Authors: K.T. Hastings
“Kneel Before You” was almost six minutes long. By the time it was over,
Brandee
was ready to kick the slats out of the place again. They rocked the joint with “Your Ass is Mine”, getting the crowd back on its feet. Brandee ventured into the crowd for the first time in almost 45 minutes during “Your Ass is Mine”, allowing some of the crowd to touch her green with black tiger-striped mid-calf dress that was new for tonight. She had ordered it from Pizzazzwear when they had left California and it had just caught up with her in Grand Junction. The crowd fondled her as she moved through them, showing her the love that she craved.
Next on the list that
Brandee
had compiled for tonight was “Granite Heart”, a country ballad that gave Brandee a chance to show off the yodel that was becoming renowned among those who followed the group. The feedback that they received from critics and fans alike about the CDs they sold often mentioned the country yodel that they had included in the disk. It wasn't Brandee's favorite part of the show, but if that's what turned on the crowd, that's what she would give them.
The second half of the show went off without a hitch. “I Will Always Love You” got a tremendous response, and made Brandee decide that, in the future, they would use that for the wind machine song even on the nights that they sang a shorter set. “Kneel Before You” could be interspersed in other places and used in the longer sets.
For their two encores, the group played a reprise of “Honky Tonk Broad”, as had become their custom, and a shortened version of “Voracious Little Girl”, their closing number. There were isolated calls from the crowd for another round of “Bad Girl in Town”, but Brandee didn't have the voice left to go through that again. Bruce raised his eyebrows at her once, asking her if she was game for it, but she ignored him.
***
The group was tired by the time they went backstage for the last time. They had grown accustomed to playing sets that lasted 30-45 minutes. Tonight, they had been onstage for almost 2 hours by the time they had gotten through both of their encores. They were pleased with how the night had gone, and were ready for some food and a chance to unwind. They didn't count on a visitor.
Just before they got to the door of the dressing room, behind which they would find a light snack and a little solitude, they spotted a commotion ahead. Someone was trying to get past the one security guard that The Opera House had offered up for the show. He was gamely holding the person off, but he was being defeated by someone half his age, a third his weight, and twice as determined.
The determined fan broke out of the security guard's grasp and ran to the group, skidding to a stop in front of them. Jake grasped the fan's upper arm, concerned about the safety of the group, particularly the female members
.
Jake realized that he was holding on to a young lady, no more than a girl really. She was 20 years old or so, tops. She had shaggy dark brown hair that hung a little below her shoulder blades. The feature that he noticed first though was her eyes. They were dark brown, almost the color of dark chocolate, but it wasn't the color that Jake noticed. It was the fiery determination in them. She obviously thought that Jake was nothing more than some roadie, hired on to keep her from getting where she wanted to go.
“Whoa there, young one." Jake said, still trying to keep a grip on the writhing young woman.
“Let me go, asshole!” she said, twisting and turning in her efforts to be released from Jake's grasp. She almost escaped before Bruce stepped in to give Jake a hand. She relaxed visibly when she saw the keyboardist.
“Bruce!” she said. “Bruce Jackson. You were really hot tonight.”
“Thanks honey,” Bruce said, smoothly exchanging Jake's hold on the young lady for his own grip.
The young fan looked past Jake, her eyes finding the prize that she sought.
“Brandee! Oh Brandee! Ohohohohoh Brandee!” she stammered, one word climbing over the other. “Please can I come inside and talk to you, just for a minute?”
The members of the group looked at each other. They were tired and ready to get into the dressing room and sit down with their feet up on a footstool. They had never set up an exact protocol for having fans in the dressing room. Frankly, they had never imagined that it would be an issue. They were hardly renowned enough to have groupies and they always assumed there would be time enough to figure something out by the time they did. Brandee spoke up.
“Sure. Come on in for a minute if you want.”
Brandee was always a little more magnanimous after a good concert than she was any other time. Performing gave her a high and she was friends with the world if things had gone well onstage. She thought to herself,
Why not give the girl a thrill? What could it hurt?
Jake thanked the wheezing security guard for his attempts to help. The guard readily left the group to themselves and their fan, remembering that he was needed for traffic control leaving The Opera House.
***
The young fan had two objectives in mind. Her first one had been accomplished. She had wanted to talk to Brandee Evans. This wasn't the first time that she had seen the group in concert, but it was the first time that crowd control had been so lax. She had decided by 20 minutes into the show that she was going to try to get backstage.
