Page 35 of Hexual Healing
Gary got elevator music, because of course he did.
And Zelda?Zelda got “Walking on Sunshine” so loud and cheerful that she covered her face with her hands.
“Turn it off!”She laughed.“This is absolutely mortifying!”
“I can't!I don't know how!”
The couple in the next booth—their themes were both different versions of “I Touch Myself”—made eye contact and immediately excused themselves, practically running for the door.
“Sounds like they're going to have a good time tonight.Alone, or together,” Gary observed.
Then the worst possible thing happened.A new song started playing, louder than all the others.“Let's Get Physical” began blaring as a man walked through the door, and his eyes locked directly onto our waitress.
She dropped an entire tray of dishes.
“Randy?”she squeaked.
“Martha,” he said, his voice rough with emotion.“I came as soon as I heard the music.”
“This is private!”Martha protested, but her own theme had shifted to something that would make romance novelists blush.
“Twenty years, Martha!”Randy declared, apparently deciding the entire diner needed to hear his confession.“Twenty years I've loved you!”
“I'm married!”
“To a man whose theme song is literally 'If I Only Had a Brain'!”
We all turned to look at the cook, whose music was indeed the Scarecrow's song fromThe Wizard of Oz.
“Harsh,” Baz murmured.
“But accurate,” Dee Dee added.
“This is incredible!Your magic isn't just revealing emotions, it's forcing honesty through musical expression,” Zelda said.
“Make it stop!”I begged.
But it was too late.The music had awakened something in the diner's patrons.People were confessing things left and right, driven by their suddenly audible emotional states.
“I stole your pie recipe!”one woman shouted to another.
“I know!But I stole yours first!”the other replied.
“I'm not really a vegetarian!”someone else announced.“I just wanted to seem interesting!”
“Nobody’severthought you were interesting!”someone replied.
A man stood up suddenly, his theme music shifting to “I Will Survive.”“I quit!”he announced to no one in particular.“I don't even work here, but I quit!”
“Gerald, you're retired,” his wife, presumably, reminded him.
“Then I quit retirement!”
Baz leaned closer to me, and his music got louder, something about the way it thrummed making my skin feel too tight.“You need to calm down.”
“And how exactly do I do that?!”I whisper screamed at him.
“Think of something boring.”