You and Your Pussycat Lips

You and Your Pussycat Lips:
My Aunt Goes After Tom Jones
by Dan Roche
originally published in River Teeth, 2012
My aunt Norma is standing in the bathroom of room 315 on the 25 th floor of the MGM
Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, thinking that at this very moment the singer Tom Jones may be thirty
feet above her. She had learned yesterday from grilling the bellhop that Jones stays in the hotel’s
penthouse on the 29 th floor. She has since been proposing an idea to my mother, who has
accompanied her on this trip: that they steal some maids’ uniforms and go up to the penthouse
in the service elevator the bellhop said Jones uses. Norma practices her line in the bathroom
mirror: “Hello, Tom, can I come in and clean, and straighten your bed?” So far, however, she
and my mom have stayed put, trying to feel Jones’ vibes drifting down through the four ceilings
that separate him from them.
I am in Vegas with them because I want to see firsthand just what all the Tom Jones fuss
is. Norma has been a big fan—some would say obsessed, using the word either with admiration
or disdain—since both she and Jones were in their twenties, back in the late 1960s. Stories of
her various pursuits of Jones have circulated through our family for decades. There is the one,
for instance, in which she and her other sister, my aunt Nancy, went to a Jones concert in
Chicago and afterwards chased Jones’ limo down the Dan Ryan Expressway at a hundred miles
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an hour, until Jones’ driver lost them at an exit on the south side of town. And there was the
other in which Norma came home from a Tom Jones concert with a Kleenex that Jones had
wiped across his glistening chest and that she examined under her son’s microscope for stray
chest hair fragments. I wasn’t sure how much these stories had expanded during the many
tellings, how much they’d become myth rather than fact. I did know, because I’d seen it, that
Norma still keeps the Kleenex in her top dresser drawer, in a plastic baggie, identified by a scrap
of paper on which she scribbled “Tom Jones sweat napkin.” (On the hutch in her dining room
is also a drinking glass, unwashed since she went up to the stage after a show in 1978 and asked a
man unhooking equipment whether she could have it because Jones had sipped from it between
songs to keep his throat moistened.)
Both Jones and Norma are now in their early seventies. Jones is still playing two
hundred shows a year and putting out well-reviewed albums, and the media has predictably
celebrated his “exceptional staying power,” expressed awe that he still has the strong baritone
that initially made him famous with such ancient pop classics as “It’s Not Unusual,” “Delilah,”
and “What’s New Pussycat?” He’s let his hair go gray, but otherwise, according to all accounts,
still “has it.”
Norma still looks young herself. Her short white hair is feathered across her forehead,
and her eyes are the blue of an ocean map. Her cheeks shine when she smiles, as they always
have. On the other hand, she has had two open-heart surgeries—the last was only a year ago,
though she’s recovered enough to be nostalgic for how it caused her to lose twenty-five pounds.
She’s gained it back, however, and in the bathroom she’s been trying to decide whether to tuck
her t-shirt into her black jeans or leave it out, in order best to hide the modest roll around her
belly. “Out,” my mom advises her.
The shirt itself is white and has on it a black-and-white picture of Jones, microphone in
hand, neck glistening with sweat, his own shirt open to reveal thick chest hair and a cross
hanging from a thin chain. It is the later Jones, probably in his mid-sixties, with a weathered face
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and a closely trimmed beard. He is smiling broadly. On the shirt’s collar, Norma discovers
when she leans close to the mirror, is a smudge of makeup, barely noticeable in the fluorescent
light but glaring at Norma like a cigarette burn. She can’t get it out with soap and cold water,
and she kicks herself for not packing at least one more of the twenty other Tom Jones t-shirts she
has at home. Smudge or not, she decides, she has to wear this one, so she can walk around town
and have people ask, “Oh, are you going to see him?”
