I’ve always loved a stage. In 1996, Graciela and I learned that our favorite group, the B-52s, were allowing “friends of the band” to be go-go dancers onstage during their summer tour. We immediately took action. I’d met the band’s manager a couple years before when they recorded the music for the Flintstones movie, and since then he had very sweetly set us up with concert tickets. In all, Grac and I had seen the B’s probably twenty times.
The band’s manager told us we could pick any date on the tour. We chose Graciela’s thirtieth birthday, July 19, when they’d be playing outside Chicago. We told every single person we knew that we’d be dancing with the B-52s. In fact we didn’t talk about anything else all summer.
That’s not strictly true. For a few weeks I’d been nervously monitoring a massive reddish welt on my stomach, with something of a bull’s-eye in the middle. It changed size and shape every week and was sensitive to the touch. Berated by my mother’s constant nagging to “GET THAT DAMN BITE CHECKED OUT!” I finally showed it to the CBS This Morning doctor, a woman who gave medical advice on TV every day to a few million Americans.
“Spider bite!” she proclaimed. Relieved with the diagnosis, and maybe even hoping that the spider had somehow imbued me with super dancing powers, I went on with my summer and concentrated on the only thing that mattered to me. Graciela and I would meet anywhere and everywhere to practice our moves. We danced in Sag Harbor, we danced on sidewalks, and we turned her den into a stage. Graciela had incredible natural dancing talent; I, on the other hand, had only blind confidence and a love of what I was doing—a common theme with me.
When we had our dance moves down, we took the next most important step and rented stage outfits at Odds Costume Rentals on West Twenty-ninth Street. Grac rented a yellow dress with billowy transparent sleeves and a matching yellow vest with fringe. I got myself a pair of blue sequined pants—which I’d always wanted—along with a green metallic shirt and silver sequined shoes. Those shoes, as you will see, would become forever tainted in my memory.
Meanwhile, my spider bite was not going away. Of course my mom was relentless in her quest for information concerning its size, and she was especially hysterical about its endlessly changing shape. She finally made me consult (in her words) “an ACTUAL doctor. A real medical PROFESSIONAL.” I went to a doctor who asked me to raise my shirt, took half a look, and said, “Lyme disease. I’m a hundred percent sure of it.” This doctor, despite never having been on television, was correct.
You may have noticed that TV doctors do about nine hundred segments a year about Lyme disease, about the telltale signs (the bull’s-eye!) and symptoms. While I go to the bathroom during these segments, is it too much to think that the TV doc is paying attention to the words coming out of her own mouth? I was furious, but I had no one to blame but myself—who else but a man hopelessly devoted to television would receive a serious misdiagnosis from a TV doctor? The real-world medical professional prescribed an array of medication, including—hold your breath and cover your nose—suppositories.
“You want me to dance onstage with the B-52s with a suppository up my butt?” I asked. The mood of the summer quickly morphed from B-52-phoria to a Hope over Heartbreak movie-of-the-week dilemma. While I wasn’t about to let a little case of Lyme disease get between me and the B’s, I also had no intention of using those suppositories.
On the weekend of Graciela’s thirtieth birthday, we flew to Chicago. The night before the gig, we danced around the Ritz-Carlton like banshees, rehearsing moves we’d made up à la the Molly Ringwald (think Breakfast Club): the Stand-March-Jump, the Freeze, the Honeybun, the Right-Armed Lasso, the Strobe Light. We anticipated nothing less than the best time of our lives.
It wasn’t easy, but we’d made arrangements with the Jumbotron people at the venue to give us the footage of the concert afterward, so we had to look great. Graciela spent several hours of her birthday afternoon getting her hair done, and the effort paid off. Her hair was blown out into a high Jackie Kennedy flip with bangs, and she put on big spidery Twiggy eye makeup, exaggerated for the stage, which I thought was an especially smart touch. As far as my look went, I was in crew-cut mode and happy to let Grac’s hair be the main attraction.
When we arrived at the stadium, the parking lot was strangely empty. I don’t mean the lot wasn’t full, I mean there was nobody there. At all. We finally found a parking attendant who told us that we were the last people in Chicago to discover that the concert had been canceled. We were speechless. We were devastated. We would never have been able to articulate it at the time, but it was a measure of how blessed our lives had been to that point that this was the single worst thing that had ever happened to either of us.
Hysterical, we called our band contact, who told us that Cindy Wilson’s father-in-law had died. Poor Cindy! Poor Cindy’s father-in-law! And to an admittedly lesser extent, poor us. The band was doing a shorter set the next night—without Cindy—in Wisconsin. We pondered driving there, but in the end we went back to the hotel to look at the band’s tour schedule and choose another date. We scrolled through a summer full of complications but at last found a date we could both make in Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheater
