Stripes.

The devil wears Prada.

From top to bottom, Summer looked like she just walked off the runway at all times. To others, maybe it was impressive or even normal. To me, it looked a bit ridiculous. It did have the effect of making it look like she always had money. The way she acted backed it up. But no one could say she didn’t have hustle. 

We first met at an excessively neon bar during a music industry conference almost four years earlier where she told me rejecting a drink from a record label representative wasn’t a good look. Nonetheless, she said I reminded her of herself when she was younger, and all during my college years she’d call me up from time to time for local gigs. 

When you graduate earlier than all your friends, your last day of college ends with a fizzle rather than a bang. And you might be like me, walking past all the Christmas lights that make winter in New York worth it, fully focused on the fact that you have no job. No real job, anyway. The full-time kind with healthcare and a retirement plan. And as if on cue, Summer reaches out to me saying she’s financing a tour and she wants me to be on it. 

A tour in this case refers to concerts held by an artist in multiple towns over some length of time usually to promote a new album. But ever since the record industry got hijacked by music downloads and later streaming, it’s the album that really does the job of promoting the tour - the thing that’s going to bring in the real money. You may have heard of the recent Taylor Swift and Beyonce tours, shows big enough to put entire cities in gridlock and create an economic spike for any industries they touch. But there are also much smaller tours like for the bands who would come to that hole-in-the-wall nightclub I’d been working at (described in The Door.) with a tiny stage, a handful of lights, and three hundred people watching if you were lucky. 

I came to college knowing I wanted to go on tour someday but as a teen, there seemed to be no straightforward way to do so. As my life goal, I figured I’d get a shot at it around age thirty after working my way through the venue system. So getting that call from Summer significantly earlier than that was like I’d just won my golden ticket. I was terrified, of course. I had just graduated earlier that afternoon. It was time for me to get serious. Look for work with the symphony, maybe. But with a good look at my situation: Young, diploma and little else to my name, no other obligations aside from keeping myself alive, and honestly way too rough around the edges to be let within a hundred feet of any symphony, I figured it was now or never. I said yes.

I don’t know if other industries are like this, but it seems to be the case in entertainment (music, TV, movies, sports, fashion) that the concept of being part of that environment is so glamorous that they really don’t need to advertise to get people interested. Because of that, the first lesson drilled into your head is that you’re not special and that there are thousands of other people who would gladly take your position if you have any complaints. So if you’re young, like I was, when your boss throws a chair at you, you take it. If you’re asked to sit on a curb all night until sunrise to make sure a truck can park where your boss wants it to, you do it. If you’re told to leave in the middle of class to go pick up a specially ordered item from a warehouse for an artist and bring it to their manager in a five-star hotel lobby on the other end of town, you get moving. Because if you don’t, someone else will. This sort of thing is expected. The necessary part of earning your stripes. 

I’d done all of that and more during college. One of my first jobs for Summer was posing as a merch girl for a club party her business partner had booked. In reality, I was smuggling in huge bottles of hard liquor wrapped in t-shirts to sell right under the venue manager’s nose with the help of a lower level club employee who was in on the whole scheme. The thing about transitioning from local work to touring work, however, is that none of the stripes you earned before mattered. It’s back to square one.

This particular first tour was all fly dates. That means you fly to each stop rather than drive as described in Bus Call. It consisted of a larger tour party that was split into three groups. 

A Party: The artists and their general entourage like managers, a team of stylists, and friends. It also included Summer, a curious investor looking for some thrills, the tour manager, and an artist liaison. 

B Party: The crew including the production manager, audio, lighting, and video teams as well as a gaggle of backup dancers.  

C Party: Also known as the “advance team.” A small team of people who travel ahead of the rest of the tour to make sure everything is set up the way it needs to be when everyone else arrives.

I was in C Party. 

Megan, the artist liaison and part of A Party, had a big say in what was going on in C Party. She was the person on staff who kept a pulse on artist needs which was important when C Party would be setting up their hotel rooms and lining up their transportation. Megan was like Summer but wound up a hundred times more tightly (though years later I’d find out they were both reportedly bipolar). In one second she’d be hospitable enough for the Queen of England. The next? Well…

She came into my life flanked by two other women (Sarah and Natalie - my C Party teammates) closer to my age who hung onto her every word. They’d already done a tour together with an artist I liked quite a bit so despite appearances, I assumed they were the real deal. It didn’t matter that I was technically the assistant tour manager. I was the greenest of the bunch. 