Las Vegas is a good place to assume that strangers will ask such a question, because
Jones’ name has been on a marquee here more often than most of the other names currently
decorating The Strip: Don Rickles, Bette Midler, Donny and Marie Osmond, Barry Manilow,
The Platters. This is TJ-friendly territory, and Norma doesn’t have to worry about the kind of
ribbing she has received over the years in less understanding environments for being such an
ardent fan of a singer many consider the essence of camp and the butt of jokes about profuse
perspiration. (When my dad used to come into the house soaked in sweat after mowing the
lawn on a hot day, he’d say to my mom, “Give me a hug! I’m just like Tom Jones!”)
Impressively, though, no amount of ribbing has ever caused her to experience a drip of doubt in
what she feels about Jones. What she does feel, as my mom and I already heard last night over a
two a.m. breakfast when the subject of Jones’ endurance came up, is protectiveness of Jones
himself.
She gets really aggravated, she had said, when people find out she’s a fan and ask, “Oh, is
he still around?”
“He has the same voice,” she explained with some vehemence. “He performs the same.
He just doesn’t wiggle as much.” She got increasingly riled.
“People say, ‘You know, he must be getting old,’” she continued, flipping her fingers
outward as if she’d had it. “Well, aren’t we all? You know, I’m not quite the same as thirty
years ago either. Well, I try to be, but…. But things happen, and people grow old.”
“And then you die,” my mom had pointed out.
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“Yep,” Norma had agreed. “Then you die.”
Norma sleeps late on what she calls Tom Jones days, and today she was in bed until
noon. The concert will drain her, and being unconscious all morning eases her butterflies,
which are so strong when she finally does get up that she can barely eat. On concert days, she
survives mostly on coffee, a large cup of which my mom has recently gone downstairs to get her.
Occasionally she will pop a bite-size Snickers bar, the Halloween kind. There is a bag of them on
the desk.
Since my mom and I are the followers today, we’ve been patient. I am here as the
reporter and have told Norma not to change anything on my account. Her sleeping until noon
was a sign that she was taking me at my word. My mom is Norma’s helper and press agent, a job
she has held for twenty years, ever since Norma lost her previous two concert-going partners.
The first was her other sister, Nancy, who used to enjoy Jones so much that she kept a scrapbook
of Jones photos and newspaper articles on which she wrote post-concert notes such as “When
and where will we see him again? PANIC!!!” She was with Norma in the chase of Jones’ limo
down the Chicago highways. But Nancy eased away from Jones in favor of her increasing
number of grandkids and her deeper involvement in church. The other was Norma’s husband,
whose name, coincidentally, is Tom. Tom the Husband liked Tom the Singer’s music and
appreciated his dynamic shows. But he quit going to Jones’ concerts in 1992, after he took
Norma to Vegas for her fiftieth birthday and realized more than he ever had before that his
wife’s interest in Jones outweighed his by several orders of magnitude. Her nervousness kept
him from being able to relax into the show, and she was distracted for the entire trip. So the two
of them came to an understanding that he would stay home from now on. He is at home now.
My mom’s main job as Norma’s helper is differentiating her from the typical and
uncommitted Tom Jones fan by bragging to strangers about the thirteen kisses Norma has
gotten from Jones through the years, either before or during concerts. In a little lounge act the
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sisters have perfected, Norma, who is naturally outgoing, initiates conversations and steers
people nimbly to the subject of Tom Jones. If she’s wearing one of her t-shirts, that helps. Then,
when she has gotten even the diffident and the unenlightened to think that maybe they haven’t
listened to enough Jones in their lives, my mom leans in and stage-whispers, “She’s gotten
thirteen kisses from him.” People always perk up as if Jones himself has just strolled into the
room. Norma often then provides the details of individual kisses. (The first, she recalled when I
asked, was on September 28, 1976. “He got out of the limo,” she said. “But he was looking
down because he had a curb to step up. I was standing right there watching him. And as soon as
he looked up from stepping up on the curb, he looked at me and planted one on me. Oh my
god. Yeah, that was it. That was the start of what was to be.” I had previously heard her claim
that another kiss, in the mid-eighties, had “some tongue” in it.)
