“Have a good show,” I said, as I hurried along, to avoid hearing how no one understood their work, that they were intellectually superior to everyone in the room, and that they had been treated badly. I would probably hear it from them at some point this weekend.
I saw Indigo one row over and gave her a wave. Indigo was a beautiful black woman wearing Birkenstocks, a batik-printed skirt, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She made gorgeous beads—sculptural leaves and flowers and glass spheres full of natural imagery. Indigo didn’t believe she should actually have to sell her beads and instead, was working on a barter system in which she would simply trade her beads for food and clothing. Her biggest problem was that landlords didn’t want to receive their monthly rent payment in beads—they all seemed to want cold, hard cash. For this reason, Indigo would show up at the occasional bead sale to try and make some money—and sleep in her van at night when she didn’t have enough for a hotel room during a bazaar. I felt for her, knowing how hard she must have it, trying to make ends meet on an artist’s income.
Next to Indigo was Vandal Beads. A man sat crossed-legged on the floor in front of the booth, sorting through show gear, which had spilled across the aisle. I had to swerve to avoid him and his chaotic mess. I was glad I wasn’t going to be his neighbor for the next few days.
Down the aisle, Saundra Jameson, the self-proclaimed queen of the bead world, was talking to—no, yelling at—someone. It looked like Sal, the bead bazaar promoter who was notorious throughout the bead world as a scumbag. But he was a scumbag with a series of well-known bead bazaars across the nation that would bring in customers who were ready and willing to spend their money on beads. Saundra towered over Sal, her back curved forward as she arched over him, while he leaned backward trying to avoid cracking heads with her. I was too far away to hear what they were arguing about. Saundra shoved an envelope at Sal. He grabbed it and pushed past her without another word.
As I arrived at my booth, marked out with silver duct tape on the floor, I made a horrifying discovery: I would be at a table next to the bead diva. I was going to be neighbors with Saundra Jameson for the next three days. Oh joy.
Saundra bustled around her booth in a long crushed velvet skirt in deep purple, matching purple lace-up ankle boots, a form-fitting black sweater, and a sheer lavender scarf wrapped artfully around her neck, with a long necklace of beads hanging over the top of it. She was tall and thin, her long dark hair elegantly twisted into a chignon. Saundra certainly made me feel like I needed to review my clothing choices, which usually consisted of jeans and T-shirts. Even with Val’s wardrobe help, I still had a long way to go to get to elegant.
I’d met her at Tessa’s studio last April, when she’d done a beadmaking demonstration. I didn’t think she’d remember me from that event. I knew about her, having read magazine articles and interviews over the last few years, but I didn’t feel I knew her on a personal level at all. Saundra had been making beads for about fifteen years, much longer than a relative newbie like me.
She was a walking display of her work and would stop and tell anyone she could, in exhausting detail, about each bead and where it could be purchased. Usually, she’d throw in some information about her latest show at some gallery, press a business card into the person’s hand, and move on to the next adoring potential customer.
Since I had to sit next to her for the next few days, it seemed smart to start things off on the right foot. When Saundra visited Tessa’s studio last spring, her giant ego had filled the room from the moment she walked in the door. Tessa told me Saundra’s attitude had been surly at best. With that in mind, I thought it best to say a quick hello and then finish setting up without too much interaction.
“Hi, Saundra,” I said. Saundra subtly glanced at my name tag.
“Oh, Jax, nice to see you,” Saundra said a little too sweetly, as her eyes now focused on the necklace I was wearing. It was a single tubular green and pink bead I had made a few weeks ago, on a simple silver chain. She seemed to be sizing me up, seeing if I’d be any competition for her. She extended her arms as if to offer a hug. As I reluctantly approached her, she thrust her wrist in my face.
“This is the new Cosmos bead.”
“Nice,” I said, slowly backing out of hugging range.
“This design is one of the seven different beads you can learn to make in my new book, Celestial Bead Designs. No one has ever seen these designs before. I’m premiering them in this book,” she said with a flourish, as she pressed a flyer into my hands.
“And as a special bonus, I’ve included instructions on how to make this fabulous seed bead bracelet.” At that moment, the clasp on the bracelet popped open, and the bracelet slid from Saundra’s wrist. I snatched it before it hit the ground. It was quite beautiful, with its labyrinthine swirls of color, set on the background of midnight blue, row upon row of tiny seed beads creating a cuff.
