Stevie Nicks is on tour in the fall of 2022...and so is Lindsey Buckingham...separate solo tours because it's been five years since they've spoken...five years since the incident at MusiCares put an end to their years-long affair across two Fleetwoo...
Santa Monica, California Sunday, October 2, 2022 (3:00 pm) ********************
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Karen Johnston sat on the terrace off the living room of Stevie Nicks' penthouse apartment in Santa Monica, using a vape pen to take a few hits of weed before going back inside. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the time Stevie usually woke up these days after going to sleep at around eight in the morning, and once she sat down with her coffee and her dogs and her L.A. Times, Karen was going to tell her. She was going to pull out her phone and go to Instagram or Twitter or wherever the message to the public had been, and she was going to make Stevie look at the screen. John McVie was going to be in the audience at the Hollywood Bowl tomorrow night - which also happened to be Lindsey's birthday, and she couldn't risk her hearing the news on a show night. Jimmy Iovine was going to be there as well, and, come to think of it, it was Jimmy Karen was more worried about. John McVie was a man of very few words, even if he was in contact with Lindsey again. Jimmy wasn't Lindsey's friend - more like his competitor of sorts - but Jimmy Iovine was a big Hollywood producer and he had a mouth almost a big as Stevie's introducing a song. Karen couldn't take that chance.
Karen had known Lindsey Buckingham for over thirty years - longer, she thought, if she counted the years her sister Kelly was Stevie's assistant before she'd taken over the job. They had barely been on speaking terms then and they were not on speaking terms now, Stevie and Lindsey, but Karen had been around for the rest of it, the things Kelly hadn't. Karen had been there during The Dance in 1997, when it looked as though they were really going to make it this time. She'd been around to watch that dream crumble when Lindsey had married Kristen Messner and proceeded to become a suburban father of three. She'd been there twenty years ago watching Stevie try to come to terms with it when they'd recorded Say You Will and spent over a year on tour, albeit without Christine McVie around to shoulder at least some of Stevie's emotional outburst over the situation.
Karen had been around in 2011 when Barbara Nicks had died and Lindsey had been on the first flight to Phoenix to take care of Stevie in her unfathomable grief...and it was then, on a rare rainy Arizona afternoon when Stevie's mother had been lain to rest beside Jess, whose funeral in 2005 Lindsey had also attended, that Karen had made her prediction and it had come true two years later on the tour when Stevie had told the ever-lengthening "Without You" story before performing the old lost-and-found Buckingham Nicks song...
Karen had predicted the long standoff between two people trying desperately to fall out of love with each other would come to an end.
Her prediction had come true in a hotel suite in Boston in 2013, when the five-year affair between Stevie and Lindsey had begun.
Karen had to admit, she'd been mighty impressed when she'd come back from a trip to Target on the afternoon of December 29, 2011, on a search for black shoes to wear to Barbara's funeral because she had packed only sneakers and Uggs for her trip, and found Lindsey Buckingham in Christopher Nicks' kitchen, drinking a Heineken with the man he considered his brother-in-law talking about how Stevie was a wreck and needed everyone to rally around her.
