benji stop,” said Robert, while he and Maggie continued to sit in the car.

“I can picture you, dying to be first in line and racing to the window,” Maggie teased.

“You know me, I always go hard for what I want,” he said with a maddeningly sly smile. “But alas, my ankle was uncooperative, and Benji wasn't a good sport about getting to the front. So your cherished Golden God queued up like everyone else.”

“Referring to yourself in third person, are you now? Maybe your pain meds need to be reduced?”

“Where's the fun in that?” The sly smile returned. “No, I'm basically off of those. I'm running on my standard chemical enhancements. And my favorite natural high, of course.”

“Well, it's official, folks: Mr. Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll is back to normal.”

“As normal as I can ever truly be,” he quipped with self-deprecation. “But yes, I'm mobile, I've got time to burn, and I'll be on vacation, as far as I'm concerned. I'm looking forward to shacking up, as it were, with you, during this last bit of down time.”

“It really has been too long,” Maggie agreed.

“And I'd really love to keep this thing going after the music hoopla kicks in. Having a girl who can understand the highs and the lows of being an artist--having that person be you--would mean the world to me. And I'd love to be there for you, too, if you'd let me.”

He stared intently at Maggie and sighed. “You know, I missed a big opportunity when I moved here… I should've reached out to you then. I wasted a lot of time.”

“I'm glad you brought that up. Why didn't you call? You always did before. It was disappointing to have to read about it in Rolling Stone.” Maggie looked expectantly at Robert.

“All I wanted to do when I got here was to forget everything. We had to cancel the final leg of what was an exciting tour, which was most disappointing. But Cole damn near had to pick roaches off me in the hospital and bribe our way out of Greece.”

He brushed his hair out of his eyes and turned toward the window. “And then I could barely say goodbye to my friends and my parents before the taxman would've grasped me by my collar and waylaid me with highway robbery. All of Great Britain's greatest musicians are in America now, you know, and not by choice,” he said, turning back to Maggie with a pained expression on his face.

“I read about that… Either stay away, or lose a fortune.”

“Exactly. Tough choice, that, convalesce among my loved ones and be left with fuck all in my bank account, or retain the spoils of conquering the world, but be left without most of my favorite people around… I knew where my head was at, and I feared you wouldn't have wanted to be around me.”

“I can understand your concern. It's very rare that you're not giving off a sunny disposition. But you wouldn't have scared me off that easily.” She placed a reassuring hand on Robert's thigh.

“I really thought I was making the right choice. But sometimes… I mean, Jimmy was camped a stone's throw away in his place, and Cole and Benji kept my time occupied with all the revelry I could handle, but it was lonely for me, even though I was never alone, you know?”

He searched Maggie's eyes before continuing, looking more weary than she'd ever remembered seeing him before.

“And don't get me started on damn physical therapy. I'm grateful to them, for sure, but bloody hell, they were absolute sadists! It got pretty dark for me, for a lot of reasons. I even wondered if all these crazy coincidences meant I was cursed, or something...”

“I'm sorry to hear things got so heavy for you. What a lot of feelings and physical challenges to deal with…” Maggie was still, processing Robert's words and fighting the burning sensation of tears in her eyes.

“Simply put, I was wrong. Seeing you has always been the highlight of my time on the West Coast. You're a hell of a woman, love. You're sweet, and a creative dreamer, but you never compromise on what you want. You put up with me, and my silly, spoiled rock star ways. You always put a smile on my face when we talk. And then, the delights of your beautiful, curvy body…” He looked at her with a gaze that cycled through a number of emotions: love, regret, joy, lust.

Maggie smiled and blushed at his words of devotion but also felt an insistent flutter in her core as carnal memories flashed through her mind.

“I let my mood and my nerves get the best of me,” Robert continued. “But no more. I want to make up for lost time. Let's play house, shall we? Let's wake up together, have fun excursions, let the sun warm us head to toe on the beach, enjoy night caps, and more, in the Jacuzzi…”

He smiled softly and caressed her cheek. “And then we can live through what comes after that, just us, together or apart on tour, for as long as it works. What do you say, señorita?”

“I'd really like that,” Maggie said, grasping and squeezing Robert's hand. “And I would love for ‘this thing,’ as you call it, to keep going for as long as we can.”

“My sweet Mags.” He couldn't contain his smile as he leaned in for a kiss.

She savored his words, warm as the sun that hovered in the afternoon sky without the shroud of a single cloud around it. It was what she had longed to hear from him over their years of off-and-on connection, a desire for something more solid, defined. She wanted to stay enveloped in the fantasy of the picture he painted with his words. She had to believe that she wouldn't be burned by his promises later.

“So, what do you recommend here?” she asked, shutting the car door behind her as she stood. She was trying her hardest to stay in the present and not get swept away by guesses about what their future might hold. She also, reluctantly, realized she needed to curtail the indecent thoughts of Robert that just as forcefully battled for prominence in her mind. It had been way too long since his touch ignited electric sparks of lust through her body. It was maddening to be so close to him but so far from the ensnarement of his thighs, the pressure of his body on top of hers, the fullness of him inside--

“--All of the flavors are delicious,” Robert said, peering over the car at her and interrupting her thoughts, “but if I had to choose? I like the classics: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry.”

“All at once, I'm sure. Some things never change...”

“Hey!” Robert protested. “While I'm on the mend, dairy is even more important for my bones, innit?”

“You've won your case, Mr. Plant.” She couldn't help but laugh. “OK, let's get a little closer, so I can check out the menu.”

They joined a line. Maggie had her eyes on the menu, but most everyone else had their eyes on Robert or were whispering to someone about him.

It didn't take long for the more courageous admirers to descend upon him, expressing their love of him and his band. Pens were produced, and napkins, bus schedules, anything the fans could get their hands on for him to sign. A few raced to their cars to procure eight-tracks, cassette cases, and cameras.

Robert was all smiles and thank-yous among his people. He confirmed for the crowd that the next Led Zeppelin album “would be out in a little more than a fortnight,” but that touring would likely come much later. “I'm still getting my sea legs back after my accident,” he explained. The crowd was sated, for the time being, by the interaction with their idol and the promise of a comeback album.

Maggie had lived this experience before, of fans wanting to share their favorite Led Zeppelin concert memories with Robert, or living a few seconds of fantasy by taking any conceivable opportunity to touch him. But now, she fantasized about this excitement someday being the reality for her band. She hoped they could achieve even a tiny fraction of the success that Led Zeppelin had.

She and Robert made their way to the front of the line. Others came and interacted with him. “I'll have a mint chocolate chip cone, please,” Maggie said to the girl behind the counter. “And for him--”

“--Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry scoops. On the house for both of you, with all this business he's bringing in!” The girl smiled and stared longingly at Robert. “How's his ankle doing? Poor baby.”  

Maggie considered the teenage girl, who was surrounded by an invisible cloud of Love's Baby Soft and swathed in a pink velour sweatsuit under her uniform smock. She wore a hair net over her ash-blonde mane, and Maggie would bet anything that a feathered hairdo would emerge from its workplace moorings after closing.

“Much better. We just came from a soccer game, and he was standing the whole time.”

“Lucky you! I've only seen him with the leg brace before. You're new… He has come here a lot, but there's always a different girl…”

Maggie blinked and considered the even expression on the girl's face. Was it an absent-minded observation, or did the girl intend to hurt her? Maggie mulled it over. Either way, she wasn't going to let it get to her.

“Well, if we're back out this way, you just might see me again. I'm Maggie.” She smiled sweetly before taking both cones and walking away. The girl's words caught Maggie off guard. Although Robert would never be free of admirers, all signals from him indicated that he wanted to put Maggie first. But she knew he had not been alone all this time. She had to be realistic.

She had enjoyed the shooting star path he blazed across her life on tour visits, leaving her to reconnect with reality alone when the time was over. She couldn't help but wonder if his feelings this time would shift like an impermanent mountain of sand once he was back in the thick of tour life, or if she would be tossed indefinitely between his romantic desires and her professional dreams, his tinge of melancholy and her giddy anticipation. Only time would tell.

“OK, Golden God, here's your dessert,” she said, snapping out of her spiraling thoughts and handing Robert his cone.

“This lady says that's all for me today, I'm afraid.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled apologetically to the crowd before walking back to the car with Maggie, holding the ice cream with one hand and lightly grasping her waist with the other.

“Never mind the bollocks from those bloody punk bands, our fans are still solidly in place,” Robert concluded with the flashiest of smiles.

“How lovely to be so wanted still! And your turn is coming next, Mags. We'll have some press interviews coming up, and I'll be sure to mention the new sensation coming out of San Diego as a personal favorite!”

“Robert, I appreciate that, but you don't have to--”

“--No, I insist, dear! I love your music, and it's the least I can do for you. Oh, by the way, do you have any shows around here anytime soon?” He turned his attention to his ice cream, and not a moment too soon. It had started to melt a little while he was talking.

“Next Friday,” said Maggie.

“I must come to your rehearsal! It's been so long since I've seen my sexy songbird on a proper stage.”

“I'd like that a lot. And, you know what else I would love?”

“What's that?” Robert asked.

“I'd love for you to help me pull together some stage outfits.”

“I know just the place. But let me donate some of my jewelry to the cause, too.”

“Really? Thanks!” She nuzzled into his embrace of her.

“It's not entirely altruistic,” he responded from above, still hugging her close. “I might make you model them for me, so I can see what looks best against your skin. Sans clothes, bien sûr,” he added, his voice softened to his trademark hypnotic murmur.  “No distractions…”

“Por supuesto, of course.” Maggie wasn't sure what made her feel weaker: Robert's French, which was less heavily chained to his British accent than before, or his sexy fashion show idea. Either way, she was burning to be alone with him.

“So, next, it's back to yours, grab your things, and drive off into the sunset to my place.”

“That's right. And you'll see my brother Victor again. We live together.”

“How's he doing these days?” Robert asked, switching his attention back to the ice cream.

“Fine. He's just as excited as I am to have this opportunity. He's also driving the neighbors crazy, practicing his drumming all times of the day and night.”

“Shades of young John Henry Bonham,” Robert said, reflecting on his youth with a smile.

Maggie was busy with her ice cream cone. “I see why you go out of your way to come here,” she said, back at the car. “It's not for the cashier; it's this sinfully delicious ice cream.” She sighed after taking another lick of the irresistible cone. She also couldn't resist probing Robert's thoughts about his enthusiastic fan.

“Totally the ice cream, love. Young Gwen over there, she's just a friend who indulges my sweet tooth from time to time.” He waved and smiled at Gwen, who still had her eyes on him. “With dessert,” he quickly added. “I'm sure she turns into an LA queen at night, but I'm not her king… Enough about her. I'd like you, talented woman, to show me how much you really enjoy this ice cream cone.”

“Sure. I am feeling pretty hungry and impatient, so I'm going to bite a big chunk out of it like this…”

He grimaced. “Whoa, not at all what I had in mind, love!”

She smirked at his reaction to her teasing. “But now I'll take my time…” she closed her eyes and slowly licked up one side of the cone, and then all around. She continued traversing the scoop of ice cream while Robert watched and licked his cone when he wasn't too busy smiling wickedly at the sight before him and the memories of her busy tongue on his sensitive skin. “Mmmmm… I miss getting the special treatment from you...”

“Your wait will be over soon. And mine,” she said with a wink. In a few hours they would be entangled, mind, body, and soul again, at his beachfront hideaway, and Maggie could hardly wait.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The rest of my stories are here, or search for the hashtag #brownskinsugarplumlibrary.

mom, elvis and me

[some of you have read this already, but it’s the 41st anniversary of my teenage transgression, so here it is again

It was one of those moments when you say something you know you shouldn’t. But I couldn’t help myself. I was fourteen and still in the throes of teenage-girl-smart-ass disease. It was 39 years ago that I was sitting in the backyard listening to the radio when I heard the news. I went inside and found my mother in her room, making her bed.

“Hey, mom. Guess you won’t be going to that Elvis concert next week.” “What?” “He’s dead.”

I may have snickered, I don’t know. Mom ran into the bathroom and turned on the little radio she kept in there. I remember the exact sound of the tinny, staticy voice that relayed the news to my mother in a much softer way than I did. Elvis was dead. My mother’s eyes filled with tears and despair while her face registered only that small “o” one’s mouth makes when they hear shocking news. That “o” stayed there for a while, but the despair in her eyes had become hard and angry. She was pissed at me. How could I have told her like that, knowing that she idolized Elvis in a pure, passionate way? How could I do that? What kind of daughter was I?

Well, I was fourteen. That’s my only excuse. I was a fourteen year old whose mother made fun of her own idolization of another self-obsessed, overly dramatic singer who similarly became a bloated replica of himself. And later, dead and bloated. Maybe it was my way of evening up the score.

My mother had this friend Noreen. Noreen was the largest woman I ever knew. Not just heavy large, but tall and broad and wide, with a thick, teased hair piled up on her head so she looked even taller. Her voice roared even when she whispered and her sneezes were legend in the neighborhood, said to be heard from at least three blocks away. She wore mumus and housecoats and tons of hairspray and sometimes she wore an ugly fur coat that made her look like a small woodland creature was nesting on her shoulder.

Noreen and my mom were the Elvis duo. They worshiped him. They loved him. They knew everything about him and owned everything to do with him including Elvis commemorative plates and I think one of them had an Elvis wristwatch. I grew up with Elvis’s hips grinding in my face and his voice grinding in my ears and I have to admit that at some point, I realized what the attraction was. When I would lay in bed on summer nights, trying to sleep while my mother and Noreen and the rest of their crew played Pinochle in the kitchen with Elvis on the stereo, I knew. His voice would come drifting into my room and I could feel the sensuality, and the passion within his words. I would never tell anyone this, of course. I went about my daily business of bowing before Jim Morrison and Robert Plant and never let on that I thought Elvis was cool. Especially to my mother. That would just ruin the taut, tenuous relationship that we both thrived on. Who was I to break the rite of passage of mother-teenage daughter bitterness and anger?

