Rhythm and Bluegrass (12 page)

I heard a thump of something breaking in the background of Sadie’s office. “Kelsey just throw something at you?” I asked.

“Post-it holder,” Sadie supplied.

On the other end of the line, I heard her take a deep breath. “Bonnie, I value your work and your contributions to the commission. But you will figure out a way to make this work. You will work with the locals. You will try to find some compromise. You will do whatever you can to convince them that this museum is the best thing that ever happened to their town. You will create the best possible outcome for this situation. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I mumbled, not bothering to mention that I’d promised something remarkably similar to Will earlier. Because I didn’t think that would improve things for me.

“Because if you don’t fix this, I am having Kelsey pull a press release from my doomsday file.”

I cringed. Sadie only pulled her prewritten, fill-in-the-public-relations-disaster press releases from the worst-possible-scenario doomsday file when she was really nervous. Her potential scenarios included “misfired cannon at state-sponsored historical reenactment,” “governor hits senior citizen in face with shovel during park groundbreaking,” and “zombie outbreak at Kentucky Derby.” This did not bode well. No KCT employee whose work had led to a doomsday file release had stayed employed.

“I’ll fix it, Sadie, I promise.”

11

In Which I Discover the Many Layers of Miss Martha

I sat in Miss Martha’s living room surrounded by Brenda’s photos, trying to arrange them into a timeline marked with dated Post-its. Despite the fact that the landmark designation was moving right along in the approval committee, it had not been a good week for me.

The sponsors who had received Will’s letter responded at every point along the spectrum from blacklisting my proposal to “We find your actions unprofessional and embarrassing—don’t contact us again. Ever.” Will had followed up his initial volley by sending copies of his anti-Bonnie letter to the state commissioner of tourism, the state parks department, and the governor’s public relations office. Needless to say, after the amount of tap dancing she’d had to do to shield me from bureaucratic wrath, Sadie was none too pleased with me. And Miss Martha still seemed to think of me as her surrogate cat.

The cat lover in question shuffled into the room, beer in hand, and glanced over my shoulder.

“Actually, honey, the Blue Notes played at McBride’s in June 1962. The Wilson Morris Band played there four months later. They had such a similar sound that George wanted to space them out. He was smart that way, knowing people didn’t want too much of a good thing at the same time.”

I glanced up at her. “You knew Mr. McBride?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, carefully lowering herself into a mauve wingback chair. “I was George’s booker.”

“And by that, I guess you don’t mean that you did his accounting for him.”

She snorted into her beer bottle. “The only math I do is measurements and seam allowances.” She reached into her workbasket and held up a small green satin piece covered in black lace. “I was the one who helped George book all of his acts the first few years.”

My mouth fell open so wide that my chin seemed to be resting on my collarbone. I was not proud of myself. I normally had more dignity than this during research interviews. “And how did
you
have connections to the music industry?”

Miss Martha drained her beer and gave a discreet, noiseless belch before hauling herself back out of her chair, saying, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Slowly but surely, Miss Martha led me upstairs to a guest room two doors down from my bathroom. The door had been closed since I’d moved in. I’d assumed it was a storage closet or something. But when Miss Martha opened the door, it felt like stepping into a historian’s wonderland.

As long as that historian specialized in ladies’ undies.

Every wall was decorated with black-and-white eight-by-tens of pinup girls posing in fancy corsets and fishnet stockings. Miss Martha had arranged shadow-boxed corset sets in between the frames. They were older, but beautifully maintained. The embroidery was still brilliant against the rainbow of satins and silks. While a few were just gorgeous examples of needlework—silver scrollwork over lilac, black floral stitches over ice blue, and gold flames over red silk—others had themes. A patriotic corset looked a little like Captain America’s costume, only there were two stars on the chest instead of one. And those stars were stitched on the bra cups instead of the shield. My favorite was a mermaid costume with seashells over the breasts and rows of tiny stitched starfish leading to the waistline.

I picked up an old black-and-white picture of a sleek blonde lying across a sofa and winking over her shoulder at the camera. She had perfectly executed eye makeup and a tiny little beauty mark at the corner of her lips. I looked over to Miss Martha, who had a not-so-tiny-anymore black mark at the corner of her mouth.

“This is you?” I exclaimed.