For start of tour, we’re all in the first city a day before the artist team. Megan goes over each person’s rider. A rider is basically a document that lists everything needed to make the show happen. There are production riders that specify the equipment needed on stage and there’s the hospitality rider which specifies the things needed backstage, in hotel rooms, or in vehicles. If you’ve ever heard of the “green M&M’s” thing, that’s part of a hospitality rider. 

Megan describes how she wants each hotel room set up. Aside from the items, of which there were many spanning from alcohol to fruit trays to slippers and minor pieces of workout equipment, she told us that we’d always need hotel staff to change each set of bed sheets in front of our eyes so we could confirm that they were, in fact, fresh. Whatever was in the bathroom (towels and other toiletries) we’d need the front desk to make it double. She also said we’d each need to take our own rolls of packing tape and use it to pick up any speck of lint or other abnormalities on the carpet, the bedsheets, and the curtains. 

“I know these two can do it,” she said, referring to my two teammates. “I want to watch you, Anna.”

So I got to work, placing all the drinks and snacks in the most aesthetically pleasing way I could manage, making sure all the labels were lined up facing forward. Then came the packing tape ritual which is when everything started to go south. 

“You’re moving too slowly,” she said first, so I started to move faster. “You should be crawling,” she said next, so I got out of my squat and instead got on my knees and crawled. “Face to the floor so you can see what you’re doing, Anna!” 

Eventually, she stops paying much attention to me, talking to the other two out in the hallway before walking off. Once I’m done, Sarah comes to me with her impossibly big, bulging eyes wide open. 

“Megan says it’s going to be difficult to work with you if you don’t improve. You’re too slow.” Somehow, after all that, it’s this comment that got to me. 

“And Megan has an issue saying that to my face?” I asked. Sarah looked shocked, then offended. 

“I’m telling you,” she said. 

“For the future, if Megan has an issue with my performance, she can pull me aside herself.” I pause. “In fact, I’m going to go tell her that right now.”

I did. And I believe it is that action that made Megan decide she was never going to let me have a moment of peace on the entire tour. 

“Anna, why can I see you right now?” she asked during load-in at the first venue as I was walking down the backstage hallway. “If I can see you,” she goes on to say, “that means the artist will be able to see you and the artist should have no idea you exist. You should never be in the same room as him or the same hallway as him. And if you screw that up and get in the way, you should never make eye contact with him.” I stare at her in disbelief but shrug it off. I may have been new to touring, but I wasn’t new to working with celebrities. If she wanted to be right in their crosshairs it was fine with me. I didn’t realize how quickly that would become a problem.

At all hours of the day and night, my phone would be blowing up:

The artist needs new slippers. The artist needs cold medicine. The artist doesn’t like the hotel pillows, go buy him a different one. The artist wants weed. The artist wants to go to a strip club. The artist wants to go to shopping at a designer boutique, please go in advance to make sure there is someone to attend to him. 

At our Houston stop, it was communicated to me that the artist wanted ice cream. Not the normal flavors, but cool flavors. A variety he and the rest of A Party could sift through. The venue told me of a neat local place and before long, I was bringing in the bags of ice cream every color of the rainbow. On my way out, an artist was walking in.

“Oh! Is that the ice cream?” he asked me. I froze first, then decided to answer like a normal human being.

“Yes. Just got here.”

“What flavors are they?” he asked. 

I walked over to the table where I had set everything up and pointed to where each cup of ice cream was labeled. 

“Awesome. Thanks!” 

“No problem,” I say, then quickly exit the green room only to run right into Megan who looked like her head was about to explore. 

“What the fuck were you doing in there?” she seethed, keeping her volume as low as possible. 

“Dropping off the ice cream,” I said plainly, staring her in the eye. 

“Look, I don’t care if you’re some little obsessed fangirl gagging for his dick. You have no chance with him.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Whatever delusion you have about my intention here, it’s yours alone. He asked me about ice cream flavors. I directed him to the labels on each cup. I left. End of story.”

The next day I am called into Summer’s office to get a lecture about professional conduct and putting aside differences to work well with Megan who apparently ran to her the previous night nearly in tears because I’d been rude to her. But Summer knew me well enough. She also knew Megan well enough. She figured it was far easier to talk me into taking the steps to placate Megan than Megan changing her entire personality. She’d worked with too many big names in the industry. A Party loved her. So we had to keep her happy. 