Noreen and my mother were going to see Elvis in August, 1977 at the Nassau Coliseum. They had seen him many times before but this one was special. They had a feeling this would be his last tour ever. They were like little giddy school girls in the weeks leading up to the show. Sometimes my mother would take out her ticket and just stare at it. She was 39 at the time. When I was fourteen, 39 was old and withered and wrinkled. 39 was too old to be getting worked up over a hip-shaking idol. I thought it was kind of creepy. Funny how that works. I’m 52 now and not old or wrinkled or past getting worked up about my musical idols. And there I was, a stupid teenager looking with disdain at her mother for being excited about seeing Elvis.

Then there was no Elvis.

She was so happy. And I crushed her world. It would have been a much softer blow if it came from Cousin Brucie or Uncle somebody on whichever oldies station she was listening to. It would have been a bit easier to take if her teenage bag of hormones didn’t make some smarmy remark about dying like a fat, beached whale.

The news of Elvis’s death spread around the neighborhood. It was like my mother’s sobbing set off some kind of bat signal and you could hear wails of anguish coming from housewives all down the block. When Noreen found out we heard her bellowing from two blocks away. Her booming voice sounded through the neighborhood like a siren, a mourning call for all Elvis fans to gather on her lawn and weep. It was a sad day for Elvis fans and all I could think to do was make fun of them.

I don’t think my mother ever told Noreen the way in which she found out about the death of their hero. I probably wouldn’t have lived to tell this tale if she knew. She would have beat my ass, and an ass beating from Noreen was unlike any other. I suppose I owe my mother for saving me from that.

When Noreen died, my first thought was that she would finally get to see Elvis again. My second was that I was now safe from my mother ever spilling the beans to Noreen about my youthful indiscretion. I had lived in fear all those years. Hell, sometimes I still think the ghost of Noreen is going appear 30 years later, wearing a sequined white jumpsuit, hell bent on haunting me.

I thought my mother had forgiven me, but judging from the look she gives me whenever the story is brought up again, perhaps not. Maybe that’s what drives every argument we have. Maybe she’s still mad at me.

I have apologized to her since. I told her I was sorry for breaking the news like that, but in a way it was her fault for making me sit through Viva Las Vegas and Jailhouse Rock, for forcing that horrid “In the Ghetto” on my ears, for making me try fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

One of these years my Elvis penance will end. I hope.

In The Light        Jimmy Page     Fan Fiction           Part 7

Part 7   Party Night

Saturday, December 3rd, 1977

Jill got plenty of sleep the night before and was ready for the party. He said to dress casually, so she wore a pair of black jeans and a cotton dark purple Indian style top. It had a V neck that had tiny mirrors all along the collar and a tie in the back at the waist. Her dirty blond hair was long and straight but gently curled at the ends. The bell rang in her apartment and she let Jimmy in. He looked so handsome in the evening light. He handed her a small bouquet of flowers and wore a beautiful smile. She loved the flower gesture so much.  He said, “ Jill, you look really pretty. Never saw you in jeans before. You seem so relaxed.”

She said, “Thanks, I am relaxed, I’m home. Haven’t seen you anywhere but my workplace before now.  And you look really nice too.”

He wore comfortable blue jeans and a button down shirt with a casual brown blazer style jacket over it. And a warm coat, since it was pretty cold out. He helped her put her coat on and out they went, walking. He took her hand and held it as they walked, but few words were said. It was a bit awkward.  She loved holding his hand. He seemed taller tonight and seemed so confident as he led her the couple blocks away to the hotel. The party was at a nice gathering room at the hotel in which the band was staying.

They entered the room, which was amazingly cozy with a big fire lit in the fireplace.  A lot of people were already there.  Everyone was dressed casually and there were a lot of little couches and fabric chairs set up about the room. There were sconces all around the walls with candle shaped bulbs in them that flickered. Everyone had a drink and snacks in their hands or sat at little tables next to the couches. A waiter handed them each a drink and they sat next to John Paul and his wife.

John Paul gave Jill a little hug and said, “So good to see you again. This is Maureen, my wife. ”

Jimmy said to Maureen, “This is Jill. She works at the medical center where I had my hand stitched.”

Then Robert came wandering over with a drink in hand and stopped at Jimmy and Jill. “Well, what a lovely young lady,” as he kissed her hand. “I’m Robert. And you are…? ”

 "This is Jill, she’s from New York Central where they took care of my hand this week. She works in the medical lab.” said Jim. “Nice to meet you, Rob.”  said Jill.   With that, Robert put his arm around Jill and turned her and started walking away with her, “Let me take you around and meet some people, Jill. I adore your New York accent, it’s so light and cool. Where did you grow up ?” as they walked off.  Jimmy could hear her saying to him, “Since we’re actually in New York now, you’re the one with an accent, not me !” As she looked behind her at Jim, she saw him chuckling lightly at her ever so true comment.

Jimmy sat calmly and sipped on his drink. The music was pretty loud. The room was warm and dimly lit. Peter Grant came over and sat. Bonzo came around behind him and said, “Ah, I see you’ve brought along the young lady from the hospital. She’s a sweet one, aye ?”

“Yeah, very sweet.” said Jim. “By the way, Peter, I don’t think I’ll be taking the same flight with you all, on Monday.  I think I’ll stick around here awhile, maybe for a few weeks since we won’t be carrying on with our schedule as planned. No point in rushing home with my hand still healing.”

Bonzo and Grant looked at each other disbelievingly, and Grant said, “Oh, oh, yeah. Page, that’s sounds about right. Your hand needs to heal. And it wouldn’t do so if you were to travel with us, I guess, right ?”

“Nope, it wouldn’t.” he answered.

“Apparently this has nothing to do with that cute blonde going around with Plant, meeting folks, hah ?”

“Apparently not.” said Jim.

Later on, they were all seated at a table, drinking, laughing. Jill had met a young woman who was there with Bonzo. A dark haired woman named Clare. She was from England also and had been travelling with the band on tour. Clare was very warm and kind and well liked. She and Jill seemed to really understand each other.  They were cut from the same cloth and bonded instantly.

Robert also had a young woman travelling with them named Linda. She was a girl with very light blonde hair, dressed very neatly and was a little snarky. She often had a snide remark to offer but deep down she had a good heart.

While they all sat at a table talking, Jill noticed Jimmy’s arm around her back and his hand on her shoulder. Now and then he would take a small handful of her hair and play with it, feel it between his fingers. It gave her a chill when he did this since she was finding him irresistible. His shiny mane of black hair was so silky looking and the highlights glistened in the dim light. And his sweet mouth was so moist and pouty, she was craving a taste of his lips so badly. It was difficult to keep her mind off of it.

Grant spoke up, “Anyone would like a little white stuff ?” and pulled out the coke onto the table. He started dividing up little lines and focusing very hard on this. When Jimmy hesitatingly offered Jill some, he had no idea whether or not she used it. But she waved her hand away lightly, as in ‘no thanks.’ Grant said, “Hey Jill, it’s really good stuff, sure you don't want some ?”

She said, “You mean Peruvian marching powder ?  Well, thanks but I guess not, because I have to follow my own rule. That is,…  If you’re not a lion tamer, don’t put your head in the lion’s mouth.”

They all started laughing. Jimmy had a smile on his face, and ruffled the back of her hair playfully. His way of gesturing to her that he found her behavior extremely cute.

He passed on his chance as well, strangely. And all his friends noticed.

Quietly, Robert asked him why he refused some, since that was unusual.

He said, “because, when I kiss her later or whatever happens, I want to feel every sensation I can feel. I don’t want to be numbed up.”

Plant just nodded in understanding, it made sense.

It got to be about midnight and Jill said she was ready to go, if he didn’t mind. So Jimmy got their coats, they wished everyone goodnight and walked out. They walked to her place holding hands and were chatting and laughing. Jill told him that she really enjoyed his friends and how much fun she had.

He said, “I had a great time with you, too. And I wonder if you’re free tomorrow, we’re all going out to a Mexican restaurant for their last night here. Why don’t you come with us ?”

She said to him “Sure. By the way, you’re sweet as sugar, sugar.” She said it with a warm smile, which Jimmy found enticing. Everything about her, he found to be enticing.

He smiled a huge smile and said “You are too, angel.”

Just then she realized they were at the doorway of her apartment building.  She invited him up and he jumped at the chance.

They got into the apartment and took off their coats. She made some tea and he sat at her counter on one of the tall chairs she had against it, like a tall barstool. The bouquet of flowers he had brought for her looked gorgeous in a vase of water, there. She walked around the counter and sat next to him on another tall chair.  They directly faced each other and looked seriously right into each other’s face.  Jim felt his heart beating hard at that moment, and an ache formed in his chest and throat. He looked longingly at her mouth, not even aware of the expression he held.  He decided there was no point in waiting even another second. Time is wasting. So he reached out to her beautiful hair with his left hand and began to touch and caress it. He began to say softly almost in a whisper, “You,... your mouth. Your mouth is just so…..” then he hesitated. His eyes looked foggy and he began to close them and slowly leaned his head down toward her mouth. Then so gently, they met lips. The kiss was extremely soft at first, just a light touch, his lips pressing against hers. But neither one of them attempted to pull away. So they began moving and pressing against each others’ mouths and it was wet and felt like an electric current flowing between them. He gently opened his mouth a little and pressed himself further against and into her mouth and their kiss ignited into molten lava.

She was focusing on the feel of his lips and his tongue caressing her mouth. He  had no intention of stopping. He reached to her with two hands and put one into her hair and his other gently against the back of her head. He slowly pulled her from her seat till she stood up. Jimmy remained in the tall chair and further pulled her body in, close to himself, between his open legs. He had his arms and hands now around her back, caressing her waist. She had one of her hands deep but gently into the back of his luscious hair, massaging his scalp. His soft curls felt like satin. Her other hand grasped his upper arm and shoulder. Jim pulled her in tighter against his chest and stomach and held her close like that. He had his tongue in her mouth and was feeling all along her tongue, but in a slow sensual way. Holy hell, he was amazing at kissing. Jill noticed his lips were so soft and moist.  He continued pulling her into himself closer and tighter. She thoroughly melted in his arms and felt like she was made of liquid. He pressed his face into her silky hair, near her ear and she felt his warm moist breath against her neck, and it felt intoxicating. She loved the feel of his strong shoulders, hard as rock in her hands. He spoke softly, whispering to her ear, “Jill, you feel perfect in my arms, and I don’t want to let go of you.” And he continued pressing his face into her soft clean hair and breathed in her delicate scent.

She felt like the luckiest woman on the planet, kissing him was just the most sensual thrill she’d felt in a long time. To Jill, he was like a hypnotic drug, taking her to some other realm. And he was now overheated, kissing her delicious lips again, now. Feeling an incredible physical and emotional connection with Jill. She was unlike other women he’d been with. She was smart, funny, fascinating, beautiful, educated, sexy. In no way was she climbing all over him. Instead, for him it was now a challenge to try to win her affection. Not typical, not in his world.

He knew he needed to stop kissing her soon, before he couldn’t stop. He had to restrain himself because he worried he’d risk losing another chance to be with her, if he carried on too demandingly. She was such a clean sophisticated woman, he didn’t want to overstep his boundaries. Didn’t want to possibly scare her off by being too forceful or too insistent. He knew he certainly would’ve tried to get her into bed if it had been some other woman or girl. That was absolutely his usual style.  No matter how incredible it was kissing her, and for him, it was incredible, he had to stop. He had to save something for tomorrow. So, he broke the kiss.

He said, “Jill, you are so alluring, I could get lost in you in another moment. So, I’m going to leave now, but I’ll be dreaming about you all night.  I’ll be so looking forward to seeing you tomorrow night, my girl.” And he placed a few more wet kisses onto her face and mouth. And it took all the discipline he had to pull himself away from her warm lovely embrace. But he had to. She smoothed his hair and kissed his wet red lips one more time. She was completely high on his delicious mouth and body. It was hard for her to let go of him too. She said, “That was a beautiful night. ”

He answered, “You are as sweet as it gets. It was my pleasure, good night.”

With that, he grabbed his coat and left. He strode down the two city blocks to his hotel in the cold. But didn’t feel cold at all. His mind and body were so completely alive from the contact between the two of them, he could barely calm down.  She is surely worth his trouble, he thought.

He was so pleased that things had gone so well tonight, he thought about her the entire night with a smile on his face.

Next Part 8 :  https://ritacaroline.tumblr.com/post/173521314276/in-the-light-jimmy-page-fan-fiction

Chapter Index :

https://ritacaroline.tumblr.com/Fan%20Fiction

* would like to thank @tremble-and-shake for helping me with several details.

* would also like to thank @ladygrange for helping me with some details also.