So far on this trip, Norma and my mom have been able to perform their act once, last
night in the taxi line at Caesar’s Palace. The audience was a half dozen college-aged women on
the town in their black dresses and strappy shoes. None of them really knew who Tom Jones
was. Norma sang a little of “It’s Not Unusual”—“Oh, yeah,” a few of them said uncertainly—
and then pulled from her purse a snapshot of her and Jones taken in 1978, the one time she has
been able to get backstage. He has his arm around her shoulder, and she has her hand on his
belly. The women still had only the vaguest tipsy notion. And yet when my mom announced
the kisses, the women gasped and fell almost magically into a shoulder-to-shoulder back-up
singer formation and began stumbling their way through “It’s Not Unusual,” adding Vegas-style
undulations and hummings from the ones who didn’t know any words whatsoever. Norma
videotaped them singing and sloppily swaying their hips.
Here on this trip to Vegas, Norma is hoping for Number Fourteen. It’s a long shot.
She’s out of practice, because she hasn’t actually been to a concert in five years due to the heart
surgeries. And at the previous few concerts she did attend, she got no response to her loudly
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yelled requests of “Tom! Tom! Can I come down?” She suspects that in this age of
transmissible diseases, Jones may not be kissing any strangers.
“Who could blame him?” my mom says.
My mom’s other task as helper is to tell Norma to get a move on. It is two o’clock, and
Norma is still fiddling over her clothes. As my mom has said five times in the last half hour,
Norma has to buy her rose. She takes one to every concert, just as she always wears her “I Love
Tom Jones” button, which is the size of a CD and has thick red letters on a white background
that has slightly yellowed over the decades. A rose search, my mom reminds her, can take hours.
It can’t be droopy (Jones doesn’t like those, Norma claims), and the petals can’t be open too
wide.
The quintessential offering to Jones, of course, is panties or a bra, a tradition that began
in 1968, when an especially uninhibited fan reached under her skirt and slipped off the panties
she was wearing and flung them to Jones so he could wipe his sweaty brow, which he did.
Norma insists she’s much too shy to throw her “unmentionables” in public. Besides, she
explains, a rose has always been more pragmatic.
“Tom would usually pick up a rose and comment on it and talk to whoever threw it,”
she recalls. “It was the perfect chance to ask if I could come to the stage.”
Though I push the issue a bit, Norma pointedly refuses to criticize the underwearthrowers.
“Whatever,” she says, implying nonetheless that she appreciates the way a rose
signifies tenderness rather than naughtiness, sincerity rather than campiness, the way, maybe, it
is a message of both love and lust—appropriate to how at one moment she will pant bawdily
over Jones’ hunkiness and then in the next moment declare innocently that she’d “just like to
hang out with him.”
A rose seems encompasses the range of what she has already told me of what Jones has
long been for her: at one end a “hobby,” at the other “the main excitement for most of my life.”
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Norma remembers from when she was at the MGM ten years ago that there’s a florist
down by the pool. But we can’t find it. In the labyrinth of the casino layout, we can’t even find
the pool. When we finally emerge into the open space of the main lobby, Norma asks a desk
clerk for directions. He tells her there is no florist in the hotel—never has been.
“If you want flowers,” he suggests, “you can call room service. Whatever you want, you
can order, and they can bring them to your room.” He does not say where room service would
get the flowers.
“Yeah, for twice as much,” Norma says under her breath as we walk away. Norma and
my mom decide to try The Bellagio, an upscale hotel half a mile down The Strip that might cater
to the romantics in town. Outside, where the desert wind kicks up hard as we hike past the The
M&M candy store, tattoo shops, and a 7-11, Norma complains, “You’d think there’d be at least
one florist out here. Don’t honeymooners buy flowers for each other?”
