Rough Cut

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As the lights went down in the screening room, the sweet, weedy aroma of marijuana rose from the back, near the projection booth.

There are a lot of holdovers from the flower-power days in our advertising agency. Invite them to view a rough cut of our new commercials and they think it's like seeing Fantasia back in '68.

The projector completed an exceptionally bad day for me by breaking down midway through the leader, throwing the room into darkness, catcalls, and a few giggles.

As if the day hadn't been bad enough. I was still considering swallowing a few dozen sleeping pills because of what a certain sleazy private detective had told me a few hours ago.

The house lights came up. The dozen people scattered throughout the movie-theater seats looked like escapees from the world's last disco-trendy to a fault. Many of the guys were dressed like cowboys to reassure themselves and others that they really were manly, while others were got up in less obvious but no less goofy costumes-short ties, pegged pants, sport coats that looked like bellhop jackets, even a few white-hunter numbers, apparently made necessary by the dense vegetation that Harris-Ketchum Advertising finds itself surrounded by here on the eighteenth floor of a Loop office building.

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