National Enquirer, November 2

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Jealous O.J. Simpson killed Nicole Brown over sizzling photos 

Page 2: Melanie Griffith was caught in lockdown meltdown mode outside her Los Angeles home yelling at an unsuspecting laborer and giving him a good working over after he somehow crossed her bath and pushed her buttons but it doesn’t take much to get Mel to blow these days because she’s upset about two things which are getting old and not having a man in her life 

Page 3: Lisa Marie Presley’s son Ben Keough’s tragic last moments were caught on tape as he argued with his girlfriend according to the coroner’s report on his suicide and security camera footage also captured the eerie sound of an apparent gunshot said the officer who viewed the tape -- Ben had hosted a party for his girlfriend Diana Pinto then about 4 a.m. the 27-year-old musician went to his bedroom; two hours later Diana went to check on him and had to jimmy the bedroom door lock with a bobby pin and she discovered his body and called 911 but Ben was pronounced dead at the scene -- since his death a devastated Lisa Marie has blamed herself for not intervening sooner; Ben had been to rehab several months before and Lisa Marie could see he was struggling with drugs and depression and she has kept a close eye on Ben’s gravesite with Graceland’s surveillance system 

Page 4: Anne Heche’s shocking public pronouncement that she wants to reunite with former galpal Ellen DeGeneres was met with fury from Ellen wife Portia de Rossi -- Ellen and Anne were Hollywood’s highest-profile lesbian couple when they dated for three years before their bitter split in 2000 and they haven’t spoken since but Anne announced after her elimination on Dancing with the Stars that she would love to appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show but Portia has made it clear she wants Anne nowhere near her wife and she believes Anne is using Ellen to drum up publicity for herself, lonely Ryan Seacrest is longing for a reunion with former flame Shayna Taylor but she wants no part of him -- workaholic Ryan announced the combustible couple’s third split in June after eight on-and-off years together -- Ryan’s obsession with being the next Dick Clark tests the patience of everybody around him and it’s made him a nightmare to be in a relationship with as Shayna found out firsthand -- Ryan seemed so cocky and sure that breaking up was the right thing to do but not having Shayna there to lean on has really gotten to him however Shayna is refusing to be played for a fool 

Page 5: Kelly Clarkson made a massive mistake dumping husband Brandon Blackstock according to famed numerologist Glynis McCants 

Page 6: Doting dad Kanye West is spoiling oldest daughter North rotten and it’s causing even more problems between him and wife Kim Kardashian because Kim feels North is getting too spoiled but Kanye won’t hear any of it because North is his firstborn and his princess and he treats her like it -- North is regularly served breakfast in bed on a silver tray and gets whatever she wants even if it’s waffles with strawberries and ice cream and she also has a team of beauticians and a stylist to cater to her every need as though she was a full-grown woman and her wardrobe is extensive and expensive and she never wears the same designer outfit twice plus North also loves to shop online for jewelry and Kanye gives her his credit card and she can spend $100,000 in a single sitting and Kanye just thinks it’s cute 

Page 7: Daring Jill Duggar and husband Derick Dillard are rebelling against her conservative parents and causing a full-scale family war as the couple has publicly defied Baptist patriarch Jim Bob Duggar several times since their 2014 marriage and now they’ve been banned from the 19 Kids and Counting reality clan; Jim Bob’s even demanded that their neighbors have nothing to do with them -- Jill and Derick drew Jim Bob’s fury after criticizing her parents’ conservative views and shutting down their own family factory after having two sons and said they’re stopping there for now unlike Jill’s folks who had 19 kids, dog lover Jennifer Aniston adores her new rescue puppy but potty-training the pooch has been the pits so desperate Jen had to sign up her new pup Lord Chesterfield for private lessons with a dog trainer -- she has two other dogs Clyde and Sophie but they’re well-behaved and know to do their business outdoors and Jen loves them all but she forgot how much work it is to train a puppy 

Page 8: Prince Harry’s wife Meghan Markle revealed her private battle with depression as her struggles with first-time motherhood and fitting in with the rigid royal family pushed her over the edge but Queen Elizabeth thinks her conniving confession is simply a ploy to sully the monarchy -- Meghan described the emotional pain caused by criticism as a death by a thousand cuts and said if people are saying things about you that aren’t true what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging -- Queen Elizabeth believes Meghan’s confession is a calculated attack on the monarchy and Meghan is acting like the royals waged a war against her but Meghan and Harry’s actions since they quit have infuriated Her Majesty because Meghan keeps orchestrating situations where she takes center stage appearing to support and put the spotlight on those in need but she turns them all into opportunities to talk about herself and how hard her struggle is

Page 9: Rattled Tyra Banks’ rocky start on Dancing with the Stars has her looking for a way to waltz off the show and she is already trying to back out of hosting because she hates the criticism she’s been getting from virtually everyone plus she’s unpopular with the contestants and is bickering behind the scenes with producers who now regret replacing longtime hosts Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews -- ratings have also plummeted since Tyra took the helm with the show losing more than a million viewers in early October from the same week in 2019

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Gwen Stefani during a photo session in Calabasas, Tiffany Haddish used a leaf blower during a skit on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Justin Bieber on a scooter in Beverly Hills, Zosia Mamet donned a unicorn horn as she wrapped the final scenes of The Flight Attendant, Robert Pattinson and Colin Farrell on the Liverpool set of The Batman 

Page 11: John Oliver’s jokey jabs have earned him a crappy honor from the town of Danbury in Connecticut -- after he ragged on tony Danbury on his show Mayor Mark Boughton vowed to rename its sewage plant after him and now it’s official that the Danbury Sewage Plant is now the John Oliver Memorial Sewage Plant and as promised John is donating $55,000 to local charities which has spurred fundraising efforts for local food banks and Boughton is offering tours of the plant for $500 donations to local food pantries, ailing Phil Collins was rocked by ex-wife Orianne’s betrayal and pals fear he won’t make it to Christmas -- the singer was shocked when it emerged that Orianne who he’d divorced in 2006 and reunited with a decade later married another man in Las Vegas and the stunning news prompted him to serve an eviction notice to get her out of his Miami home and his life for good but Orianne refused to leave

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- Nev Schulman on roller blades in an L.A. parking lot (picture), Eboni K. Williams only landed the gig on The Real Housewives of New York City because she co-hosts State of the Culture on Sean Diddy Combs’ Revolt TV cable network and Bravo is desperate to get famous New Yorkers on the show so cameras will be following Eboni around at work hoping to catch Diddy, with Keeping Up with the Kardashians ending E! is looking for the next big reality family and it may be Sylvester Stallone’s daughters Sophia and Sistine and Scarlet Stallone who are all models and not one has a sex tape, with Bravo boss Andy Cohen and axed Housewife NeNe Leakes at war their mutual friends are being forced to pick sides -- Andy gave NeNe access to his famous non-reality show friends and now he’s regretting it -- Kelly Ripa and Anderson Cooper are all Team Andy

Page 13: Kris Kristofferson is battling Alzheimer’s disease and has been forced to retire from singing and acting but the songwriter is in the best place he can be at his home in Maui with family and friends who are surrounding him with love and support, frantic Kate Gosselin is feeling a financial pinch and ready to take a bath on her house by putting her $1.2 million mansion on the market for a measly $815,000 because she’s been struggling with money because she hasn’t worked in a while and living off the money she made in past 

Page 14: Crime 

Page 15: Marie Osmond was blue over being booted from The Talk but husband Steve Craig gave her something to get over it which was a stunning pair of opal and tanzanite earrings worth nearly $3000, Megan Thee Stallion cheated death when she was shot twice in July and is now using the terrifying incident as a platform to empower Black women and she wrote an op-ed saying the attack proved she and other Black women are not protected as human beings -- fellow rapper Tory Lanez was charged with the shooting that left two flesh-shredding wounds in Megan’s feet and allegedly took place after they argued in an SUV in Hollywood Hills 

Page 16: Cover Story -- Rampaging O.J. Simpson was driven into a kill-crazy rage after seeing photos of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson dating hunky young boytoys and flaunting her body in modeling shots -- 25 years after the disgraced football star’s 1995 acquittal intimate images from Nicole’s secret photo album including a picture of the blond beauty posing topless with lover Brett Shaves is believed to have given the jealous ex-jock a motive for murder 

Page 18: American Life -- I found a $1M diamond in the rough 

Page 19: John Travolta paid tribute to wife Kelly Preston on what would have been her 58th birthday three months after tragic death following a secret two-year battle with breast cancer -- John addressed his late love in a touching Instagram post featuring an image from their 1991 wedding day alongside a picture of his own parents as newlyweds, sci-fi legend George Takei has fired yet another shot at former Star Trek castmate William Shatner as the aging actors’ war of words continues to rage on well into their 80s -- George who played Sulu claimed Shatner was jealous of the amount of fan mail received by their late co-star Leonard Nimoy who played Spock but Captain Kirk shot off a testy response and claimed George was making things up and the only person with jealousy is George -- when told Shatner’s comments George calmly remarked that you can tell by those words that he is upset to put it mildly 

Page 20: In a rerun of their long-running rivalry Madonna and Mariah Carey are prepping dueling biopics -- their cold war dates back to the ‘90s but Mariah ramped up their feud when she revealed the very exciting prospect of her biopic but that followed Madonna’s announcement that she was collaborating on her own script -- they’re each obsessed with getting their film out first and getting the right It Girl to play her so the other one doesn’t grab her first

Page 21: Elton John and ex-wife Renate Blauel agreed to zip their lips about their four-year marriage and privately settled her $3.8 million lawsuit over claims he blabbed about their relationship in his memoir Me and the movie Rocketman, Stevie Nicks admitted her insomnia has gotten so bad that she needs therapy or needs someone to hit her on the head with a hammer -- she’s long been nocturnal and it used to be she could sleep from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. but now says she doesn’t nod off until 8 a.m., singer Amy Winehouse died in 2011 but her dad claimed he still can’t get her out of his house -- former taxi driver Mitch Winehouse who is working on a movie and stage show about the late singer insisted he’s regularly visited by his daughter’s ghost who comes and sits at the end of his bed -- Mitch also said Amy helps around the house in his dreams 

Page 26: Niecy Nash’s new bride Jessica Betts has a nightmarish criminal past according to police reports -- Jessica was arrested twice in Chicago once for domestic battery and then for selling a gun to a minor

Page 28: Stars Who Refuse to Zip It -- cringeworthy confessions and nasty habits and more -- Jennifer Love Hewitt, Megan Fox, Al Roker, Olivia Wilde 

Page 29: Kristen Stewart on Robert Pattinson, John Mayer, Lady Gaga, Suzanne Somers 

Page 32: Demi Lovato’s relentless ex Max Ehrich refuses to let her go and her friends are worried he’s turning into a stalker -- since their breakup he’s been particularly creepy, Tatum O’Neal’s confession that she was ready to jump off the balcony of a Los Angeles home was actually a desperate cry for help -- Tatum was reportedly put on a psychiatric hold at a local hospital after the alleged incident and the event signaled she was in unbearable emotional and physical pain and she feels lost and rejected because she was the youngest Oscar winner ever and now she has trouble finding a job and lost all confidence in herself 

Page 34: India Oxenberg has confessed she was afraid of former NXIVM cult master Allison Mack of TV’s Smallville -- India found herself Allison’s slave and realized she was being groomed as a sexual partner for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere and she was branded with Raniere’s initials in her pelvic regions, a disturbing TV interview in England has sparked new fears for the well-being on boxer Mike Tyson -- Mike looked like the train wreck he was when he was plowing through drugs and was sent to prison in the early ‘90s; he looked barely conscious as he slurred his speech and offered incoherent responses -- Tyson blamed his interview on lack of sleep and insisted his contact with drugs is now limited to growing and smoking pot on his California ranch 

Page 36: Health Watch

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Zendaya 

Page 45: Spot the Differences -- Debbie Matenopoulos on Home and Family 

A Year Later: Robert

It’s me again, with ya Dream Daddy fanfiction. I can’t be stopped. 

Robert x Dadsona

light cursing, reference to alcohol abuse and depression

3483  words

It's a warm night. Probably the warmest yet, this year. But, then again, it's only just now really getting into summer.

"Damien's hanging out in the graveyard again."

I look over at Robert who's peering down at the city through his binoculars. I smirk at him a little even though I know he can't see me.

"You are so obsessed with him, lately."

"I think he's a vampire. 99% certain." He scans the city some more. Not totally sure what he's looking for, but he'll tell me when he finds it.

"I'll just text Mary. 'Hey. Is your brother a vampire?'"

"She's a vampire, too, obviously. Undead siblings wandering the night, seducing young men. Taking them back to their lair where they feed on them for sustenance, draining their body dry. Then they bathe in their blood and offer them up as sacrifices to their dark lord."

"Wouldn't they need to bathe in their victim's blood before draining them dry?"

"How dare you expect internal consistency in my conspiracy theories." Robert lowers his binoculars. "What did you manage to come up with?"

I turn my hands out to show him my shapely hunk of wood. It's still pretty chunky and malformed, but it actually resembles a panda.

"Adorable," he says flatly. He pulls a flask from inside his jacket and takes a big ol' gulp. It's not booze. Soda, probably. Maybe sweet tea.

At first he just started cutting back, and was doing a pretty good job of stopping after one or two glasses. The smoking began falling off, too, soon after. Then he started taking anti-depressants, and he took the recommendations not to drink while on them very seriously. There are still bad days where he'll feed the dog and water his plant like usual but forget to eat himself. They're becoming less and less though, and every day things are a little better. A little easier. A little more manageable. I'm very proud of where he's brought himself.

"I talked to Val. She said Amanda's doing really well at that summer job she got her. Like a fish to water."

"Yeah. I was a little nervous about letting her go live in the big city, but Val offering her extra room helped. That was really nice of them."

"Desiree's coming with her when she brings Amanda back." Robert looks down at his thumb as it fiddles with the knob that changes the focus of the lenses.

"This'll be the first time you've mey her, right?"

"Yep."

The sounds of the night creep in and around us, settling into place. He brings the binoculars back up to his eyes. After a minute, he hits me in the arm a little.

"Roll out. The mission is a go." He hops down out of the tailgate of the truck and heads to the driver's side.

"We're actually doing this?" I ask as I jump out behind him and close the gate.

"Um, yes, we're actually doing this. I spent all this afternoon scouting the best location."

"Okay, I guess. Got nothing else better to do." Robert's already got the car running when I climb up into the passenger seat.

With a lurch, we roll down the dirt road from the top of the overlook. About halfway down the hill, he shuts the headlights off and we slow to a painful crawl. After a few moments of squinting into the dark, we find the slight turn off that's just far enough into the trees to hide the truck. Robert's very careful not to slam the car door as he gets out, and I follow suite. The rest of the evening's in his hands.

God help me.

There's a drainage gulch that runs along the road here, and he slides along the edge like a ninja. Well...a middle-aged ninja with a bum knee who still smokes about half a pack a day. I follow behind, but I'm not nearly as graceful and I almost fall into the ditch about three times. He finds what he's looking for and gestures me over closer. Hidden in the bushes is this dumb thing he's been working on in his garage for a week.