“The surprise in your voice is a little insulting,” she muttered.

“You were a stripper?” I marveled.

She gave my shoulder a none-too-gentle nudge and scoffed, “The term is ‘burlesque dancer.’ Smart-ass. And I couldn’t dance at gunpoint. The girls made me take that photo. They said it was unfair that I did all of the work and never got to have any of the fun.”

And suddenly, those undersize pieces of silk and lace scattered around the house made a lot more sense. “You made their costumes.”

“Every stitch,” she said proudly. “My mother was a seamstress, taught me everything she knew. We were living up in Newport, near Cincinnati. You wouldn’t believe the scene back in the late forties. The girls from the clubs all needed costumes that wouldn’t fall apart at the first turn. I had what you might call a cottage industry. And then I met my Hiram and moved here to be closer to his family.”

“Aw, that’s sort of sweet.”

“He was an idiot, from a family of idiots,” she said drily.

“Oh.” I bit my lip as she began to search among the scrapbooks stored on a nearby shelf. “Sorry.”

“Well, I kept in touch with the girls and when they needed new costumes, they’d come for a visit,” she said, flipping through one of the albums. “I had to sneak them into the house when Hiram was at work. He said they were a bad influence. But I kept sewing, the girls kept coming, and Hiram pretended not to see. The extra money saw us through some hard times, even if Hiram didn’t want to admit where it came from. Things changed over the years, though. I knew it was time to get out of the business when a woman named Peaches wanted me to make her what looked like an eye patch out of lime-green spandex,” she grumbled.

“It’s important to know your limits,” I said, patting her shoulder.

“Nowadays, I stick to corsetry. There’s all kinds of people out there who want a good-quality custom corset. Historical reenactors, cosplayers, costume companies, people who make their living in ways I don’t ask about. I get the orders and measurements off my Web site.”

“You’ve got more layers than an onion, don’t you, Miss Martha?”

“Don’t you forget it, kid.” She smirked up at me, turning the album around so I could see it. The pages were filled with shots of the McBride’s stage.

“The girls traveled the same circuit as the musicians. In fact, some of them performed right here in town, at some of the seedier boardinghouses where the musicians stayed. George wouldn’t allow burlesque at McBride’s, of course. But if he saw them in town, he always treated the dancers like the ladies they were. So they were more than willing to refer people from the music circuits to me, and I would pass that information on to George. Eventually he just cut out the middleman and gave me my own desk in the office.”

“But how did you make connections with so many different types of bands?”

“Burlesque dancers traveled the chitlin circuit and the country circuit. I didn’t realize it was such a big deal until our first few integrated concerts. There was a quick-rigged balcony, where the black customers were supposed to sit. And it never occurred to me that this was anything but normal. But there was only one set of bathrooms. George wasn’t about to tell a bunch of ladies that they had to walk down the road to the Texaco station just to powder their noses.

“So everybody was allowed to use the same johns. And that little bit of unusual became normal. There were very few black folks at the country shows, but a lot of people wanted to attend the R&B shows. Originally, the white kids would stay up in the balcony while the black folks danced to keep the crowds separated. Slowly but surely, some of the white boys drifted downstairs and asked some of the black gals to dance. Sometimes there was a fight, sometimes it was just an embarrassing display of bad dancing. But that smoothed out eventually, too. And the strange thing was, that ‘new kind of normal’ started spreading around town. Suddenly it didn’t seem so unusual to see black people sitting at the counter at the Dinner Bell or sitting in the same row at the movie theater. So when it came time for integrating the schools and everything, we didn’t have nearly the same problems that other towns did. George McBride set Mud Creek ahead about twenty years in terms of race relations.”

I could practically hear Miss Martha’s voice repeating this information over a video slide show of the photos I’d found of white and black customers dancing together at McBride’s. It was like she was gifting me historical copy. “I sort of want to hug you right now, Miss Martha.”

“Resist the urge, sweet pea.”

“And you took all of these photos?” I asked.

“Some of them. Mrs. McBride took the rest and shared them with me. I’ve got about four more albums over there, filled with pictures of the singers. You’re welcome to make copies with that little printer thing and use them. It’d be nice to know someone was enjoying them.”

“She was a busy little shutterbug.” My historian heart beat with a greed I can only compare to that of those Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies every time they swiped his artifacts. “I’ve been living here for weeks, and you didn’t mention this?”

