VW van.
Jayson, Tara, and Trey each took a long swig of the bourbon/scotch mixture. It was vaguely sweet, and mostly bitter, like sucking on a butterscotch hard candy that had a lighter fluid center. The trio had drunk Toni’s booze before, but always in furtive little sips straight from the bottle while Toni was working in her studio. Tara and Trey’s parents didn’t drink, of course.
Now the trio had an endless open bar weekend in front of them.
‘That’s good stuff,’ Tara gasped, gravel-voiced after her first swallow.
‘You sound like Helen Lawson on Match Game 76,’ Jayson giggled.
‘Let’s start shooting before it gets dark,’ Trey said, hoisting the bulky camcorder with his free hand. He’d been trying since Christmas to get his father to let him play with the camera, and now that he had it he wasn’t going to waste a minute–even if it meant kissing Jayson again.
‘As you’ve read, the Martini Shot–that means “final shot” in Hollywood terms,’ Jayson explained, ‘is a catfight between Amethyst Carrington and Christina.’ Both roles were played by Jayson, so it would be a complicated effort. Without any editing facilities, the scene was a technical nightmare–requiring multiple costume changes, extreme close-ups, and body doubles played by Tara. ‘I’ll go get the costumes.’
Tara and Trey went out into the backyard to pick the location, and Jayson went through the upstairs walk-in closet pulling out his dead grandmother’s mink coat and a taupe ultrasuede wrap dress which Toni once wore to a singles mixer at the V.F.W. From the top shelf, Jayson pulled down Toni’s old platinum Lite n’ Airy Eva Gabor wig, and an even older Milady II brunette cropped wig.
Stopping in the bathroom on his way back downstairs, he scooped up a handful of eyeliner pencils, compacts, and lipsticks from the pickup stick-like tangle on the back of the toilet. Now that Toni was single again, the makeup supplies had reappeared.
‘You okay Willie boy?’ he shouted as he passed Willie’s locked bedroom door.
‘Yeah. I need a snack,’ came the voice from the other side, barely audible over the canned laughter of a Love Boat episode.
‘No snacks after six, buddy,’ Jayson replied. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll have a nice breakfast tomorrow. I promise, buddy.’
‘Okay,’ came the sullen reply from the other side of the door.
Tara and Trey were studying the buttons on the camera when Jayson appeared at the sliding glass door in the mink coat and Milady II wig.
‘I’m going to begin the scene over here,’ Jayson said, stepping into the puddle of remaining sunlight by the edge of the rusty swing set. ‘Shoot me from below.’
Trey knelt in the muddy patch at the bottom of the slide. ‘Okay. Ready when you are.’
‘And…action!’ Jayson called, instantly slipping into Amethyst Carrington’s cold character.
AMETHYST CARRINGTON: Miss Belle, there’s no way in HELL that you’re going to poison J.B. against me and our son! I’m not leaving NorthFork Farms until I’m CARRIED OUT IN A COFFIN!
Trey clicked the camera off after Jayson finished his line. Jayson had to quickly change into Miss Belle’s costume. Filming the dialogue between two different characters who were both played by Jayson would be a miracle of cinematography–if they could pull it off. Jayson rushed over to the swing set where he’d stashed Miss Belle’s costume and began switching into the platinum wig and taupe wrap dress. There was no time to change makeup in this scene. The viewing public would just have to accept that Miss Belle and Amethyst Carrington had similar tastes in cosmetics.
Jayson rushed back to his mark. The sun was slipping fast.
MISS BELLE: Well then, call up the funeral home. Amethyst Carrington, ’cause you need to get measured! Take this!
Jayson threw the tumbler of Tab he was holding ‘off screen’ at the invisible Amethyst Carrington. This was meant to instigate the catfight between the two characters Jayson was playing.
With all the complications, the entire scene took nearly an hour and a half to shoot as Jayson repeatedly changed back and forth between Amethyst Carrington and Miss Belle. Sometimes Tara–shot from the back–acted as a stunt double for the actual catfighting. It was exhausting, and by the time Jayson yelled his penultimate Cut!, the sun was slipping down over the lake and fireflies had begun sparkling in the background.
‘We have to hurry to get the last scene,’ Jayson shouted, running across the yard to the back door that led into the garage. The season’s cliffhanger was to end with Trey and Jayson, as J.B. and Amethyst Carrington respectively, kissing in front of a sunset. The drama would come from Tara (Patricia) bursting out of the house with a gun aimed at one of them. A shot would ring out. Would they live? Would they die? Lorimar/CBS would have to shell out big bucks for another season of scripts to find out the answer to that one.
But first, Jayson had to find a prop that resembled a gun before he ran out of sunlight.
The garage, which doubled as Toni’s studio, was dimly lit and filthy. Jayson frantically rooted around the piles of melted bridal toile and boxes of bride and groom cake decorations for something, anything, with which Tara could take aim and fire. She would be relatively far in the background, probably even a little blurry, so the gun didn’t need to be that terribly realistic. Even the spray nozzle off a garden hose would work. In the dark he finally felt something hoselike and followed it along to the end. As hard as he twisted the nozzle wouldn’t come loose, and given the dim lighting it was impossible to determine why. So he stepped down on the hose with one foot and yanked as hard as he could on the nozzle, breaking it free and nearly knocking himself over into a pile of flea market wedding dresses.
After feeling his way back to the door, he emerged from the garage, quickly passing the nozzle to Tara and running back to take his mark next to Trey. This would be his second love scene with Trey, and as much as he tried to convince himself that he was merely excited for the final scene, Jayson knew that much of his anxiety came from the anticipation of kissing Trey.
Trey propped up the camera on a splintered Teeter Totter in the overgrown grass.
‘Go?’ Trey asked.
‘The word is “action,”’ Jayson clarified. ‘And the director says it.’
‘So say it, motherfucker,’ Tara shouted drunkenly from across the yard. ‘My ass is glempty.’ She held up her glass and tipped it upside down to illustrate her obvious point.
Jason looked through the site on the camera to be certain Tara was in frame in the background, yelled Action, pressed the record button, and ran to his mark in front of Trey.
‘Though you may be a common gigolo,’ Jayson recited staring up into Trey’s blue eyes, ‘I will always be yours.’
With all the hurrying to finish before the sun went down, Jayson had broken out into a sweat. He could feel a trickle run under his wig and down the back of his neck. The lake mosquitos were out in full summer force and quickly zeroed in on the heat he was giving off. It felt like a dozen of them were plunging their hypodermic bloodsuckers just below his hairline all at the same moment. He resolved not to flinch. Or swat. This was the biggest moment of the whole series.
