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masks. That was when the innocent boy in the song began morphing into a female rape victim as more and more of Tamar’s body was revealed in the shredding garment. There was a lot of meaning to this song. This song spoke to gender problems and crises of identification. This song spoke to adolescent boys and girls in turmoil. This was a very deep song.
    She was worried that some of its depth and meaning might be lost in the live performance tonight. It had taken hours and hours of shooting time to capture the dual morphing effect. Tamar’s transformation from adolescent boy to vulnerable maiden to ferocious defender of her virginity had required repeated costume changes to achieve the effect of a gradually more girl-revealing garment, the rape becoming in effect a subtle strip tease. Nor had it been simple to morph Jonah from a merely somewhat threatening creature (albeit with eyes of flame) that came whiffling through the tulgey wood in a blue mask, burbling as it came, into the raging monster in a red mask, slain and bleeding at the end of the battle. How on earth would they convey all that tonight? Eyes of flame? Wouldn’t it have been simpler and better merely to show the video? But it had previewed last night on all four music channels and tonight Barney wanted something to top that. Something like Tamar Valparaiso, live and in person!
    And scared to death.
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    IT WAS ALREADY nine-thirty, and Honey Blair hadn’t yet shown up. Binkie Horowitz had busted his ass setting up the Channel Four interview, but now he was beginning to wonder if the PD for the Eleven O’Clock News had changed his mind. Or else sent Honey somewhere else where hotter news was breaking. Binkie couldn’t imagine what might be hotter than Tamar Valparaiso performing the new Hit Number One Song from her Platinum Album (aluvai and from your lips to God’s ear!) live and in person, right here on this little old yacht, but then again he never knew what the hell went on in the heads of program directors.
    As VP in charge of Promotion at Bison Records, he’d been working the PDs at radio stations all over the country for the past two months now, courting them the way he would a young girl (some of them were, in fact, young girls), making them familiar with the tricky lyrics of “Bandersnatch,” playing the single for them over and over again, hoping they would come to like the song well enough to add it to their rotation. Binkie was shooting for plays on both Top-40 Teen and Top-40 Adult stations, hoping to catch the pubes and their soccer Moms as well. Your dead zone on radio was from seven to eleven P.M. , a time slot the big-money advertisers shunned. That’s where the Teen-Appeal records usually landed, square in the middle of Death Valley. In radio, your big bucks were in the eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old market. Binkie secretly suspected that Tamar’s appeal would be to the teenybopper crowd, but nobody argued with Barney Loomis, and besides, there was plenty of time to go after the younger crowd later on.
    For now, what he was looking for was some ninety to a hundred weekly spins on each of Clear Channel’s twelve hundred stations. Used to be a record could take off with as few as forty, fifty spins a week, without going into power rotation at any of the stations. Nowadays, if you did a sampling of top hits around the country, you came up with 83 spins in Bakersfield, 86 spins in Des Moines, 95 in San Antone, as many as 115 spins in Vegas, and so on. Moreover, the biggest stations tended to utilize high spins early on in a record’s life. They’d play a song for a week or so and then conduct random telephone surveys, calling listeners and playing a snippet of the tune for them, asking if they recognized it. If they got a positive reaction, they added the song to their rotation. Binkie’s job, though, was to get the damn song played in the first place.
    He knew that Bison had to sell