The second objective had to do with what she was carrying in her bag, but for now, she examined her surroundings. She had never been in a performer's dressing area before. The Opera House had separated cubicles for the performers to change in and out of costume in relative privacy. There was a performance mirror above the dressing table in the area where Brandee prepared herself for the stage. There was a small refrigerator, and an overstuffed chair with an ottoman.
However, the enterprising young fan wouldn't have cared if there had only been a bare bulb with a No-Pest Strip hanging off of it. She had come to see the person she most admired in the world, Brandee Reneé Evans!
Janelle Kelly had been at the concert in Laramie the night before. Up until this moment in the dressing room, the high moment in her life had happened at that concert. She was the lucky fan who had caught Brandee's damp towel. She knew that her friends would say it was lame and stupid to do so, but she had slept with that towel the previous night in Laramie. Tonight, she was going to try to get Brandee to autograph that towel with the indelible black fabric marker that she had brought from home.
Brandee asked Janelle her name and how old she was. The singer was flattered that Janelle had driven from Laramie just to hear her in concert 2 nights in a row. After a few minutes, when Janelle produced the towel, Brandee laughed and said that certainly she would be glad to sign her name on it. The two of them stretched the towel out on the dressing table so that Brandee's flowery signature, something that she had been working on since she was 12 years old, would be visible on the white towel.
Brandee found out during their time in the dressing room that Janelle Kelly was 19 years old. She lived in Laramie but didn't attend the University of Wyoming. She was in her first year at Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington, Wyoming. She had vague intentions to become a cosmetologist but didn't really know for sure what she wanted to do with her life.
Brandee took to the younger girl instantly. Maybe it was the way that she was both driven and at loose ends at the same time. It reminded Brandee a lot of how she had felt during the days after her father had passed away. She had known that she wanted to do something onstage, but couldn't seem to find a way to make that happen for herself as soon as she wanted it to. She reached over and brushed a piece of Janelle's hair that had gotten in her eyes. Janelle kept flipping her hair back, but this one strand seemed unwilling to be tamed.
This girl is like that strand of hair
, Brandee thought to herself.
***
Janelle Maranda Kelly was born June 24, 1993 in Florence, Oregon to Terry and Connie Kelly. Her father had been a forestry worker in the rainforest near the Oregon Coast. Janelle's mother was a waitress when Janelle was young, later becoming a desk clerk at The Pier Point Inn, a motel just south of town. Her father was too old to be in the woods any longer, and had taken a job in the local Ace Hardware.
Terry and Connie Kelly had one more child, two years after Janelle was born. It was another girl, whom they named Francine. They had visions that Janelle and Francine would grow up to be fast friends: sharing secrets, clothes and makeup, but it was not to be. From the time Francine could walk, Janelle couldn't stand her. It didn't help that Francine was pretty. She was blonde-haired and blue-eyed while Janelle had hair the color of mud and what she called “stupidly big eyes”. Francine developed friendships, boyfriends, and breasts when Janelle still had none of the above, even though Janelle was two years older. Francine was, Janelle believed, a stuck-up bitch. Her presence in the family only made Janelle that much harder to raise.
To say that Janelle was hard to raise would have perhaps been the greatest understatement of all time. Both in and out of school, Janelle always found herself in trouble. She had done time at Burlingame reform school in Eugene, Oregon by the time she was ten years old after she was caught shoplifting at The Piggly Wiggly near her house for the fourth time. Having served 90 days in reform school, Janelle decided that she needed to change her ways, but she had no intention of becoming a law-abiding citizen. She simply needed to change her methods to avoid getting caught as often.
She learned to get others to do her dirty work for her. By the time she was 12, she was talking boys into putting packs of cigarettes in their pockets for her when they stole their own. She accomplished this by becoming the only girl in her class at West Lane Junior High School to regularly give guys hand jobs through their pants during the lunch hour at school.
Janelle graduated from Siuslaw High School in Florence one week before her 19
th
birthday, something that she only managed to accomplish by cheating on her Algebra final. She had missed a year because of another stint in Burlingame, this time for boosting her neighbor's dune buggy and crashing it on the dunes at the South Jetty. Her neighbor sued Terry Kelly for the cost of the dune buggy when it was new and was also awarded $5000 punitive damages for failure to control his offspring. When graduation day finally arrived, Terry and Connie told Janelle that as of her birthday, she would no longer be welcome in their home unless she was paying rent.