The closest thing to romance we encounter on our walk, however, is a string of
expressionless men offering small cards that advertise escort services. The men don’t seem to
care if any passerby takes a card or not, or if the people who take them toss them almost
immediately to the ground, which most do. The sidewalk is littered with pictures of near-naked
women.
We’re only halfway there when my mom wants a cheeseburger, and we stop at the
Harley-Davidson Café, a building dominated by a giant motorcycle jutting from its front and
containing the “world’s heaviest American flag” (made of chain and weighing seven tons).
Norma orders vegetable soup but doesn’t touch it because of her butterflies and the leafy greens
full of Vitamin K that her doctor says interferes with the Coumadin she’s on. She has a couple
cups of coffee.
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The restaurant is mostly empty, but there’s a man at another table who my mom says
looks like a semi-famous singer. It turns out not to be, but the close call makes the two of them
admit that they are always seeing people who look like celebrities, and not just here in Vegas.
They can’t decide whether this is because many people really do look famous or because their
own celebrity radars are rarely turned off.
“We come from a star-struck family,” Norma admits. She cites as evidence her mother,
who was such a fan of Engelbert Humperdinck that at her funeral, rather than something
religious, the organist played Humperdinck’s biggest hit, “Please Release Me.” My mom has
always been an enthusiastic Elvis fan—not with the depth of Norma and Tom Jones, but enough
that her refrigerator is decorated with Elvis magnets and my dad hired an Elvis impersonator to
sing at my mom’s sixtieth birthday party. An example of how my mom’s attitude with Elvis
differs from Norma’s seriousness with Jones: my mom danced happily with the fake Elvis, asked
him where he had been hiding, then ran up to her bedroom and came back with a pin on her
blouse that said, “Elvis is Dead, Get a Life.”
Still, it’s my mom who says this about the fun they have with celebrities: “Some people
think it’s stupid. But we don’t.”
Before leaving the restaurant, Norma calls home to talk with her husband and her dogs.
With the dogs, her voice is spirited and bounces off the chain-metal flag. “Molly! Hi, Sweetie!
This is Mama! Whachya doing?! I’ll be home pretty soon, and then we’ll go for a walk. You
and Ginger go outside and catch some bunnies, okay?”
When Tom the Husband gets back on the line, Norma is matter-of-fact—the tone she
has adopted for whenever the subject of Tom Jones might come up, so as not to let on about the
knot in her stomach.
“Okay, so we’re just going to the concert tonight,” she says. “And then probably get
some coffee or dessert afterwards.”
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After she hangs up, she repeats in a monotone voice, “Yeah, we’re just going to the
show.”
The Bellagio is flower heaven, but none of the first ones we see—pink, orange, yellow,
and red tulips, plus lighthearted sculptures like the five-foot-long snail made out of miniature
roses—is for sale. It takes us a half hour of direction-asking, wandering, and cursing
(“Everybody’s full of shit,” says my mom. “They don’t know where anything is.”) before we
find a shop called Tutto, where the rose selection is modest but sufficient. Norma goes through
most of the roses in the cooler before choosing a red one on which the petals are not opened too
much, so that it can last until eight o’clock.
At the register, my mom tells the saleslady, a short Filipino woman, “This rose is for
him.” She points at Norma’s shirt. “He’s getting a rose.”
“Oh,” the saleslady says, smiling.
“For him,” says Norma, sticking her chest out. “You know who it is?”
The woman squints and then reads, “T… Tom Jones! That’s a good singer.”
“Ye-ah,” Norma agrees, sing-songy.
“So that’s your favorite?” the saleslady asks.
“Ye-ah,” says Norma.
Norma carries the rose back into the casino.
“Take off the price tag,” my mom tells her. “You don’t want him to think you’re
cheap.”
“Now, things are coming together,” Norma says. “I have my rose. I got to go fix my
hair. Get the makeup off my shirt. And sit and relax, and look calm for a while, so he doesn’t
think I look stressed out.” She laughs. “If he knew what it takes for me to get there.”
