‘An Evening With Blaine’ Is An Evening Well-Spent
Elliott Murphy, Saturday 24 December 2039

Blaine Hummel-Anderson has long been a staple of the entertainment industry, starting out as a fresh-faced college graduate with a story to tell through his music. Over twenty years since being discovered by Interscope Records, his career highlights include three triple-platinum albums, sell-out world tours, a brief stint on Broadway, numerous acting and presenting jobs, and even a book.

Clearly still one of our most beloved personalities, his one-off Zone V show ‘An Evening With Blaine’ promised to be nothing short of spectacular: a two-hour special, broadcast live from Times Square Studios in front of a star-studded audience.

And Blaine didn’t disappoint. His manner was as easy, charming, and affable as ever, and his rapport with the audience second to none. For the first hour he focused on brand new arrangements for the best of his catalog, taking us back over two decades to the days of ‘Iconic’, ‘The In Crowd’, and the unforgettable ‘The Knight And The Oak Tree’—his first number one hit. It was after that, however, that the evening really kicked up a notch. Personal highlights for me included his take on The Kinks’ You Really Got Me, immediately juxtaposed against the soft and haunting melodies of what is undoubtedly this year’s biggest smash hit, Sara Vermosa’s Lullaby.

It was with the final two songs, however, that I think we saw the true Blaine as he is today. Even if he had not prefaced them with a short and heartfelt introduction, it would have been obvious for whom the songs were being sung only from the lyrics, and the raw passion and emotion with which they were performed is something that shook me to my core. In Kurt and Blaine Hummel-Anderson, the power couple of all power couples, I believe that we are looking at that transcendent kind of love that nowadays seems so very rare, and it is never more clear than when Blaine is singing for his husband.

‘An Evening With Blaine’ is available to stream via the Zone V website until January 31st. On behalf of everyone here at LightNews.Com, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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Friday 23 December, 2039

For Blaine, the waiting had always been the hardest part.

Waiting to fully come around from the general anesthetic; waiting for Kurt’s reactions to the transfusion subside; waiting to hold his children again; waiting for the cells to take and engraftment to occur. Waiting, waiting, waiting, and Blaine could do nothing else, nothing more.

Two weeks after the transplant, when Daniel told Blaine that Kurt’s vomiting, cramps, and the rash all over his skin were symptoms of graft-versus-host disease, his heart sank. They had known since well before the transplant that the chances of Kurt having no reaction to Blaine’s donated cells were around twenty percent, but he had still hoped against hope. After all, what were the chances that getting stopped at the bottom of a staircase by a lost and beautiful boy, one unextraordinary November afternoon, would have been the first moment of the rest of his life?

The orchestra members were patient under the cover of darkness for their cue; the first verse was just Blaine and the piano. His final two songs of the night were arrangements he had created himself, working tirelessly for weeks in the privacy of his sound-proofed home studio, singing until his throat was hoarse and his back ached from sitting on his piano bench for far too long.

The audience grew quiet as he seated himself at the piano, settled the microphone into the holder that reached across the keyboard, and flexed his fingers. He could feel every camera trained on him, the soft blue spotlight for which he'd asked gradually growing brighter and casting everything in a watery glow.

“Most of you know that my husband, Kurt, is in the hospital right now,” Blaine began, fingers striking the first chords of Letters From The Sky. “These last two songs are for him. You’ve been a fantastic audience, and I’ve been Blaine Hummel-Anderson. Thank you, and goodnight.”

An hour before he was due on stage, Blaine sighed heavily as he sat alone in Green Room One. Waiting, waiting, waiting. They were ahead of schedule, and the members of the orchestra had gone to the second green room, where craft services had set out snacks and drinks for the production crew. Sound check had, at first, been an unmitigated disaster, and they all needed to wind down before the show. Blaine always spent at least thirty minutes alone prior to a performance, settling his nerves and limbering up, but he hadn’t performed since before the beginning of the summer; he needed the extra time.

It had been months before Kurt’s diagnosis—even before Kurt had started complaining that he was feeling more tired than usual—that he had committed to the live show, having no reason to doubt that everything would be as it always was: always that little bit too rushed, always that little bit too tired, but somehow all the more perfect, all the more real, for those aspects.

