Chapter 12 Not Long Ago #2
She pointed toward a chart on the screen.
“If you’ve never worked on a concert before, it may seem straightforward: bring one act up, then another, and rinse and repeat until the night’s over.
Believe me, there are a lot of moving parts, especially if musicians and their teams are traveling to participate.
There’s hospitality, food and beverage, ground transportation, lodging.
We’ll have to manage crowd control before, during, and after the event, which could get crazy.
It’s a circus. Besides, we don’t want this to be a run-of-the-mill concert.
This will be a homecoming. It’s a celebration of the Artemis and its role in promoting the Detroit indie and garage sound.
It may be the last time these musicians and bands ever appear on the same bill.
And if Jerome does what we think he can do with the footage, we may have a very high-profile documentary come out of this as well.
To wrap our heads around all this, we’re going to take a fifteen-minute break, and then we’re going to play everyone’s favorite game, ‘Brain Stew!’ See you then and be sure to bring your Sharpies and Post-Its. ”
As the Function Fest folks filed out of the conference room, Jace walked around the table to where her niece was sitting, hammering away at her laptop. “Liv, are you sure you’re going to be able to do PR for us while you’re doing work for your agency clients?”
“I can wedge this project in around my billable hours for the firm, and I made sure there aren’t any conflicts of interest,” she replied, not looking up from her screen. “Besides, you remember that guy in Legal?”
“Yeah,” Jace said.
“His girlfriend doesn’t know that he asked me out. Doesn’t know yet. So let’s just say he owes me a favor. No one at the agency will find out.”
“Okay then,” Jace said. “Let me introduce you to the social media lead at the Artemis, Rennie…I’m sorry. After all this time, I don’t know your last name.”
Rennie laughed. “No worries! It’s Jackson.” They turned to Livvy with an extended hand. “But Rennie is all you need to know.”
“I’ll remember that,” Livvy said with a handshake and, to Jace’s surprise, an unguarded smile.
The rest of the day flew by. The team started with Jace’s Brain Stew exercise, a half hour of talking about anything other than the upcoming event, focusing instead on what everyone was watching, reading, listening to, fascinated by, laughing at—whatever was grabbing their attention creatively—to prime the pump for the rest of the conversation.
Next they focused on the purpose of the event and defined what success looked like for the client, for the talent, and for the audience.
With that done, they broke into groups to examine each of those areas and tease out what would make that success possible and memorable.
By the end of the afternoon, the team had a solid outline of what they planned to do in pursuit of an amazing show.
Breaking everything into smaller tasks and assigning people to complete them would happen tomorrow.
By the end of the week, Jace would be able to take Sabine through their plan, and Louis could bring his team to the Artemis for a site visit.
Right now, though, she needed dinner. Livvy did, too, and Jace knew from experience that she wouldn’t be willing to wait until she got back to her mother’s house, where she was staying.
And maybe Rennie would want to tag along, considering they had been hanging on Livvy’s every word since she arrived.
The three of them were packing up their computers for the night when Jace’s cell phone buzzed with an unfamiliar number from a 323 area code: Los Angeles.
She walked into her office, and when Rennie and Livvy appeared at the door, she gave them an OK sign to listen in.
Jace put her phone on speaker as she answered, “Hello, this is Jace Randolph.”
There were a couple seconds of hesitation. “Uh, Jace? This is Nolan Greene.”
“Hey, Nolan!” Jace said, smiling toward the phone. “Thanks so much for calling me.”
“Who’s Nolan?” Livvy whispered.
“Tex Mechs,” Rennie whispered back. “He may know where Paloma is.”
Jace mouthed “What the hell?” and put her finger to her lips.
“Jerome gave me your number,” Nolan said. “He said he was going to film this concert in Detroit for a documentary and you might need my help?”
As relieved as she was to hear that Jerome was fully on board, Jace noticed a touch of tension in Nolan’s voice that was concerning.
Had she done or said something to him years ago that lingered as a slight in his memory?
If she had, she couldn’t remember anything specific.
“Yes, Jerome is right: I’m organizing a benefit on behalf of the Artemis Club that’s taking place on September ninth here in Detroit. We’re finalizing the lineup and—”
“Thanks,” he interrupted, “but if you’re asking if I could join you, I’m sorry to say I’ll have to decline. I’m a music supervisor these days, and I’ve got a full plate until early next year.”
