And the Rainbow Hearts. Lisa Clark
me, you’ve got a very vivid imagination, those songs are written especially for you.
Every single dreamy word.
Sigh.
Which is why Sadie and I crush on Tom Tootie.
He is a full-time resident of Swoonsville. He’s not like most guitar boys, who look like they need a really good bath. He’s clean, and I bet if you were ever to meet him, he would smell of flowers and freshly mown lawns. Tom Tootie sings beautiful heart-string-pullin’ lyrics and has these piercing indigo-blue eyes that aren’t even contact lenses, they’re his real eyes and everything. Believe me when I say, Sadie and I have a totally incurable case of Tootie Cuti fever and we don’t want to ever, I repeat, ever, find a cure, thank you very much.
“Lo, Lo, this is our chance!” Sadie’s voice has gone up a whole octave as she waves her copy of Missy magazine in the air. “We could actually meet him. We could meet Tom Tootie. We could touch him, we could talk to him, we could even sniff him!”
We could?
“Look!” She taps the magazine page from where Tom Tootie and his band mates are looking out at me from. I try to read what it says, but as Sadie is jumping up and down on my bed impatiently, I can’t really read anything but I can see that it involves Tom Tootie and that makes my belly do a flip that only pretty boys can make it do.
“Miss Sades,” I say, not wishing for one minute to be a fly in any kind of expensive-looking ointment, “while I am as unbelievably excited at being in the same air-breathing space as Tom Tootie as you are, and as much as I really want to know if he does smell of flowers and freshly cut lawns, we have a problem…”
Sadie frowns.
She knows it, I know it.
We look at each other and as if we’re mind-reading sisters from psychic city, we both let out a collaborative sigh and say,
“Bella.”
“No way. Not in a million zillion, trillion years. Nu-uh. No. Nada. Not a chance,” Bella picks up her electric guitar and without plugging it in, plays an annoying noise that hurts my ears a little bit.
It appears we have been brutally re-buffed.
It was to be expected, but I just hadn’t planned on it happening quite so early on in the whole ‘Project-Win-Bella-Over-So-We-Can-Meet-Tom Tootie’ proceedings.
But Project-Win-Bella-Over-So-We-Can-Meet-Tom Tootie was set to fail from the get-go.
Why?
Because in our initial excitement at seeing the ad in Missy, we had ran straight from my house to hers—it’s next door, so there wasn’t a whole lot of physical exertion involved—and just blurted out the need for the Pink Ladies to make a demo so we could meet Tom Tootie.
This was a huge faux pas. Y’see, Bella takes her music making VERY seriously. She wants to be the next Joan Jett. (JJ was this really cool guitar girl in the seventies and in the same way that I take props from retro film girls, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, Bella’s inspir-o girl is guitar goddess, Joan Jett): Now, in times of crisis or self-doubt, the Pink Ladies each have an inspiro-girl to who they utter the immortal words:
“What would____________(insert name of inspir-o girl here) do?”
Well it turns out that Joan Jett would not perform at a Missy gig. She would not want to meet what Bella terms as a ‘boyband’ and apparently, under no circumstances, would Joan Jett want to meet Tom Tootie either. Right now, Joan Jett is not my kinda girl.
Sadie and I pull our best glum-girl faces, complete with jutting bottom lips and everything, in the hope that it will be enough to change her mind. But we should never underestimate The Bella. She’s a tough cookie. She has a super-mellow-yellow side, that’s thanks to her yoga-dad who, as his title might suggest, is a bendy wendy yogini guru. But there is no denying that Bella is every inch the punk rock princess she claims to be. Today for example, her look says it all. She is working a must-have rock girl snarl painted with a thick slick of Gwen Stefani red lipstick and is wearing a Sadie-made tutu with big chunky black boots and a Care Bear t-shirt. Let’s face it, a girl this cool was never going to agree to Tom Tootie Time, was she?
I almost kick myself at not taking time out to really think this through, but I didn’t, ‘coz that would hurt. Sadie, seeing that Bella is not planning to budge on her decision anytime soon, resigns herself to a future filled with No-Tom-Tootie-Time and sulks. As in legs crossed, arms folded, real-life sulking.
This is a first.
Sadie is usually a total ball of fun-filled energy and fabulousness, no matter what. But it seems that everyone, including Sweet Sadie, has something that makes them glum. I have to admit that I too was feeling a li’l un-pink, but despite suffering from Tom Tootie fever too, I was actually more upset about the idea that we weren’t going to rock it up.
Hold up, I’m a pink-thinkin’ genius—that’s it! If only I had thought of this earlier, Miss Sades would not be glum and Bella would not be playing that really annoying noise that is still coming from her guitar. Y’see, since our one-night-only appearance as The Pink Ladies, Bella has had big plans for a girl-rock revolution.
Which we would front, natch.
Now Sadie and Bella used to be in a band with Jo-Jo, a Japanese version of Emily Strange. She was a bit scary-looking because her punk-girl snarl was a permanent one. Her family run a yummy-scrummy Japanese restaurant in town and they made her give up the band to work in the shop with them in her spare time. Bella kept threatening to bust her out under the cover of darkness, but every time we went to eat there, Jo-Jo seemed so un-snarly and nearly even happy, that Bella decided against it. But Jo-Jo’s departure left a guitar-shaped space in the band, and Bella says that if I keep practicing, she really thinks I could fill it. I am all about rocking out. I love it, in fact, I plan on getting so good I get to do a really screechy guitar solo—that’s the stuff of my pink-tinted dreams.
“Bell, can you stop a minute, please?” I ask, trying to make it sound like a simple request and not a desperate plea from the noise police. Surprisingly, she does.
“If it’s about meeting your boyband Lo, I don’t want to hear it.”
Oh.
“No, it’s not,” I lie, only a teeny weeny li’l white one. “I do want to talk about the band though, our band.”
Bella puts her guitar down. Ok, she means business. I better make this good. “So, sock it to me, kiddo,” She’s American-o, she says crazy things like that all the time.
“I L-O-V-E being on stage, Bell,” I tell her, channelling the very best persuasive Marilyn Monroe to help me deliver a prize-winning performance. “I know we’ve only done it once, but I loved looking out at the audience and seeing people clapping and cheering, I loved making a pretty noise with my guitar, but most of all I had loved looking across the stage and seeing my BFFs.” I paused. She seemed to be listening. “I remember thinking this is where I belong. Not necessarily on stage, although being on stage is a total high-energy buzz, no, I mean, three girls of total and utter amazingness—each totally different but when put together, make the perfect team. We rock, right?”
Sadie leaps to her feet and whoops in agreement coming over to hug us both but Bella stares right at me, her big eyes fix my gaze and I know she’s checking me out for fibs but that’s okay, there’s nothing to read because I actually really mean it.
“Right?” I ask again looking for confirmation.
Bella purses her lips and moves them from side to side as she thinks.
“I guess it would be good practice for you,” she ponders.
“Exactly!”