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On the way back we find a Walgreen’s, and Norma buys a bleach stick for the smudge.
After she applies it back in the hotel room, the smell is so potent that she has to walk around
waving her hands at her neck as if she’s having a hot flash.
The bathroom counter is strewn with bottles and hair brushes and combs and a plastic
travel bag that unfolds into three zippered compartments and a blue bullet of deodorant and
white hand towels and Norma’s black makeup bag, which is open and has its own miscellany of
objects jumbled in it. It is six thirty, and Norma is brushing foundation onto her cheeks. She
stands directly in front of the sink bowl, her stomach against the edge of the fake marble, and my
mom is a step behind her, off her right shoulder, trying on different necklaces. They talk to one
another’s reflections. Norma is regretting that she left her mousse at home and so can’t make
her hair stand up the way she wants.
“I like it flat,” my mom says generously.
“Do you?” Norma asks. “Well, Tom Jones has always seen it high.” She laughs. “I
can’t change too much.”
My mom says she hopes Jones sings plenty of slow songs tonight.
“What’s that one we both like the best?” Norma asks. “‘Without’ … not ‘Without You’
… ‘We’re ….’”
“Where he goes like this?” my mom says. She takes a sharp intake of breath.
“Uh huh. What is that one?”
My mom begins to sing. “I’ve been in love so many times, all I la la la, I’ll never fall in
love again. Right?”
“Uh, uh,” says Norma. She sings, too. “I’ve been in love with you so long, duh duh
duh…. How does that go? I can’t sing it wrong.”
“And it looks like….”
Norma joins in and they get a few bars along before they run out of words.
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“I’ve only heard it eight thousand times,” my mom says. “I’ll never fall in love again. I
used to take everybody at work and say, ‘Listen to this part.’” She means when Jones has a little
hitch in his throat, a small but vulnerable moment in a song about a generous man who has been
hurt by a cheating lover.
“I know,” Norma says. “I’d play it over too. I loved it when he used to sing ‘Walking
Through Memphis.’ Oh, god, I loved that song. Well, I’m walking through Memphis, da da da a
da da.”
Norma gives her hair another long spray, the whoosh and the mist clouding around her
head. “Now we can go out,” she says. “This hairspray is real strong, right? I got a couple holes.
I’ll just have to keep my head turned the other way.”
“Remind me to take a Zocor tonight, will you?” says my mom.
“Why don’t you take one now?”
“I’m not supposed to, am I?”
“I thought you were supposed to take them in the morning.”
“That’s Synthroid.”
“Did you take one?”
“Uh huh.”
“This old hometown looks the same…,” my mom sings.
“As I step down from this train,” Norma continues. She stops and says, “I used to say,
‘As I step down from this plane.’ I thought, how could he step down from a plane when it’s
going? Then I found out it was a train.”
fumbles with it.
Norma pins on the large “I Love Tom Jones” button. She picks up her camera and
“Who’s nervous?” she asks. “Not me!”
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It is now past seven, and my mom wants to get to the theatre as soon as the doors open.
“Got tickets?” she says. “Rose? Let’s go.”
The bleach smell on Norma’s shirt is still lingering, though, and she tries to cover it with
a long shot of body spray.
“Oh, my god, that’s enough,” my mom says.
“By the time I get down the hall it’ll be gone,” Norma predicts, then coughs. “Okay.
Where’s my rose? I need some hand lotion.” Then she stops again, this time in a small panic,
and cries: “I got to get my teeth in! Oh my gosh! Where’s my Fixodent? Now my Fixodent’s
in here. I won’t wear it now. Okay, I wish… Oh, jeez, I’ll leave that in.”
Finally, we open the door to the hall and ease ourselves out.
Okay,” Norma says, “we got to walk slow through the casino so that people can say, ‘Oh,
where you going?’”
