More than anything else, the local newscasters seemed concerned with whether or not the ceremony would be affected. Because, if Los Angeles loves nothing else, it’s their ceremonies. And the Grammy Awards just so happened to be coinciding with the first-ever hurricane force wind warning in the state’s storied weather history. Although several months earlier, the state had been slapped with its first-ever tropical storm warning, this was something entirely different. This was a new kind of weather smackdown that the state wasn’t equipped for (but then, is any state really equipped for hurricane and tornado phenomena pummeling it at once?). And L.A. itself certainly wasn’t equipped for it on one of its most important nights of the year: Grammy night. 

So yes, understandably, the newscasters were all quite focused on what was “being done” to ensure the show could still go on. Even though it was putting so many pretty faces and thin bodies at risk. Surely, if they really cared about the well-being of “Hollywood,” they could have just bumped the event to the following Sunday. But too much money (and too much glam) had already been invested into this date, February 4th. Two days after a Groundhog Day that predicted an early spring. But maybe Punxsutawney Phil was off his game this year. Because it felt like whatever was happening right now in California was a portent of a very long season of winter left to endure. 

May Lerjift, who knew all about Groundhog Day lore thanks to being from Pennsylvania, was feeling the toll of that sense of time as her makeup artist readied her for the evening despite the meteorological apocalypse outside. She, like most millionaire singers, wasn’t accustomed to actually having to face the same things as the hoi polloi. She could usually sidestep “inconveniences” of this nature. In fact, she had just sidestepped the inconvenience of the space-time continuum by traveling all the way from somewhere East on her private jet to be here. But everyone can forgive her these frequent CO2 emissions if it means she’ll keep her musical output at the same level. The only one who might not be able to forgive her on this night of a thousand wind gusts is her songwriter foil, Alma San Dei. Sure, she’ll act happy for May if she wins, but inside she’ll be seething that she lost yet again despite being the superior songwriter. Something she knows to be true deep down in the pit of her increasingly large gut. In fact, Alma speculates that May’s thinness and blondeness is what really gives her the edge in the music industry. 

She notes this contrast between them that night on the red carpet (the way everyone else does). She is the Wednesday Addams to May’s Enid Sinclair. Except May also has the Wednesday benefit of being more waifish. But Alma, people are noticing, has been hitting the gym lately to get some semblance of her “original figure” back. One she shows off in her black knee-length dress with puffy sleeves. A dress, she realizes, that makes her look rather dowdy next to the sleek, Old Hollywood glamor of May’s white floor-length Schiaparelli gown with a thigh-high slit for an added dramatic flair. What on Earth was she thinking, coming here? And in this weather, too. She would have much preferred to stay huddled under the covers than show up to this cold, gloomy red carpet, only to find that she wasn’t going to win a single nod of approval from the Recording Academy yet again. 

Amid the downpour that was splashing onto them as they went from their car to the shelter of the covered red carpet, Alma should have taken it as an omen when her right shoe got totally sopping wet as she unwittingly stepped into the middle of a puddle. The plopping thud of the sound mirrored what she felt in her heart that night. Knowing somewhere in what was left of her soul that she oughtn’t be there. Not because she didn’t feel she deserved to be, but because something about it all felt decidedly The Zone of Interest in that inside the Crypto.com Arena, she and her kind were yukking it up, enjoying themselves while, outside, all hell was breaking loose.

The wind was like a one-man Big Bad Wolf, huffing and puffing and trying to blow the celebrities’ house down. And their house that night was the Crypto.com Arena (though many of the musicians attending could still remember when it was called the Staples Center…unlike the lower classes, however, they didn’t bother getting too attached to things in their “original” state; perhaps being famous made them realize that one day you’re something, like popular, and the next day you’re not). But it hardly had the warmth of any home. Alma tried to see if May or any other of her fellow musicians, the ones she got into the business to feel a kinship with, felt as cold or uncomfortable as she did. As averse to celebrating tonight as she suddenly was. Not just because of the weather, but also the pro-Palestine protesters outside the venue who braved the elements just to remind celebrities what pieces of shit they were for refusing to use their influence for any real or meaningful change. Alma, being kind of empathic, could feel their contempt as her driver had passed them, splashing their plastic rain ponchos as he did. 

Riley Silas, whose team of handlers had moved heaven and Earth to get her there in time to receive the first award of the night, summed up the vanity of it all when she freely admitted that the reason she decided to show up and perform was so she could watch herself in bed the next day on YouTube. They were all there, in some way or another, to do that. To watch themselves and ejaculate. Except maybe Roni Kimball, who was the last pure artist left on this ego-driven planet. That might have been the one thing that could justify Alma coming to the ceremony that night. Otherwise, after leaving empty-handed, she failed to understand what she herself had braved the elements for. Though she supposed it was good to give the little worker fairies who had set up the event to be “hurricane-proof” a reason to have done so. After all, the show would have been nothing without her presence. She knew that. And, elsewhere, all across the arena that night, every other musician thought the same thing…about themselves. This was Grammy night, goddammit. No increasingly worsening harbinger of climate change was going to take that away from them.