Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [63]
As Selina commenced a countdown, I turned my attention to the studio monitors mounted on the wall and waited for the closed captions to begin rolling.
Framed in perfect close-up, Donna was a skeleton-thin fifty-something woman with a sun-bed tan. Despite those extra layers of makeup, she wasn’t attractive, although it was hard to say why. Individually her features were perfectly fine, like she’d gone twenty rounds with a plastic surgeon, but the cumulative effect resembled one of those fractured Picasso paintings. She also made smiling seem strenuous. She probably got along really well with Selina.
She returned from the commercial break full of manufactured delight: delight that she had the best audience in the world (cue rapturous applause); delight that she was about to introduce the first live TV performance of a local band called Dumb (“Such beautiful kids,” she added, having never met us); delight that it was only a few weeks until Thanksgiving (did she seriously think most of the audience would live that long?). Just watching her made me feel profoundly intellectual.
The camera cut to Dumb, and Ed tapped four strong, steady beats on his sticks. Tash hit her opening riff aggressively, then bared her teeth like she knew the camera would be doing a close-up on her at that moment. Which it did, until she bared her teeth, at which point someone decided to switch to camera two, fixed on Kallie.
Twenty seconds into “Look What the Cat Dragged In” I was pretty sure Josh should’ve started singing. I even thought I heard him sing-screaming the opening verse, but only Kallie appeared on the monitor screen. She played with grim determination, staring at her fingers to make sure she didn’t screw up. I moved away from the monitor and approached the edge of the set.
Sure enough, Josh was in full swing—eyes closed, body rocking, head tilted to one side like he was having a seizure. Everyone except Will exuded raw energy, and the audience looked predictably shocked. I figured it’d be no more than another minute before the security guards started unpacking the defibrillators. In the meantime, the camera was locked on Kallie.
When Josh opened his eyes at the beginning of the chorus, he evidently noticed that neither camera was pointed at him, and his disgust was unmistakable. He began to drive athletically to his right, placing himself between the camera and Kallie, but as soon as he pulled off the complex move, the light above the camera went off. Suddenly the camera on the other side of the stage was fixed on Kallie instead, and Josh had even more ground to cover to get himself in frame. It didn’t seem to occur to him to stand in front of her. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested in sharing the spotlight. Either way, if his cavorting hadn’t been so ridiculously self-absorbed it would have made a fairly compelling spectator sport.
Josh needed only two more tours of the stage before he realized, like me, that Selina had crowned Kallie as the face of the band—that is, the only face of the band—and from then on he delivered each line with undiluted venom. I couldn’t tell if anyone else in the band had realized what was happening, but in any case, only Josh seemed to care. My sixth sense told me his fuse had been lit, and immediate action was required.
I found Selina in a corridor off the set, barking into her headset. When she saw me coming, she looked away to make it clear she had no intention of talking to me. I had a desperate urge to stride up and whip the stupid headset off her head, but instead settled for scrawling a brief message on a piece of paper and shoving it in front of her face: CHANGE THE CAMERA SHOT.
She spun around sharply. “No way,” she spat. “My director says that girl is the only one she wants our audience seeing. The others are punks.” I almost laughed at the way she said it, like Dumb had somehow insulted her sensibilities. (I wondered if Ed would