Once Blaine committed to something, he didn’t back out, not even when things were almost falling apart and it was all he could do to keep his head above water.

“One of these days the sky’s gonna break and everything will escape, and I’ll know. One of these days the mountains are gonna fall into the sea, and they’ll know that you and I were made for this, I was made to taste your kiss, we were made to never fall away,” he sang, voice tapering almost off into silence, before he took a deep breath to finish the verse. “Never fall away.”

The lights came up at the same moment as the drums and guitar kicked in, and despite the melancholic nature of the song, Blaine felt himself buoyed up on the cresting wave of music. In the short interlude between verses, he realized that it was what he needed: performances had always been his truest and most honest way of communicating. The spoken words over which his throat closed and his mouth refused to utter somehow came easily when put into measures and melodies. Everything was precise, and timed to result in the best possible sound.

“One of these days letters are gonna fall from the sky telling us all to go free, but until that day I’ll find a way to let everybody know that you’re coming back, mmm, you’re coming back for me. ‘Cause even though you left me here, I have nothing left to fear; these are only walls that hold me here.”

Absent-mindedly, he scrolled through his iPod, settling on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to soothe his nerves. He had plenty of time, after all. It was as he was putting in his ear buds that his phone rang, and he sighed again at the intrusion. When he saw the display reading Burt – Cell, however, his mood brightened.

“Hey, Burt,” he answered, clicking off his iPod and switching to shoulder technique as he wound up his ear buds.

“Hey, kiddo. Just wanted to call and tell you to break a leg before the big show,” Burt said, and Blaine settled back onto the couch, already feeling more at ease. “Is Kurt watching tonight? I just called him but he fell asleep about two minutes in.”

“No, I think he’ll probably miss it,” Blaine replied. “But he can catch it some other time.”

Easily vocalizing over the instrumental interlude, he glanced out at the audience and as one of the cameras swung around to focus on him, he let his eyes slip closed. He had been playing the part of the venerated entertainer, one of America’s sweethearts, all night—he’d hammed it up for the nation long enough. With his closing songs, he was singing for no one but Kurt.

He hummed into the song’s grand finale, his keystrokes becoming heavier, and it was with sweat beading at his temples and his voice tearing from his throat that he leapt to his feet as the drums kicked back in with shattering force.

“’Cause we won’t have to be scared,” he belted, the note soaring upscale as the strings and guitars brought the song to its crescendo. “You’re coming back for me, you’re coming back for me, you’re coming back for me, you’re coming back for me…”

Each and every time he had rehearsed the song—at home, in the studio, during sound check—the last repeating lyric had always seemed, to him, like something he was trying to convince himself to believe. If he sang it enough times, with enough emotion, exactly the right pitch and intonation, it would become an inescapable truth. His passion and belief would spark and kindle a reaction in the universe that would be fanned into a wildfire strong enough to sweep away every last terrible thing in his world and bring Kurt back to him—his Kurt, not the shell that his illness had made of him. Since his conversation with Burt, however, that passion and belief had metamorphosed into something he could feel: a quickening of his heart, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, a reason to feel bright for the first time in months. The words were taking on a different handle even as he was singing them. Kurt was coming back for Blaine, for Audrey and Oliver, for the life that had been put on hold. He was getting better every single day, and while the road ahead was still long, the worst was over. It was time to start smiling again, start hoping again.

“You singin’ for him tonight?” Burt asked.

“The last two songs,” he said, adding after a pause, “and every other song. It’s always for him.”

“Even the weird one that goes on forever?” Burt asked, and Blaine knew he was teasing—he’d sneaked enough glances at the play count on Burt’s media player to know that it was one of his favorites.

“Storm House,” Blaine supplied. “Yep, even that one.”

By the end of the song, Blaine had reseated himself and was almost whispering into the mic, playing the final notes with trembling fingers and wishing more than ever that Kurt was watching live. Kurt knew the song; he was the one who had introduced Blaine to the band when Mercedes had made him watch Harper’s Island. It had had such a different meaning, then—Blaine always smiling over the first verse at the thought of tasting Kurt’s kisses again, even if it had only been an hour since the last time he had done so—but when he had stumbled across it the same afternoon that Jason had called in a panic that Blaine hadn’t yet locked in his set list for the show, he couldn’t help but identify the undercurrent of deeper meaning held within the lyrics.