They arranged for her to move to Wyoming and live with Connie's sister, Sarah. Terry agreed to pay Sarah $400 a month for two years if she would take Janelle off his hands. Three days before her birthday, Janelle boarded the North Coast Stage Lines, a bus service that would connect with a Greyhound in Portland that would eventually take her to Cheyenne.
Janelle knocked around Cheyenne aimlessly for the better part of a year, narrowly escaping another brush with the law when she stole a bottle of tequila from a state liquor store. She passed the time by experimenting with her own sexuality.
In truth, Janelle was ambivalent about sex, seeing it as a means to an end. She figured that if she could get guys to do things for her by doing things to them, why wouldn't the same thing work for women? So, she decided that she was bisexual and began frequenting gay bars. She did this secretly at first, knowing that eastern Wyoming wasn't the most gay-friendly place. The area was still infamous for an incident that involved a gay guy who had been strapped to a fence and left there to die. She didn't want to die, but she saw other women as a handy revenue stream. After all, gas was expensive. She just wanted what she could get and didn't care which gender she needed to do to get it.
Soon, she became a little more open about her professed bisexuality. She began to delight in the reaction that she got when she French kissed a woman on the street corner. The sex act itself was still not a big deal to her. Being outrageous, though, was.
Her aunt Sarah was appalled. When she had agreed to take her niece, she thought it would be a way to get to know her sister's daughter a bit, and also a way to bring in some extra cash. When her house became a regular destination for cowboys to drive by in their pickups and yell “LEZBO!” she knew that she had seen enough. She gave Janelle a choice. Get a job or go to school, whichever she chose, but do it out of town. When she finished her speech to Janelle by saying, “Why can't you be more like your sister?” Janelle told her to shove it up her ass.
For the second time in as many years, Janelle had to find somewhere to go. She heard there was grant and student loan money available to her if she would take some courses in cosmetology at Eastern Wyoming Community College, so that's what she did.
She supposed that she liked EWCC well enough. The classes were fairly easy for her, despite the fact that she only attended them about 60% of the time. The liquor and weed flowed pretty easily through campus, and Janelle found that there was a drunk or a high available to her almost any weekend night and most weeknights too.
She found college to be tolerant sexually as well. It was during her year in Torrington that Janelle had her first experience in a group sexual activity. She and a couple of her friends, one male and one female, had gotten high on a Saturday night. A convivial good time took a turn for the amorous when Janelle would take a bong hit and then blow the smoke first into the girl’s mouth, and then the boy's. The other two participants would then share the bounty that they had received from Janelle with each other. Soon, the three were wrapped in each other's naked bodies. Janelle found that she enjoyed a man having sex with her more if she was giving a woman pleasure with her mouth at the same time. Before long Janelle adopted an attitude that said, “The more the merrier.” She guessed that this life that society would consider self-absorbed debauchery suited her just fine. It was during this time, though, that Janelle found the only thing beyond herself that started to make any sense.
Janelle had no formal religious training. Where Brandee's family had been nominal Christians at best, Janelle was left to fend for herself to find deeper meaning or a higher power. It was during the winter term at Torrington that she discovered mysticism in a book on Eastern religion that she was browsing in a store that sold used books. Janelle Kelly went from aimless slacker to Mystic to be, almost overnight.
Mysticism, referred to as Spirituality in the Orthodox Catholic Church, refers to beliefs and practices that go beyond the liturgical and devotional forms of worship of mainstream faith, often by seeking out inner meanings of conventional religious doctrine, and by engaging in spiritual practices such as breathing practices, prayer, contemplation and meditation, along with chanting and other activities designed to heighten spiritual awareness. Janelle was fascinated by this and wanted to learn more, so she went back to the same bookstore the next day.
Janelle had always felt like she was different from the other people around her. Things like clothes and parties that seemed to so consume the girls that she had grown up around held no particular interest for her. In mysticism, and the writings of Evelyn Underhill, she found something that mattered. Janelle Kelly had found her path to enlightenment.
Author and mystic Evelyn Underhill outlines the universal mystic way, the actual process by which the mystic arrives at union with the absolute. She identifies five stages of this process.