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Rainbowland IV -- A Step Beyond The Rain or “I’m In Love With The Girl In The Yellow Dress”
A fantasy that takes place somewhere over the rainbow, in one of many possible realities involving Katharine McPhee, her McPhamily, McPhriends and McPhans
I was in a bar in San Jose, feeling like hell and looking for trouble. I’d left all my good will and most of my brain back home in Sherman Oaks, and with the aid of my buddy Tommy Lowengard, who, as luck would have it, owned a Piper Cherokee, flew north to see if I could get rid of the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach by, oh, maybe killing something.
Not really. I was just in an absolutely rotten mood and it was not made any better by having Tommy kick in his new satellite radio, which immediately picked up Jackie O’Hanlon singing Waiting There For Me. “I guess it didn’t have to be a ‘boy’s year’ this year,” I said. “It was okay for a girl to win Idol. They even wrote her a better song than they did Katharine.”
“Well, it could be worse,” Tommy said. “Remember those rumors that she was going to sing Over The Rainbow because Eva Avila had done so well singing a lot of the same songs that Katharine did?”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “That would be the last straw.”
American Idol 6 had been a crap shoot toward the end and eerily reminiscent of the previous year, with strong representatives of jazz, R&B, country, pop, rock, and just about every genre you could think of. Paula had been equally dotty over Hussein Al Khoury, a New Yorker of Lebanese descent who despite his heritage had the sympathy vote because he’d just recovered from cancer; rockin’ Rocky Sales, called Leather Man by Katharine, who looked like Chris Daughtry with hair; and Travis Bettford, this year’s funky white boy. Randy had taken a strange liking to Addy Lincoln, an eerie blend of every blonde country chick who had ever made it into the top ten for the past five years.
Simon had been unable to hide his fondness for Jackie-O, as the eventual winner had been dubbed early on. She had won my suspicion early on by auditioning with Since I Fell For You and singing it note-for-note just like Katharine, after which Paula had actually done an instant replay of the previous year and kissed her right on the lips. Simon, however, totally refused, and the world was spared hundreds of fan videos, not to mention the inevitable comparisons. To make it even worse, her father, who had spent 40 years working in a car dealership in Muncie, Indiana, sat in the audience honking into a large red checked kerchief every time she sang. He had been instantly dubbed Daddy-O, but the O’Hanlons’ working-class background seemed to work in their favor, as did the fact that Jackie’s mother had died when she was ten, leaving her to help raise her two younger brothers. Having been semi-orphaned close to that age myself, I felt extremely guilty at the realization of how much sympathy her story could garner, even from me.
Jackie was a gorgeous 20-year-old redhead whose voice reminded a lot of people of Streisand’s, but her stage manner was instantly compared to Katharine’s. She loved to wear clinging low-cut gowns and knew how to make the camera a slave to her enormous blue eyes, and she sang her way into the Top Three with a jazzy rendition of Cry Me A River that nearly made me cry. I loved that song and had always wished Katharine would perform it, so my reaction made me feel almost like a traitor. Simon practically handed her the crown by assigning her Unchained Melody, which she sang in such a hauntingly beautiful fashion that America eventually squeaked her past Travis Bettford’s best effort of the year, a very well done cover of What A Fool Believes.
“If Katharine had been born in a little teeny town up on the Oregon border and worked her way through BoCo as a pizza waitress, she’d probably have won last year,” I crabbed to no one in particular. Tommy made vaguely supportive noises but generally didn’t say much for most of the trip.
As the flashing multicolor sign welcomed us into Toons, I could hear Ashton Shepard singing and my guts started tying themselves into knots. He was becoming a big enough name that he didn’t really need to play places like this, but it was his hometown and he’d gotten his start here, so he liked to come back and help them out, or just drop in and jam with whoever happened to be providing music at the moment. Nobody minded. Nobody but me. I wanted to march up to the front and smash his face in, but that was just because Katharine was sitting somewhere up front and I was pretty sure she’d be paying close attention to whatever he was doing, probably smiling at him and nursing a drink and—that was about as far as I could take it before smoke started rolling out of my ears.
“Hey, Buddy, how about we just stay out here,” Tommy said. “Get a Coke. You might want to think a little, know what I’m sayin’?”
