I was hired by a young female filmmaker who, in her email to me, said that her mother dated me back in the 1980s in Los Angeles when I was the frontman of a well-known (but not famous) new wave band.
Wishing to keep her mother's anonymity, she never revealed who the woman was, but as she was a petite beauty of a woman with olive skin and dark brown hair with soft large curls, I rounded it down to two possible woman: Nancy Williams, the African-American architect's daughter from Oakland who I met at the Safeway supermarket in Woodland Hills (she was a cashier whose line I would wait forever in during my lunch breaks from the savings and loan across the road just to get an up-close look at); or Tema Weiss, the younger, barely-old-enough sister of Ronnie Weiss, the first drummer who I played with upon my arrival in L.A. in the summer of 1982.
So, I was hired to fly over to New York for a day's-long recording session to cover the Norwegian band A-ha's 1984 hit, "Take On Me," for the low budget film.
I was greeted by the director's musical director and her travelling secretary in the recording studio office and told we'd be starting right away.
Panic stricken as I hadn't time to print out the lyrics, and seeing how I had neglected to remember to bring a pair of reading glasses to the studio (which meant I wouldn't be able to read the lyrics off of my smartphone), I asked the assistant if I could print something out and she said their office printer had been taken for servicing.
Feeling confident I had known the song after having heard it hundreds--–if not thousands––of times over the past forty years, I was escorted into the isolation booth where I nailed the track in one take, surprising even myself with the decision to try and hit the high falsetto part in full voice...which I did and nailed to everyone's amazement. After the session I was greeted by the director who handed me an envelope containing a thick stack of hundred dollar bills which, thumbing through the notes, I was certain contained two, maybe three times the agreed amount.
The director placed her hand gently on my shoulder and said, that's for a job well done and for satisfying my lifelong desire to finally meet the man who my mother was madly in love with until the day she died.
I then found myself at a men's clothing store wanting to have my grey Marks & Spencer two-piece suit let out as I had gained a considerable amount of weight and wanted to make sure I had a clean, pressed, well-fitting suit on the ready in the event the song was nominated for any awards and I'd be invited back to the States to attend the award ceremonies.
I went to a branch of a popular chain of Dutch suit shops where I knew one of the salesmen as he was a customer of mine at the barbershop.
Knowing I didn't buy the suit from his shop, he understood my predicament and told me to go and put the suit on and he would take care of talking to the tailor, letting him know I was a good friend of the shop and a local businessman.
He quickly marked up the jacket and as I took it off he maneuvered his hands around the trousers and concluded they were fine, though I told him they were extremely tight and uncomfortable and that I couldn't even sit down in them.
He told me if he altered the trousers, he'd be taking all my motivation for losing the extra weight I had on board he knew was both troubling me and making me ill.
I thanked him and returned to the changing room where I sat on the little bench and stared at myself as I cried in the mirror, disgusted for letting myself go as I had.
Then I woke up.
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