Gloss. Jennifer Oko

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СКАЧАТЬ I said, explaining that I only did tape pieces, suggesting by my tone that I was somehow above the 6:00 a.m. call, like I was showing off. Which I suppose I was.

      “So, why are you here today?”

      “I heard one of our guests needed some coffee.” He was looking at me via my reflection in the mirror, and I was deeply regretting hitting the snooze button earlier, not allowing myself enough time to put on any makeup. But, looking at my reddening cheeks, I knew I didn’t need any blush.

      He smiled. Cute dimples, I thought, which made me a little nervous. I glanced at my watch.

      “We should get going.”

      The stylist sprayed Mark’s (thick) hair one last time, trying unsuccessfully to tame a small cowlick on the right side of his head. He laughed (look at those dimples) and told her to leave it, that without it no one would know it was really him on TV.

      I brought him to the sound check, where a lavaliere microphone was clipped to his tie, and then I left him with another nubile production assistant so I could get to the control room in time to watch my piece.

      “Sorry again,” I said over my shoulder.

      “Don’t apologize,” he said. “I feel like I should buy you a coffee or something. I was the one who got in your way.”

      I emitted a shrill giggle (ugh!) and rushed down the hall. By the time I reached the control room, my cheeks were so flushed they hurt.

      “What’s wrong with you?” my friend Caitlin whispered as I sidled up next to her. Caitlin was another producer on the show, although she only did live bookings—politicians, pundits and their ilk. We’d worked together for years now, sharing late nights at work and many drinks at the corner bar afterward, and our friendship had long extended beyond the office. She was a friend I could call after a bad date or a bad haircut. I was a friend she would call for the same. Truth be told, for her the bad haircuts were pretty common. She had recently acquired an unflattering bob, streaked in brassy shades of red and yellow that seemed to change with each flicker of the monitor lights. She tried to tone it down by clipping it back with little baby barrettes, and the general visage was far from professional. Certainly, she looked odd as we stood in the control room, hovering in the back row where the segment producers waited to watch their pieces hit the airwaves. Apparently, I looked a little odd myself.

      “Annie?” She tried again. “Your cheeks are like a clown’s. What’s going on?”

      “Nothing,” I said, my voice still sort of shrill.

      “Whatever.” She let out a quiet, knowing chuckle. “Thanks for babysitting my guest. I got here late.”

      “Mark?”

      “Yeah. He goes on after your segment. Isn’t he cute?”

      “I didn’t really notice.”

      She gave me a don’t bullshit me kind of look. I glanced at the clock: 7:34.

      “Excuse me, my piece is up.” I went to stand next to the executive producer, the EP, which is what we producers did so we could gauge his reaction when our pieces were on. It was the only time to get feedback. The rest of the day, he was too busy planning for tomorrow. There is no such thing as retrospect in morning television. It’s all present tense and tease the future.

      “Take camera five! Cue music! Dissolve four.” The director brought us safely out of commercial. “Take three!”

      Faith Heide looked up.

      “Welcome back to New Day USA,” she said with an engaging smile, which quickly morphed into a furrowed, concerned-citizen look. “Later this hour, is the popular eggshell diet safe? And we’ll talk to the stars of the hot new reality show Who’s Your Mama. But first (pregnant pause), for this week’s edition of our American Ideals series, I met a man whose free-market ingenuity is helping to improve the lives of some women who, until recently, didn’t know what it meant to be free.”

      She turned her head to watch the video on the enormous plasma monitor to her left, and then the image went full screen.

      I breathed in deeply. I always got a bit of a knot in my stomach when I heard the words I had written come out of an anchor’s mouth. I never knew what they were going to do with them. And Faith, of late, had apparently decided she needed to be taken more seriously. Meaning she was constantly lowering her voice a few octaves and interjecting poignancy with perceptible sighs, trying, I suppose, to sound smarter. You could try to tell her to speak normally, but she wasn’t one for taking direction. Her agent had recently negotiated to get her the largest salary in television history (with a decade-long job guarantee), so she probably felt that she didn’t really need to learn anything new.

      “Douglas Purnell might not look like someone who would care much about mascara,” Faith’s narration began. I watched my work in the staccato reflections of light the monitor cast upon my boss’s face. A flicker of emotion from him would be victorious. Call it compassion fatigue, but most television news professionals are intensely jaded. Once, I had produced a piece about a reunion of people who had grown up in a brutal orphanage. But the show was tight on time and something needed to go. “What do you think?” the director had asked the executive producer. The EP had turned to him and said, as if it was the most obvious thing, “Kill the orphans.”

      Anyway, the piece I had on that day had nothing to do with orphanages. It was a profile about this guy Doug Purnell who had set up a number of beauty parlors and cosmetics laboratories in Fardish refugee camps at the southern edge of the former Soviet Union, all run by women. We didn’t shoot there, of course. There was no budget for international travel anymore, especially if it meant going to upsetting places where we’d once funded wars. All of the interviews were done stateside, in Purnell’s D.C. office (an organization called Cosmetic Relief) except for a short pickup bit shot by one of the freelance crews the network retained in the region, and there was some amateur DV footage provided by Purnell himself. But it was clear, from the translated sound bites, that these women were immensely grateful to him. He was helping them become self-sufficient while building self-esteem in the process. And the story was as all-American as a network could ask for because a major American cosmetics company had loaned funds and supplies. It was the best story I had done in a while. The most interesting to me, anyway.

      People always told me I had the coolest job. I traveled all over the country; I met loads of interesting, colorful people. Celebrities mostly bored me, they were so ubiquitous in my work. So, yes, I would say I had a cool job. But I also had a growing sadness about what I did. It was a feeling of constant loss. I would put in weeks and weeks researching, shooting, writing and editing hours of footage, building relationships with strangers and soothing their fears that they might be portrayed badly, and out of it came about three minutes, four if I was lucky, of a story that most people only half watched because they were chomping on their Cheerios as it played. And then it was gone. There might be an e-mail or two of follow-up, colleagues might say something like “nice piece” when I got back to the office, but that was basically that. The end of it, and on to the next one.

      Besides, even if they did put down their Cheerios and watch, they would have no idea that you, the producer, had any hand in it, because someone like Faith would appear in a few shots and have her voice laid in. Some of the correspondents I worked with were more involved than others, and some were really great, but the truth was, in order to show up on the air every day, someone else had to be doing some of the lifting for you. With Faith, “some” really meant “all.”

      Sometimes I СКАЧАТЬ