Girls Just Want To Have Fun [1984, NYC] (tag: Idun)
The truth of the matter was that everyone had secrets. Even the gods, though most of their secrets tended to be public knowledge from one start of the pantheon to the other, thanks to however it was that mortals kept hearing about them and spreading the tales. Even the Underworld wasn’t safe from gossip. That was why Melinoe kept this particular secret so closely guarded. She didn’t even tell her best friend about it. She didn’t even tell Phobetor or Makaria about it. Mak might understand, and who knew what Phobetor’s reaction would be (aside from a skeptical ‘really?’, maybe) but it was better safe than sorry.
She went about it quite discreetly. There were, ostensibly, lots of things to do in New York City in 1984. It was a happening place. Gentrification was at an upswing, the AIDS epidemic was coming to an end, and One Times Square was adding new screens all the time. The New York City Ballet was performing Push Comes to Shove again. Broadway was bright and promising; CATS was running for the third year straight and didn’t seem to be losing any momentum. Proving, perhaps finally, that cats were superior to dogs.
So if anyone asked, she was here for that. Or a Mets game. Whatever. Sure, they hadn’t won a title in eleven years but that didn’t mean she couldn’t root for them. Yes. That was exactly what she was doing. Not, say, currently squashed between a gaggle of teenage girls in Day-Glo painted spandex in Madison Square Garden while they waited for Cyndi Lauper to come on stage. Or that she currently had a Rainbow Brite temporary tattoo slapped onto her cheek. But that was it. Okay, so perhaps she’d painted her nails every color of the rainbow and maybe they could have used a coat of glitter but even ghost goddesses had limits. Of some kind. She was sure. Then again she kind of thought that she was only ghost goddess she’d ever heard of, so maybe she was just being overly sensitive…
“Oh my God, like, Cyndi is totally a goddess and I worship her so much!” The most excitable of the teenyboppers screamed at her friends, drowned under the ocean of excited squeaks and yells as the stadium filled. Standing next to her, Melinoe gave her an odd look. The things mortals worshiped, honestly, she blamed Thyone… maybe Dionysus, too.
Then the lights dimmed. The laser lights blinked to life and machines jerked into motion, spewing voluminous puffs of smoke that immediately went low, trailing to the ground like vaguely cigarette-tasting fog. Melinoe tried to stand still as the bodies around her strained to get nearer to the stage, warded off from climbing onto it by burly bodybuilders who inexplicably kept sunglasses on even at night, as if they came standard bolted to their temples. She lost the fight because she didn’t want to actually hurt anyone, and it was so weird and exciting that people suddenly forgot millions of years of instincts and didn’t realize they were dealing with an otherworldly being actually shoved her hard enough to stumble into the trio of frenzied Lauper fans.
“Oh my God, like, are you okay? What jerks!” Day-Glo green clamped a hand around Mellie’s bicep. “Like, why bring that here? Cyndi’s all about fun and love!”
“I, um,” Melinoe said.
“Oh my God! Rainbow Brite! That’s so cute! It looks like she moves when you talk!” Day-Glo red poked at her tattooed cheek. She smelled like LSD under the dry ice fog. Mellie wondered sympathetically if this was what it was like for Horkos to deal with her all the time. She made a note to be nicer to him. Maybe less poke-y.
Day-Glo purple wrapped an arm around Mellie, dwarfing her by a good half a foot. “Hey! Stay with us, okay? These concerts can get really rough!”
Day-Glo green added, “And you’re all in black, so people can’t see you!”
That was how somehow Melinoe ended up wearing Day-Glo yellow paint smeared over her arms and shoulders, ruining a perfectly good black shirt, squished between three teenage girls. Her mild bemusement at the situation came to an end about three minutes later, when Cyndi Lauper came on stage and the real hysterical screaming started.
Melinoe’s secret, as it turned out, was that she really loved Cyndi Lauper.