Arnie Kotkin has finally gotten his doctorate in science, but his dream of teaching at the college level eludes him when a private prep school in Vermont makes a far better offer.
To add to the changes in his life, his parents have announced that they can no longer care for Todd--the child of his late brother--so he and his partner, Barnaby Moss, are tapped for the honor of raising the boy.
Northward bound again, the pair stop to look at a house; it will be a wonderful place to raise a child, but it might also be a great place to share with someone else…someone who should have left 145 years ago.
An East Hartford, Connecticut native, Susan M. Hooper, worked in a law firm for 23 years, before entering the Connecticut craft circuit as a doll maker in the fall of 1996.
Now the author of six books, Ms. Hooper shares her home with her extended family, plus three cats and a huge Yellow Lab, known to readers as Tillie Fentnor.
It was a surprisingly sticky Friday morning in May, and record producer Bob Knox was sitting back in his chair listening to yet another playback of “Screaming Blue Midnight”.
It was not getting any better.
Beyond Rotten, the group responsible for the musical fiasco, felt it was exactly the sound they wanted.
Bob thought otherwise.
His striped shirt was rumpled, and his deep maroon tie had long ago been tugged off; it hung over the back of his chair like a dead snake, and, if its owner had had his way, a few young singers would have been hanging with it.
Scratching his head, the man cursed the bad timing that had found him free, and able to take on this project. How could even a group calling itself ‘Beyond Rotten’ be this bad? Good God Almighty, they were beyond rotten!
He smirked at the spontaneous play on words that had formed in his mind, knowing he was too disgusted to have made it purposely.
Absently thinking that a case could be made that the band members had, in fact, screamed themselves blue until many midnights, Bob turned to the young engineer seated beside him, and said, “I didn’t know the bar on good taste had dropped so low, Barn.”
At nearly 29, Barnaby Moss--standing all of five feet tall, and weighing in at a whopping 108 pounds--looked to be about 12 years old. The last engineer in, so to speak, he was the low man on the seniority totem pole at Legend Studios.
Although highly regarded by the studio that employed him, Barn seldom got the caliber of artists he deserved--even returning acts with which he had been successful, were crap assignments at one point.
Legend was notorious for never putting ability above seniority; it was a system that smacked of impartiality and idiocy at the same time, and was one that might very well bite them on the corporate ass one day.
A conviction long held by Legend’s youngest, but arguably best, rider of the dials was that, in lieu of decent retirement benefits, the studio gave its engineers a Right of Refusal, which granted them the option to kick crap assignments down the line.