The Hollywood Theatre seats an intimate seven hundred in rows that arc out and
upwards from the stage, each filled with small, round café tables and teardrop-back banquet
chairs. The stage curtains are red velvet, and the red-and-black carpet has small, fleur-de-lis
designs. Norma bought tickets for Row B, assuming it would be the second row, a mere three or
four strides from the stage. But the theatre has both a Row A and a Row AA. Row B is the third
row, up one tier and behind a low wall. When Norma finds our table, right in the middle of Row
B, she stands behind it for several seconds trying to figure out what to do. The first rows will be
filled, and so there won’t be a chance of moving downwards. Then she sets her rose and her
purse on the table and walks the thirty feet to the far wall. She goes down the two steps to the
floor level and wends between Rows A and AA, looking for the best opening. There are nine or
ten tables there, each with two chairs, and little room between them. She’ll have to squeeze
sideways, or lean over someone. When she comes back, she says, “I don’t know, it’ll be tight.”
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The room fills, with the average age probably seventy. The youngest couple by far—
they look to be honeymooners in their twenties—takes a table in front of us, on the stage-side of
the wall from us, exactly where Norma had intended to be.
A couple who sits right to Norma’s left, however, is ecstatic to have her exactly where
she is. They’re about sixty and laugh happily when they see the rose, the “I Love Tom Jones”
button, the T-shirt. No one else in the audience has anything like this. These two are huge Jones
fans, also. The man tells Norma they’ve seen him at least three dozen times. When their
daughter was a baby, she wouldn’t fall asleep to anything except Tom Jones songs.
Norma shows them the backstage snapshot. My mom tells them about the thirteen
kisses. The man hoots joyously and scoots his chair up to show how he’ll get out of the way
when Norma makes her move.
At eight o’clock, the PA begins playing clips of Jones’ songs, and Norma panics like a
girl still getting dressed as her prom date rings the doorbell. She flutters her fingers and faces
forward, as if she’ll be called on. When Jones walks languidly onto the stage as if into his own
kitchen, Norma shoots out high-pitched wooos and sharp yelps that cut through the room. Then
she and he each take a deep breath. Jones is in a black suit and a loose black shirt, untucked. His
belly is flat, his shoulders husky, his goatee and hair thoroughly gray. Horn players and
guitarists and a drummer have materialized behind him. He holds the mic loosely between his
thumb and forefinger, waiting for his entrance into the opening song. Norma leans forward.
Jones’ deep and familiar baritone flows over Rows A and AA and B and up to the far
corners of the room. Norma’s shoulders rise and her eyes open wider. Other audience members
glance at each other with an animated disbelief, as if they hadn’t really expected this to be Tom
Jones singing to them, as if they’re surprised that, to judge from the first notes, he does still have
it. Norma screams again and circles her fingers around her “I Love Tom Jones” button, toggling
it back and forth like a lost hiker using a mirror to reflect the sun and be found.
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In the old days, Norma had explained to me beforehand, Jones would open with five or
six songs, culminating with either “Delilah” or “It’s Not Unusual.” He’d have broken a sweat,
and the crowd would be in his palm. Then he’d say sexily that anyone who wanted to come
down to the stage could do so. Norma would hustle. She’d hold up her rose. He’d get down on
one knee and kiss her. The evening consummated, she could then slacken into a blissful and
uncomplicated feverishness.
Tonight, as Jones works through his first numbers—new stuff and old—Norma
gradually inches forward, ready to push herself upwards, rose in hand.
The fifth song is “Delilah.” People mouth the words and squeal each time Jones lets his
arms and legs shoot out in short bursts. Norma is right that he doesn’t wiggle as much. The
trombone players, however, get corny, doing alternating deep knee bends, and Jones makes the
song sound happy, even though it’s about a man knifing his ex-lover. Norma shifts her chair.
Jones transitions, though, immediately into “This Is It (Look What You Get).” My mom
and Norma frown at each other for a split second, until they grin euphorically when Jones pulls
up his shirt to reveal a toned and hairy belly and chest, down which he runs his hand.
