Chapter 34

I waited for the rejection, but she swallowed and smiled and asked if the plain was much different. I told her that they were just “fishier” and picked out a small one for her to try, taking one for myself and showing her that these are eaten straight from the shell. She made a face when it was in her mouth and didn’t chew much before swallowing. She thought for a few moments and then reached for another.

The lunch was mainly to thank us for the experience on Friday night and Kelly asked if Ali could repeat it on Saturday, now the papers were already full of her performance.

“Because of your age we can’t pay you.”

Ali grinned. “I work for chocolate cake.”

Then Laura brought up the matinee. “It’s a training session, rather than a show,” she said. “I, or one of the teachers, will explain the history behind the music, who commissioned it and why. I think that you may get to play the complete Warsaw, but the other pieces will be just that, pieces. I’ll give you the marked-up scores when you get in. We’ll only pick out passages that reflect their time or relate to other works. What I would like is to have Alicia play the Moonlight as a piano solo to show the students what they can do if they apply themselves.”

Ali smiled. “More chocolate cakes?”

Before we left to get ready for the matinee, Algernon took me aside. He looked serious.

“Last night was a revelation. I’ve never been in on the beginning of someone’s career before, other than my own. I want to do something to help Alicia continue. I’m prepared to fund a sponsorship to let her go through the best schools if she wants. I know that you can afford all of that yourself, but I’m talking about something that will continue beyond Alicia going into the wide world as a star.”

I nodded. “The main thing I’m already worrying about is her proper schooling. She’s very bright and well ahead of her age in many things. She should be able to mix with children of her own age, but I wonder if she would find them too young for her.”

Fiona asked. “Have you considered home schooling?”

I nodded. “Yes, but it still has Ali mainly on her own or with three others who are more than two years younger.”

Ali chirped up. “I’m happy with the little ones, Mummy. Tabitha is very bright, and we talk a lot when we’re alone. She’s still very shy around strange adults. Why can’t we have a room in the new block as a school room and have all four of us learning. Gina and Marty are almost ready to start reading properly but they’re not big talkers yet.”

Fiona laughed. “I see what you mean, that sounded like a teenager. What say we underwrite the home schooling for you and expand it to take in other children with special requirements? If we take it to the disabled, it can come under our business umbrella. Alicia can be our research project into the feasibility of a full program.”

I looked at Jordan and he smiled. “It works for me. Ali is happy being a bit of a loner but, there again, she does take after her parents.”

That afternoon we educated and amazed the schoolchildren. Laura and her other helpers were very good at describing the times that the music had been written, and the state of the composer when they put quill to parchment. Emily and I played pieces from our performance items, and we even picked up on questions about the times before and after the piece. We were able to play bits of earlier and later pieces by the composer to show how they had progressed.

Ali did her Moonlight and then, when the children clamored for more, played a bit of Satie as well. As the classes were taken out to their busses, Laura produced a chocolate cake, and we tucked in.

We went back to the hotel where we freshened up and had a light meal. Both Emily and I made sure that Ali understood that playing on a full stomach was not the best. We were applauded as we each came on stage, with a standing ovation when we had finished.

The atmosphere when we got to the end of the double could be cut with a knife. If Ali wasn’t brought on to play, I think we may have seen a riot. When I brought her forward there was applause. As the notes of the Moonlight hung in the air, Wilhelm stood for a bit longer before allowing the audience to vent their pent-up need to cheer and clap.

We did three curtain calls and Wilhelm whispered that they wanted an encore. Ali and I went back out on stage and sat at our respective pianos. We then recreated the Satie piece that had made Facebook all that time before. She used the full scope of the tiny grand with me just adding the notes beyond the range of the shorter keyboard.

Another encore was demanded so I waved Emily on stage, and we sat at our instruments. I whispered to the two of them to do the ragtime. I led off and Emily joined in, following on. I nodded to Ali who came in with her own versions of our pop songs and then I finished off with the ragtime again. This time we left the stage with our posies and the lights faded.

