Blues for Cupcake

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!
Wendy O. Williams

Cupcake sat back stage waiting her introduction. A filterless cigarette was nested between her ring and pinkie fingers smouldering, sending rings of smoke through the tangle of curls and swirls of her shoulder length hair. Her eyes the color of Turkish coffee scanned the band members to make sure they were ready. As she finished her mental preshow check list she poured herself a splash of scotch and impatiently waited for there introduction. Before every performance the ghosts of her past begin to dance across her subconscious as she waited the beginning of the concert, the ritual that brought her release.
She was born Natasha, named after a Grandmother lost in the frozen waste lands of Russia many decades before she was born. Her parents molded and guided her in the ways of hard work and simple living. When she became a teenager she discovered Charlie Parker and Jazz. Her world went from a gray path of following blindly to a technicolor vision of rapture. Her parents strongly disapproved of her taking band class and learning the saxophone. When they found out she was hanging out with the old Jazz cats they attempted to put her in boarding school. Natasha ran away and slept upstairs in a shooting gallery. She practiced her horn all day while the junkies slept off there high and jammed with them at night. There bodies oozing out the music and heroin that they so craved. It was at this time she got the name "Cupcake". For her rich sweet riffs that she coaxed out of her sax. They teased Cupcake that the sound of her horn could rot a mans heart. The old beatnicks taught her all they knew about the music. She learned voraciously and sadly watched them cook away there talents in a spoon. At 16 she had a Jazz band that reminded everyone of the good old days. By 17 she had a record contract and toured the world.
Now she was back "home" playing a charity show for one of her mentors who needed medical attention for the hard life he had lived on the road. Cupcake inhaled the last of her cigarette and crushed it on the ground. The thoughts of day to day life vanished with the hiss of smoke she blew out her aqualine nose. The band began to play. The drummer and Bassist grooved in perfect harmony. The audiance impatiently awaiting her presence in the music. The light hit her figure and she begin to play the chords on the Sax's register. Like John Coltrane when he played she completly left her body. The music taking her away to a place of total clarity.....