From chicken wire, he's sculpted the figure of a woman. Then he covered it in cheesecloth though I don't actually know what that is. Some kind of thin, see-through fabric, I guess. Something he found on the internet. He waves at me that I should help him heave it into an upright position. It's not heavy, but I feel my back crack every step of the way. With more silent signals, he insists we move it farther into the trees. We go a few feet, then drop the statue down into place. He zipties a little, black Bluetooth speaker to the bottom edge. I got it as a white elephant present at the neighborhood Christmas party, and this is the first time I've used it.

"Okay, let's check it from the road," he says quietly, creeping back out of the trees. I follow behind, already puffing and panting. Since distancing himself from booze and getting professional help, Robert has become a force of nature. Turns out he actually gets bored easily. That used to be when he drank the most. Afterward, his whittling output went up about ten fold. Then he ran out of ideas. Then he found the internet and holy mother of God. He hasn't found Pinterest, yet, at least. I hope.

When we get to the road, we look back into the trees, and wow. Okay. I hadn't expected it to come together so well. In the dark, beneath the trees, with the faint light from the moon and the city and the streetlight down the hill, it looks like there's an actual spectre standing in the woods. When you look at for more than a second you can tell that it's anything but incorporeal, but it's still pretty neat looking.

"Looks good. Let's finish before they get here." Robert nods, examining his work, and pats me on the back. We creep back into the woods and I help him hook a carabiner clip to the bottom of the "ghost" and attach that to a rope. We just finish before we hear the sound of a small group coming up the hill. Clumsy but quietly, we drop down into the ditch. We can just see the people of the group through the hedges.

"And the last stop on our tour is the hill where Joanna Ingelbread took her own life. It's said she haunts the woods still, waiting to be reunited with the spirit of her earthly lover. Stories say, she drives young lovers to jump from these cliffs themselves, dragging them into the afterlife with her." The guide speaks in a low, spooky voice.

"The guy who used to give this tour has his own public access cable show, now," I say quietly. Robert wants to ignore me, but he gives a little "hmph" of consideration after a moment, instead. A few weeks ago we had a discussion about what the difference is between "small talk to fill the silence" and "ice breakers meant to create discussion." So far, anything involving weird animal genitalia is primo conversation material, but hypothetical deep space events are mindless chatter. Seems like interesting factoids about people from the neighborhood might be on the approved list, too.

The group gets a little closer, and we see that tonight's customers are mostly middle-aged folk in breezy summer Hawaiian shirts and fanny packs. It's not a good look, and it clashes with the spooky atmosphere the guide's trying to create.

"They say on dark summer nights you can still hear her ghostly wail." He pauses for dramatic effect. Nothing happens. That's because earlier in the day Robert temporarily disconnected the remote controlled speaker hooked up in the trees across the road from where we're hiding. The guide, only a kid really, starts getting a little nervous and looking around. It's not the good kind of nervous for this sort of thing, though, and he's losing the interest of the tourists quickly.

Silently, Robert pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket and starts fiddling. I peek over his shoulder and see that he's synching to the speaker and queuing up an mp3. How the absolute hell does he know how to do this kind of thing so easily? I can barely get my pictures onto my PC without a six lecture course.

He presses play, and a very soft but distinct "wooooOOOooooo" emerges from the speaker. The tour guide shoots his head toward the sound, legitimately terrified. Robert plays another, similar sound. The tour guide gives a little panicked cry. The people in the group hear it. They feed off his fear and the overall terror rises quickly. Robert plays one more sound and uses the rope to wiggle our chicken wire ghost a little.

"Oh my god, what's that!" A woman screams.

"Holy shit!" says someone else.

Then Robert yanks the rope, bringing the figure flying at us through the grass and down into the ditch. We both manage to catch it, and Robert gets his arms around it.

"Run," he commands quietly. We take off down the ravine back toward the truck, heads ducked and sprinting like idiots. He throws the statue into the bed of the truck with a muffled clang, then heaves himself up out of the ditch. He helps me up, too, and we lean against the truck for a moment, gasping.

We didn't actually run that far. We can still see and hear the tour group a ways down the hill, shooshing each other and confirming over and over "you saw that, right?" Robert's grinning like a moron. Our hands are hanging next to each other, and he taps me on the fingers.

"Let's go before they see us."

As quietly as we can manage, we slip into the truck. It chugs just a little when it starts, but we're far enough back in the trees no one seems to notice. I watch the group as we pull out onto the road and drive up the hill. The don't see us, too focused on filming and searching the spot where the "ghost" was only a few minutes before.

"You know what? That was more fun than I expected. Did you see their faces?" I say as we get on our way.

"I told you it would be worth it. Throw one little wrench into the script, and they all lose their minds." He giggles like an idiot. "I haven't had this much fun in a while, honestly. It really is the little things."

"I'm glad."

Robert reaches over and pats me on the hand where it's resting on my knee then puts it back on the wheel quickly.

"Thanks for coming out with me. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without you." He's still smiling, and I feel that little bubble of fire in my heart when I look at him. I push it down.

We had an agreement. Robert wasn't in a good place for a relationship, but he needed a shoulder to cry on when things got too much for him. So it was my job to not catch feelings. If I really cared about Robert's long-term happiness and health--which I do, I desperately do--I had to be the thing he needs. Nothing more. Nothing less. And he needed a friend, not a boyfriend.

But there were so many little things that I couldn't help but notice. The way he tried not to smile but eventually did, leaving this weird tightness at the corners of his mouth and eyes. How he fiddled with his carving knife or the way his eyes darted over a chunk of wood before he started chipping parts away. The way his calloused hands would drift near mine when he wasn't thinking it. Dumb little things that mean nothing on their own. But they send through little shockwaves that remind me how deeply I've fallen for him over the past year.

We pull into his driveway, and he motions to the ghost in the back.

"Let's get it back in the garage. Do you want your speaker?"

I shake my head and help him lift it up out of the truck. It's fairly light, but it's awkward and the extra set of hands is instrumental in wrangling it into the garage.

"Am I coming over tonight?" He asks.

I hate it when he asks that because I always say yes. It's not like anything happens. We eat nachos and watch TV until 3am. I spend the whole night, though, in anticipation of that accidental graze of the thigh turning into something more. It kills the mood and drives me crazy, but I also hate being alone in that house since Amanda's been gone. That's why he offers on the weekends when those feelings get the worst.

Damn it.

"Sure. I'm out of snacks, though."

"That's fine," he replies, "let me just check on Betsy." He goes inside briefly, then returns jacketless, only a t-shirt and jeans. I bite my lip and reprimand myself.

It's the third--no--fourth episode in a row of Chris's Cryptid Cavalcade when I feel something heavy hit my shoulder. He'd been calling bullshit on Nessie, chupacabras, and the Jersey Devil for the past three hours, so I was surprised he was giving the Beast of Bray Road a pass via his silence. Turns out he'd rather just lean his head against me and stare at the screen, now, instead of giving Chris Cryptid shit for his shoddy show.

"Something up, Robert?" I ask, knowing full well he'll probably just stay silent. He sighs, though. Deeply.

"Remember that AA meeting I went to last summer?"

"The one that you said was completely bullshit because you're not an alcoholic. You just needed a kick in the ass?" He had spent about a week afterward complaining about the mere concept of the twelve-step program. He wasn't a fan, apparently.

"Yeah. Well. There was someone there who had come out of rehab and they told her something that I thought was interesting. When you get out of rehab and you're trying to figure out if you're ready for a relationship you should keep a plant. If it lives past a year, then get a dog. Raise that dog for two years. Then and only then, should you consider starting a new relationship. I already have a dog, but I still thought-"

"Wait. Is that a real thing? I feel like that's from a Sandra Bullock movie."

"Does it matter?" Robert lifts his head to give me a level glance. "The point is-"

"It just seems like a really weird system to me. I get the making sure you can keep something alive, but the relationship dynamics are so different."

"It's just a general principle. Anyway-"

"Because a dog and a plant are wholly dependent on you, but you wouldn't want a person to be. You wouldn't have a human companion for the same reason you'd have a dog companion."

"I understand, but-"

"It just seems dumb."

"I'm actually trying to be emotionally vulnerable. Why won't you let me talk?!" he raises his voice slightly, and I find that I've been holding my breath.

Damn. Damn it. Shit. Crap. Effing…god, what other profanities do I know? Bollocks.

"Because I know that you've been raising that dumb ficus, and that it's been a year. And I'm terrified, Robert. I'm terrified that you're about to tell me you want a relationship, and that it's not with me because you can only see me as a friend, now and I-"

He kisses me, that son of a bitch. He kisses me to stop me from talking and it's equal parts annoying and extremely hot. He pulls away, and I pick up where I left off.

"And I'm even more scared that you're going to say you do want to be in a relationship with me, but that neither of us are actually ready, and it's all going to fall apart. And I don't want to lose you."

Robert has my chin firmly in his grip. I'm crying. Why am I crying? Where did this come from?

"Only one of us is supposed to be a basket case," he says doing that thing where he tries not so smile.

"Well, you've had a year, so I think I get, like, ten minutes." I pull his hand away from my chin and sink my face in my hands. We sit, the drone of the TV filling up the silence.

"I've worked so hard the past year trying to be the best friend I can to you while you get yourself together. And I wanted to do it just because I cared about you, but then part of me also did it because I hoped we'd be here someday. But now that we're here, I'm freaking out a little, and I don't know why." I drop my hands down between my knees. You have to be up front and down to business with Robert. No beating around the bush. No passive-aggression. Otherwise he won't understand you. I know this, but I can't explain because I still don't know why my gut is upheaving, right now.

Everything is silent again.

"After...losing...Marilyn...and Val to a lesser extent, I was alone for the first time, and I didn't know...how to be. I had spent so long as somebody's dad and somebody's husband, that I think I lost track of Robert. And...well…you see what it did to me. I slept with Joseph, for Christ's sake. If that's not some form of rock bottom or another."

I let out a tiny snorting laugh despite the seriousness of the moment.

"Where I'm very badly going with this is that...I feel like myself...my real self for the first time in a very very VERY long time. Not my drunk self or a projection of one my bullshit stories. I'm...me. And that me...wants you. And I've never been surer of that. And I think I just met my emotional intimacy quota for the year, so you're gonna have to pick up the slack, now."

I look to him and his arms are a little open. I lean into him and let him hug me, really hug me, for the first time since we said we were just going to be friends.

"I guess...I think I'm still adjusting to not having to be Amanda's dad 24/7. And I think....effing...give me some of those fancy therapy words you've been learning."

"Um...uh....an aversion to change?"

"...no….I think…," and I try really hard to work it out. Robert did it for himself. Did it for me. I can give him this, at least. "I've never lived alone. Ever. Parents to college dorms to living with Alex. With Amanda away, I'm having to learn to live with myself and only myself. I feel like (not fake, necessarily, but) a not quite real version of myself, right now. And I'm worried that when I come out the other side, I'm not going to be a person you want, anymore."

Robert lets out a very low hum, and I feel it vibrate in his chest.

"I fell for the you that was still Amanda's dad. I still love the man that's sitting here right now. And I'm extremely confident in keeping those feelings well into our even grayer years when we become even older men. But you waited for me, so I'm more than willing to wait for you. Now that was another year's quota." He laughs. I laugh a little too. More like a sigh, I guess.

"Kiss me," I tell him, breaking out of the hug. "For real. Not that bullshit from a minute ago." I need it. I don't know why, but I need it. Something dramatic that can shake me into action.

Robert sits up straight, and angles his body on the couch better. A hand drops around my waist, and he pushes me down against the couch, his other hand framing my head resting on the armrest. His lips are cracked and dry, his stubble scratches stiffly against mine, and he tastes like old cigarettes and root beer. But damn. A year of pent up frustration and waiting and wanting and it pours out as his weight moves on top of me. We're suddenly people with mature, sophisticated romances and horny teenagers all at once. I want him. I want him so bad. I want him more than I've ever wanted him before. And I'm scared shitless by it, but it's very very real. This is very very real. And I can't deny it any longer.

Original Mythos + Literary References

Here’s a compilation of references to (allegedly) real books, movies, online stories and sites, etc. made by contributors to the Original Mythos.

Original Mythos Meta:

Slender Man would make a pretty nice horror novel in the lines of "House of Leaves".

Essentially, make the novel a collection of witness statements, newspaper clippings, pictures, drawings, articles discussing evidence for an against the slender man and, to tie it all neatly together, a few stories of people who want to track the slender man, unravel the mystery,

And the kicker would be the last 20 or so pages would be missing, with only scraps of paper left, arranged as logically as possible, just excerpts, words, rips, ink stains, etc.

Original Mythos Meta:

It's The Rake all over again!

Conspiracies:

When you posted the part about the chest injuries it reminded me of the Dyatlov Pass incident that was posted in the Unsolved Mysteries thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident

Wikipedia posted:

and both Dubunina and Zolotarev had major chest fractures. The force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, with one expert comparing it to the force of a car crash.Notably, the bodies had no external wounds, as if they were crippled by a high level of pressure. One woman was found to be missing her tongue.[1]

Original Mythos Meta:

I'm suddenly imagining a Slender Man "documentary," done in a style similar to The Last Broadcast or that old Alien Abduction TV special. Interviews with witnesses of various encounters through the years, investigation into the different events brought up in this thread, and specialists analyzing photographs, intercut around home video footage taken by a missing family, showing them being picked off by the Slender Man. As we get further into the film, we also start to see behind the scenes footage of the making of the documentary, with crew members not showing for work and not answering calls, various production problems… then finally ending with a note that the director disappeared immediately after completion of the film.

Original Mythos Meta:

"Some say that the worst monsters reside in the imagination, drawn from the greatest fears of those who imagine them. I say there are horrors beyond mortal imagining, and they are far worse. And I have looked on both."

Original Mythos Meta:

The backstories have been working well so far because they talk about things without explaining them, it's sort of along the lines of House of Leaves in that way.

Marble Hornets Preamble:

He agreed, but only under the circumstance that I never bring them back to him, and never discuss what was on them with him. He also highly discouraged me from showing any of it to anyone else. I laughed at this, and said that he must have accidentally made The Ring or something with the way he was talking. He didn’t acknowledge this and brought me up to his attic, where he was storing the pile of tapes.

