“Surely you’re not serious!”  I exclaimed.

Dianne got a really pained look on her face, but didn’t say anything about me calling her “Shirley.”  This was much too serious for jokes and laughter.

“Jodi, I’ve explained it to you twice…” she began.

“Then explain it again!” I insisted.

She sighed heavily.  I hate it when she sighs heavily.  I know she thinks I’m one banana short of a bunch, but I’m really not, I do understand more than she gives me credit for.  And I understood this, too.  I just didn't believe it.  I needed to hear it again.  And again.

“Geoff Baker has forbidden us to attend Paul's concert tonight.”

Dianne bit off the words as if they tasted particularly bad.  Like sushi.  Not the cooked sushi, but the raw stuff.  I’d have looked like that, too, if I’d been eating raw fish.  Why do people eat raw fish, anyway?  For that matter, what's the deal with snails?  Now there's something I really don't understand.  How do you get them out of their shells?  And what happens to the slimy stuff, do you cook that too?  What is that slimy stuff?  Who was the guy (you know it was a guy!) who decided that snails belonged in gourmet restaurants?  And speaking of gourmet restaurants, why do people make such a fuss over truffles?  Not the kind George sings about, although they're certainly worthy of being fussed over.  I mean the truffles that pigs go searching for.  You know...

"Jodi?"

"What?"

"Where are you right now?"

"In France, searching for truffles with my trusty pig."

Dianne rolled her eyes.  "The last thing I said to you was 'Geoff says we can't go to the concert,' and you answer me with truffles and pigs."

"But..."

Dianne held up her hands.  "No, no, I don't want to hear it.  The last thing I need to do is to enter Jodi-World.  Let's just try it again.  Geoff Baker says that we can't go to the concert tonight.  So what do you have to say about that?"

“Why?” I wailed.

After rubbing her eyes for a minute, Dianne sighed again.  "Well, that beats pigs and truffles."

"Who beat what pig?"  I wailed.  You know, it really makes me crazy when I want Dianne to give me a straight answer, and she keeps changing the topic.

Dianne smacked the top of her head and made the sushi chewing face again.  “Because Geoff said that it was our fault Sir Paul had to work on his day off.”

“You mean the free concert?”

“Yes, the free concert.  The free concert that was all your idea.  An idea that you didn't share with Paul McCartney, Geoff Baker, or even me."

I pouted.  "Well, technically I did share it."

"Right.  Technically, you did share it.  Technically, you did share it... on live TV in front of the entire free world.  You couldn't just keep your mouth shut and enjoy the fact that we were at a press conference.  Sir Paul McCartney's press conference.  You had to push past that reporter from the Boston Globe ..."

"...That's not exactly how it happened...."

“Pardon me,” Dianne snapped.  “Let me explain how it exactly happened.  In a most ladylike manner, you delicately removed six people who stood in front of you, gently threw yourself at the reporter from the Boston Globe, oh-so-subtly ripped the mike out of his hands, and calmly announced your brilliant idea of a free concert.  And you wonder why Geoff is just ever so slightly perturbed with us?”

I folded my arms.  "A free concert is a great idea and I still stand by it!"

Out of the blue, the Boston Yellow Pages sailed past my ear.  It's amazing how heavy objects become airborne whenever Dianne is around.

I stood my ground and just blinked at her.  "It made a great picture on the front of the Boston Herald.  That's the first time I've ever had my picture in the paper, and I get to the front page!  How cool is that?"

"How cool is the lawsuit from the Boston Globe reporter for ruining his story?"

Honestly, Dianne makes such a production out of the silliest little things.  "Come on, Dianne, can't you tell that the man was joking?"

What really worried me wasn't the flying blowdryer, nor the airborne tissue box, but Dianne's expression.  Kinda green.  I carefully moved the wastebasket a little closer to her with my foot, and inched my chair away from her.  If she was going to be sick, I wanted to be as far away as possible.  But that was beside the point.

“How can he not allow us to go to a free concert?” I asked plaintively.

