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The young woman smiles, but rolls her eyes. “Yeah. You do.”
I stand by the door to wait, confident this person will be found in time. She arrives on the same elevator as Will and they appear to be arguing.
Once they reach me, he says, “Catherine, we go live in three minutes. I need you in that room now.” He points across the hall.
I ignore him. “Thank you,” I say to the young woman at his side. “I’m sorry I was being stubborn. Can you get this done in three minutes?”
She shakes her head. “Five. Minimum.”
“Perfect,” I say. “Let’s get it done.”
“Catherine, what part of ‘going live’ don’t you understand?”
“You do at least a three-minute intro before your guest is even mentioned. I’ll be there.”
The make-up artist has her door unlocked. She pushes it open and I go in with her, leaving a furious Will Power standing alone.
My adrenalin is pumping and my mind is unfocused. While my face is being covered in God-knows-what, I try to focus on my talking points but the words that have found their way onto repeat in my brain are from an old advertising slogan—Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.
I can’t make it stop. I try to remember if there was music with the words. And then I get an image of a painting and a sculpture. A new installation. The timing could not be worse for inspiration to strike. But I go with it, letting creative ideas ignite and burn out in rapid succession, like Whack-a-Mole with live dragons.
“Done!”
The young woman startles me back into the room.
She spins my chair so I can see myself in the mirror, but I don’t look. I don’t want to see and second-guess my decision.
“Thank you. I appreciate you.”
13
ERIC
I’ve gotThe Will Power Hour streaming on the larger of my monitors. I texted Catherine four more times but she didn’t reply. Hopefully she was prepping with Will, not mad at my unsolicited advice.
Will’s talking about all the upcoming seminar cities he’ll be speaking in, dropping mini-success stories from entrepreneurs who’ve gone through his twenty-thousand-dollar coaching program. We’re five minutes into the episode and I feel like I’m watching an informercial delivered by a TV evangelist … which, Will Power kind of is, preaching about the god of entrepreneurship. A god which has deemed him its one true savior.
I tune him out and a song fromJesus Christ Superstarbubbles up from some long-forgotten cave in my mind … the lyrics struggle to connect and all I can remember is something about him being just a man.
I’ve known off-stage, off-camera Will for over a decade and he most certainly is just a man. A nice guy, but the way he talks, preaches success, you’d think he believed that it was available to anyone who had the drive to succeed, as if forgetting or ignoring the fact that his programs cost two thousand dollars for a weekend in a room with a thousand other people and that his actual coaching program is out of reach for ninety-nine percent of the Western population.
Catherine is an entrepreneurial unicorn who made it on her own, without the benefit of a million dollars backing her trials and errors until she achieved success.
Will pulls me back to the show.
“Today’s special guest is Catherine Clay, internationally renowned installation artist. You may not know her name, but you’ve almost certainly seen her work, from the anatomically correct—except for its size—ten-foot-tall clitoris that was recently on display and then banned in Texas toThe American Girl Dollsdressed in camouflage and portraying a grisly scene fromApocalypse Nowin Times Square.
The camera finally puts Catherine on screen. And she looks … wow.
“Catherine, it’s a pleasure to have you on The Will Power Hour.”
“Delighted to be here, Will.”
I cringe. That’s not going to land well. He’s “Mr. Power” to guests. She knows that. We joked about it. What is she up to?
The camera changes to have them both in frame. “Ms. Clay,” Will drawls her name, “you have a fascinating origin story. Tell us about that and how it’s influenced your art and career.”
Catherine talks about growing up in rural Texas and some of the books she read that inspired her to take the art-meet-politics path she’s chosen to walk. She’s engaging and comfortable and I feel proud to be the man who gets to walk down the street with my arm around her.
