“Damn,” I said. “All this on a little performance arts team.”
“I needed one with an edge,” he said. “They’ve got enough to work with.”
He checked his phone, and then his expression looked hurried. “So, we’re going to put you up in the VIP balcony, just up the stairs in the west lobby, they’ve got your name. You’ll be good.”
“Sounds good, Marvin,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
He turned to leave, and the man from earlier that had picked a fight with the cheetah lady approached us and gave Marvin a look. Marvin pulled out a money clip and slipped the man a hundred dollar bill.
“Feminazi bush, huh?” Marvin asked.
“I did what I could,” the man laughed. He took the bill, stuck it into his pocket and smiled at us before he left. Vicki and I both stared at Marvin, our mouths wide open.
“Ratings,” Marvin shrugged and then walked away.
“Ratings,” Vicki and I said in unison.
My phone buzzed with a text. AJ was outside with her boyfriend Landon. But they were stuck in a traffic jam. Security had tightened when a car of mooners flashed the protestors.
“Ratings,” I told Vicki as I showed her the text.
“Ratings,” she said.
Chapter 2
The VIP balcony on the stage’s right wing was a roped off section of old style theatre seats. I recognized a couple of Sedona movers and shakers, including Matt Chelmi, the managing editor for our local news site, The Herald. Matt appeared to be with a couple of colleagues, but he nodded to me as soon as he saw me. I smiled and nodded back, but I was surprised because I don’t think we had officially ever met.
Vicki and I took our seats in the low theatre light. I flipped through the program.
“Okay,” I told Vicki. “They’re called Ghoti?”
“No,” she read another page. “It’s pronounced ‘fish’.”
“How do you get ‘fish’ out of ‘ghoti’?”
“I heard about this one time,” she said. “It’s a Hemingway thing.”
“Hemingway?” I asked.
“Hemingway invented this fake word, out of irregular uses of spelling. So, in the word, ‘enough,’ the ‘gh’ makes a ‘f’ sound, right?”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“The idea is that why can’t you use that in the beginning of a word,” she explained.
“Because that’s not how the rules of the English language work,” I protested.
“Exactly,” she said. “He’s Hemingway. He decided he was going to be a non-comformist and reinvent English convention.”
“Because he’s Hemingway,” I said with an eye roll.
“Right, the ‘gh’ makes an ‘f’ sound, as in enough,” she repeated. “And then the ‘o’ makes a short ‘i’ sound like in ‘women.’”
I nodded. “I guess I can see that.”
“Then the ‘ti’ makes the ‘sh’ sound as in ‘nation,” she finished. “So the word is actually ‘fish.’”
I rolled my eyes. “This guy had too much time on his hands. He needed to find something productive to do. “
“He did write The Old Man and the Sea,” she said. “And drank a lot.”
“I stand by my original statement,” I replied.
I flipped through the program on my lap again, full of ads for every business in Sedona.
“Hey,” I told Vicki, “why did no one bother us for ad space?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we’re just not hip and enlightened enough to sponsor ‘fish.’”
I shook my head and laughed and then a photo caught my eye.
“Julianna Spencer,” I told Vicki as I pointed to her bio. “I went to high school with her.”
“Really?” she leaned over my shoulder, and we read her bio.
After high school, she had gone to some dance academy in New York, and had been in a few off Broadway shows, and then she joined Ghoti.
“Huh,” she said, “Julianna Spencer. She’s your ‘road not taken.’”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. I could have been in fish.”
She shook her head. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s still time for you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I mumbled.
The lights dimmed and an emcee took the stage and warmed the crowd up with some bad jokes. AJ and Landon finally snuck in and issued whispered greetings as they took the seats we’d saved for them.
AJ smiled at me, and they both looked harried and rushed. “We had to park two blocks away because security shut down a whole street,” she whispered. “I’m in heels!”
Our investigator was a beautiful young woman, but she had that sort of edge that I found it odd to see her in a formal evening gown. At nineteen, she stood about five foot six, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her real hair color.
It was currently dyed jet black, and cut into a short bob with sideswept bangs and subtle purple highlights. Tonight she wore an ankle length cream lace dress, with an open back. Whatever she gained in a traditional look with a formal and heels, she lost with dark edgy makeup.
I smiled a greeting at her boyfriend Landon on the other side of her, and he smiled and nodded back. Landon was a freelance graphic designer, and he and AJ had gotten together when I hired him to create some marketing materials for our firm. They had had a short surging flame of a relationship, until Landon went off to art school in Chicago. They now had an avid Skype relationship, from what I understand. Now, in early May, he was home on summer break.
Landon was the original hipster with an ironic black beard and gauged earlobes. He surprised me today, looking somewhat normal in what I assumed must have been a rented tuxedo.
The emcee left the stage and the room darkened as on stage monitors flipped on. An intro clip composed of costumed