Tommy thought I was totally nuts to have come chasing all the way up here to torment myself, but he had a wild, edgy streak in him that couldn’t resist a bit of danger now and then, so instead of trying to talk me out of it, he’d simply watched as I talked myself into it, then offered me transportation. Tommy could have been a clone of Al Lowengard, my boss, but aside from the obvious, I’d never seen a shred of similarity between the two of them. His dad would never have let me get this far, but Tommy wasn’t his dad.
“God, this place is such a hick joint,” said a voice at my elbow. A man looking very out of place in a suit pushed an orange-colored drink away from himself and made a disgusted face. “I guess they serve so much beer they haven’t a clue how to make a mixed drink. You want it?”
“No,” I said, then reached for the glass and took a huge swig. It tasted pretty good. “What’s this, a stinger?”
“You can call it that if you want to,” the guy said. “I’m gonna call it a night.”
Then he was gone, and I was left with his drink, which didn’t taste insufficient to me at all. It tasted damn good.
“You sure you want to do that?” Tommy asked.
I was wearing a cap and sunglasses, which I suppose I thought of as some kind of disguise, but I stuck the glasses in my shirt pocket. “I’m not sure of anything except that—oh hell, I suppose I’m going in there and torture myself a little bit more.”
“You know what vodka does to you,” Tommy said.
“You know what the thought of Katharine flirting with that whey-faced little pansy does to me?”
“Half a drink and you’re belligerent as a damn hornet,” Tommy said, curling up his lip. “You better think.”
“All roads lead to American Damn Idol,” I muttered, finishing the stinger. I took a deep breath and wished I hadn’t, because the cigarette smoke was bad even in the relative safety of the nearly empty bar area. “I’m goin’ in.”
“You sound like a fighter pilot getting ready to dive,” Tommy said.
“Just watch me,” I said. I pushed through the crowd and got there just as Shepard was finishing a song. I hated his music. I hated him. Months ago he’d gotten a lot of mileage out of publicly stating that he’d like to date Katharine, but it had all come to a halt when she didn’t reciprocate. He’d looked a little silly but recovered. Then somewhere along the way things had changed.
“I’d just like to say something I should have said before,” he said, smiling stupidly toward the front row of tables. “That song was for the beautiful young lady sitting right over there.” He nodded toward Katharine’s table but stopped short of naming her. She was turned sideways to me. Enough that I could see her returning his smile.
Maybe if he’d just gone backstage, or anywhere except to Katharine’s table, nothing would have happened. But he came down and sat by her. Leaned toward her and engaged her in conversation. And she was still smiling. Maybe if she just hadn’t been smiling…
I pushed past people until I was standing across the table from him. The idiot was still right in her face, trying to ingratiate himself with her. I’d fix that soon enough. “Hi,” I said. “You probably don’t know me, or maybe you do, who knows, the damn paparazzi go after everybody these days, but anyway, my name’s Chris McDonald, and if you don’t move your sorry ass away from this table, I’ll move it for you.”
“Oh my GOD,” Katharine said, standing up and deliberately placing herself between us. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’ll bet you detoured through the bar, didn’t you?”
Shepard insinuated himself between us. “Let’s not have any trouble now,” he said.
The mere sound of his voice irritated me beyond belief. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” I said, and before I was aware of what I was doing, my fist started straight for his jaw.
*****************
A day late and a dollar short--that was me and current pop culture, most of the time. Sometimes I thought if it wasn’t for my son constantly telling me how behind the times I was, I wouldn’t have an inkling of what people my age, or slightly younger, were “supposed” to like. My penchant for becoming emotionally involved with older women, which I attributed to my post-collegiate need to associate with ladies whose parents couldn’t dictate their most important life choices, didn’t help much in that regard either. The few nights I’d watched American Idol 4 with Katharine were like a revelation, and even then I couldn’t get it right. I’d been convinced Bo Bice was going to take it all. Not that I wanted him to, I didn’t really care, I just thought that’s what the voters would go for. Katharine got it right, though. She called it for Carrie Underwood. Not sure why, she just had a feeling.
“She’s gonna take it and run with it,” she’d said. “Something tells me she’s got the stuff to go really big.” Eyeing a third pizza slice, she’d thought better of it and instead simply sipped her Diet Pepsi. “Sometimes I think I could do that.