All three of us were wiped out by the experience and went straight back to the hotel for some glasses of water and then a lot of sleep. We left Boston the next morning, and all three of us dozed on the flight. When we landed there were reporters waiting for us and it took a while before we could get into our waiting Town Car. We were home just after the less famous members of our household.

Sharron was almost in shock at the experience. She had thought that the attention we had received as a pop group was amazing, but the same spotlight shining on a four-year-old had her wondering at the sanity of it all. I tried to explain that this is a result of doing something we loved. Ali floored her by telling her that a chocolate cake would be delivered soon. That is, if the photographer she had requested it from came up with the goods.

Twenty minutes later, a delivery driver came into the farm with three boxes of cake, one chocolate, one strawberry and one cherry, as thanks for our patience with the media. I wondered if we should replace Allan with Ali, seeing that she had our payment delivered so quickly.

Emily and Ian were going to marry on the weekend after our concert, so we had that one to prepare for. That had been planned for a while. Then it was a mid-week double wedding with Joyce and Matty teaming up with Abigail and Matthew for a joint civic ceremony.

Then it was a church wedding for Colin and Janet. The first had Josie as Maid of Honor with me and Pet as bridesmaids. We duplicated that for Joyce and then Josie and I swapped places for Abigail.

For Janet it was a big wedding. Emily was Maid of Honor and the other three of us were bridesmaids. Colin had a big circle of friends in a choir. There were a lot of photographers at all the weddings, with plenty of coverage in the magazines afterward.

We had another week off before going back on stage in Chicago and Milwaukee. Pet married Anton in a quick ceremony in Las Vegas. I think they may have organized it while we were there in May. Josie, Emily, and Janet were bridesmaids, and a school friend of Anton was best man. Jordan and I took Alicia with us to the wedding and came home the next morning.

After Milwaukee, no-one had time to relax as the Detroit show took on a life of its own. As mainly locals we were wanted in TV studios and besieged by reporters who all wanted to know how we got to the place we now occupied, and how we coped with it. Many column inches appeared with comments about how none of us had bought a mansion. Some comments were made about the farm, but no-one could say that it didn’t earn its own money.

Some of our workers were asked how we were as employers, and they all gave glowing references. They even spoke to other bands who had used the studio and pet owners who had been to the clinic. The papers started calling the shows “The Sister’s Homecoming”, and I suppose they weren’t far wrong.

One Monday evening Pet, Emily and I got together with Sharron in the rehearsal room and worked on a special opening number, just for this show. When we had it worked out, we rang the others to come over to the studio in the morning. I had checked the schedule and there was no-one else booked until the day after.

The next day we brought the others up to speed with the basic song, and then worked on their own input. By lunch we had finalized the song and Tony had overseen a quick recording session. It was called “Hello, Old Friend” and started with me on the piano and singing the first verse to the people I had known and the Detroit I loved.

Then Joyce came in with the guitar for her own verse about her own friends. Donna and Josie were mentioned several times as we worked through Emily and Pet, with Abigail coming in at the end. The penultimate verse was a thank you to everyone we knew and loved and a special thank you to the teachers and role models in our lives, who may never have known how much we admired them. Sharron was a real help in making it sound heartfelt.

The final verse was a thank you to our support crew and, finally, the fans that turned up to see us play and bought the albums. The last line was, “Hello, old friends, this song is for you,” and ended back in solo piano, as it had started. Tony tweaked the master slightly, to give it a “live” feel and we sent it to Allan with a note. The note said that this would open the shows in Detroit but that will be the first, and the last time we would do it on stage.

We asked him to release it as a digital upload on the website only after we had left for Toronto. That done, on Wednesday we expanded the show as much as we could with early Pixies numbers and even a few of the old covers the original Pixies had started with. Allan had done a deal with the TV station that showed us first, to film it for posterity with the thoughts of a “Homecoming” DVD.