It wasn’t just that, though. Kurt had always had that uncanny, unfathomable ability to see through to the real Blaine, pick up on every single inflection of every last note he sang and figure out what was really behind abstract lyrics and a showman’s exterior. He would know, without question, that Blaine’s smiling fa�ade was finally taking on elements of truth.

Without further ado, Blaine nodded to the orchestra conductor that he was ready to perform his closing number, Rivers, and his two back-up singers readied themselves at their mic stands. The lights dropped, leaving only a single spotlight trained upon him. After a brief pause, he began the elaborate piano introduction he had composed from the melody of the song, and the string section behind him layered their own harmony beneath, each member gradually lit with their own faint lights.

“So how’re you doing, kiddo? And I want the truth, not any of that ‘I’m fine’ crap,” Burt said firmly, and Blaine let his fingertips whisper across the skin of his face, exercising restraint in order to try and keep Zara’s handiwork as smudge-free as possible.

“Well, Kurt’s doing better. Daniel said he’d be out of the BMT unit any day now, so—“

“Blaine,” Burt interjected. “I know how my son’s doing. What about my son-in-law?”

“I’m…” Blaine trailed off, suddenly unsure of how to respond. He sat up and cast his eyes about the room, taking in the chairs, tables, and soothing green walls that, thankfully, didn’t remind him a single bit of the sickly green linoleum that lined the floors of the University Hospital in Brooklyn. It was a balm. “Honestly, I haven’t stopped to think. It’s wake up, get the kids to school, go to the hospital, watch Kurt sleep for hours on end, be there when he wakes up, go get the kids, bring them to the hospital, take them home, make dinner, watch TV, music, then bed.”

“So you’re keeping busy. Sounds like something Kurt would do."

“When these rivers run dry, don’t cry. Don’t cry; I’ll be thirsty too. When things ain’t right, don’t sigh. Don’t sigh; we always get through. When the money runs tight, it’s alright. Alright; I’m rich in love for you.”

When the drumming began and the entire stage burst into blue and white lights that flashed in Blaine’s periphery and flowed like water over the ivory-white piano keys, the song swallowed him whole, and he let it. It represented the latest in a lifelong line of love songs to his boyfriend, partner, husband, soul mate, and he knew that neither his voice nor the emotion behind it had ever been stronger.

His conversation with Burt had freed something he had been keeping chained up—something he’d regarded as feral, wild, unpredictable—and yet, instead of feeling like it was eating its way out, he felt the continuing flutters of hope beating inside of him, taking flight and lifting him until he was performing with a reignited passion that fueled and spurred him through the rest of the song. He had opened a Pandora’s Box, and rather than being consumed, he took the tiny butterfly of burgeoning hope and nurtured it with thoughts of his sweetheart, his family, their future.

“When I was young, we used to run, we used to laugh, we used to smile, we used to run wild. Rivers run dry, the air runs tight, things change, we keep on chuggin’, man,” he sang, the back-up singers harmonizing in both higher and lower registers so that Blaine’s own voice was caught between them.

“It is what it is.”

“And what it is is terrible,” Burt said succinctly, and Blaine found himself nodding along. “Kid, whatever you’re feeling that you’ve got buried deep down, it’s okay to let it out. You’re not a robot and no one’s expecting you to always have it together. God knows I didn’t when Kurt’s mom was in the hospital.”

Blaine felt it: the way he’d been walking half a step out of sync with the rest of the world; the chills rolling beneath the surface of his skin that no amount of layers would dispel; waking up to the sensation of falling, falling, falling each and every night. His life, essentially, was on pause in the middle of a routine that he’d developed in order to exist as a functioning human being. He ate and didn’t taste a thing; he could barely swallow. He dressed himself on autopilot, matching together shirts and pants that he knew Kurt liked together but might not even have bothered with otherwise. All of the energy he had left at the end of the day—and the dregs that he managed to dredge up from reserves he didn’t even know he possessed—went to making sure that the twins were content, and safe, and not falling apart inside over and over every day, like he was.

