by Dave Daren
Like many buildings in Sedona, the PAH was geometrically shaped, this one was a giant metal triangle. The lobby, of course, had impressively vaulted ceilings as the arc rose, but the walls were disappointingly modern. They were simply painted cream, with flat screen monitors mounted every few yards. There were some unmanned reception booths, and the occasional contempo styled seating areas.
“I love this building,” Vicki gushed. “The design is so cute.”
“Eight months in Sedona, and you still think the buildings are ‘cute,” I muttered.
She smacked my arm. “I didn’t grow up here. I’m not a jaded and bitter cynic like you.
“I’m working on it,” I laughed. “I actually performed here a few times.”
“Really?” she asked. “Acting?”
I had been a star theatre student in high school, and had even been accepted into Julliard. But, I ultimately chose to pursue a legal career, much to the chagrin of my parents.
“Yeah,” I said. “My high school summers, I signed up for a youth community theatre. Most of the time we had our own auditorium, but we would sometimes do a matinee show here. I did The Importance of Being Earnest here, and Chicago.”
“You were in Chicago?” she laughed. Chicago was a famous Broadway musical that became a hit feature film starring Richard Gere, Renee Zelwegger and Catherine Zeta Jones.
“Yeah,” I laughed back.
“Please tell me you were not Billy Flynn,” she said. She referred to Gere’s character, a flashy, sleazy lawyer who manipulated both the media and the legal system to get his guilty client off a murder charge. I winked and smiled.
“Oh, my gosh,” she rolled her eyes, and then she launched into the character’s sensuous theme song. “We... want…. Bi-llly…”
She suggestively rubbed her back against me as she sang the rest of the lyrics. I was laughing right as Marvin approached us.
He cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow when he saw us. “Am I interrupting something?”
Marvin Ioakava was an intimidating man that looked and acted like he was in his sixties, although his online bio put him in his eighties. He had a full head of white hair, and wore a flashy three piece suit in bright purple, with white wing tipped shoes peeking out from under his overpriced pant legs. Tonight as always, he was not without his signature custom designed blue tinted glasses, both indoors and outdoors.
Vicki and I both laughed as we straightened and greeted our host.
“Hi, Marvin,” I said and offered my hand. “Good to see you.”
He smiled and shook it. “By all means, don’t stop on my account. Get your kicks while you can, is my philosophy.”
Vicki and I both blushed and laughed. “Thank you for inviting us,” Vicki regained her composure and offered her hand.
“It was my pleasure,” Marvin shook her hand. “This is a big publicity event for Starbright Media. I’m glad you could be part of what it is we’re doing here.”
“Is it really that big of a publicity campaign?” I said. “I didn’t realize that Ghoti was that much of a group.”
“No,” he smiled. “It’s not. They’re a small performing arts group out of Brooklyn. But, one of the women is originally from Sedona, and she called the Arts League to book a filler date on their tour. Starbright, on the other hand, is updating a lot of equipment, and we need to increase revenue to cover the cost. So, it all came at the right time. We took a small act that is dying for this kind of publicity, and we’re bilking the shit out of it.”
“How are you making that much money off of this?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “A few ways. First of all, we’re running this as a paid event on all our websites. We’ve been teasing it for weeks, we’ve even created a competing price war between some of our websites and paid channels, and done exclusive packages. We’ve done feature interviews and behind the scenes clips online and sold ad space on it. We’ve made them enough of a local sensation that we can now run competing features in our print publications, and sell premium ad space on it. It’s all a media game. All we needed was one small group that wanted to play. And we’ve made a lot of money on this so far.”
“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 h
igh 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 mermaids floating through a blue ocean explained that the human species evolved from fish. The screen flashed images of Paleozoic-Cambrien era trilobites and ameobas and then a speedy montage took the viewer through the stages of evolution from prehistoric and eventually to modern man.
“But,” the film’s voiceover continued, “We are all fish that have adapted to our surroundings. We have acclimated to the ever-increasing demands of the modern world.”
The film’s view sped through computer circuitry and ended with a mashup of the busy streets of the world’s large cities.
“We, and we alone, carry the genetic code to survive as the dominant species of the planet,” the film explained. “We have adapted to survive famine, floods, and even biological warfare. We have learned to harvest the power of nature to bend to our needs. We have even broken apart the very atoms and proteins that make us human.”
A DNA helix rotated into a lab where researchers in white coats peered into microscopes.
“We have put on these human cloaks to disguise our true nature and survive in a world that is often dangerous and risky,” the voice over continued.
A frowning animated man was surrounded by angry faces, then a desk appeared, and piles of paper stacked up, and more angry, scowling figures pointed fingers at the man. The man was still frowning and then beads of perspiration popped up on his forehead. His brow furrowed into a sad, overwhelmed expression.
Then, a silver suit of armor popped up, and piece by piece the man was covered by the suit. Once in full armor, the man pulled out a sword and slashed the paper until it disappeared in a puff of smoke. Then, he used the sword to turn the scowls around him into smiles, and then a fake sitcom laugh track played. The knight raised his sword in victory.
“So many of us are overwhelmed by the demands of our lives,” the narrator said, “that we develop armor around us to get through each day. We are unable to feel, and we live a fake existence.”