“Glad I caught that before it hit the floor,” I said, admiring the bracelet and passing it back to her.
“Perhaps you could learn something from the book,” she said. She was condescending, and I didn’t like it.
“Thanks for showing me. I’ll think about it,” I said, quickly setting the flyer down on the side of my table.
I started setting up, first laying down a long blue satin tablecloth for the sides and front of the table, then placing a piece of black velvet on the tabletop to add a little elegance. The display furniture came out next: busts to hold necklaces, fabric-covered platforms, and tree-shaped wire stands for earrings. I pulled the lights out of their boxes and placed them on the table. Having good lighting is key to selling glass beads. Customers need to see what they are buying, and the only way they can do that is if the pieces are well-lit. I set business cards and postcards in their acrylic stands. I unloaded my calculator, receipt books, and bags necessary for sales transactions, and placed them behind my table.
I had designed the layout of my table so that the six trays of beads I’d brought would lay side-by-side in the center of the table, with stands for earrings, loose bargain beads, and kits on each end. Since I already knew where the trays would go, I would bring them down tonight before the sale started. At this point, I was about as done as I could be.
While working, I overheard Saundra talking to a slim man in his 30s with a stack of books in his arms, who had just arrived. His hair was ruffled as if he’d just fallen out of bed, and he wore a yellow thrift-store cardigan with a black and white checkered shirt buttoned all the way to the top. When I went to high school, this guy would have been the nerd who got beat up after class. In Portland today, he was something else entirely: a hipster. He was so uncool that he was cool.
Saundra wasn’t exactly bossing her assistant around, but in a weird way she was coercing him, herding him, so he would do what she wanted. Anytime I heard her use the word “dear,” I knew it would be followed by a demand.
“Miles, dear,” commanded Saundra, “look at this mess behind the table. These cords are such a hazard, and why aren’t they plugged in?”
Miles neatly placed the books he was carrying on the table beside a standing mirror. Then he scrambled behind the table to untangle the electrical cords. I watched as he plugged the lights into a black toaster-sized power box, which had been set up to provide electricity to the vendors. The units were daisy-chained together with over-sized plugs and thick cables in a line down the row, with one power box in each vendor’s booth. Vendors plugged their lights, credit card machines, and any other equipment that needed electricity during the bazaar, into these boxes. At the end of each row, even thicker cables ran to a suitcase-sized distribution box. More cables snaked from this large unit up the wall at the rear of the ballroom into a utility room.
Most of the day, it was hard to miss the electrician buzzing around the room, setting up the equipment and heading to and from a utility room where I assumed the building’s main power center reside
d. Right now he was wreaking havoc on an importer who had several tables of African tribal and trade beads. Crawling around on the floor, the electrician pulled tables this way and that, peeled long strips of black electrical tape off a roll, and wrapped them around frayed cables that were sticking out in all directions.
The importer, who according to the sign on his booth was Mr. Mboto, tried his best to remain calm during all the chaos, and was relieved when the electrician pulled himself out from under one of the tables and bolted toward the door at the back of the ballroom to turn on the power. Suddenly, the lights for Mr. Mboto’s booth burst on, and I smelled burning plastic. The importer wasn’t the only one with a dodgy electrical setup. The whole electrical system looked unsafe.
Miles glanced up from where he was sitting and adjusted his large tortoise-shell glasses. “Do you want me to plug in your lights too?”
“That would be great, thanks. I’m Jax, by the way.”
“Miles,” he said, subtly checking me out to see where I fit on the hipster spectrum. It was obvious I’d dropped off that scale years ago—if I’d ever been on it. “I guess we’re going to be neighbors.” Miles stood up and brushed the lint off his black skinny jeans.
“Right next door to each other here on aisle four,” I said, looking down the line of tables in our row at all the other beady people setting up for the show. “Thanks for plugging in my lights.”
“Miles, dear,” Saundra said, looking at him, and then at me, with disdain. “You can talk to your new friend on your own time.”
“I’d better get back to work here,” Miles said, glancing at Saundra, who had grown quiet and was looking more intense than usual.
“We’ll have time to talk this weekend, I’m sure,” I said. I flipped the switch on one of my lights. No power. I was going to have to catch the electrician next time he sprinted by.
As I stood up, I ran into a woman. Actually, she ran into me. Or more specifically, she ran over my foot with her electric scooter.
“Coming through. Beep, beep,” the woman said, stopping abruptly in front of me.