Miss Martha shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

With general renovations started and my timeline perfected, thanks to Miss Martha, I could start organizing the exhibits in earnest. I loved connecting the learning process with the interesting data I’d collected. But now came the fun part: standing in the museum space and moving things around in my head, figuring out how to communicate that information. When creating a display, I liked to engage as many of the senses as possible. I used recorded music, video, and news clippings, and when I was lucky, I got real artifacts. I loved picking out which facts would make a museum-goer say, “Huh, I’ll probably never get that weird factoid out of my head.”

I hoped that the thrill of seeing their neighbors being interviewed on-screen would help draw in the locals.

I tried several different configurations and traffic patterns, in an effort to evenly distribute points of interest without clustering too many objects in one area of the room. Nothing was worse than standing three deep in a museum and being unable to get close enough to see the exhibit.

A few drafts had to be scrapped because I went a little overboard on the number of flat-panel TV screens I would need. I might need to save some electricity to, say, light or heat the building. The challenge would be highlighting the Lurlene lyrics while giving the other exhibits their share of the attention. And then there was the hamburger-counter thing to deal with. And the possums.

How the hell was I going to deal with the possums? I mean, sure, they were historical artifacts, but I didn’t want to include the words “taxidermically preserved possums” on my brochure. I had never had to deal with this before, not even in Possum Trot, a Kentucky town named for actual possums.

Miss Martha seemed a little worried about me because I had no real social life. While she seemed to enjoy evenings in the parlor with her surrogate cat, she made several tutting noises when she realized that on the one night I was dressing to go out, it wasn’t for drinks with Jenny Lee, but to meet with Miss Earlene to discuss applying for grants from the Bothwell Corporation to repair the library.

In return, Miss Earlene was willing to dig up even more information for me. Apparently some grad student had come through town a few years before and taken oral histories from George McBride, Miss Martha, and Mayor McGlory. I chose not to question why Miss Earlene hadn’t offered me these resources on my first tour through the library. I guess I’d passed some sort of initiation when I didn’t start stealing stuff from special collections the minute I found out the theft sensors had stopped working in 2002.

But the interviews did give me all sorts of ideas for cranny installations, smaller displays set in random locations around the museum, usually in nooks or crannies, where individual visitors could have their own personal experiences reading, listening to, or watching the media selected by the historian. It wasn’t so much filler as quiet little cubbies for those overwhelmed by having other tourists all up in their reminiscing space.

And somewhere in all this, I sought out every possible source of funding for moving the Quonset building. I’d contacted historical societies, music preservation societies, and all the corporate contacts I had left in my bag of tricks. There was no money to be found. Anywhere. And I had used my charming voice on the phone and everything.

As a last-resort, crazy-enough-that-it-just-might-work move, I’d even contacted the administrative offices at ComfyCheeks, but the public relations manager assured me that the company just didn’t do that sort of thing. So I went over her head and contacted the CEO’s office, but the secretary informed me that Mr. Roth didn’t have an open appointment slot until the next month. I made the appointment. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Will about it. Lord knows what sort of letter he would write. He was really good at accurately hurtful correspondence.

And frankly, I didn’t want to get his hopes up, only to fail and leave everyone in town even more discouraged . . . by my actions . . . again.

Ugh.

I would get through this. I would make everything all right. The museum would be a triumph in educational entertainment. And I would find a way to burn Sadie’s doomsday file.

When Miss Martha was tired of worrying over me, she sent her well-armed elected-official niece after me to
drag
me out to socialize. Since I was not terribly popular with the local girls because I (a) was rumored to be torpedoing the town’s prospects, and (b) was rumored to be Will McBride’s new squeeze, our outings were limited to just Jenny Lee and myself. I think it was more (b) than (a), personally. But it was still fun, Jenny Lee taking me out to Durbin’s, the area’s only running drive-in movie, which was known for its fantastic cheeseburgers and less stellar movie selections. (An Andy Dick double-feature. Shudder.) She also introduced me to mechanical-bull riding at Shooter’s, a country-and-western bar two counties over, where we took a solemn oath that we would never discuss what happens when Bonnie Turkle, “ladies drink free” night, and gyroscopic motion are combined.