The hollow laugh track played again. I started to feel like I was watching a Scientology promo video.
“We struggle to remember what it is like to truly be human,” the narrator said.
The animated knight reappeared. His suit of armor fell off, and then his form regressed through the stages of evolution and settled on a disgusting Cambrian period trilobite one eyed lobster thing.
“A fish,” the narrator declared. But on the screen the word appeared, “Ghoti.”
“A fish so caught up in the mores and rituals of invented social norms and expectations, we can’t even recognize our own species,” the voiceover moved to a preaching tone, and the screen broke down the group’s name into the unconventional spelling rules.
The screen switched to the stage view, and the performers trotted out in blue unitards. There were five performers, four women and one very muscular hulk of a man. For a while, they danced around the stage to upbeat music I took to be the ‘modern world every day’ soundtrack. While in their modern world period, they did some rather impressive contortionist acrobat moves.
Then, came the time, everyone was waiting for. Or at least I was.
They were ready to shed their modern shells to revert to their naked fish life. They all curled into fetal positions, and one by one, each underwent a “rebirth,” by uncurling to a standing position.
I didn’t quite get how standing played into the whole fish theme, but maybe it was more logistical than artistic. If they were flopping about on the stage, it would be difficult to see them. But whatever, as they stood, they ceremoniously shed their exoskeletal shell of clothing.
Finally, they all stood naked in front of the audience, with the man front and center. Yes, he was definitely a man. And with a shout, the hulk of a man yelled with a Mel Gibson gusto, “Freedom!”
The audience rose in a standing ovation, and I just rubbed my face and turned to Vicki, who was hiding her smirk. Then, to a swelling Braveheart-esque soundtrack, the dancers danced their dance of freedom, flailing genitals, flopping boobs and all. And it was not sexy. Not sexy at all.
They performed like this for the next hour, different incarnations of the group. The program spelled out the scenes and their interpretations, but they started to lose meaning after a while.
There was some trotting through a field, against a CGI backdrop of wildflowers and waterfalls, and then there were some butterfly wings, and they did a butterfly dance or something. But, I thought they were fish?
Then it descended into this Alice in Wonderland psychedelic acid trip, and they were all flowers, and there were some lighting effects and thunder and maniacal laughter on the soundtrack.
Finally, the last scene of the show, the whole group laid on this bed, against a backgroup of an opulent castle, and it looked like they were all going to have sex. Then I think there was a nuclear bomb explosion, and they all died. I wasn’t sad.
The house lights came back up, and I cleared my throat and looked at Vicki, whose barely restrained smirk told me everything.
“Well, that was something,” I remarked.
“I thought it was cool, man,” Landon said. “It’s all about how humankind has been corrupted throughout the ages by greed and money, and how we can take back our power as people.”
AJ nodded slowly. “I like that. A historical perspective.”
“Totally,” Landon replied.
I rolled my eyes. AJ was a different person when Landon was around. “How long are you staying, Landon?”
“Just until the beginning of June,” he said. “I’ll go back for the first summer term.”
Marvin texted me. Up for a meet and greet with the cast?
I showed the text to Vicki. “You want to meet the cast?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“You guys want to come and meet the cast?” I asked AJ and Landon.
They looked at each other and shrugged. “Cool, man,” Landon responded.
We all filed downstairs and made our way through the exiting crowds to the front of
the auditorium. This took some time, as we were stopped a couple of times along the way by various people we had met in the past eight months. Finally, we made it to the security checkpoint, where they handed us backstage passes on lanyards.
We slipped through the secure area, and a golf cart met us and took us through a concrete hallway. We reached the backstage area, where Marvin, and a few crew members stood around talking. The going conversation seemed to be the green paint spill on the ground that a janitor was cleaning up.
“Hey, Henry,” he greeted me warmly, “And Vicki, good to see you guys again.”
“Hey, Marvin. Thanks again for the invite. This is AJ,” I said, “And Landon.”
They shook hands with Marvin, and Landon’s face was white like he would pass out.
“Let me let you meet the cast, follow me,” Marvin said. We followed him through a hall. Landon turned to me and whispered. “That’s Marvin Iakova!”
I smiled and winked.
“Holy shit,” he whispered and clasped his hands over his head in shock, and he even stepped backwards a few steps. AJ snickered, and he looked at her wide eyed.
“When did--” he stammered. “Okay, it’s all good. It’s all good.”
We all laughed out loud, and Marvin turned and looked at us quizzically.
“So, Landon’s in art school in Chicago,” I told Marvin.
Marvin smiled and nodded approvingly at Landon. “Is that right?”
“Well, just, uh, yeah, graphic design,” Landon stammered.
“Good for you,” Marvin told him. “What do you want to do with that when you get out?”
“I freelanced for a while,” he said. “Thought I’d find somewhere with steady work after graduation.”
Marvin nodded. “Well, we definitely have need of good graphic designers at Starbright. When you’re ready for an internship, let Henry know. I’ll see what we’ve got open.”
Landon’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head. “Absolutely,” he said.
Marvin smiled and continued to duck his head in doorways looking for the cast. Meanwhile, Landon turned to AJ and whispered, “This is it. This is my invitation into the Illuminati.”