He felt all of it; he just didn’t want to acknowledge it. Acknowledging it meant that it was there, that he didn’t have it all together, that he was ready to crumble if only someone would push the right buttons.

And yet.

If the show hadn’t been airing live, Blaine might have asked the orchestra to indulge him and play Feeling Good, just for the hell of it. Instead, he once again jumped to his feet, bouncing on his heels as he played and sang with more fervor and conviction than he’d have thought himself capable. The song was drawing to its close, and rather than fade with it, he simply let go of everything except the first threads of happiness dancing within his grasping reach.

When the final strains of the song were swallowed by the announcer—“Ladies and gentlemen, give it up one more time for Blaine Hummel-Anderson!”—the audience applauded and cheered, and he thanked them profusely. Tears stung at his eyes as he waved and took his bow, before feeling as if he were floating offstage, everything in slow motion. It was being back in his secret place, the expanse of his mind that only existed when he was riding the adrenaline-junkie high of closing a successful show, and oh, how he had missed it.

He passed into the wings, where the stage manager clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder, his manager grinned widely and handed Blaine his phone, and one of the runners passed him a towel. As he scrolled through the numerous messages he had received throughout the course of the show—it looked like more than one person had live-texted their reactions—it buzzed to life in his hand, and he felt himself light up when he saw Mount Sinai flash up on the screen.

“How—“ Blaine began, stopping to clear his throat when his voice cracked, the word sounding like a splinter. Reaching out had never been a particular forte of his. “How did you get through it?”

“Lizzy made me talk about it. Never wanted to; that’s not what us guys did, you know? We shut our mouths and just got on with it. But she talked to me about it. She even had her awful sister come over a few times to make sure we were doin’ okay.”

“Julia’s over a lot,” Blaine said dully. “She’s always checking in with the kids in case they need anything. We get a lot of pies.”

“So let me ask you again, kiddo. What about you? You got anybody you can talk to about this stuff?”

“I—It just feels selfish, somehow.”

“Of course it does. You’re not the one in the hospital. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you, too,” Burt said, letting out a sigh that crackled into static. He still held the receiver too close to his mouth; it was comforting to know that some things never changed. “Don’t let this one crappy thing make a martyr out of you, Blaine. You forget that I saw what you were like with the kids when they were knee-high to a grasshopper. It’s almost like you think you don’t exist unless you’re helpin’ somebody else.”

“Well, I…”

“Blaine, I can come home. Right now, if I want to,” Kurt told him, cutting straight to the point. “And I really, really want to. Tell me you can come pick me up. Tell me we get to have Christmas without masks and gowns and I can actually hold all of you, really hold all of you.”

“Sweetheart, you—you’re coming home?” Blaine asked disbelievingly, the hand holding the towel poised in mid-air as he stopped dead to take in the weight of Kurt’s words.

“I’m coming home.”

“I’ll be right there,” Blaine said, not giving it a moment’s thought. “There’s no press, and the after-party is mainly crew. Give me thirty minutes.”

“Blaine, wait. First, just… Tell me how the show went. Tell me how you are,” Kurt said, and the words felt like a cold compress just before the breaking of a fever.

“Thirsty,” Blaine answered after a moment, gratefully taking a bottle of water from the same runner who had provided the towel.

“So… I’ll be thirsty, too.”

“Sweetheart, if you’re thirsty then you should—oh. You saw the show?”

“I saw the show,” Kurt affirmed, and Blaine’s grin only split wider. “I’m exhausted and I’ll probably fall asleep while you’re on your way but I just—I had to tell you that I saw it, and I’m so proud of you, and I love you so much, and I am so, so happy right now. Things are finally looking up.”

Blaine’s mouth and jaw worked a few times before he lapsed into silence. What could he say to that? There was more than an element of truth to Burt’s words—he lived to help people. It was what he was good at. Being the caretaker, listening, providing a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. But what about when he needed his own hand to be held?

“Guess you never thought about it like that, huh?”

“Can’t say that I did,” Blaine replied tightly, blinking up at the ceiling. “Ouch, by the way.”