We had an opening band that would get the fans revved up and then we were on after a short break, long enough for a pee if you were first in line. We figured that we would be on stage for close to three hours for all four nights we would be playing. The original Friday and Saturday now being from Thursday to Sunday night; so popular were the tickets. We had set the first two rows aside for our own friends and relatives.

As I arrived at the venue on Thursday evening it struck me that the band that they were coming to see was nothing like the band they had known. We had moved on from semi-acoustic sets in bars and clubs, to a different line-up and a bigger sound that toured Europe. We were now very much the “big arena” band with riggers, roadies, and sound guys to handle the bigger kit that we carried with us these days. We now even had a sound and mixing desk out in the audience which we asked Tony to man for this venue.

On the way in, someone asked me if I was nervous. I said that you don’t get nervous when you’ve put in the hard work. It’s only random acts that could mess things up now and if you can’t control the power or the weather there’s nothing else left to worry about. What I didn’t notice was the camera pointing my way and that comment made it to the news next day.

We assembled in the dressing room while the first band played and got changed into our stage outfits. Just for these shows we had four different outfits each. Two had been bought in Paris, one came from Berlin and the last was a new one from London. We had certainly shopped our way around Europe.

When the house lights went down to start our part of the show there was a spotlight trained on the electric piano and the crowd roared as I walked into the pool of light and started playing. I doodled until it had quietened down and started with our opening song. As I mentioned people and places there were whoops and hoots from the audience. Then the others joined, one by one and the atmosphere was electric as many out there were being named and thanked in song.

As it came to an end, and I played the last few bars on the now-solo piano there was a huge roar that almost lifted the roof. We stood and waved as if it was the end of the show and it was a couple of minutes before we could move into the proper show, starting with some older Pixies songs and then progressing into Sister’s material. There was a section where we did a bunch of Abigail numbers and even a couple from my own album. The last part was a string of hits from our albums which went down a treat.

We ended with a best seller from the latest album and bowed. Of course, someone, who sounded a lot like Donna, called for the Devil. It was picked up and a chant grew. We had half expected this, so the last song had me already playing the electric violin. It was a fitting finale to a very packed show. When the Devil had been driven out, we all lined up across the stage and bowed, waved, and blew kisses before giving a final wave and going off behind the amps, the way we had arrived some time before.

That was one night down, and just three more to go before we escaped to the comparative calm of Toronto. We had agreed to keep a low profile in our homes during the days as we may have been mobbed if we were seen out and about. We wanted nothing to mar this set of shows.

The Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shows got progressively noisier, and the papers were full of interviews with people we had mentioned in the song, many not realising the effect that they had on our lives. The emotion generated by just that one song was draining; not factoring the rest of the show which brought home to us the enormity of where we had got to. I went home Sunday night and slept until early afternoon Monday. It was emotional fatigue and Jordan was very attentive and supportive. Ali had been to all four shows and had miraculously stayed awake until the end every night.

Wednesday, we were heading for Toronto and our first show in Canada. That, and the Montreal shows that followed, were almost an anti-climax after Detroit. In Toronto we did what we needed to do to please the fans. The other girls went home for a rest while Joyce and I joined the local orchestra to prepare for our Rodrigo concert the following Friday and Saturday night.

While we were relaxing in our hotel lounge, I asked Joyce why she wasn’t on the baby bandwagon. She told me that she hadn’t considered it until the others had confessed to being pregnant.

“With the window of opportunity that the others have created,” she said. “Matty and I have spoken about it, and I’ve already stopped taking the pills so that we can have our baby next year.”

Our guitar concert was well received, and we spent a couple of extra days in Toronto talking about possible shows into the future. There are many classical guitar pieces that can be played with an orchestra and Joyce agreed to a likely date in May next year with me getting one for later in the year, all dependant on the orchestra sorting it out with Allan.

