The Feet of God

41 - SHOW TIME

I’m not sure how long I’d been asleep, but my nap ended and I came to consciousness with the toe of a boot running along the backside of my Levis.  It’s amazing how often this is the way I’d woken up.  I turned over to find Cherrie Cowridge hovering over me with a dinner plate and a glass.

“Here, I brought you some tossed salad and fried chicken.  You better eat now, we go on in two hours and Bobby needs you to help set up the tape deck.”  I rolled off my makeshift bed and accepted the plate of food.

“Sorry, the breasts and thighs are for customers only,” she said.  “All that’s left is chicken tails.  You don’t mind eating what my real family used to call the Pope’s nose, do you?”

“No, no, no, not at all, Miss Cherrie,” I accepted her kind offering.

Then she passed me the glass.  “I mixed this myself.  It’s my own super-energy wakeup drink.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called a Drew Barrymore.”

“What’s that?”

“A Shirley Temple with vodka.”

“Well thank you very much,” I gratefully took the libation from her hand.  “I sure do appreciate your efforts on my behalf.”  I was ready to face the world again.

This moment of peace and tranquility was disturbed by a fist pounding hard on the side of the bus.  I almost spilled my drink.  Bobby climbed aboard.  “Rise and shine, roadie, we got work to do.  Hey sis, how nice of you to see that the hired help is fed.”  The younger Cowridge brother smacked Cherrie on the butt and gave it a lingering grope.  Bobby glared at me for a second or two, “Well get your ass in gear and finish up, roadie.  I need your help.”

I wolfed down my dinner and downed my drink and hustled past Cherrie to run after Bobby.  In the back of the bus was a secret compartment holding the tape deck that provided all the music for “The Intimate Venue Tour.”  We sneaked through the back door of the kitchen.  We connected the real mini-speakers hidden inside the large fake speakers, and the whole thing was set up in short order.

“Okay, that’ll do it,” Bobby clapped his hands together at a job complete.  “I gotta get outta here before Freddy’s fans come in to pig out and think they recognize me.  Let’s go move the bus around back of the building where no one will bother us while we get into makeup.”  Bobby gave me a hard punch in the arm.

Even though I come from a long line of theatrical folks, dancers mostly, I’d never seen TV stars get ready for a show before.  Mom and Cherrie and Freddy was picking through the garbage bags of costumes, pulling out shirts, sniffing them to see if they was clean or at least clean enough.  They sprayed different body parts and fluffed their hair and got into their underwear right there, like I wasn’t even watching.  Then they began to fuss and push each other away from a couple’a mirrors they’d hung by the overhead light.  When I got hit with a flying bottle of moisturizing lotion Freddy tossed to Buffy, I figured I’d seen enough of what goes on behind the scenes in this family.

I wandered toward the back door of the kitchen hoping I could get some more to eat since I was still hungry.  Once I opened the door I felt a blast of hot moist air, familiar to anyone who has ever spent time in a restaurant kitchen.  A couple of ladies was bringing in trays of dirty plates and stacking ‘em up next to a sink being manned by a skinny teenager in a food-stained apron.  Just as they’d drop off a tray of dirty dinner dishes they’d pick up a tray of desserts for serving.  Dinner was winding down.

I moved over to where the teenager was busy cleaning off dirty tableware over the garbage can, just to see if any of the plates came back with some uneaten servings of chicken or a little extra spaghetti.  But these people wasn’t gonna let the thrill of seeing a 1970’s semi-icon stand in the way of generously stuffing their pie-holes.  They’d done everything but suck the marrow outta the bones on them poor chickens, and I didn’t find a single uneaten meatball.

Since it was a waste of time looking for leftovers, I figured I’d go take a gander at the crowd.  Through the glass in the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room I could see a candlelit room filled with sixty or seventy big ol’ gals of a certain age, all of ‘em dolled-up, teased-up and obviously keyed-up to see the object of their teenage fantasies close in the flesh.  They was laughin’ and wavin’ at each other from table to table, while out by the bar an equal number of men stood around with beers in their hands and boredom glaze’n their eyes.