“BECAUSE YOU MADE SIR MACCA WORK ON HIS DAY OFF!” Dianne roared at me.  "BECAUSE YOU, A JODI FROM NOWHERE, MADE A DECISION FOR HIM, A SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY, KNIGHT OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE!”

It’s a good thing the window was closed, or I’d have fallen out of it when my chair went over backwards.  Dianne’s usually pretty calm and collected, this roaring wasn’t like her at all.

She silently helped me up, and I took that as an apology.

“What if we go in disguise?” I asked in a small voice.

Dianne's hands danced over the bureau as she searched for another object to lob at me.  “What would we disguise ourselves as, Jodi?”  Finding the bureau empty, Dianne sat down again with the air of someone who’d had far too little sleep.  “We don’t have any money to buy clothes or disguises, we’re nearly broke, remember?  I don’t even know how we’re going to get home,” she added dispiritedly.  “We’re going to have to cash in our plane tickets to pay the hotel bill.”

“Well, what about…..”

I let my voice trail off and waited hopefully for her to come up with a brilliant idea, but Dianne didn’t say anything.  She just ran her fingers through her hair and looked kinda sad.

Finally she said, "You have to be clever if you're going to go in disguise and not look like you're going in disguise."

Even I couldn't come up with a good response to that one.  "Huh?"

Dianne rolled her eyes.  "If this were Halloween, we could stick masks on our faces and we would look like everybody else."

"Not if we had really clever masks," I retorted.  I was rather proud of that remark, but Dianne wasn't impressed.  A dresser drawer flew over my left shoulder.  Thank heavens she’s got a terrible aim, or I’d be black and blue from all the airborne items she’s tossed my way.  I’m also pretty agile, I can dodge pretty well.  Why, I was princess of the playground when I was a kid, I was the best dodge ball player in the neighborhood!  And come to think of it, I was pretty good at hide-an-seek, too.  Nobody could ever find me, I’d hide so well that everyone would give up and I’d be the last one left standing on the field.  They’d be home to their dinners and I’d still be hiding!  And what about tetherball?  I was the best, because I was tall.  And.....

"Listen to me," Dianne hissed, interrupting my thoughts.  "On Halloween, everybody wears masks.  So, if we wore masks too, we wouldn't stand out in the crowd.  But it isn't Halloween.  It's summertime.  And if we wear masks in the middle of the summer, everybody is going to notice us.  So the only way that people won't notice us when we're in disguise is to disguise ourselves as real people who don't look like us."

I smiled and nodded.  Now she was speaking my language.  "Oh.  You're saying that if I borrowed your makeup and, say, your oversized sweats and you borrowed that outfit that's a bit snug on me..."

Gideon's Bible skipped across the top of my head.  "Jodi, what's wrong with you?  Even if we could perfectly swap identities, which we can't, we would still look like us, right?  What kind of a disguise is that?"

I knew that there had to be a flaw in Dianne's logic, but I just couldn't figure out what it was.  I kept quiet anyway because I didn't want her to think I was dense.  Besides, it was her turn to come up with a brilliant idea.

I looked out the window and across the street, trying to come up with something to say.  Our hotel wasn’t very tall, and I could see people walking along the paths in the park, avoiding the geese that strolled along the lawn as if they owned it.  A little child was walking with her parents.  The girl held a bright red balloon, and I watched as the balloon was either set free or got loose on its own.  It floated into the air, free as a bird, off to who knew where, drifting with the breeze.  It kind of brought to mind all those goofy performers who served as Paul's warm up act.  You know, the people who walk around with all those oversized balloons. 

Wanna hear something funny?  Dianne is so tiny that I'll bet one of those balloons would just carry her off into the sky. 

Which wouldn't be such a bad thing when she's in one of her grumpy moods. 

I was imagining the vision of Dianne floating off into the sky, held captive by a balloon, screaming at the tops of her lungs, when the most brilliant idea in the universe exploded out of my mouth.

“What about dressing up as one of Paul's circus performers?”

