Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

“Hi Jesselle!!!!!!!”

“Is that my Telma-girl?”

“Queen Telma speaking.” ( A not-so-great English accent )

“Hello Your Highness! Hello Gwen.”

“Hi Jesselle.”

“You know I always have to say hello to Her Highness first, that’s the protocol. Now, you can’t see it, Telma, but I curtsied too, same as I would to Queen Elizabeth.”

“You better ,” said Telma comically. “I can’t see it but my knaves are there, & they report back to me.”

“You’re scaring me! Gwen, she’s scaring me! I want my Telma-girl back!”

“Jesselle,” said Telma. “When are we going to have dress rehearsal at the hotel?”

“Well that’s one of the reasons I’m calling, guys. Sweetheart, you’re not going to be too happy with me, but we need you to sing another song.”

“Why?” ( Crestfallen not hopeless — yet )

“You’re doing ‘Smile,’ aren’t you?”

“You know I am.”

“Jesselle, what’s going on?”

“Our problem is that ‘Smile’ is the only song the little girl Aleisha knows.”

“She’s not even supposed to be singing!” said Telma.

“I know, I know, darling, but she sang ‘Smile’ for Marcy and now Marcy insists that she sing it at the gala.”

“But that isn’t fair! ”

“I know it isn’t, baby. I know.”

“Darling,” said Gwen. “Can’t you sing ‘Over the Rainbow’?”

“‘Over the Rainbow’ isn’t ready, Mama! And I sing ‘Smile’ so much better , you know I do! Tobey Maguire & Mrs. Biden sent me flowers . People brought bouquets to the stage . They never did that for ‘Over the Rainbow’—”

“Honey,” said Jesselle. “ You are a rockstar. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is so much more of a big person song. There’s still a few days, you can nail it.”

“Of course she can.”

“I can’t .”

“You can ,” said Gwen.

In the last handful of years, cheering Telma to walk on with hope in her heart had become an involuntary reflex. But now, the sickening absurdity of it hit Gwen hard. Here she was, dreaming the impossible dream, tilting at (nonfatal) cancerous windmills for her baby, grotesquely dreaming of permanent remission — a remission at least from something! Willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause…

To right the unrightable wrong—

“Jesselle, we’ll work this out. Telma will steal the show like she always does. We’ll regroup. She just wasn’t expecting it.”

Hearing her own voice ground Gwen down.

A Judas mom, leading her only one to slaughter…

“Your mother’s right, Telma, listen to her. You always steal the show. Gwen, can you take me off speaker?”

Gwen held the phone to her ear and listened, saying nothing. Then, “Oh,” “Uh huh,” “OK,” “That’s definite?”

The doorbell rang.

“Uh huh… OK right, yes, I’ll convey that. But I have to go now, we have company.”

She hung up and opened the door. Phoebe stood there like the priest in The Exorcist . Instead of the usual effusive greeting, Telma ignored her, still in process .

“Mama, what did Jesselle say?”

“Nothing.”

“Is what definite? Is what definite?”

Phoebe didn’t interfere; she could see she’d walked into a little tempest that need be take its course.

“Not now , Telma—”

“What did she say , what did she say! ”

“She said that — that Aleisha — the little girl — she said that the little girl was going to be the last performer, that Marcy wanted her to go on last. That you had to sing before .”

Telma blinked at her mother like a robot on the fritz.

That was when she gave Phoebe a proper if stormy greeting, running tearfully into her arms.

Evening is the time of the merging of Man and Woman: the Unknowable

A l’alta fantasia qui moncò possa,

ma già volgeva il mio disio e

l velle

sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa.

l’amor che move il sole e l’altre

stelle

.

— P A R A D I S O, XXXIII. 142–5

What’s Your Favorite Got In The Bank?*

*www.celebritynetworth.com

Tom-Tom

had a feeling about it in her gut, a feeling she’d grown to trust, an extrasensory feeling about Rikki & The Treasure of Sierra Leone from the beginning. How could she not?

