Role of a Lifetime
By:
Kenneth Kirk
(© 2021 by the author)
The author retains all rights. No reproductions are allowed without the author's
consent. Comments are appreciated at...
kkirk@tickiestories.us
Chapter 35
Five Months Later
July 2, 2021, was going to be the best day of my entire life. I just knew it. It was my wedding day. The date Brant and I would celebrate every year for as long as God gives us life.
Even though it was a Friday, we opted for a late afternoon wedding by the side of Mom and Dad’s pool with the minister and the wedding party in the gazebo and the intimate wedding party spread out below us in clusters according to people’s pandemic isolation bubbles. It made for a somewhat awkward arrangement, but it didn’t dampen one bit the love and support we felt from our friends and family.
The day was a typical California day with skies that were the color of the water in the pool, a gentle breeze, and a top temperature of 91 degrees at 3:00. The ceremony didn’t begin until 6:00, after the seating area had been engulfed in the shade of a stand of ancient eucalyptus trees that separated our yard from multiple-Oscar-winning actor Oliver Stark’s yard.
The wedding party consisted of the minister of the local Metropolitan Community
Church, Rev. Florence Callahan, my best man Andrew Ellis, Brant’s best man his
brother Brady (who had flown in from Portland), and, of course, Brant and me.
Wearing a plain tuxedo, Brant looked every bit the matinee idol he has become.
Present in support of us were my parents Brodie Ford and Rachel Hughes, Brant’s parents Ricardo and Francesca Madrona of McMinnville, Oregon, his sister Sally Madrona Fannin of Portland, my grandparents Charles and Millicent Hughes of Sandy, Utah, my aunt Rosemary Hughes Gillespie and her husband Frank of Provo, Utah, my uncle Henry Hughes of Salt Lake City, Utah, my other grandmother Gertrude Ford of San Diego, my uncle Robert Ford and his date Kathy Yee of San Diego, our co-workers from Laying Low (David, Tammy, Kenny, Cole, Valerie, Rachoud, Max, Rita, and Gianni) along with spouses/dates, Juanita Montez and her boyfriend hot actor Hector Uvalde, Brant’s agent Freddy Kendall and his wife Sarah, my agent Joan Hawkins and her wife Angela, and about 10 others from our work on current projects. It was 52 people total and we all had a great time.
Gianni and our own cook Violet provided a lovely buffet dinner on the portico with Katrina and Violet serving us. We tried to keep it all low-key and limit the number of people in attendance so it would not make the papers as a COVID-19 super-spreader event. All in all, the presence of our biggest supporters meant the world to us. Knowing we now had the support of the State of California and the federal government brought an unexpected sense of relief and justice to my mind. The toasts were beautiful and the entire event was a huge success as far as my new husband and I were concerned.
Brant and I delayed our honeymoon for a couple of days so we could visit with our out-of-town family. Since our relationship had long been consummated, we didn’t really feel the need to race off to the Ritz Carlton to get laid.
On Sunday he picked me up in his BMW and we started north on I-5. Once it was clear the direction we were headed, I asked if we were going somewhere familiar.
He smiled and said, “What could be better than to spend a week in the place where we fell in love?” As we drove north through the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, through Sacramento, and into deep Northern California, we reminisced about our relationship to date and all the exciting things we had experienced professionally as well as personally.
Life was forever changed, it seemed, by the release of Laying Low. Our debut together had been number one at the box office for 6 weeks during COVID and had broken lots of records on Hulu. We’d had dozens of Zoom interviews on a variety of shows and been the subject of endless articles in People, Us, Entertainment Weekly, Variety, Time, Hollywood Weekly, The Advocate, even Parade as well as all the sleazy tabloids. Paparazzi were always trying to get photos of us and enough succeeded that there seemed to be a few new shots in print every week.
After Laying Low came out, Brant and I got some tremendous reviews amid Oscar and Golden Globe speculation. We started getting tons of offers. My stint on Lunar Base 1 had been so popular I was scheduled to be a series regular in the next season. The producers of Stronger Than Ever were racing to get the film out in the fall to make it eligible for this year’s Oscar nominations. I was able to be very choosy about my projects and even began to get hired without an audition.
Likewise, Brant was clearly the hottest young male star on the planet with lots of roles offered to him. Even after he came out and proposed to me on Juanita’s show (which, incidentally, was bought for national syndicate a couple of weeks later), Brant’s potential in straight romantic roles was still better than anyone else. We decided it must not matter to women who you sleep with, they’ll still have their fantasies based on looks and persona. Hmm, not much different from gay men when you think about it.