When setting up the production office in Dallas, I realized my bag of backstage passes was gone. Backstage passes were reserved for special artist guests before and after the show. A couple stops from then, we’d be in Los Angeles where other celebrities were on the guest list. It would be a madhouse backstage so I was preparing the credentials early. I wracked my brain to try and figure out where the bag could’ve gone. I called the previous venue but they’d found nothing left behind. Eventually, one of the tour’s production assistants told me he’d seen Megan walking around the hotel with at least thirty passes hanging from her arm.

“Tell him what you told me,” I say to the PA now in the company of the tour manager that night after the show. The guy explains and the tour manager, Michael, decides he’s going to step in. There had been conflict earlier in the tour about me enforcing the limits on comp tickets (the number of people let into the show for free, dictated by the booking contract). We had been in the process of thinning down the LA guest list after backstage in NYC got so out of hand the venue almost shut down the entire concert. Since I was the keeper of the credentials, it seemed on brand for Megan to steal them straight out of my production suitcase so she could let as many people in as she wanted through the back door day of show. 

Michael approached her about it after C Party took off to go to Los Angeles. The next time I saw Megan was during load-in just inside the stage door where she looked ready to give the Oscar performance of a lifetime. She accused me of spreading a lie about stealing all these credentials to make her look bad. Tears running down her face, she emptied the contents of her tote bag to reveal seven backstage passes that she claims she always kept on her “in case of emergencies.” 

“I never gave you seven backstage passes to keep on you in case of emergencies. I have a log, with serial numbers, of every backstage pass that exists on this tour and who it was given to,” I say. “You took them and I need you to give them back. You’re not in trouble or anything. But we have a lot of important people coming to the show today and I have no credentials for them.”

She slaps me in the face much to the shock of surrounding security who I wave off before calling me a bitch, a liar, and some other colorful things before storming off. I continue my load-in like nothing happened. The missing backstage passes mysteriously appeared in the wardrobe case Megan was responsible for transporting so I had everything I needed. But as usual, the situation escalated itself up the chain of command as Megan announced she was quitting the tour to instead cry her eyes out in her downtown LA luxury condo. The artists were shocked, then concerned, then upset. So it wasn’t a surprise when Summer approached me again.

“The artists want her on the show,” she said. “So you need to go to her, apologize, and ask her to come back. She’s already said it has to be you.”

“And if I refuse?” I ask. I was still the assistant tour manager for this run. I alone had all the knowledge of our travel and lodging plans because the actual tour manager was just part of the inflated A Party who mainly took responsibility for schmoozing with important people and making sure the party never stopped. I’m the one who was in charge of all the catering. I’m the one who made the overall schedule in the first place. If I walked off the tour, everyone would be screwed. If Megan walked off the tour, however, the artists would be upset… which also meant everyone would be screwed. 

So I put on my big girl pants and Shakespeare hat to concoct a drawn out apology and pseudo heart to heart. Megan made her way back to the venue. A Party was satisfied. The tour was completed as planned. 

I’d go on to do a whole second tour with Megan that would get her blacklisted by a big time show promoter called Golden Voice after which she’d spend some amount of time in a psychiatric hospital before becoming deeply involved in aerial yoga and getting together with a rich guy in the tech industry. Her minions didn’t last much longer in the touring world either. I would only see Megan on one other occasion, at a music festival from afar. Just the sight of her made my chest feel tight with anxiety.

Along the same timeline, Summer would exit the industry too after the whole incident with her main business partner’s right hand man getting stabbed to death outside a club in New York, his associates fleeing the city or even the country, and the IRS as well as the FBI later getting involved when two million dollars were mysteriously unaccounted for. The stress from all of that culminated in a giant medical scare. She’d recuperate in Mexico before moving permanently to the Bahamas.

But on those two tours with Summer and Megan, I’d more than earned my stripes navigating a long list of unusual situations should they have happened in any other type of environment.

I was in the business. I was clean. I was there to stay.

In 2019, Megan’s name came up during a preliminary tour meeting I was having with an artist manager.

“She came highly recommended,” he said. We were looking for someone to handle artist care and some light stage management duties.”

“If you hire her, you lose me,” I said. He was shocked.

“Was she that bad?” he asked.

“I can connect you with several people to back up my claims.” He only considered it for a few seconds.

“No, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ll leave filling the role up to you.”