“What?”  Dianne started gasping for air.

“Sure,” I replied enthusiastically, warming to my idea.  “It would be easy, we just have to get backstage and find some costumes, we could do this!  All we have to do is walk around all dressed up and stuff!  It wouldn’t be hard!  We could even be the ones carrying those balloons around!  It’s not like we’d have to do anything hard!  We’d just be standing around and walking and looking pretty.” 

I could already see myself in the Marie Antoinette costume with the big wig.  I’d be beautiful!  Or maybe the Spanish dancer costume!  Oh yeah!  Wait, I didn’t know how to flamenco.  Never mind.  But the Marie Antoinette costume held definite possibilities!  And my vision of Dianne floating off into space - what could be better?

“Absolutely not!” Dianne screeched.  “There’s no way…  Why, that would be against the law, stealing costumes like that.”

“Not stealing,” I interjected mildly.  “Borrowing.”

Dianne stared at me in fascinated horror.

“You are out of your mind!” she hissed.  "What will the performers think when they can't find their costumes?"

"They'll love it," I winked.  "I'm sure they would enjoy having a break for the evening.  Especially when it's supposed to be their night off, anyway."

"You need help," Dianne whispered.

***

The problem wasn’t in getting backstage, that was easy at an outdoor concert on the Common.  And the roadies knew us after the piano incident yesterday, so they let us in pretty quickly. 

The problem was in finding costumes that fit.  I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m fat or anything, but I’m a little bit bigger than your average person walking around in a costume at a Paul McCartney concert.

“The performers must weigh fifty-one pounds apiece,” I grumbled as I attempted to squeeze myself into another outfit before discarding it.  I’d had my heart set on the Marie Antoinette costume and that had been a dismal failure.

“Soaking wet,” Dianne agreed.  “How about this one?”

She held up something, and I shrieked.

“I am not going to wear the strong man’s suit!” I exclaimed.

“Be quiet!” Dianne hissed.  “And we don’t have a lot of choice, you’ve tried on just about everything we’ve looked at!  Do you want to do this or not?  If you want to see the concert, you’d better try this on right now, before everyone else shows up!”

It was easy for her to tell me to wear the strong man’s muscle suit.  She looked beautiful, dressed up all in gold.  She’d fit into the first thing she picked up, you know.  And that was one of the gold dresses that the mannequin/dancer ladies wore.  I’d painted her with the gold makeup and done her hair, and she looked really good.

The dress was a little long on her, but I didn’t think she’d trip over it.

Sighing, I accepted my fate and tried on the muscle suit.  Wouldn’t you know it?  It fit perfectly.  That figured.

Dianne helped me with the mustache; I couldn’t seem to get it to stick properly.

Now we just had to find a hiding place until the show started.  I’m not sure how we crammed into that portable closet, what with my muscles and Dianne’s huge gold dress, but we managed the impossible.  Macca fever will do that to a person, you know. 

***

Okay, so Dianne was right about one thing.  The real strong man and the real mannequin/dancer lady raised quite a fuss over their missing costumes.  We could even hear the whole to-do from our little closet, but we were confident that “the show must go on.”  Good old Geoff Baker pulled out his wallet and the argument ended pretty quickly.

"You know," Dianne mused.  "We could just stay in this closet all evening.  At least we'd get to hear the concert.  And we'd be pretty close to Sir Paul."

"No way!"  I screamed as we heard the first few strains of the opening music.  I burst out of the closet, and I pulled the protesting Dianne along with me.  We made quite the odd couple, especially as she left a trail of gold glitter in her wake.

I have to say that the night was a blur, but I remember some parts of it pretty vividly.

I remember seeing Dianne on stage with the other three women on their platform doing their statue impersonations, and I thought I’d have to tell her that I could see her breathing.  She wasn’t very good at the statue part of things.  And she was a lot shorter than the other ladies.  They were looking at her pretty strangely, too.  Then again, it might not have been her size that caught their attention as much as the "Wet Paint" sign that clung to her back.  The hazards of hanging out in a closet, I guess.