“Ah, truth’s a bitch sometimes. What about the kids, how are they doin’?”

Blaine let out a low chuckle, thankful for the switch to a safer subject. “Twist’s been hell-bent on becoming a doctor since coming to the hospital with me that first time, so he’s always got his head buried in books nowadays. Hep’s been spending a lot of time with Kurt, though. They have about an hour together every afternoon, just talking on their own while Twist bugs the nurses and I try to keep him under control.”

“And Audrey’s okay? She’s happy enough?”

“Yeah, she is. I mean, as happy as she can be.”

He changed into a fresh pair of jeans and polo, complete with a signature Westwood & Hummel bowtie for good measure, and stopped at Eden Flowers’ Madison Avenue branch on his way to the hospital—it was the only florist he’d found that was open twenty-four hours. Each time he stepped through the doors, he thought back to the first time he’d stepped inside to be greeted by Maya, the sleepy-eyed twenty-year-old who often worked the graveyard shift. It had been one of his bad days, and it had slipped his mind entirely that with Kurt being in the BMT unit, he wasn’t allowed fresh flowers.

“The tiger lilies are always a good choice,” she’d told him when she caught him eyeing a bunch.

“My husband, he—he likes tiger lilies when he’s sick,” he had told her, needing Kurt to be something more to someone. More than facts and figures, more than a bed number, more than a name on a whiteboard. “Roses on anniversaries, tulips for birthdays, daisies when he's sad, peonies when we're celebrating something. But always tiger lilies when he's sick.”

He had remembered the unit rules just as he was rounding the corner of the nurses’ station, and the bouquet had brightened Lydia’s day instead.

When he stepped inside Eden Flowers that night, he lingered only a moment by the bright displays of tiger lilies, shaking his head and smiling to himself as he moved onto the peonies. It was a night worth celebrating, after all.

“Sounds like you need to take advice from my granddaughter, then,” Burt said firmly, leaving no room for argument. “Kid, just… I’ve been worried about you lately. Carole and I both have. You need to talk about this stuff before it eats you up and makes you something you never were. Or find something that’ll let you escape for a bit, and keep you sane.”

“Is that what you did?”

Burt laughed at that, a guffaw that was colored with memory and wistful nostalgia. “Lizzy talked me into buying this beat-up old Camaro and spending the weekends working on it. Come to think of it, that was Kurt’s first oil change. He was muttering for hours afterward about getting grease all over his hands—“

“But really he loved it,” Blaine interjected, eliciting another hearty laugh from Burt. “Okay, Burt. I hear you. And—“

Before he could say more, the door opened and Zara strode in. She took one, sweeping look at Blaine and silently shook her head, hands on hips.

“And you’re right,” Blaine said, holding up a finger to Zara with an apologetic glance. “But judging by the look my stylist is giving me, it seems I’ve managed to mess up my entire appearance in the last fifteen minutes, so I’d better get going.”

It was as he was leaning over the flowers, looking for the perfect arrangement of bright colors, that his phone rang. Buoyed up by the residual rush of both the show and knowing that Kurt had been watching, he grinned as he pulled it from his pocket, winking at Maya where she stood behind the counter, watching him with a bright expression when she noticed that he wasn’t standing by the tiger lilies.

The display read Burt and Carole – Home, and he grinned even wider as he accepted the call and lifted the phone to his ear.

“Blaine?”

“Finn?” Blaine asked, taking the phone away from his ear just long enough to glance at the screen and confirm that his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him. “You’re at Burt and Carole’s?”

“Yeah, I’m—Blaine, something’s happened.”

“Alright, kid. Just think about what I said,” Burt instructed firmly. “You still okay to pick us up at the airport tomorrow?”

“Yep, I’ve got your flight info on the fridge,” Blaine said. “Kurt’s so excited to see you. He’s determined to be home soon, and the doctors aren’t disagreeing with him anymore. It’s gonna be a good Christmas.”

“We sure could use one. Now go kick some ass,” Burt said, and Blaine grinned. Retirement and advancing years hadn’t done a thing to quell the flame that Burt had always carried. “Love you like a son.”

“Love you like a dad. Bye, Burt.”