The others flew into Montreal, and we did our last two shows for some time. It gave us a lift, and we left our new Canadian fans hungry for more. That was it for quite a while.

Whether the Sisters went back on stage again was an unknown. We all said we wanted to. Who knew what a lengthy break would bring, especially with babies taking up your time.

It was now just into December, and I had a Christmas at home to plan. Jordan warned me that the January and February period was one of the busiest for a vet, with all the unwanted or unexpected gifts to look at. That was when he would make his salary de-sexing cats and dogs or fitting ID chips.

Tony had a full diary until the beginning of the festive season but had, wisely, refused any bookings for the first three months of next year. That had become our most productive period to get albums made. It would mean that I should have something to work with to make it worthwhile. I did have several songs that had come out of Sharron’s poetry and few that had drifted out of my own brain, possibly enough for a middling album but nothing really special.

After a week at home, I called all the other girls and invited them to lunch at the farm. I warned Becky that there was likely to be up to a couple of dozen for that lunch and to prepare something that could be saved for later. She suggested home-made pizza from our new pizza oven.

On the day all the girls arrived with their husbands, so with me and Jordan we had a dozen already. Add to that Tony and Joyce and Alan and Helen we had a big table set up. My one big question to them all was what the plans were for the next year.

I explained that we had to have likely dates when each of us would be available so that Alan could talk to likely venues with some certainty. He nodded as I said that.

I kicked off the discussion saying that I wanted to put down at least two albums before the end of March. One was to be my own and one should be, if we came up with some good songs, a Sisters album. Abigail said she would like to do another one herself in that time.

We discovered that Abigail, Pet, and Janet would be off having babies around the end of March and Joyce announced that she was due in August. That led to a round of hugs and a toast to the parents-to-be. That allowed Alan to look at a few shows we could do around October as a band. That gave us a reason to keep together.

We would all be available for promotional or vet show dates between May and July. Abigail wanted to do a few shows with just her out front, and whichever ones of us were around as a backing band, to promote her album should one get released. Alan told her that he could provide a backing band from his stable of artists if needed.

Dianne had spoken to me about doing a Swans concert to play the “Sharron” album live, and I had that pencilled in for April while none of the others were available. Joyce said that she could do a guitar concert up to June and after September. Emily was not planning any babies in the foreseeable future.

During the discussion it came up that all the others were going to move house in the first six months. With babies on the way they all thought that a new place was on their wish list. Janet and Colin were going to get somewhere big enough for a granny flat so that Flora could stay with them. They also wanted enough space to put in a rehearsal room and studio.

Emily and Ian were looking for somewhere that would take a concert grand. Pet and Anton also needed space for a piano and a small recording studio. Only Joyce and Matty were not going large but were still looking for a music room with a nice house attached. Abigail just wanted somewhere comfortable and was looking for a nice penthouse.

This brought a serious look to Alan’s face. He, and I, knew that laying down roots could mean an unwillingness to travel for long periods. Any shows we did in future would have to be weekends so we could get home during the week. Overseas tours would have to be carefully planned for a few years.

We finished lunch with a firm decision to lay down an album in the first three months. All the girls were taking a month off to bask in some sunshine, so we arranged to meet again in the second week of January.

After the others had gone, Alan sat down and filled in his notebook with what we had discussed and the looked up. “It’s going to be an odd year, you know.”

I nodded.

“It’s not unexpected. We’re all an age where babies are likely. It’s not as if any of the girls can’t afford a nanny once the first blush of motherhood is over, but that could take up to six months. It makes an album even more important.”

“Have you had any flashes of brilliance with new songs?” Tony asked. I had to admit that the year had been so filled I hadn’t been able to invent a top ten hit for a while.

“I seem to be concentrating on more wistful songs like the Swan album or my “Postcode” one. We really need something big for when we hit the stage as a group again. I’ll let you know when inspiration hits, but, until then, I have a Christmas to plan.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023