As I surveyed the crowd, an urgent female voice piped up from behind me, “Coming through, coming through.”

I turned to face a small pert woman I’d seen carrying out desserts just a minute ago, now standing with a pot of coffee in each hand while I blocked her exit to the dining room.

“Oh, sorry,” I apologized.

“Don’t be sorry, just get out of the way.  Are you with the Cowridges?”  She moved forward while I tried to remove myself from the doorway.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m with the band.”

“Thought so.  Damned Hank comes up with these promotional ideas and I get stuck with all the work.  I’ll have dinner cleared in ten minutes, and you’re on.  Have your people ready.  I’m not hanging around here all night.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure that this was the lovely Mrs. Decker.

Nora Decker surged past me followed by the other waitress, and they began to pour coffee and urge the ladies to finish up their apple cobbler and ice cream because the show was about to start.

I headed toward the back door when it opened and Fabulous Freddy appeared like a hallucination.  As he entered the room the rest of the family swarmed around him, but it was Freddy who shown like the sun in his white denim, sequins and silver studs, his tan radiating, his hair poofed perfectly, and a number of white scarves draped under the collar of his partially buttoned shirt.  Oh yes, magic was about to happen.

Nora and company returned with trays piled with empty dessert dishes, and as you might expect, not an untouched apple cobbler in the bunch.  These folks did not linger over a meal.  Nora refilled her coffee pots while she ran her eyes up and down Freddy betraying no emotion at all.  “Gimme a chance to top ‘em off and you can have ‘em,” then she disappeared into the dining room again.

Bobby squatted next to the tape machine under the stainless steel table just inside the door to the kitchen.  As he diddled the dials, nonexistent horns and strings swelled up in the dining room.  Lights dimmed and strobes began to flash.  Bobby picked up a small microphone and in a deep and unfamiliar voice began, “Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, the La Barge Inn is proud to present all the way from 1979:  The Cowridge Clan!”

Mom worked to remove the last of the bandages from Buffy’s hand to reveal that she’d been holding a tambourine the entire time.  Buffy’s feral eyes suddenly took on a fire, and she began to whack that tambourine against her hips.  Step by step, she approached the kitchen door.  Bobby stood to one side to let her through.  With her blonde pigtails twirling around, her chest jiggling, her hips thrusting, and her tambourine pounding, pounding, pounding, Buffy gyrated onto the strobe-lit stage just as a thin, pink curtain of cheesecloth descended around the entire performance area.

The ovation was deafening.

Buffy did a cartwheel across the tiny platform, jumped up to a standing position, planted her feet wide apart, then did a half-pirouette showing her back to the audience.  Then she bent forward in order to wave at the customers from between her legs, all the while beating at her body with her musical instrument.

The applause died away and the women didn’t seem sure how to react, but the menfolk in the bar stirred with a certain interest.  The applause swelled again, this time with hoots and whistles from the bar area as Buffy bent totally backwards, touched her head to the floor while rapping frantically on her midriff with the tambourine.  It would be an understatement to say the bar crowd went wild.

As Buffy pulled herself upright again to end her routine, Mom and Cherrie bounced out of the kitchen and up behind their keyboard and bass.  Together they waved and smiled and pointed with surprised recognition at people they’d never seen before.

Then it was Bobby’s turn to storm out into the spotlight.  He bolted onto the seat behind his drums and twirled his sticks while waving his huge Afro back and forth to the delight of the ladies.

Finally, the canned trumpets blared and everyone in the room except Buffy turned their faces toward those swinging kitchen doors.  I watched as Fabulous Freddy bowed his head and made a sign of the cross, then he pushed through the doors and sprinted into the strobe.

When he hit the middle of the stage the music suddenly stopped.  I had a moment of pure panic, thinking there was a problem with the tape, but once I saw Freddy raise a single triumphant thumb into the air I knew everything was going to be all right.

“Helloooo La Barge!  Are ya feeling lucky?”