British Myths, Legends, and Unsolved Tales:

Adair, J. (1989) British Myths, Legends and Unsolved Tales, London: Pan Books.

Original Mythos Meta:

Has anyone thought about the possibility that we are creating a tulpa? It's a thought form that is realized through the efforts of a group of people. We might be creating the Slender Man, making him real.

The Toronto Society for Psychical Research did this with an entity called "Philip" in the mid-70's. There was a book written about it, called "Conjuring up Philip." "He" was a fictional person, knowingly created by the group. It was all fun and games until "Philip" started to take on a mind of his own. "Philip" became real, as far as any paranormal thing could be said to be real. So take all this with a big grain of salt.

Original Mythos Meta:

Now go watch Aphex Twin's 'Come To Daddy' video. Take careful note of the inhumanly tall, emaciated figure the children gather around.

Original Mythos Meta:

The Slender Man, to date, is the only thing to creep me out worse than the Black Eyed Kids… of course, not all the missing children were recovered… who knows what happens to them when the Slender Man is finished?

Original Mythos Meta:

After all, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Original Mythos Meta:

No, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he DID exist.

Small Findings:

I have this coffee table book of photos from Life magazine. The pictures go back to the late 1800s.

Imagine my surprise when I took a closer look at this photo of Yosemite Valley from the 1870s.

Not only did I see our mysterious boogie man

But also the skull and rib cage of some unfortunate soul.

I can’t say for sure that the remains are one of its victims, but I’d be willing to bet on it.

Conspiracies:

XI 20: He who several times has Held the cage and then the woods, He will return to the first state His life safe shortly afterwards to depart, Still not knowing how to know, He will look for a subject in order to die.

Original Mythos Meta:

"There are those who believe they can be "one" with those who are not of our world. These people often think that somehow they have some kind of mental or "spiritual" link. Oftentimes these people will go out into areas that have been reported to be the hunting grounds of said creatures. These individuals are often more dangerous than the creatures that they worship/are in love with. When faced with the choice between the reality of the creature not existing or staying in a fake world they will choose, sometimes to the bitter end, the made up world.

In a somewhat ironic way, those who believe themselves to be the worthy follower/lover of these beings are in fact far removed from the "ideal" being the creature would choose!"

Edvard Tobin "Humanity and the Supernatural: A Dangerous Combo" Pub: 1994

Original Mythos Meta:

In reading this thread, I'm struck by one behaviour of Der Ritter in particular, that of its impaling its victims in a tree, while removing and reinserting their internal organs. It's remarkably akin to the feeding habits of shrikes, also known as butcherbirds.

See, what a shrike will do is capture a smaller animal - anything from a cricket to a smaller bird or mouse - and kill it. Shrikes are songbirds, and their musculature is pretty lacking compared to a straight-up raptor like a hawk or owl, so their kill is messy and inefficient, consisting of many pecks and bites to the head and neck. This continues until the prey animal is either dead or too tired to fight. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that as weak as their jaws are, their claws are weaker, and they wholly lack talons. They're built to perch. So, what a shrike will do, is it will take its prey to a thorny tree, or bush, or even barbed wire, and it will ram its prey down on a spike so that it won't move when the shrike tears it apart.

It's a songbird that's learned to kill, and it does so far more cruelly than any raptor.

Anyone ever hear the Slender Man sing?

e: Wikipedia on Lanius excubitor, the Great Gray Shrike: "This species will lure birds closer by mimicking their calls."

Original Mythos Meta:

I'm still REALLY seeing Slender Man as being related to Shadow People and, now, the hat man. http://www.thehatmanproject.com/

I have this vision of Slender Man coming up to you and Shadow People just… gurgling out of his shadow. As if he creates them.

Original Mythos Meta:

Slender Man is like that stupid game where you lose as soon as you think about it.

If you think about him, he knows. If you fear him, he comes. The only way to escape the Slender Man is to not know about the Slender Man.

Conspiracies:

In 1977, as Led Zeppelin embarked on their tour of the United States, Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult and addiction to heroin were at their peak. His playing was spotty at times, his weight had dropped considerably, and his focus was clearly elsewhere. His delving into the supernatural spirits made him lose sight of the goal of the band, with Zeppelin’s lights manager later remarking that singer Robert Plant would often have to snap Page out of his between-song trances, with Page not remembering how their own tunes went. Page also grew increasingly paranoid in an infamous incident prior to an interview with Cameron Crowe where he ripped a phone out of the wall because he felt that someone was spying on him. It was as if a force he tapped into was corrupting him.

Original Mythos Meta:

I wonder perhaps if Slenderman's name is Zoso, but he would come for anybody who figured it out, which is perhaps why Jimmy Page has been so secretive about exactly where they got their symbols for their IV album.

Hang on guys, I think there's somebody standing in front of my house…

Ghost Stories of the American South:

So once the Slender Man began popping up in this thread, I could have sworn something about it seemed familiar. I’m an amateur folklorist, so I had a few source books lying around. It took me a while, but I finally found something in W.K. McNeil's Ghost Stories of the American South. Most of the tales collected are transcripts of recordings other folklorists made, but McNeil compiles them and offers notes. A really handy book. So anyway, this particular story appears in the book’s seventh section, “Other Supernatural Creatures.”

Original Mythos Meta:

Wasn't there an artist who painted a picture—supposed to be really famous, its in all the big fancy art books. Isn't called "The Scream" or "The Screamer" ? It showed an elongated person with its hands besides its head or doing like the microphone around its mouth.

[...]

Hasn't ANYONE seen the movie "Mimic" ? The Judas Bug. It EVOLVED to look like the prey that it hunted. Now, i understand that this doesn't fit every story (like the wood carvings, But it does rather fit the Woodcarving with the skeleton with the arm-spear, It looks human)

Nathaniel V:

From a grimoire of sorts I picked up at a used book store.

Called The Observations and written by someone calling himself Nathaniel V. I don’t know if that is a letter “v” or a roman numeral 5.

Original Mythos Meta:

I think I mentioned this before--but the original Slender Man pics associated him with fire, as in preceding or instigating fire. Dissection and other means of destruction came later--not that I'm complaining. As Call of Cthulhu d20 once said, a beastie can have a thousand legs today and no legs next time, so long as it makes each encounter more horrifying.

LUCY - WHAT I AM IS BRAVE

June 16, 1983

By Lynne Hirschberg, Rolling Stone Magazine. Reprinted in the Dayton (OH) Journal-Herald

Lucille Ball is not Lucille Ball. She is Lucy. 

In Los Angeles, everyone knows where Lucy lives. The mansion is a big, white affair in Beverly Hills. Fans pose for photos in front of it, and they dig up Lucy's front lawn. 

Inside the mansion, the visitor is led through a series of spacious rooms to what appears to be a large den. The predominant color is orange. Dark-green carpeting with upholstered , orange chairs. Lots of orange and lots of plants. One wall is completely glass and overlooks a large yard, also filled with plants. Lucy, you are told, loves to garden. 

Lucy enters from the yard. She has just taken a singing lesson. She is wearing big pastel sunglasses, a black V-neck sweater and matching slacks. Her hair is a strange shade of reddish pink. She adjusts her sunglasses. Takes them off and cleans them. Her eyes are very blue. She puts her glasses back on and extends her hand. "I'm glad to meet you," Lucy says. "My name Is Lucille Ball." 

As we speak, she begins to smoke, and smoke. "I smoke a lot," she says, "but I never inhale." 

The smoking seems to elicit questions. Lucille Ball likes to ask questions. She likes an honest response. She asks questions like, "Do you ever dye your hair? Do you believe in astrology? Do you want a grilled cheese sandwich?" These questions give way to statements. Statements like, "You should dye your hair. Have a grilled cheese sandwich." And, then: "I believe in astrology." 

Lucille Ball explains. She is 71 years old, born Aug. 6 and a Leo. Leos are, she says, vain, proud and forthright. She is startlingly forthright. "Leos know what they're about," Ball says. Leos are also, she adds, accident-prone. "We break a lot of bones." She has broken this very leg. She even suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. "They told me I'd never walk again," Ball says, "But I want you to just feel this leg." 

She points to her leg. The leg is truly beautiful, a showgirl's leg. I feel it gingerly. "THAT'S NOT THE WAY YOU FEEL A LEG," Ball screams. "My God - don't you even know how to feel a person's leg?" She grabs my hand and then, hand in tow, grabs her leg around the calf. The leg, In fact, appears to be quite sturdy. "Years ago, that leg was completely weak. But that was years ago. Today Is another story." 

Today is another story, and "years ago" was New York. Lucille Ball was not Lucille Ball then. "I was known as Diane Belmont," Ball says, after fixing herself the much-discussed grilled cheese sandwich. "You have to understand, I am from a suburb of Jamestown, New York. 

"When I was four, my father, who was an electrician, died. I was always what you would call stage-struck. I would recite speeches at the drop of a... anything. I'd sing, I'd dance, I'd perform all the time. But I was always interested in being of the business. Of the business. Any part of, it: makeup, costumes... anything and everything. My mother finally sent me to the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton Dramatic School in New York City. Bette Davis was their star pupil. After one semester, they sent my mother a letter saying she was wasting her money. They said I'd never learn to talk, never learn to walk across a stage. That left a helluva mark on me. I had very little, if any, self-confidence after that. I didn't change until I was a model for a while." 

Diane Belmont was born several years later. "To this day," Ball says, "people say, 'Why did you change your name to Lucille Ball?' Can you imagine anyone changing her name to Lucille Ball? My real name is Lucille Ball. Diane Belmont was a much classier name. I came up with it in the car. I always loved the name Diane, and I was driving past the Belmont race track, and the names seemed to fit together: Diane Belmont. It was such a glamorous name. A real model's name." 

Belmont was successful. She became a Chesterfield cigarettes poster girl, a hat model and a dress model. But BelmontBall hated New York. "I didn't have any friends. No girlfriends and no boyfriends. I didn't have big dreams about where I was going or with whom. I didn't go out. I was never boy crazy or man crazy or car crazy or anything crazy, but New York was a lonely place. I never even felt pretty. I was clearly a lesser beauty. I had a very dull existence." 

When she was 17 Belmont/Ball's career was interrupted by a debilitating disease rheumatoid arthritis. "One day it just struck me," Ball recalls. "I was working too hard and not taking care of myself. I was laid up for three years. I had to work pretty hard to walk again, but I was lucky. Since I had no money, my boss sent me to her doctor, and he sent me to see this specialist. I became a guinea pig, and this doctor would experiment on me. The guinea pig experiments worked. In three years, I was v modeling again." Not for long.

"I seldom use the word luck" says Lucille Ball. "But in 1933, when I became a Goldwyn girl - that was pure luck. I was just walking down the street. It was unbearably hot and someone - I don't remember exactly who - came up to me and said, 'How'd you like to go to California?' This was New York, so you had to be careful when anyone asked you anything, but this was a woman asking me, so I figured I was safe. She told me that the girl they had already found for Goldwyn couldn't make the trip. They wanted poster gals for the film Roman Scandals, and since I was the Chesterfield Girl, I fit the bill. They said the job was for six weeks. I said, 'I'd go anyplace to get out of this heat.' I went out to Hollywood and" - Ball smiles - "I never came back." 

"My hair," Lucille Ball Is saying "has always been the bane of my existence." Ball fluffs up her curls. Her hair goes straight up about six inches. "I have never known what to do with my hair," she says. "It was just never chic." A natural brunette, Ball has tried several different hair colors. Blonde. Platinum. Red. Pink. Orange. Diane Belmont was a blonde, and when she arrived in Hollywood and retrieved her own name, Lucille Bail was a Jean Harlow platinum. "You had to be a platinum blonde then," says Ball, almost apologetically, still fussing with her hair. "They wanted you to be a platinum blonde, so I was a platinum blonde."

There were other accommodations. "We had to line up for Mr. Goldwyn when we first went out there," Ball recalls. "You had to have on the inevitable bathing suit. Mr. Goldwyn and 40 other men would walk by and stare at you. We were all self-conscious, but those who were Ziegfeld girls and Shubert girls were very well stacked. They were less nervous. They had it, you see. I didn't have it." 

Ball points to her breasts. 

"So I made fun of myself. I put toilet paper and gloves and socks and anything I could find in the bust of my bathing suit. Some of the toilet paper was still trailing out of the top when Mr. Goldwyn came by." Bail pauses. "If nothing else, they certainly noticed me. 

"I think the one virtue that helped me was I didn't mind doing anything. Nothing was beneath me. I'd scream; I'd yell; I'd run through the set; I'd wear strange clothes. To me it was just getting your foot in the door." 

She went from Goldwyn to Columbia to RKO, where because of her less than magnificent films, she became knows as "Queen of the B's." But Bail did make some widely praised films. Stage Door (1937), The Big Street (1942) and the Cole Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady (1942) all met with a critical positive response. 

The latter film marked the beginning of her red-headed days of Technicolor Tessie, a name given her by Life magazine. 

"Red was a happy color. It was good with my eyes, and it photographed well. It turned out to be a successful color. There's nothing more to it than that," she says. 

Ball says she fell in love with Desi Arnaz at first sight. 

"That was real love. We met on the set. We were making a movie called Too Many Girls. I played the ingenue lead." "I asked her if she knew how to rumba," Arnaz has said. "And when she said no, I offered to teach her." 

Arnaz, in 1940, was the chief rumba proponent in America. A native Cuban, he and his mother had fled their country following the 1933 Batista revolution. The 16-year-old Arnaz drove a cab, worked as a bookkeeper and cleaned out bird cages until, in 1937, he became a member of the Siboney Septet, a swanky hotel band. While performing with this group, he was spotted by Xavier Cugat, who hired the young singer. A year later, Arnaz started his own ensemble. He became a sensation in New York and Arnaz landed the lead role in Too Many Girls. He came to Hollywood, fell in love and within six months, he and Lucille Ball were married. 