My income went up tremendously after Laying Low. I got $600,000 for Stronger Than Ever, $500,000 for B-School Confidential, $150,000 for a season of Lunar Base 1, and my first million-dollar offer for the lead role in The Gay King, a 6-part miniseries about King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who ruled from 1845 to 1886. I would play the king, also known as “Mad King Ludwig” for his mental challenges, through his entire adulthood. So, I had to learn a German accent even though it would be filmed in English. I would be aged about 40 years over the course of 6 hours and I would get to play the edge of crazy. Filming would be from August through February to capture Bavaria in different seasons and I would be in Germany for 2-3 week stints about every 2 months.
Brant was getting quite wealthy. He got $800,000 for The Seminary Scandals, which was due to hit theaters in September. He got $1.3 million for South Beach Shenanigans, $2.5 million plus 1% of profits for My Days in Kabul, which would begin filming in August, and $3.5 million for Mariel to Miami. He was in consideration for the lead role in a “definitive” bio-pic on Bobby Kennedy with a salary of $5 million scheduled for 2022.
Between the two of us, we’d gotten hundreds of thousands of letters (mostly emails, of course) from fans regarding our proposal on Hollywood Weekly. Juanita and her producers had even hosted 6 prominent gay politicians and LGBT leaders to get their reactions to Brant’s proposal and my tearful acceptance. It was shocking that nowhere in the media did we get any criticism from anyone except on a fear-mongering show on Fox News about the rise of homosexuality in America. Ho-hum.
We’d had a lovely dinner at Juanita’s, where we met the gorgeous Mexican actor Hector. We all fell in mutual love and she and Hector quickly became our new best friends. Such friendships in Hollywood often center around the mutual career boosts they provide, but we did genuinely love hanging out. Thanks to Brant’s influence, Hector was cast in Mariel to Miami to play Brant’s best friend and fellow escapee. We were all excited about spending some time together in Miami during the filming. We became frequent guests on Hollywood Weekly and appeared each time one of us had a new release coming up.
We decided that we needed to invest some of our new wealth in a nice home, so we began looking for houses in the spring of 2021, when prices were going up, up, up. We finally settled on a rather dilapidated house built in the Hollywood Hills back in the 1920’s on a wonderful lot less than a mile from Mom and Dad. Proximity to Mom and Dad was not a particular goal for us, but it was certainly a plus. We closed on the house for only $11.2 million (fuck, I almost died!) early in May and immediately began doing extensive renovations. We expected the remodeling to take until October and would likely cost an additional $2 million. With a combined income about $10 million in 2021, our financial advisor felt we could easily swing it and would desperately need the tax write-off.
We spent a beautiful 6 nights in the same cabin where we had lived the previous
year while filming Laying Low. We made love on the same bed where we had
slept many nights that summer. We hiked over to the cabin we had used as a set,
which was even more disreputable than it had been. We fucked on the same spot
on the cliff overlooking the beautiful lake. We purposely avoided the internet
and only answered calls from Mom and Dad, Andrew, Juanita, Brant’s parents, and
our agents. It was heavenly! We decided in a year or two when we needed more
tax write-offs we would see if we could buy the three cabins.
In the cabin next to ours, a Lesbian couple from Reno and their 3 teenagers, a boy and 2 girls, were spending the week. We became friends with them while we were honeymooning. The 16-year-old girl (Dolly) practically peed herself when she recognized Brant but it was really the 14-year-old boy (Gary) who seemed to blossom around us. We figured he didn’t have a lot of male companionship, so we took him jogging and swimming. One day we rented a smaller boat from the marina and took everyone out into the lake. That brought back some beautiful memories, too. We didn’t think Gary was attracted to us sexually but he was really drawn to us as men. On our drive home from the mountains, Brant and I talked for a couple of hundred miles about how great it had been being with Gary. We considered if we might want to be fathers one day. We decided we’d wait until his 30th birthday (6 years hence) to consider that possibility.
Landing the role of Aaron in Laying Low had clearly been the best thing that ever happened to me. Single-handedly, it launched my career and gave me the love of my life. It introduced me to the most handsome, sexiest, kindest, and most dedicated man I know. In one of my interviews with Juanita, she had called it the “role of a lifetime”. On air and in public, I agreed with her and we talked about how it had opened up my career. But, when we shut down Zoom that evening, I turned to my magnificent husband and clarified my comment.
“Baby,” I said as I took his hand in mine, “this. You and me. Us. This is the role of my lifetime!”
The End
Author’s Note: Thanks for joining Sky and Brant for their experiences having a new relationship amid the Coronavirus pandemic with its associated lockdowns and social distancing as well as with the omnipresent eyes and ears of the public. I’ve loved writing this story and I hope you have loved reading it. Living with these hot guys through much of my own quarantining has made the isolation much, much easier for me. So, publically, I thank Sky and Brant for being the sexy, exciting, and fun characters they are and the wonderful companions they’ve been for me. May this damned pandemic be over soon!
Kenneth Kirk
Dallas, Texas
August 3, 2021
Posted: 12/03/2021