Wendy Wilson was a long-time beadmaker and famous for one thing: polka dots. All her beads were covered in them. She wore them along with dotted everything else: always a dotted shirt, and on occasion, dotted socks and pants. It made my eyes cross looking at all the dots swirling across her massive blouse.
“Oh. Excuse me, sorry,” I said to Wendy, although I was pretty sure she was the one who should have been apologizing for running me over. “Jax O’Connell,” I said.
“Jax, nice to meet you. I’m Wendy Wilson, but I suppose you already know that,” she said in a self-congratulatory way.
“Yes, I do. I’ve seen your work everywhere. This is only my second show, so if you have any pointers, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”
“Be careful of people who steal your work,” she said, almost to herself, as she turned back to her table and smoothed out a pile of dotted beads in a tray.
“Yes, thanks,” I said. “I’ll watch out for shoplifters.” Thieves didn’t seem like they’d be too much of a problem at a bead bazaar. But beads are small, and there are some people who might be tempted to slip a shiny trinket into a pocket if they thought they could get away with it.
I turned back to my display. Wendy’s giant backside bumped into mine as she climbed off her scooter, sending me crashing into the back edge of my table. I stifled a yelp. It was going to be a challenging weekend with the bead diva on one side and the polka dot princess behind me. One claustrophobic weekend, coming up. Ugh.
As I squeezed past Wendy and her scooter in the narrow gap between the tables that led out to the aisle, I noticed Saundra’s standing mirror was blocking about a foot of space at the front of my table.
“I’m going to move this mirror so it’s in your space,” I said.
Saundra was kneeling behind her counter and either didn’t hear me, or was ignoring me. I gently moved the mirror so it was no longer blocking my table. She popped up from where she was sitting on the floor.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could have crushed me under there,” Saundra screeched. Such a drama queen.
“I told you I was moving your mirror. It should be in front of your table, but had gotten shifted in front of mine.”
“Look,” she said, pointing to the ground where a duct-tape grid indicated the boundaries of each table. “My mirror was clearly within the square where the promoter wanted me,” Saundra said, sliding the mirror back.
“Our squares overlap—we can’t both be in the same spot,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You don’t need as much space as I do.” She was waving her arms dramatically now, trying to look bigger and scarier than me.
She was succeeding. “I’ve got all these brochures. I have all my beads and jewelry to display. Certainly you can give up a few inches in front of your table. You probably don’t have enough inventory to fill your table anyway.”
I pushed her mirror until it was fully in front of her table. She was not going to bully me. “I have plenty of inventory,” I said, giving her mirror a final shove.
She stood there glowering, her dark eyes fixed on me, her fists pulled up in front of her face in anger. She looked like a giant praying mantis about to rip my head off.
Time to get out of here, before I lost my head.
I grabbed my handbag and headed for the door. Everything around me was a blur of noise, color, and movement. My eyes, stinging with tears, were focused on the door. All I wanted was to get out of the chaotic ballroom.
As I neared the door to the lobby, I heard a loud crackle and watched as the overhead lights gently dimmed, brightened, and then flickered off. There was a resounding groan across the ballroom as all the vendors stopped what they were doing. Then, as quickly as the lights had gone out, they were back on, followed by a collective sigh of relief.
I was nearly run over by the harried-looking electrician as he dashed past me, a giant tool belt slung low around his scrawny hips. This was the man I’d seen earlier working at Mr. Mboto’s booth. I glanced at the name tag sewn onto his untucked brown work shirt. It said Ernie in white cursive letters. He trotted down the aisle, past all the booths, and into the utility room. Following closely behind him was Sal, who ran the Bead Fun show. He was as sleazy as they come, propositioning any woman he saw. His pitch-black hair revealed his dependence on Clairol dye, and the paunch hanging over his too-tight belt told me he didn’t get to the gym—ever.
“Why’d ya not listen to me on this? You’re supposed ta have at least 100 amps in here,” Sal yelled.
Ernie replied, in a thin plaintive voice, “It’s not my fault. Nobody ever listens…”
I pushed hard on the panic bar—an appropriate name—on the door. What a relief to be out of the ballroom.
The lobby of The Red Rose had clearly once been elegant, but its opulence had faded years ago. Now it looked tired and worn out. Me? I was feeling the same, except for the elegant part. I don’t think I’ve ever been that.
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Be Still My Beading Heart Page 7