The best part was when Dianne and the other ladies started that dancing/writhing thing.  I hoped somebody had sneaked a video camera onto the Commons and had filmed it.  I really, really wanted to show the video to Dianne's boyfriend.  And to her parents.  And to everyone she’d ever known, from kindergarten up through graduate school.

It’s not that Dianne can’t dance.  She’s really pretty good.  But I think she got hit with stage fright or something.  She looked like a stork who was chasing after a mailman.  If you can picture such an event.  I saw it once during a vacation in Florida.

Then it was my turn to hit the stage.  I had to help carry out the little piano, and I had to pretend that it weighed nothing at all.  Well folks, just for the record, that little piano weighs more than a BMW.  I nearly dropped it when I tripped over Brian’s guitar cord.  You should have seen Geoff Baker's face when I bobbled Paul's instrument.  Geoff sat in the front row, so I had a real clear view of him.  First, he looked horrified.  Then he narrowed his eyes and stared at me, really, really hard.  I could feel myself sweating beneath the strong man costume, and I wondered whether Geoff could see that, too.  Then I started to fret over my fake mustache.  I hope Dianne got it on there good and solid!  But there was no way Geoff could have known it was me.  I mean, the muscle suit covered up any chance he’d know I was female.  At least, that's what Dianne told me.

I managed to set the piano down in the right spot, but I never wanted to move it again.

Then I saw HIM.  HIM sidled up right next to me.  Standing only inches away from me, thanking the crew for bringing him the piano.

I froze.  I admit it, I just froze and stood there looking at HIM as everyone else but HIM left the stage.  I didn’t think I could breathe any more, and I wondered if I passed out, would HIM do mouth-to-mouth respiration on me?  But if I were passed out, I wouldn’t get to enjoy it.  Maybe I could just pretend to pass out?

And what about my mustache?  Wouldn’t that get in the way?  But if Paul thought I was a man, he probably wouldn’t do mouth-to-mouth on me, would he?  Should I rip the mustache off?  I didn’t know what to do!  So I just stared at HIM.  And I tried to remember to breathe every once in a while.

Sir Paul sat down at the piano and looked at me in confusion.  He made a shooing motion at me, but I just stayed where I was, wondering if I should breathe again or just hold my breath.  My idol made some sort of a joke about the strong man having a crush on him, but I was too busy staring to pay attention to the actual words that came from his lips.  I just wanted to stand there all night long and stare and stand and stare and maybe breathe occasionally....

“Jodi!”

That didn’t sound like HIM.

“JODI!”

Reluctantly, I raised my eyes and saw Dianne beckoning me from backstage.  I shook my head.  I was staying right here.  And when the strong man made up her mind, no force on earth could move her.

Dianne, the traitor, led the charge and I was wrestled offstage by the guy on the stilts and the other guy with the apple hanging down in front of his face.  The muscle suit didn’t make much difference, the three of them were stronger than me.  It’s amazing how much strength those wiry little guys had.  They got me off stage there before I even had a chance to say anything to HIM.  Then they sat on me. 

I could hear HIM talking on stage, but I couldn’t make out his words.  The audience laughed, and then the music began again.

“Let me up!” I commanded.

Well, they let me up, all right, but then the real strong man showed up and he made me change back into my street clothes.  Dianne was already back in her skirt and sweater.  She had a little gold paint left on her cheek, but I wasn’t going to tell her about it.  After all, she was the traitor, dragging me off stage and away from HIM.  I pointedly ignored her.

“Jodi, quit sulking,” she insisted, tugging on my arm and forcing me up from the seat I’d grabbed.  “At least we got to see part of the concert!  Heck, we got to be in part of the concert.  Come on, we’ve got to get out of here before…”

“Before what, may I ask?”

The English accent and the clipped words stopped us in our tracks.

I looked out of the corner of my eyes at Dianne, forgetting all about her being the traitor.

“Is that…?” I hissed.

