a rough night

I thought I was just going to the Y to play some basketball while I was waiting for my laundry to finish, but it turns out they wanted me to be the manager for a new teen pop sensation. I can't tell you his name, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

Part of my job was to monitor his movement around the stage during shows. It was a pretty complicated set up, with hidden harnesses and elevated platforms and various large pieces of moving machinery. I followed him around the stage like a mother hen, carefully keeping out of view of the audience, making sure he didn't accidentally fall to his death and take out a few tweens in the process. We were halfway through the night's performance, in a large warehouse space in rural Florida, packed full of near-hysteric teenage girls and quite a few very enthusiastic teenage boys as well, when it was suddenly revealed to us and to the audience that the pop star and his entire staff (myself included) were actually clones, distant copies of the real pop star and his original entourage.

I didn't really have time to deal with the unhappy implications of this revelation for myself. The tweens were in near revolt, and one of my many duties was crowd control. So I took the mic and said the first thing that came into my head, which was that we were changing the format of that night's show. In half an hour, members of the audience would be given the opportunity to wrestle a clone. Five clones, five matches. I know this was an idiotic idea, but the crowd seemed to like it. They happily filed out of the warehouse to let us reconfigure the space for the impromptu fight night.

Now we were faced with the conundrum of what to do if our pop star was crushed, strangled, or otherwise damaged in the upcoming bouts. Of course, it wasn't actually that much of a problem, seeing as there were apparently additional clones of all of us waiting in reserve. All in all, it was a stressful night all around, and I completely forgot to take my laundry out of the dryer.