The office had enough room for a small rolltop desk and a card table. There was an old-fashioned vertical phone sitting on the desk. A map of the United States bore little paper flags of different colors that denoted either Sally’s upcoming tour or her secret plan to conquer the United States where its citizens would least expect it.

There was an unreasonably beautiful blonde sitting at the card table writing a letter. She put down her fountain pen and graced me with a smile.

“Hello again, Ray, it’s a pleasure to see you,” she said and stood to greet me. All of five foot one, she looked as graceful and lithe-some in a flowered rayon shift as she did onstage in a thin layer of mother-of-pearl body paint. Her hand, as she shook mine, was cool and small. It was rumored her shoe size was four and a half.

We talked about the days in which our lives had overlapped, when I’d first met Nancy and she and Sally had alternated between being artist’s models in the afternoon and “living statues” in the late-night glamour shows of the period. Years later, Sally had cleverly concocted her fan dance and then her bubble routine, which had kept her exposed to the public for well over a decade, even as she concealed a reputation in the industry for being a financially savvy entrepreneur.

She moved the conversation fairly swiftly to business but was very human about it. “Nancy and I talk,” she said, “as one does with a trusted friend, and we think we’d like you to try your hand at being my musical director. I know from the discs you’ve cut with Jack Donovan that you’re a fine arranger, and everybody knows you play a remarkable tenor sax.” She waved her hand at the map with its paper flags. “And there’s no one who knows the road better than I, so I know what your life is like. I’ve got a top-notch show moving into the Music Box and, knock wood, we’ll be good there for a couple of years. San Francisco is a beautiful city. You could pick your own house band, I figure fourteen pieces with you playing tenor and leading it. I’ll let you do a specialty number each night, and you play for dancing, too, so you can work in a couple of jazz numbers there. It may not be a swing band, but it’s also not traveling on a stale-smelling bus for fourteen hours trying to get to the Hotel Mandrake in Lansing, Michigan, where the crowd will ask if you can play ‘Lady of Spain.’ ”

Nancy added, “You could also be doing more recording if you were here. It’s not New York or L.A., but there is session work and KPO has just built a new studio . . .” She looked at Sally, who finished the pitch.