She nodded, her eyes wider than I’d ever seen them before.  Even wider than that time we’d gone sky diving on my thirtieth birthday.  And let me tell you, they’d been plenty wide on that particular day.  Especially when I’d had to push her out of the plane because she said she’d changed her mind and didn’t see any reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.  But that’s beside the point.

We turned to face… Geoff Baker.  An angry Geoff Baker.  No, I guess I’d have to say I finally knew the meaning of the word livid. 

Let me give you some advice.  Never, never, never make Sir HIM’s press agent livid.  It’s something that you don’t ever want to experience.  Trust me on this.

His speech was long and inventive.  It was full of forbids and thou shalt nots and never in my lifes and several other words dealing with death and destruction.  Lots of fist shaking and teeth baring and kicking up the dust around our feet.  And we just stood there and took it.  I started to get indignant at one point, after all we’ve done for him, but Dianne elbowed me when I took a breath to say something, so I subsided and let Geoff finish.

He’d just reached the part in his speech about calling the police, or possibly the marines, when there was a big uproar from the crowd.  The encore!

I nearly fainted when HIM walked directly over to us.  Well, to Geoff, actually.  But since we were standing directly in front of Geoff, HIM walked up to us, too.

Sir Paul grinned and patted Geoff on the shoulder.  “Hey man, that little thing on stage with the muscle fellow was great!  The crowd loved my joke about it, we’ll have to work that into the rest of the shows.  Take care of it, would you?  Oh, and that bit with the gold dancing lady was pretty cool, too.  I rather liked the 'Wet Paint' sign, nice touch.” 

Sir Paul glanced at us and smiled.  I melted.  “Hello, ladies,” he said with a wink.

And HIM was gone, trotting back on stage for the encore.

We stood there in stunned silence and listened to HIM singing.  I finally remembered to breathe again.  Geoff didn’t seem to know what to say, but his face had turned this amazing shade of purple.  Dianne’s eyes were even bigger than they’d been when Geoff had started his speech.

"Contract," Geoff Baker rasped.  "I have to get you two a contract."

Wow, I was impressed.  Geoff Baker could make the same sushi chewing face as Dianne.  Maybe they were long lost relatives or something. 

"Hey Geoff, how well can you throw the Boston Yellow Pages?"  I asked him. 

Dianne began to make the same retching sound as Geoff.  Cool.  We're definitely going to have to check into their family backgrounds.

"A room," Geoff choked.  "We will have to book you a room at the Four Seasons.  And figure out a salary."

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “And there's something else, too.  Dianne and I still owe money on....”

A very sharp pain in my ankle stopped me.

“Ouch!”  I exclaimed, turning to Dianne in bewilderment.  “Why’d you kick me?”

Geoff rolled his eyes, the same way Dianne usually does it.  This is getting spooky. 

"What have I done to deserve this?" Geoff asked the heavens.  "Why oh why do I have to pay these demented women to be part of our crew?"

"Paul's crew," I grinned.  "Think of it.  We can quit our jobs and go touring with HIM."

"Poor HIM," Dianne rasped. 

"Poor HIM," Geoff echoed.  "Poor me."

Stay tuned for Jodi and Dianne's next batch of misadventures in the Baker's Dozen series.

Lisha Goldberg is a freelance writer and editor. She also writes a newsletter for a Boston piano studio. Lisha has won several prizes for her writing, including the Boston Herald Star Trek Competition (write a eulogy for Captain Kirk!), CompuServe's Beatle Essay Contest, and Writers Digest Magazine Award for best Inspirational Short Story.

Cheryl Mortensen has been a Beatle fanatic since the 1960s, but somehow went on to other things in the late 1960s, only rediscovering her passion for "all things Beatle" in the late 1990s (and on into the new century).  She is a computer programmer and an avid photographer. (Concert photos of bands and performers is her favorite area -- ask her about her Ringo pictures!!)  Cheryl lives with her husband of many years (Mike), her German Shepherd (Sorsha), and a bunch of fish in the tank and the pond that they've never bothered to name.

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