Heaven’s Gate
32 TDY
Halloween is a lot harder on the kids when it comes on a weeknight. Of course, they were all pretty little. Eleanor was four and Matthew almost four so they didn’t have school the next day. But parents and family still had to work. We put out the word to the community, including those in the southeast corner, that we would celebrate and accept trick-or-treaters on Sunday and held open house at the studio for parents and other adults. It went on for about four hours and we had a very good time. I even got to go to a few of the houses with my children before I had to go entertain the grown-ups.
Céleste and James were just eight weeks old but I couldn’t believe the little costumes their mothers put them in. They both wore beige T-shirts the moms had painted to look like they were tattooed. They both had little black leather vests and Céleste had a black knitted baby cap. Of course, her ‘tattoo’ was a black rose. We had our own baby anarchists.
“Auntie Nicolette will teach you all about being a good anarchist,” Nikki explained to the two babies. “Your mommies and daddies will never know what hit them.”
Nicolette, for her part, reverted to her leathers and a black wig so she could demonstrate proper decorum. She did not wear a T-shirt under her vest and the rose tattoo was on clear display in her cleavage. I examined it carefully later, just to be sure it didn’t need touching up.
It just needed touching. And licking. And sucking…
The next week, I did a week of remote broadcasts from the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. They really did a great job with that place and included performance venues of various sizes in the design. They had both radio and television studios that we could broadcast from.
Samantha, Jennifer, and Courtney traveled with me. What a treat! All three were typically tied to their offices. Samantha was doing a great job of locating interesting places for our week on the road each month. In addition to a week broadcasting from Rae-Rae’s studio in Chicago, we were scheduled for a week at Conway’s Comedy Club in New York City in January. We’d be at the Houston Space Center, back in Fort Lauderdale, in the Crystal Court in Minneapolis, and at Boston University. This spring we’d even have a week broadcasting from the Space Needle in Seattle.
But the week in Cleveland with the three girls was almost a vacation for all of us. If we weren’t on set, we were in bed.
Jennifer had transitioned to a role at CEN in which she was coordinating advertising and marketing for all the CEN originated programing instead of just Hearthstone’s. Courtney was teaching two classes at IU this year. She’d sailed through her master’s thesis and was working on her PhD with an emphasis on digital video technology. She was really excited about having a digital storage medium that was like a super-CD. She said DVDs were going to make our lives so much easier in the future. All I could do was nod. I didn’t need any more evidence that she was onto something than the sales of the video editing software she developed. Her little company now had three other programmers working on developing the software.
Most of all, we made love.
Now that we had a regular schedule and a network to keep alive, we didn’t take all week off for Thanksgiving. Reese, Elaine, and I ran our broadcasts through Wednesday with reruns on Thursday and Friday. The Redress crew were producing ahead of schedule and Heaven’s audience was growing on the new network. They were able to take the week off and Heaven consented to be my guest on Thanksgiving Eve. Fashion Week was off this week and we put up a rerun on Sunday night. The show was proving to be surprisingly successful, driven in part by its half-hour timeslot right after Redress. Pam and Nancy had actually received a couple modeling contracts. They were starting too late to ever become supermodels like Heaven, but local modeling work was good and they could work a couple gigs in around their classes and Fashion Week this spring.
We had a comparatively sedate Thanksgiving, not to say that it was small. We served dinner in the studio, which had much more room now that we’d taken out the audience seating and just had the Young Cooking and Fashion Week sets. We set up a huge buffet and people from all over the village stopped in to eat. I noticed that even a couple from the Southeast corner had joined us for a while. In spite of how many of us there were, we did nothing formal and it was all very lowkey with a lot of visits back to individual houses.
I took some time at noon to call Whitney. She was six hours ahead of us, so I caught her just before she headed to dinner. Even though she was in Germany, the officers’ mess offered a full Thanksgiving dinner all day and several private groups were holding their own celebrations. Since Whitney had no ties in Germany, she lived in on-base officer housing.
“Can I come and visit you for Christmas?” I asked. The topic of when I would visit Germany had arisen in every one of our conversations since she left. Whitney sighed.
“I’m afraid not, love. I’m going TDY.”
“What’s that?”
“Temporary Duty Yonder. As of Monday, we are in lockdown and my platoon ships out on or about the tenth. With luck, I’ll get two weeks leave in time for fireworks,” she said. “I’m putting in for it.”
“Where are you headed?” I asked. Worry tinged my words and I could feel my heart accelerating.
“If the orders hold, my platoon is being sent to take over embassy security in Pretoria.”
“Pretoria? That’s like… Where is that?”
“South Africa. The current platoon rode out all the political turmoil around the first elections last year. Our deployment should be pretty routine,” she said.
“I love you, Whitney.”
“Just keep saying that, Brian. Every once in a while, I think I hear you.”
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