You May Be The One

You May Take My Hand

Santa Monica, California
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
(4:00 pm)
********************

"You don't mind the cameras, do you? Dave films literally every waking moment of his life."

Stevie was suddenly in hyper hostess mode, walking Lindsey into the foyer where an enormous amount of recording equipment was set up beneath the chandelier and two director's chairs were poised on either side of the space beside microphones. Lindsey had been there for thirty seconds and she had already offered him coffee, tea, a martini, a sandwich and a place to hang his leather jacket and put down his guitar case. She'd assumed she'd be angry or sad or both when she saw him in person, but she hadn't counted on this emotion, which could only be described as schoolgirl anxiety. She was talking a mile a minute, which wasn't unusual for Stevie, but Lindsey noticed right away and he took her hand and looked into her eyes.

"Stephanie. Chill out. We've done this before." A calming smile came across his face, and she dropped her head with a bit of a giggle.

"Sorry," she said down towards her snow boots. "I'm freaking out."

"It's only me," he said, and Stevie thought "...who wants to wrap around your dreams..." and she knew that she was spinning out. Lindsey was right. She had to relax.

"That's the problem," she muttered under her breath as they walked, arm in arm, into the living room so Lindsey could say hi to everyone he knew and meet the people he didn't. She assumed he hadn't hear her.

He had.

*********************

(5:00 pm)

"I thought it was marching."

Stevie was standing up as everyone around her sat down. She'd been pacing around the room as she described what had led her to compose the poem that had become the song "Soldier's Angel", and she was holding court now, Lindsey sitting in front of her where she stood at the crackling fireplace, talking about how she'd come up with the idea.

"It was like soldiers marching off to war," she continued. "And I was little - I was, like, in the fourth grade or something...and it continued on and on and on, and finally I realized that I used to, like, put my hand up in a way underneath my ear that made me hear the blood pulsing..." She put her fist to her ear to demonstrate what she was talking about. "I finally figured out as I got older that that's what it was, but for many, many, many years, I thought, well I'm hearing soldiers marching off to war."

It was Lori who caught the look on Lindsey's face as Stevie spoke. At first she got angry because it looked as though he was rolling his eyes. She'd known Stevie and Lindsey since 1971 and she'd seen him roll his eye at her before when she'd gone on for too long making a point. She'd also seen him tell her to stop it, that it wasn't "The Stevie Nicks Variety Hour", as he used to call it, and she used to get furious with him about that, knowing that Stevie only went on and on when something meant a lot to her, and there were just so many words in her head that she couldn't get them out fast enough. She was ready to confront him about his eye roll later...and then she realized what she was looking at from across the room in her seat next to Glen.

The poor man was petrified! Lori knew how hard it was for Lindsey - private, imploding, intense Lindsey - to sit in a room surrounded by Stevie's team in a life she lived that had nothing to do with him and their life together, the one he had been asked to leave behind twice. She was looking at a man who'd told Stevie to "go her own way" thirty-three years ago and never expected that when she did, she would create something as rich and passionate and fun and elaborate as this. He looked like it was his first day at a new school.