There was no way to ignore the facts— that Rikki shared that battered fosterchild thing with Antwone Fisher, and had even read his memoir (over & over!); that the inspiration for the character Rikki was auditioning to portray was none other than Ishmael Beah, who had visited his middleschool; & that Rikki had thoroughly read/iPod’d Mr. Beah’s book as well. It all amounted to a heavy dose of what Tom-Tom called the propinquity of providence. She was especially convinced of the importance of her seductive ministrations during the making of the video that one day would have hundreds of millions of hits because people would watch the audition tape as an historical document/debut, like they did Bieber’s first youtube or Susan Boyle’s I dreamed a dream . She was certain their juices & commingled ch’i had set the stage for Rikki’s brilliance, even moreso that their coupling was, with direct obliqueness, the actual cause of three outlandish pieces of recent good fortune: 1) Rikki’s “accidental” read-through with Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne; 2) the bizarre, unexpected call from an old friend asking her to take up free residence in an empty, Greek-columned minimanse high atop Mt Olympus; 3) the unheralded arrival of a reality show convention in downtown LA, whose convenient appearance, as if custom-made, presented itself not merely as a gathering of like minds, workshops, hook-ups and industry connects, but as a one-stop casting shop for the washouts & almost-were’s who would form the cornerstone and fountainhead of Tom-Tom’s Big Idea.

. .

What happened with the whole Mt Olympus thing is that Tom-Tom’s friend Cherokee was a hair & makeup gal who Tom-Tom used to run with and Cherokee called out of the blue just like everything lately seemed out of the cosmicorgasmic blue, saying Double T you gotta help me, I’m fucked. For the last 5 yrs Cherokee pretty much exclusively worked for Betty White, Betty wouldn’t let anyone touch her face & hair cept her. Sometimes when her boss was in New York or wherever but not working, Cherokee housesat Ms White’s rundown still very groovy house on Mt Olympus, which was far groovier than Cherokee’s shack in Studio City.

From what Tom-Tom heard, Mt Olympus used to be chichi but was kinda frayed now, counting dope dealers, pimps & MMA/cagefight promoters among its denizens. Its entrance was right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, you turned up the hill on Mt Olympus Drive, took Mt Olympus to Electra, Electra looped into Hercules, then hung a right on Jupiter, a left on Hermès, & you’re there. Betty was on hiatus from that show she did with Valerie Bertinelli, she was in NYC getting ready to come home and suddenly got cast in an Adam Sandler movie shooting in Paris, Spain & Poland. (Boo-yuh!) It kinda sucked not being Betty White. Anyway, for ten fucking weeks Betty’d be flying back and forth to the States, but only to New York, LA was just too far. She bought her pad 40 years ago when the Mount was the spanking new playground of Southland gods, more Trousdale at the time than Trousdale lite (which it quickly became), gone much further to seed in the interim. Betty told Cherokee she probably should have sold it before the bubble, now that would almost be impossible, the truth is she didn’t mean a word of it because she adored that house, it reminded her of a certain lovely time in her life, it was a living museum of nostalgia and gave her a kick plus it wasn’t like she needed the money from a sale. She was frickin rich. According to Cherokee, she didn’t want to do a big makeover on it either, a decision Ms White was positive added 20 years to her life. Plus she liked that whenever her makeup & hair doll housesat, Cherokee made helpful, practical, incremental improvements such as putting in a new water heater or recaulking/resealing bathroom tiles or even just (as Cherokee reported back) walking around with a can of WD40 unsqueaking the squeaks. The thing of it was, Cherokee was now going to have to go with Betty to Europe, the doll was wonderful at making her look wonderful but aside from that, Betty out and out enjoyed her, she raised her spirits and (mysteriously) made her laugh. Kinda like the daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter she never had. The doll was a hoot. Betty had it written into her contract that Cherokee was her doll, they had to pay for her travel, per diem, hotel, all that good stuff. It kinda sucked not being Cherokee.