“Stop,” she instructed the band midway through the first verse. Either they weren’t playing to her tempo or she wasn’t singing to theirs, but the music that blared from the speakers was not the music she had written nor was it an improvement on her artistic vision. It had to stop. The audience got a kick out of this bold upstart. Her voice cooed like a young girl’s but her vocal control showed many years of practice. Her face was like a teenager’s, but her body was voluptuous like a full grown woman’s. She was as brash as she was refined, as beginner as she was pro, as innocent as she was tempting. A beautiful and intriguing menagerie of dichotomies, she was the type of woman men liked to tinker with—not for sexual gratification but because they genuinely wanted to understand how she worked. They were drawn to her in the same way men are drawn to car parts and electronic gadgets. The sexual gratification was just a bonus. After the show, as usual, they flocked to her. Most of them had nothing substantial to say, they just wanted to be near her, to touch her, to tell the story of the menagerie they met. But one man came bearing a Final Call newspaper. He asked if she had read one before. She told the handsome stranger in the brown suit and the red bow tie that she had not but would on the condition that she could call him with her feedback. He jotted his number on the inside flap, she placed the paper beside her while greeting other audience members. He may have thought she wouldn’t really read it and only wanted his number but she did read it, slowly, word for word, until she understood it.
June 5, 2013