“Oh, well, I’m disappointed, but I certainly understand,” Jace said quickly.
“You didn’t want to book Tex Mechs, did you?” Rennie whispered to Jace from the doorway.
Jace’s eyes went wide as she mouthed, “SHH!” before looking back at her phone and steeling herself.
“There’s something else I wanted to ask you about.
We’re hoping to coax Paloma Doralle out of retirement to return to the Artemis and headline the benefit, but we haven’t been able to contact her.
I reached out to her brother, Dustin, and haven’t heard from him, so I’m—”
“Dustin passed away four years ago,” Nolan interrupted. “Cancer.”
“Oh, wow. I’m sorry to hear that; he wasn’t even fifty,” Jace said, commanding herself not to think ill of the dead, no matter how little she liked him. “Since you knew about Dustin’s passing, does that mean you’re still in contact with Paloma?”
He didn’t respond for several moments, and Jace checked her phone to see if the call had dropped. “Nolan, are you there?”
He responded with a long sigh.
Her blood ran cold. “Wait, is Paloma okay? Did something happen to her, too?”
Jace had spent the last few weeks talking about Paloma like she was an abstract concept: the magic formula for saving the Artemis and making all of Sabine’s problems go away.
But in that instant, she reverted back to full-blown mortality: the achingly beautiful artist Jace had loved like no one else, the woman no other could ever equal.
As much as Jace had hated her for leaving, she couldn’t imagine life without Paloma still walking the earth.
“Yes, I’ve stayed in touch,” Nolan said at last. “And yes, she’s fine.”
The pounding in her ears started to subside. “Oh that’s good to hear, very good.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, I’m—it’s—anyway, would you feel comfortable giving me her contact info so I can invite her to perform?”
“Actually, no.”
“Ah. I see.” She wasn’t really surprised, but disappointment pinged around in her stomach anyway.
“Then could you please give her my phone number and ask her to call or text me instead?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she started to babble, hoping he wouldn’t hang up if she kept talking.
“I think she’d want to know that the Artemis is in danger of closing for good.
That venue was where her music took off, where she found her voice, where we—where she made a lot of friends who became her chosen family.
It’s still a place for new musicians getting started, and a lot of the Detroit folks she used to play with continue to do gigs there.
If she’s able to join us, we have a real chance to keep the Artemis alive for future generations of bands and fans…
and if she can’t, I’m not sure it will survive. ”
“That may be a lot to ask,” Nolan said. “For one thing, I know that you two didn’t exactly end on the best of terms.”
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Livvy angrily whispered. With that, Jace shooed her and Rennie out of her office and took the phone off speaker.
“Look, if she doesn’t want to talk to me about this, we can work through an intermediary,” Jace said, feeling the lifeline to her past unraveling in her hands. “She can dictate the terms for publicity and performance. She never has to see me or be in the same room or—”
“Jace, she dropped out of the public eye for a lot of reasons, some of which had nothing to do with you.”
Some of the tension Jace had been feeling eased. “I know,” she said. “Her childhood wasn’t easy, and I know she struggled with self-doubt and—”
“But,” Nolan cut in, “some of the reasons had everything to do with you.”
Her words dried up in her mouth. Nolan was confirming what Jerome and all those random voices in the documentary had said, and all her old fears rushed back in: that Jace had driven Paloma away and pushed her too hard.
That she’d focused too much on making Paloma a star.
That she’d wanted Paloma to be her everything.
That Paloma’s disappearance was all her fault.
But instead of all this making her feel sad or regretful, it pissed her off.
“I wouldn’t know her reasons,” Jace said, her voice rising. “She never told me why she left. Not once in more than twenty years. How can I make things right if she won’t even agree to talk to me?”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“No, I’m sorry, Nolan. Please don’t hang up,” she said, ratcheting back her volume and squeezing her eyes shut so she wouldn’t cry.
“You barely know me, and I don’t intend to drag you into this.
All I’m asking is that you please give her my phone number and my good faith request that she help me save a piece of Detroit’s musical history, which is her history, too.
If she says no, I will never try to reach her again. Okay?”
After an agonizing moment of silence, Nolan said, “Let me think about it.”