"Our marriage," Bail says, "was rough. We had a rough go. For the first nine years, it seemed like we were only together a few weeks." First work kept them apart, then he was drafted, and after the war he toured with ins band for five years. "It was very successful for him but disastrous for our marriage. You can't have a marriage over the phone. We were on our ninth year, and we'd spent something like eight and a half of them apart. We decided that we wanted to be together." 

During this period, Ball, fed up with movies, starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” (l947-1951) (1). She played Liz, the zany wife of a staid banker. CBS wanted to transfer the concept to television and Bail said OK, providing Desi play her husband. The studio objected, but Bail and Arnaz were steadfast. They put together an act, created their own company, Desilu Productions, and hit the road. The public response was terrific. CBS took notice and finally relented. Their show was “I Love Lucy”. The rest is history. 

“I am not funny," says Lucille Ball, sounding very funny. "My writers were funny. My direction was funny. The situations were funny. But I am not funny. What I am is brave. I have never been scared. And there was a lot to be scared about. We were innovators. 

"At the beginning of Love Lucy, they gave us a choice of five, six, seven scripts and asked us what we wanted our characters to be like. No one had ever done that before. 

"I... didn't want us to be a 'typical Hollywood couple,' whatever that is. I wanted our characters to have problems. Economic problems. Ail kinds of problems. I wanted to be an average housewife. A very nosy, but very average housewife." Ball pauses. "And I wanted my husband to love me.” By the beginning of the second season, the show was the biggest hit In TV history. But not everyone was happy. Vivian Vance, for Instance. Despite her rather matronly appearance, Vance was actually one year younger than Ball (who was 41 when she became Lucy). And to guarantee Ethel Mertz' dowdy image, it was stipulated in Vance's contract that the actress always remain 20 pounds overweight. This agreement caused some friction. (2) 

But Lucy was positively gleeful about the show. It was her family. Her second child, Desi Jr., was born to much fanfare the very same night Lucy Ricardo gave birth to her baby, Little Ricky, on national TV. An estimated 44 million viewers watched. 

"Things were wonderful then," Ball says, almost dreamily. "Things were just wonderful." 

But there was still trouble in her marriage. She thought the show would turn things around. But Desi Arnaz, apparently, was not Ricky Ricardo. "He was like Jekyll and Hyde," Ball says now. "He drank and he gambled and he went around with other women. I was always hoping things would change. But Desi's nature is destructive. When he builds something, the bigger he builds it, the more he wants to break it down." 

In 1957, "I Love Lucy” ceased weekly production. The show's format changed Ricky Ricardo bought Club Babalu. Guest stars began popping in for nightcaps. And “I Love Lucy” reappeared as hour-long specials that aired roughly once a month. 

In 1960, Lucille Ball filed for divorce. The divorce was uncontested. She was awarded half of Desilu Productions, the Beverly Hills house, two station wagons and a cemetery plot at Forest Lawn. 

Gary Morton is Lucille Ball's second husband. She met him in New York while she was starring on Broadway in the Desllu-financed musical Wildcat. Morton was a stand-up comic. Now his office at the Twentieth Century-Fox studios is papered with framed Lucy photos. 

"We are very compatible," Morton says. "We even sing in the same octave." Morton runs Lucille Ball Productions, an outgrowth of Desilu Productions. Desi Arnaz, who ran Desilu after the divorce, had built the company into a multimillion-dollar business. Not only did it produce love Lucy, the company also produced 60 other prime-time series, including “The Untouchables” and “Our Miss Brooks.” 

Lucille Ball looks sad when she talks about Lucy. She isn't Lucy, you see. "Lucy, for me," she says, "is like a memory. I am nostalgic about Lucy. I could still be playing that part. Before I quit working in 1974, my ratings were high, and they wanted me to sign on for another five years of “Here's Lucy.” I said, That's ridiculous.' The Lucy character is too old to run around like an idiot. (3) I'd probably still be playing Lucy if I'd signed that contract, but it was silly to keep playing the same thing." 

Ball pauses. 

"But now I miss her. I miss my arena. I miss getting up and going to work every day. I have my charities, and I'm getting my house in order, but it's not the same."

#   #   #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

This article is a reprint of an article that appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine on June 23, 1983.  Magazines were usually post-dated, so this issue of Rolling Stone was already on the newsstand on June 16, 1983.

(1) “My Favorite Husband” aired a pilot episode on July 5, 1948, not 1947 as is stated here.  However, the source material naturally pre-dates the radio series. 

(2) The controversial contract that kept Vivian Vance frumpy was discussed on “Dinah!” on December 1, 1975.  Vivian has brought a long a copy of the ‘contract’, which she describes as a gag, never to be taken seriously.  Whether Vance is now covering for Ball’s initial misgiving’s about her casting, or the contract was indeed a joke, we will never know. 

(3) Perhaps Lucille Ball forgot about this fact when tempted back onto television in 1986 for “Life With Lucy.”  Most of the critics remarked that it was not funny to see a woman of Ball’s advanced age doing pratfalls and stunts. 

This same article was published two days later in The Ottawa (CAN) Citizen. The photographs, artwork, and headline were different, but the text remained essentially the same. 

Katy Perry’s ‘Dark Horse’ guilty of copyright of a Christian rap song

https://embed-prod.vemba.io/vemba-embed.js

LOS ANGELES — A jury on Monday found that Katy Perry’s 2013 hit “Dark Horse” improperly copied a 2009 Christian rap song in a unanimous decision that represented a rare takedown of a pop superstar and her elite producer by a relatively unknown artist.

The verdict by a nine-member federal jury in a Los Angeles courtroom came five years after Marcus Gray and two co-authors, first sued in 2014 alleging “Dark Horse” stole from “Joyful Noise,” a song Gray released under the stage name Flame.

The case now goes to a penalty phase, where the jury will decide how much Perry and other defendants owe for copyright infringement.

Gray’s attorneys argued that the beat and instrumental line featured through nearly half of “Dark Horse” are substantially similar to those of “Joyful Noise.” Gray wrote the song with his co-plaintiffs Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu.

This brings to mind some other famous music copyright-infringement cases.

Here’s our top 5:

Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’

The family of Marvin Gaye, who died in 1984 after being shot to death by his father, went after Thicke along with Pharrell Williams and rapper T.I., the collaborators on the smash-hit 2013 single.

T.I was cleared from the suit, but Thicke and Williams were ordered in 2015 to pay Gaye’s estate more than $7 million on the grounds that their song infringed on Gaye’s 1977 hit. That judgment was reduced to $5.3 million and the pair appealed the verdict.

Last year the five-year court battle ended with Gaye’s family being awarded a final judgment of nearly $5 million.

So yes … they had to give it up.

Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and Queen/David Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’

The rapper initially denied that the bass line for his 1989 hit was sampled from the 1981 rock collaboration between Queen and Bowie.

Ice claimed his song had a beat between the notes which made his song different, though he later said he was just joking with that defense.

After a lawsuit was threatened, the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘I Want A New Drug’ and Ray Parker Jr.’s ‘Ghostbusters’

It was a battle of mid-80s’ artists after Lewis alleged that Parker Jr. lifted from his song for the 1984 movie theme.

According to Mental Floss, producers of the film played the 1983 Lewis track for Parker Jr. as the type of sound they were looking for.

Lewis sued for $5 million and the pair settled out of court in 1995, with terms that included neither side discussing the case.

But Lewis did, talking to VH1’s “Behind the Music” in 2001.

Parker Jr. sued him for breaking their agreement, but the result of that suit has not been made public.

Roy Orbison’s ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ and 2 Live Crew’s ‘Pretty Woman’

This case made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

The “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” rap group sampled Orbison’s classic tune and ran afoul of the song’s publisher, Acuff-Rose.

In 1994 the courts ruled that the rap song was a parody and therefore qualified for fair use.

Spirit’s ‘Taurus’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’

Filed in 2014, this suit claimed that Led Zeppelin took the opening section of what is now one of rock music’s most famous epics from a song titled “Taurus” by a lesser-known band that toured with Led Zeppelin in their early days.

It was was filed on behalf of musician/songwriter Randy Craig Wolfe, a Spirit band member who was known professionally as “Randy California.”

In April 2016 a US district court judge in Los Angeles ruled that there was enough to proceed with a copyright trial before a jury against Led Zeppelin’s surviving members — lead singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, who are credited with composing 1971’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

Led Zeppelin won the suit, but last year the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial, saying the original judge gave “erroneous jury instructions.”

Rolling Stone has reported that the court will review that decision.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/07/30/katy-perrys-dark-horse-guilty-of-copyright-of-a-christian-rap-song/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/katy-perrys-dark-horse-guilty-of-copyright-of-a-christian-rap-song/

Book Review: Gallowglass by Jennifer Allis Provost

Gallowglass (Gallowglass #1) by Jennifer Allis Provost Genre: Adult Fiction (Fantasy Romance) Date Published: June 6, 2017 Cover Artist: Deranged Doctor Design Publisher: Bellatrix Press

Karina didn’t set out to free the Seelie Queen’s gallowglass. Now she’ll do anything to keep him.

After Karina and her brother, Chris’s, lives fall apart in separate yet equally spectacular ways, they leave New York behind and head to the UK. Karina buries herself in research for her doctoral thesis, all the while studiously not thinking about the man who broke her heart, while Chris—who’d been a best-selling author before his ex-fiancée sued him for plagiarism—drinks his way across the British Isles. 

In Scotland, they visit the grave of Robert Kirk, a seventeenth- century minister who was kidnapped by fairies. No one is more shocked than Karina when a handsome man with a Scottish brogue appears, claiming to be the Robert Kirk of legend. What’s more, he says he spent the last few hundred years as the Gallowglass, the Seelie Queen’s personal assassin. When they’re attacked by demons, Karina understands how dearly the queen wants him back.

As Karina and Robert grow closer, Chris’s attempts to drown his sorrows lead him to a pub, and a woman called Sorcha. Chris is instantly smitten with her, so much so he spends days with Sorcha and lies to his sister about his whereabouts. When Chris comes home covered in fey kisses, Karina realizes that the Seelie Queen isn’t just after Robert.

Can Karina outsmart the Seelie Queen, or is Robert doomed to forever be the Gallowglass?

Gallowglass is the first book in the Gallowglass series by  Jennifer Allis Provost. This story had cute moments, naughty moments, and action moments. It also had quite a bit of down time, and it was hard to stay focused during some of Rina's research ventures. I would have liked something more to happen during those times to hold my attention better. I loved the setting though. Scotland and fae are a definite draw for me. I enjoyed the cute attraction between Robert and Rina. They were pretty adorable and had some steamy moments. I actually thought it read more like a young adult novel until it got to those naughty bits.

Gallowglass by Jennifer Allis Provost was kindly provided to me by Bewitching Book Tours for review. The opinions are my own.

