The theater was gradually filling up and the house manager still hadn’t come back with a message for me. I finally got up and went looking for him, entering the plush lobby just as the lights blinked their five-minute curtain warning. When I found him, he was behind a counter, busy passing out hearing-aid equipment to a group of blue-haired little old ladies. I waited in line impatiently until he finished with the LOLs.
“Remember me?” I asked when I finally reached the counter.
“Of course I remember you, Mr. Beaumont. I took your message backstage, but they’re all up to their eyeballs right now. They said they’d try to see you during intermission, after the show, or tomorrow sometime.”
They could stall me, they could put me off, but they wouldn’t get rid of me. “I’ll try intermission,” I told him, but he didn’t hear me. He was already turned to the next person in line and was reaching down to lift the equipment to the counter.
I hurried back to my seat. To my surprise, the cavernous theater was only a little over half full, but the audience was far different from what I expected. Dan Osgood’s and the bio’s descriptions of Jasmine Day as a rock-star-gone-pop had led me to believe I’d be rubbing shoulders with black-clad, spike-haired, rock-loving punks. Instead, I found myself seated among well-dressed, lavender-haired ladies, some of them escorted by dutiful but mostly bored husbands, with nary a black leather jacket in sight.
The curtain was just going up as I sat down. The opening act was an impressionist who billed himself as PeeWee Latham. He did a creditable job of imitating all the presidents from FDR to Reagan. His material was good enough to tickle the funny bones and occupy the interest of his over-the-hill audience, but when he started wandering through Hollywood personalities, he lost me. Sitting still in the warm theater combined with my loss of sleep to put me under. I faded into a nodding stupor.
I was too far gone to force myself awake as applause escorted PeeWee off the stage. I continued to doze, dimly aware that the orchestra I couldn’t see had struck up an enthusiastic overture. The music was a comfortable mixture, made up of bits and snatches of old, familiar tunes. It lulled me further down into my restful slumber.
A crash of cymbals at the end of the overture made my eyes snap open abruptly.
Around me, the theater was completely dark, with only the green exit signs glowing dimly near the doors. Suddenly, a splash of blinding spotlight illuminated the center of the stage.
The cityscape scrim I had seen earlier in the day covered the stage, and in front of it, captured in a brilliant circle of spotlight, stood a woman with her back to the audience, a woman in a long satin, nearly backless, dress. A vivid, vibrantly blue, dynamite dress.
Long blonde hair fell in casual ripples across bare shoulders. She stood there in a provocative, sway-hipped stance, her body undulating gently in tune to the music. A microphone was cradled lightly in one hand, and her arms hung loosely at her sides.
She was wearing gloves—long, white gloves that ended well above her elbows. One slim, well-formed leg was thrust out from a long slit up the side of the satin skirt, and her toes were tapping in time to the beat. She was wearing heels, incredibly high, shiny black spike heels.
Jasmine Day had yet to turn to face her audience, but already I, along with every other red-blooded male in the audience, grasped that she was a very beautiful woman. There was an almost palpable sucking in of middle-aged paunches and a visible straightening of shoulders as the men in the audience came to full attention.
The orchestra’s introduction ended. With cat-like grace, Jasmine Day swung around to face us, her motions fluid and easy. Raising the microphone to her lips, she began a sultry rendition of Frank Sinatra’s hit “My Way.” She sang with the mike almost against her lips, yet there was no fuzzing of the consonants. Her voice had a bell-like clarity and a resonance that made every word, every syllable fully understandable, even in that cavernous auditorium.
As she sang, the mane of her blonde hair framed her face, shifting and shimmering under the stage lights. Her eyes, a wide, opaque blue, never seemed to blink. The dress, a wonder of engineering, clung to every curve of her body, with no visible means of support except those shapely curves themselves. I was close enough to the stage to note that the golden tan on her legs was smooth, bare skin, not nylon. There was no hint of panty line under the sleek material of her dress.
She stood on the stage with her legs spread as far as the taut material of her skirt allowed, belting out the song as though her very life depended on it, pouring herself into the music until she and it were one. When that song finished, it was as though the audience had been holding its collective breath. Around me people broke into ecstatic applause. This was the kind of music they had paid good money to hear, and Jasmine Day was giving them their money’s worth.