“Yow!” Norma yells.
Jones pushes through five more songs—a boogie woogie Jerry Lee Lewis number, a
couple of recent slow ones, Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” “That Old Black Magic.” Then,
wiping his forehead with a handkerchief from his own pocket, he pauses. In the lull, a woman in
the center of Row A stands and begins saying something to Jones. She is plump and gray-haired,
and at first Jones doesn’t notice her. When he does, he removes his earpiece and takes a few
steps forward. “What is it, sweetheart?” he says.
The woman yells upwards: “The first time I saw you here, you were really young, but I
was young too.” She says she is seventy-six. “When I first started loving you, you were young!”
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Jones laughs. “And you were young too. And I’m here now and you’re still coming to
see me, and that’s what counts. As long as we’re breathing, eh?”
The woman stretches out her arms and does a twirl. She seems done, and in the brief
second when the only noises are good-hearted giggles from some of the audience, Norma stands,
raising the flower.
“Tom!” she yells. “Can I bring you a rose?”
As soon as she says it, though, the band kicks in again, and Jones has already turned
around. With his earpiece back in, he asks the audience to applaud for the brass section.
Jones mixes blues and romance through the next half dozen songs. He throws in “She’s
a Lady,” and then pumps up the house energy with a recent song called “Never” that is as
rocking as any in his repertoire. The audience is almost puffing by the end.
The guitarist then plucks out the first notes of “Never Going to Fall In Love Again,”
Norma and my mom gasp. It is the song they had been singing back in the bathroom.
“Oh,” says Norma, woozily.
She and my mom move sinuously in their chairs, wait for the moment. When it
comes—And it looks like, ugh, I’m never going to fall in love again—they nearly fall out of their
seats. They look at each other and laugh.
“Throw the rose!” my mom yells when the song ends and they are clapping and
cheering, but there is no chance before Jones moves into the melancholy “Green, Green Grass of
Home,” and Norma again gives a helpless “Oh.”
It goes on. “What’s New, Pussycat?” “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” “Sex Bomb.”
The show hits its lusty stride. And that’s where Jones wants to leave people. It has been an hour
and a half, and at the end of “It’s Not Unusual,” Jones arises from a crouch with a long and low
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growl. “Thank you so much,” he says. The cheering gets urgent, and three pieces of lingerie fly
stageward and land silkily and inaudibly.
Norma stands and flings the rose. It is a Hail Mary, and it’s obvious that this is as close
as she is going to get to a kiss tonight. The rose seems to carry slowly and gracefully over Rows
A and AA. I feel people watching it with curiosity and hope, and as I watch it I have a flash of
images Norma had described for me over the last day, moments of her important Jones
connections: being a young mother and putting the kids to bed early on Friday nights and
watching Jones’ TV variety show and then as soon as it ended calling her girlfriend down the
street, who had also hustled her kids off to bed and watched on her own TV, to rehash the
pleasures of that previous hour; having a bad day at work or with the kids, and then after dark
taking a drive alone and listening to the Green, Green Grass of Home album on the cassette and
letting it relax her; getting the first kiss and the arm around the neck; waiting for a concert and
seeing a rack of Jones’ ruffled shirts being wheeled through the lobby and being allowed to caress
one and feel his vibes.
The rose lands directly in front of Jones. It slides to a stop softly against the inside of his
left shoe. Jones does not even look at the underwear. But he bends and picks up the flower,
waves it to the audience, carries it around the stage. He doesn’t glance our way, but everyone
around us stares at Norma with mouths happily open, as magically engaged as were the college
women in the taxi line last night. I can feel their vicarious frisson, even their envy.
The couple to her left are cheering not for Jones but for Norma. My mom is patting her
on her shoulder. Norma herself is waving in the darkness, her gesture of affection, gratitude,
maybe still and after all these years, love.
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