I sped back to the ruined kirk, my knuckles white as I gripped the wheel. The real reason I didn’t get on Chris about his constant mooning over Olivia was that at least he and Olivia had had something. I’d had nothing with Jared. No it hadn’t quite been nothing, but it may as well have been. One thing that Chris and I had both learned on this trip is that an ocean is not nearly enough distance to outrun your past. I parked in the kirk’s tourist lot, leapt out of the rental and ran across the bridge and up the fairy hill, startling some of the local wildlife along the way. When I reached the Minister’s Pine I was panting, my heart pounding as sweat poured down my back. I had to find that quartz. I just had to. I dropped to my knees and felt around near the base of the tree. I found my brush rather quickly, along with my hairclip and the stupidly expensive Mont Blanc pen that my advisor had given me when I earned my masters degree. But the quartz, the quartz wasn’t anywhere. The bits of lunch I’d had turned to lead in my stomach; if the quartz was gone, then it was really, truly over. “Lookin’ for this, are ye now?” I turned toward the voice, blinked, and pushed my glasses up to my forehead. Yeah, he was really there. Standing in front of me was a tall man in what I assumed was period dress. Instead of a kilt—we American girls tend to think that all Scotsmen run around in kilts, no matter the occasion; sadly, this is not the case—he was wearing a padded brown leather coat topped with chain mail, along with matching brown pants and well-worn leather boots. A helmet was tucked under his arm, and I could see the hilt of a claymore, one of those medieval broadswords that were so heavy you had to swing it with two hands, poking up over his shoulder. A shield rested next to the sword’s hilt, its curved edge just visible above the man’s shoulder. I hadn’t realized they did reenactments at Doon Hill, and I made a mental note to check the brochure for show times. I also noticed that the actor had his hand extended, with my lump of rose quartz sitting on his open palm. “Yes!” I got to my feet, and grabbed the stone. “Thank you,” I said once I remembered my manners, stroking the stone with my thumb. The man looked at me intently, his expression wavering somewhere between confusion and curiosity. “What made you think it was mine?” “Saw ye drop it, I did,” he replied. “And you’ve been waiting here since then?” “I knew ye would be back for me.” I blinked, since I must have misunderstood his accent. What I’d heard as ‘me’ must have really been ‘it’. Accents do tend to garble words. “I really appreciate you waiting for me. Thank you,” I said, extending my hand. He eyed my hand, dark brows low over his blue eyes. Then he grasped my fingers and brought them toward his mouth. “What are you doing?” I snapped, snatching my hand away. “I thought ye wanted me to kiss your hand,” he explained. “I wanted to shake your hand!” He looked befuddled rather than offended, so I attributed this to yet another cultural misunderstanding. It was becoming quite the list. “Well, regardless, thank you. I’m Rina.” “Rina,” he repeated, that Scottish brogue of his making my nickname sound positively decadent. “’Tis quite an unusual name.” “It’s short for Karina,” I explained. “Karina Siobhan Stewart,” I added, wondering why I’d felt compelled to give him my full name. Historically I’d only been called Karina Siobhan when I was in trouble. “And I am Robert Kirk,” he said, extending his hand. This guy was way deep in character, like method actor deep. I shook his hand, and we both smiled. “Good to meet you, Mr. Kirk.” “Reverend Kirk,” he corrected. “My apologies, Reverend Kirk.” These reenactors sure liked to stick to their roles, though I’d never expected to see a reverend wearing chain mail. We stood there for a moment, holding hands and grinning like a couple of fools, and I took the time to really look at him. He was older than me, probably a bit older than Chris too, with dark, tousled hair, chiseled features, and a roguish glint in his blue eyes. They had obviously picked reenactors that would appeal to the ladies. “Do no’ fash, Karina lass, no offense was taken,” he murmured, and my cheeks were suddenly hot. I took back my hand, barely resisting the urge to fan myself. “I should be going,” I said. “My brother’s waiting for me.” I scanned the area around the Minister’s Pine, ascertained that I’d left nothing else of import behind, and turned toward the path. A hand on my arm stopped me. “Ye canna leave me here,” the reenactor said. “Ye must take me with ye.” “What? No!” I faced him, planting my feet before him and whipping out my cell phone. “I don’t know what goes on here in Scotland, but I’m an American citizen. Stay back, or I’ll call 911.” I didn’t even know if they had 911 in Scotland. Would I have to call Scotland Yard instead? I hoped my phone had some kind of app for international emergencies. I waved my phone in what I hoped was a menacing manner, and Robert—or whatever his name was—eyed it as if it would bite him. “Put away your tricks, lass,” he said. “It was ye what called me here in the first place.” I shook my head. “This is an act, right? Reverend Kirk, freed at long last from the Minister’s Pine?” “’Tis no act, lass. Would that it were.” He stepped closer, and took my hands in both of his. Robert’s hands were warm and callused, and, despite all this nonsense, comforting. “I am Robert Kirk himself, and ye have freed me no from just a tree, but from Elphame, and the Seelie Queen herself.” “Elphame?” I asked. “Aye,” he replied. “Some refer to it as the Fairy Realm.” I leaned against the Minister’s Pine. He claimed he was from Elphame. Of course he was. How did I always attract the weirdos? It was generally agreed that when magic left the world, it was because the fairy realm had closed its doors to humans. Some claimed that human industrialization, and its rampant use of iron, had caused the fae to retreat, while others claimed the global shift from pagan to monotheistic faiths was the culprit. No matter which theory you favored, the end result was the same; there was no new magic. For hundreds of years humans had made do with a few crumbling artifacts and enchanted items, but those items were wearing out too. It was as if magic had a half-life, and we’d long since passed the middle point. “You can’t be from Elphame,” I said. “It’s closed. It’s been closed for centuries.” “Has it, now? I will say this, when I was a boy the land was thick with magic. Ye could hardly walk the roads without encountering one o’ the Good People.” “When you were a boy,” I repeated, then I remembered that Robert Kirk had lived in the seventeenth century. Magic hadn’t started disappearing until a century later. “Still, it’s closed now.” “Just because a door has been closed, does no’ mean it canna be reopened.” I slid down to the ground and Robert sat beside me, both of us leaning against the tree he’d recently emerged from. Wait, when did I start believing him? “So, um, you think all of this is real?” I ventured, gesturing around the clearing. “The legend and all?” Robert smiled wanly. “Ye have heard o’ me, then?” “They say you told the world of the fairies’ secrets, so they imprisoned you in a tree.” “That is no the whole of the tale.” Robert closed his eyes as he leaned his head back against the trunk. “I did have dealings with the Good People, but it was no them who abducted me.” “Then who did?” “’Twas Nicnevin, the Seelie Queen herself.” My jaw dropped, and if I hadn’t already been on the ground I would have fallen. As it was, my arm went out from under me, and my shoulder bumped into Robert. “Are ye all right, lass?” Robert asked. “Yes,” I lied. There was nothing all right about this. “Why did the queen take you?” “She fancied me,” he replied. “Offered me an apple, ye ken. I said no, it angered her, she cursed me. And here we are today.” I looked up at him. He still had his head tipped back against the tree, his eyes closed. “That sounds like the ridiculously oversimplified version.” At that, he opened his eyes and speared me with his gaze. “Would ye be likin’ all the details, then, lass?” I swallowed. “Um, maybe not just yet.” My gaze moved from Robert’s face to the quartz in my hand. “What makes you think I freed you?” “Ye made contact wi’ the tree, wishin’ to rescue me. Wishes are powerful things, ye ken.” Robert leaned over and touched the quartz. “Then ye dropped your stone, and a door opened for me. I ha’ been waitin’ for ye ever since.” “Wishes are powerful things,” I repeated. “Why do you want to leave with me? You don’t even know me.” “I know ye freed me, and that is no small thing,” Robert replied. “I also know that as soon as Nicneven kens I’ve left me post, she will send her creatures to retrieve me.” “Creatures?” “Aye. And I do no’ want to be here when they arrive.” I took a deep breath and got to my feet, Robert following suit. Once we were standing I looked into his clear blue eyes, his guileless face, and sighed. He was either telling the truth, or he was the greatest actor in the world. Or I was the world’s biggest idiot; the jury was still out on that. “Well, let’s go.” “Go?” he repeated hopefully. “If you’re telling the truth—and I’m not saying that you are—I can’t just leave you here. And, if you’re not telling the truth, I’ll drop you at the nearest police station,” I added, trying to act tough in front of the armored man with the sword. Robert inclined his head, and took both of my hands in his. “Lass, soon enough ye will ken that I only speak what’s true.” He once again brought my knuckles to his lips; this time, I let him kiss me. It was nice, having one’s hand kissed by a dark, handsome man. “Karina Siobhan Stewart, I am now your charge, and I shall follow your every command.” “Okay. Um.” I looked him over and issued my first command. “First of all, you can’t tromp around Aberfoyle wearing chain mail. You’re going to have to take off your armor.”

Jennifer Allis Provost writes books about faeries, orcs and elves. Zombies too. She grew up in the wilds of Western Massachusetts and had read every book in the local library by age twelve. (It was a small library). An early love of mythology and folklore led to her epic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Parthalan and her day job as a cubicle monkey helped shape her urban fantasy, Copper Girl. When she’s not writing about things that go bump in the night (and sometimes during the day) she’s working on her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. To learn more about Jennifer Allis Provost and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.

THE FINAL PASSAGE of Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here contains one of the finest analogies I’ve ever read. The eponymous protagonist, whose stepfather has just died, is working one of her last shifts in his diner before she heads off to college:

People say it’s so awful that I only had a real father for less than two years and then had to lose him. I wish like anything he was still here, but it’s like getting an extraordinary meal after you’ve been eating junk food for a long time. The taste just sweeps through your sensibilities, bringing all-out contentment, and the sheer goodness of it makes up for every bad meal you’ve ever had.

Hope Was Here was published in 2000, and since then I’ve searched, mostly in vain, for novels that washed away the taste of poorly written contemporary fiction that did nothing for my mind, even less for my soul. Not one, but two new exemplary short story collections have renewed my faith in American fiction. Sweet and Low by Nick White and Fight No More by Lydia Millet employ a seldom-used conceit: the stories revolve around a cast of characters, and each collection is devoted to a specific geographic locale. White’s incisive exploration of the South — you can practically hear the scrape of a wooden chair across a dusty floor, the rustles of swampy groves, the flies buzzing over a dead dog’s carcass — is beautifully tempered with sincerity and irony, while Millet, choosing present-day Los Angeles for her tightly woven trove of adults and teenagers slowly losing and finding their minds, breathes more life and texture into life into sun-baked Southern California than anything since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

A central shtick that alters the expectations of short stories can be a clever method for soliciting a reader’s respect; for example, the minimalism of Lydia Davis’s short stories netted her adulation and a Man Booker Prize. Melded narratives and characters is a tricky feint, but when done well it allows characters to blossom and expand the ways in which they relate to one another and the reader. In fairness to White’s and Millet’s work, neither collection demands that the reader sit down and trace the presence of each story’s DNA in the tale that follows. Both authors are aware, however, of the richness embodied by each of their characters, and if you do grab a pen, as I did, and map out how and where the people in their stories overlap, you’ll be rewarded.

While the first four stories in Sweet and Low do not partake in the central universe conceit, they do share one important, and fatal, story arc: knowledge is power, and more than a little knowledge has the power to unmake you. (“Bird-Headed Monster,” a taut and mordant tale in Fight No More, follows a similar path: a young woman is touring a house in Los Angeles when she learns that her wealthy boyfriend is buying it not for them, but for himself and his fiancée.) Rosemary is the widow of Dr. Arnie Greenlee, and in “The Lovers” she runs into a young man named Hank in an airport. He promptly faints due to low blood sugar — a result of his diabetes, which was first diagnosed by the late doctor, who had also begun an affair with Hank, and took the latter’s grandfather’s watch to be repaired. But Arnie died before the watch could be restored to its owner. Only the reader and Hank know about the affair; Rosemary only knows that her indifference in the bedroom following their only child’s birth helped her grant Arnie permission to have affairs. She does not, however, know about her husband’s fondness for male sexual partners. A meandering terror wraps itself up in White’s prose:

She drives on, thinking.

At the airport, he mumbled something about a watch. Her brain makes some connections. A month or so after Arnie’s death, she was in the bathroom cleaning out his cabinet. […] If she remembers correctly, initials had been carved into the back of it, but she couldn’t make them out, which frustrated her.

[…]

Home from following Hank, she retrieves the watch and holds it in the palm of her hand. It ticks. There are things in this world, she decides, you keep for no particular reason, the things you haven’t yet found a language for.

Arnie’s secret bisexuality isn’t nearly as much of a shock to the reader as the terse, oblique hypothesis about Rosemary’s dual nature, the same nature that happily permitted Arnie to have affairs without her needing to disclose that:

Say, just for conversation, there once lived a girl who was one person — one complete person, not a person for the world and a person for herself. They were one and the same. Then, let’s say, it’s her first week at college, and a boy she trusted, a boy from her hometown even, pushed his way inside her bottom-floor dorm room while her roommate was out. Say he did things to her that split her in two. Right down the middle. Years later, this same girl met a boy who was sweet and unassuming and never curious about the other girl behind the girl, the one she hid so fiercely.

Hank and Rosemary are two very different people bonded by a loss, but there’s just enough precarity in their incipient acquaintance that they lose sight of one another, and ultimately, must seek closure on their own. White has a profound talent, one writers decades senior to him frequently lack, for imbuing his prose with bombs of shock that land with ferocity and precision, leaving a devastation far greater than might be successful in longer stories and many novels. The reader may feel no pity for Pete in “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin” — he’d “run off his faggot of a son” many years ago — and that he’s trapped under his lawn mower after a fall, “one leg crushed under the back end” of the machine feels like karma for a bigot. There are, however, horrors in Pete’s own childhood that caused me to stop reading and draw a deep breath before I could continue. After Pete’s mother died, Pete’s father would take him snake hunting:

He was lucky being a boy — his sisters, after their mother died, had to deal with things much worse […] This usually happened late on summer weekends when his father was high on corn whiskey. His sisters slept in the room next to his, and on those nights, he could hear the terrible grunting coming through the walls.

That a snake slowly slithers into the crevasse in which Pete is pinned feels like the literal manifestation of his failure to defend his sisters and accept his son. He tries, in vain, to aim handfuls of soil at the snake, but it remains unmoved, “refusing to be anything but predator.” Dying is easy. Staring down near-certain death is much harder.

The title story — which also opens the latter two-thirds of the book, a section titled “The Exaggerations” that focuses mostly on the Culpepper family, emigrants from Illinois to and residents of an unnamed town in Mississippi — posits a simple but ambitious theme: our families influence, and often dictate, everything about us. Forney Culpepper’s father Reuben died of a heart attack — weak hearts run in the family — so his widow Felicia decides to give stardom a shot with her beautiful voice. When she prepares to audition for a talent scout in Memphis, a 10-year-old Forney finds himself at the helm of a quest for self-awareness:           

The two of them — mother and son — gaze at the reflection of themselves wearing their new getups. Like different people, Forney thinks. Happier people. But is he happy? Or on the way to happiness? This singing stuff makes her happy, and he guesses he’s happy that she’s happy. But is he?

In the six stories that constitute most of Sweet and Low, the perils of being a writer are given attentive, and often hilarious, consideration. Buck Dickerson, Felicia’s music teacher and a sugar-addicted radio host, reveals to Forney that his son, a member of the Peace Corps, harbors literary ambitions: “My son says he wants to be a poet. Can you believe that? I didn’t know people decided to be poets. […] Thought it just happened to them, or something, like a car wreck.”

White unfolds the tales of Forney’s Aunt Mavis and Uncle Lucas with such care that reading about them is one of the purest abject pleasures in the book. Told in the first person, the story picks up once Forney lives full-time with his aunt and uncle, after his mother leaves for Nashville to pursue stardom full-time: “We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together […] we saw plays and ballets in Jackson […] took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans.”

But for all their cultural excursions, the Culpepper family has its share of disappointments too:

In her younger days […] [Mavis] fancied herself something of a poet. She […] had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind to “see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

Nina the real estate agent is single too; she is our foyer into Fight No More. In “Libertines,” she is showing a house to a group of three men, one of whom, she thinks she was told by a colleague, is an African dictator. Millet has a knack for two specific, brilliant devices. First, infusing her prose with the part-confident, part-bored, part-ironic intonation of upper middle-class conversation in Los Angeles:

Had the person who lived in the house died?

Well yes, in fact, she’d wanted to say, because that’s the only way anyone ever leaves a house this stunning.

Second, trading from the beginning on the necessary maintenance of fact as fiction. Business cannot be conducted if apparent flaws are pointed out with loudspeakers and fluorescent flags:

This house always seemed to be waiting for the mudslide that would drag it down the cliff, snagging those giant, spiky plants as it fell. Chunks of frame and plaster would be dangling off plant stalks as beds and espresso makers tumbled down the hillside. Till that day came: 2.8 million, if you don’t mind.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might be one of the best short stories I’ve read in the last 10 years. Millet dances between first and second person in the story, an interesting effort given the speaker is Jeremy, approximately age 16, who has decided to cut school and openly masturbate in his bedroom, knowing the real estate agent will be bringing a family on a tour through his house. For all his boorish antics, Jeremy’s internal musings are peppered with Latin, and he is concerned about his mother, who is reeling in the aftermath of the boy’s father leaving to start a family with a younger woman. Still, he celebrates when Marnie and the prospective buyers walk in on him during his orgasm, then rush out: “Murmurs outside the door. He felt a grin spreading. Reached for the Kleenex. There you go. Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar shit.”

