Different Circles

Jake and Laura arrived at the warehouse in Santa Clarita where Celia and her band were rehearsing at 8:55 AM. Jake parked his truck and they were admitted to the facility by Jamal, the day shift security guard. Things were starting to look like an actual stage production now. All of the scaffolding and lights were now assembled and mounted so they could bathe the stage in light or have individual spotlights shine down in a particular place. The stage itself was now surrounded by a wooden structure that contained a large backstage area for the crew to work unseen by the audience. And, new to a KVA associated show, there were now two large video screens—each one forty feet high by thirty feet wide—mounted on either side of the stage. High up on the scaffolding at the rear of the building were two high-definition projectors that would send images taken by a series of twelve video cameras that were positioned throughout the room, thus allowing even those in the worst seats in whatever venue they were in to see Celia and the band doing their thing during the performances.

Jake and Celia had both always been opposed to the video screens on general principles, but had changed their views over the past year. The video screens were now considered a standard part of a show where people paid more than a hundred dollars a ticket, and the biggest criticism of the Tsunami Sound Festival that Jake and Matt had participated in was that no such screens had been there and the people in the back areas had barely been able to make out the forms of the performers.

And so, KVA agreed to use the screens for both Celia’s and Matt’s tours. This decision added considerably to the total cost of tour production, which KVA was paying fifty percent of. Although National was paying for leasing of the equipment and the screens themselves, KVA had to pay half the cost of employing six camera operators, fifteen technicians to install and maintain the equipment, an additional twelve roadies to heft and mount everything, an additional truck and driver to haul everything around, and two video producers who would be responsible for deciding which images to display on which screen at which time. The big positive from all this was that Jake and Pauline had negotiated that KVA kept the rights to the video and audio recorded from both tours and could do with it what they pleased once the tour was over and the contract was fulfilled.

The screens were blank now and the techs that operated the system were not on site. Everything was in working order and had been tested, but Celia and the band were still working on the basic setup of the show currently. They had the setlist nailed down at this point, but things had taken a bit of a step backward now that they had a new bandmember who was trying to learn the tunes from scratch.

Miles O’Leary was his name—his real name, that was not a stage name—and, assuming he worked out, he was to be the saxophonist for the tour. He was a short, gangly man who was thirty-six years old. He had long, stringy brown hair, an unruly mustache and beard, and was a licensed commercial pilot who flew a Grumman G-164 Ag Cat crop dusting plane for an agricultural air company based in Colusa, California in the northern Central Valley. Playing the sax was just his side-gig, but he was very good at it. And he declared himself to be a Celia Valdez and Jake Kingsley fan.

He was kind of an odd person. He looked like a homeless transient and often smelled like one as well. He was a voracious stoner who smoked close to an eighth of marijuana every day. He shamelessly admitted to Jake, when they started talking flying with each other on their first meeting, that he never got behind the controls of his plane without smoking out first.

“Not even sure I know how to fly a plane when I’m not stoned,” he declared in his thick Irish brogue.

And he also insisted that he could not play his saxophone unless he was stoned as well. This was almost a deal breaker for KVA when they auditioned him. One of the firm, nonnegotiable rules that Jake, Celia, and even Matt enforced in their production was that no intoxicating substances would be used before a rehearsal or a performance. But, as Jake had been known to point out on an occasion or two, everything is negotiable.