Later, Jeremy starts to roam the empty house. At his mother’s vanity, he does something he tends to avoid: he lets himself reach for a memory. Millet’s prose here is charmingly graceful, a turn from the obscenity-laced monologue from moments before:

He used to watch her put up her hair. Like in the movies: rich kids watched their mothers get ready. Good feeling. Dinner parties and evening wear. She’d been so deft with bobby pins it looked like sleight of hand. Magic, he called it then. He flashed to one time when her long hair, in the space of a few seconds, was transformed into a great shining round atop her head.

That shit looked elegant. Audrey Hepburn. “Magic mama.” She picked him up and twirled him. He’d been so small. Hard to believe.

Jeremy’s actions and their consequences create a breathtaking paradigm for Fight No More. One of the buyers, who sees right through his bullshit and tells him so, causes him to look back on his childhood, which in turn exposes a brief glimpse of his truth: there’s a difference between anger and hatred, and what he felt was anger at the “paterfamilias […] sowing his seed in younger soil.” The sardonic humor of the teen boy masturbating as a stunt is not forgotten, because Jeremy, in order to do something nice but not melodramatic for his mother, decides to use her credit card to fill the house with flowers. When his new stepmother — pregnant with his soon-to-be half-sibling — invites him to dinner, he is forced to examine the reality of his new existence. Being a teenager, Jeremy masks exploration of a new family dynamic as “a movie [that] could really crack you up,” but each step he takes as a new stepson, the child of a newly divorced couple, the grandson of a woman exhibiting signs of dementia, he reconsiders. Millet isn’t out to provide redemption, but she is interested in how people change when they finally come to terms with change. Jeremy remembers a cousin’s baptism he’d attended:

In the church she was dressed in a snow-white robe and smiled without end. She beamed. His whole life, he could swear, he’d never seen anyone look that happy.

Do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?

I do.

“I renounce him,” he muttered under his breath […]

And all his works?

I do.

Jeremy wasn’t alone in his bedroom when Nina and her clients walked in. He was getting off to a cam girl named Lexie, living in Carpinteria, almost certainly underage. The small degree of respect he affords her — “She wasn’t dumb” — is important because, in “Stockholm,” the reader receives a visceral look inside Lexie’s mind. Her stepbrothers are meth dealers, her mother a drunk, and her stepfather has been raping her since she was 16. There is something astonishing, even electrifying, about Jeremy’s offer for her to come to Los Angeles and be au pair to his new stepsister; it energizes the book. Lexie’s other duty will be to keep an eye on Aleska, Jeremy’s paternal grandmother, a retired professor of the art and propaganda of fascism, who is selling her home to live in the guest house on her son’s property. “Jem” gives the new babysitter a quick rundown about Professor Korczak:

[D]on’t be fake Christian, she’s Jewish, well, kind of, but she was raised by some kind of missionaries so she’ll see through it. Tell her about your trashy family. I mean, don’t mention the Internet sex biz […] just try to be a straight-shooter. She won’t mind the white-trash part, as long as you’re smart and not rude. She likes an edge but she really doesn’t like rudeness. Treat her with respect, she’s had a hard life. Her whole family died in the Holocaust when she was six.

Aleska has experienced other losses too, namely her husband to suicide. It’s unclear when this happened — later in the book it’s hinted that Paul was still a child — but his widow does not dwell on what cannot be changed. In many ways, “Gram” is the hero of Fight No More. Her wry, self-possessed manner, her request for stiff cocktails in the evening, her general determination to keep track of her marbles before biology takes over and slowly sends them spinning off, one by one, into the darkness of senility, is nothing short of fearless. Some of the book’s best dollops of humor come from a woman whose framed posters of swastikas unnerve her new daughter-in-law.

Members of Lexie’s family, residents of Carpinteria, turn up in Los Angeles too. A content warning should be issued for “I Can’t Go On.” I don’t fault Millet or the publisher for not providing it, but anyone who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative/family friend should proceed with caution.

Both White and Millet are keen observers of the interpersonal expectations between people who are sure of themselves and people who aren’t. The chasm that separates fully functioning adulthood and reality is often invisible to characters in both books. “The Men” in Fight No More is a dizzyingly paranoid but mildly comic tale about a group of male midgets who are performing repairs on a house. Its resident, a production executive who “otherwise leads a normal life” but whose husband has left her, becomes unnerved “when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight.” Nina, the agent selling the house, wonders if she’s become “a magnet for eccentrics” in the aftermath of a lover’s death. The unnamed narrator of “Break” in Sweet and Low is befriended in college by a girl named Regan and her boyfriend, Forney Culpepper. The latter is by now an aspiring poet, but hasn’t written any poems yet. “Instead, he spent his mornings retyping the work of other poets — Ginsberg, Stevens — on a sky-blue IBM Correcting Selectric II […] When I asked him about it, he said, ‘I’ve not found the right words for me yet, so I’m using other people’s until then.’”

Very rarely in modern American literature is the reader afforded an opportunity to so fully absorb a character that it feels like he’s sitting right next to you. Forney Culpepper is such a creation. I understood his confusion when he glimpses Uncle Lucas kissing his best friend Buddy Cooper’s neck. I respected his reluctance to hear Aunt Mavis untangle the truth from the exaggerations, but appreciated his need for facts. I teared up for him during “The Curator,” White’s tour de force and the penultimate story in Sweet and Low. If you’re from a certain part of the South and you’re immersed in literature, at some point you have to contend with William Faulkner. His name doesn’t appear in White’s book, but we can safely guess that “the Author,” referred to only by that title and capital A, as the force manipulating lives in an unnamed Mississippi town where Forney lives as an adult, is a stand-in for Faulkner’s towering presence as the literary legend associated with the South.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and I was partly raised in the South, so I appreciated the lack of myopia in both White and Millet’s prose. Both areas function as characters because everyone in “The Exaggerations” is stagnating, paralyzed by circumstance and expectations lowered over time. Aunt Mavis never went to graduate school; Uncle Lucas moved out, took a trip to Canada, died of a heart attack. Homosexuality — repressed, concealed, unidentified — is as common in the South as ostensibly cool and collected facades are in Los Angeles. The sun hangs heavy over both sets of stories, only the one in the Delta is intimidating, and bossy, and the one in Southern California is part of the glossy psychological veneer of the region. And both books end with the yearnings of elderly women.

Sweet and Low and Fight No More share a brutal lesson about human frailty: we are flawed because we want so much more than what we have. This want, this hunger — financial, sexual, physiological, emotional — turns into a blind spot, and often our Achilles’ heel. Attempting to meet that want can take a lifetime, and even then that feeling, the comforting realization that overtakes you as gently as a cotton sheet over your body on a summer night, that we’re sated and at peace, may never come. The only reassurances we’ll ever get are momentary. Fleeting precious seconds of calm and security. By the time we learn this, it’s too late.

¤

Nandini Balial is a writer and copy editor whose work has appeared in the AV Club, the New Republic, Vice, The Week, among others. She lives and works in Texas.

The post Resurrection of the American Short Story: Nick White’s “Sweet and Low” and Lydia Millet’s “Fight No More” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2nd4zsU

When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less. My family had been kind of poor after my step-father died. My nana would stand in line to get us big orange blocks of commodity cheese for the week to supplement our $30 grocery budget Every  week my mom would yell at her that we didn’t need that. She always took it.

My mom didn’t answer the phone because she was so afraid of credit card companies calling.  She’d make me do it and lie that she wasn’t there.

I still hate answering the phone, even the cell phone, even when it has caller ID.

Anyway, when I went to college I wanted to forget all that. I wanted to be an intellectual like everyone else. I wanted to have gone to private school in Manhattan or Conneticut, have a summer home in the Hamptons and clothes that weren’t from K-Mart, which was sort of the WalMart equivalent back then, but worse.

I got over all that because I knew it was pretty shallow. What I had a harder time getting over was class issues that had less to do with materialism and more to do with hatred and intellectual history.

In one of my directing classes, one of the sexier straight guys actually announced about Beckett, “People who are not wealthy don’t care about this. A truck driver doesn’t watch public television or listen to NPR. They don’t care, they’re too busy humping and eating and drinking.”

My dad was a truck driver. He watched public television. He listened to NPR. I didn’t want to think about him humping. He ate food. He didn’t drink. His parents had been prohibitionists.

In one of my playwrighting classes the professor announced, “The working people of this country don’t give a shit about nuclear power. They don’t give a shit about a man of color.”

When I was in elementary school my dad would bring him with him to protest the same nuclear power plant that my step dad was helping to build. He helped me try to get New Hampshire to recognize Martin Luther King Day and do a hundred other civil rights things. He cared.

And one of my college friends would love to say, “Carrie is too poor to be pro intellectual.”

He’s a minister now. That still doesn’t make what he said right.

And one of my female poetry teachers told me over and over again, her voice trilling up with her patrician accent, “Carrie, you have the potential to be a poet, but your voice is too raw, not refined, not artistic enough.”

My voice was poor. My cadence was public school. I was not from rich. Every sentence I spoke showed that.

They still do.

Those are just four of the incidents that made me both angry and intimidated and focused, but in the back of my head it just inflamed my self doubt. I could never be a poet because I wasn’t wealthy, private-school educated, my parents weren’t intellectuals. I could never move people with words because my words were too stark and my sentences too short. I would never fit in because I didn’t have the background that most of the other students had.

And then two things happened. I read Sherman Alexie, a not-wealthy Spokane and Coeur d’Alene who despite his issues with women, impacted me positively. Maybe because I never met him.

And I met Seamus Heaney in real life.

Seamus Heaney came to our college at the invitation of Robert Farnsworth, who was an awesome poet and professor. He met with students, he gave a reading and we all got to hang out with him at a reception.

“I can’t go,” I told my boyfriend at the time.

He bit into his pizza. He was always eating pizza. “Why not?”

“Because it’s Seamus Heaney,” I answered staring at the little bits of sausage on the pizza before I plucked them off.

“So?”

“Seamus Heaney!”

“So?”

I didn’t know how to explain. Seamus Heaney was THE poet, the Nobel Prize winner. He was Irish for God’s sake. Those people were gifted with words. They had so many amazing poets… Heaney, Yeats, Wilde, Clarke, Moore. I was from New Hampshire. We had Robert Frost but pretty much every New England state tried to claim him.

Heaney wrote things like:

“A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.”

You will regret it if you don’t go,” my boyfriend said. “I’m going to just be playing Leisure Suit Larry anyway.”

So, I went, as anxious as if I was going on stage myself. Heaney transfixed me with his amazing baritone and bear-like presence. And his words… Of course his words… And when I met him afterwards, I was terrified until he grabbed my hand in his and said, “So you are a poet?”

And I said, “No.”

And all he did was nod and say, “Oh, yes you are.”

But in his eyes was this knowing, this connection, and maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe I just saw it because I wanted him to understand me, because I wanted someone to get who I was and who I wanted to be. Or maybe not?

I don’t know, but one second later my professor said, “Oh, yes she is. I told you about her. She is like you.”

And then one of them said something about growing up not wealthy and I can’t remember the exact words, but what I do remember is that I finally felt understood. Later, I looked up Seamus Heaney’s past, about how his dad was a farmer and neither of his parents were big on words really, not in the intellectual way that everyone in college seemed to be. I found out that he was like me a little bit not because he was a poet and I was trying so desperately hard to write just one decent poem, but because we were both human, that we both came from humble places, that we both looked in people’s eyes when we said hello.

And that was enough for me. That was enough for me to believe in myself.

Seamus Heaney performed a miracle when I met him. He made me believe that I could be whatever the hell I wanted to be and that it didn’t matter how hard I had to fight or work or not fit in. What mattered was that I wanted the miracle of being a writer, of metamorphosis from Carrie the poor neurotic kid from Bedford, New Hampshire into Carrie Jones, the neurotic best-selling author who lives on the coast of Maine.

He gave hope and miracles in his poems and in his person and I am so thankful for his existence and so sorry for the world’s loss.

“The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”

  I wrote this post back in 2013 when Seamus Heaney died, but in one of my student packet’s this week, I referenced Heaney and then yesterday I saw this Liam Neeson video (randomly) where he was talking about Heaney, so… there you go. I’ve reposted it.

Here’s Seamus Heaney reading his own poem, “Blackberry Picking.”

  Do Good Wednesday

Scary, right?

People are fixing it.

You can help with poetry and kids. These images are from Get Lit’s website and Get Lit is making a difference.

“Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of words and toured colleges with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in two high schools, Fairfax and Walt Whitman. When the semester ended… the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. The rest is history. Today, the curriculum has expanded to almost 100 schools, and the Get Lit Players are the most watched poets on the internet. Curriculum requests flow in from Mexico to New Zealand.”

Get Lit “uses poetry to increase literacy, empower youth, and inspire communities.”

Get Lit works – 98% of Get Lit Players go to college, and 70% get scholarships!

Here are Get Lit’s specific needs and how you can get involved.

  Writing News

Carrie’s  super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August.

This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.

An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” –  School Library Journal

  “Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” –  BCCB

  “Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” –  Booklist

  “A wild and fresh take on fantasy with an intriguing cast of characters. Dangerous and scary and fun all rolled into one. In the words of Eva the dwarf, I freaking loved it!” –  Lisa McMann, New York Times bestselling author of The Unwanteds series

  “Effervescent, funny, and genuine.” –  Kirkus Reviews

It’s quirky. It’s awesome. It’s full of heart. You should go by the first two books now. 🙂

  Time Stoppers

Time Stopper Series

Time Stoppers Front and Back Covers – US versions

CARRIE’S BOOKS

For a complete round-up of Carrie’s 16-or-so books, check out her website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.

OUR PODCAST

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips.

We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can.

Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow.

Love

The Poet Who Saw Me – Wednesday Writing Wisdom When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less.