Gloss. Jennifer Oko

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СКАЧАТЬ people to take notice, and a voice that kept their attention. And that, in the end, is probably what matters: the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale, not who wrote the actual story. Or, rather, what matters is the viewer’s perception of the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale.

      I used to question the astronomic salary scales of our on-air talent, but after years in the business, traveling around, talking to our viewers, watching the mercurial dances of the ratings’ shifts, I’m starting to think they deserve those big bucks. Their roles remind me of psychotherapy, with its theories of projection and all of that. It’s morning, the audience is just waking up, and these faces on the screen, these players, are extensions of their dreams—people they know but not really, events they are familiar with but not entirely. It isn’t actually news they are looking for when they turn on the TV; it is more of the same. And because of that, no story, no presentation of a story, can deviate too far from their expectations; it would be too disruptive, too jarring to their psyches. They would change the channel. But instead they had Faith. After all these years of appearing in people’s bedrooms every morning, Faith seemed so familiar and so credible, that, well, she just had to be there. They stayed tuned.

      “And for more information about my report, check out our Web site,” she said, smiling. “Ken?”

      His turn.

      “Nice story, Faith,” he said, as if he actually liked her, and then turned to a new camera angle. “Coming up—long-lasting lipsticks. Are they safe? And later, did she do it? Hollywood vixen Asia Sheraton is here to tell her side of the story. But first, he has been called the vice president’s Prozac, the most trusted man on Pennsylvania Avenue, the brain of the millennium. And he’s only thirty-five. People are saying that senior White House aide and speechwriter Mark Thurber is going to be a central player in Vice President Hacker’s upcoming presidential bid. He’s here with us this morning to give us an insider’s perspective of what some say is the most secretive administration in history, and to discuss his new book, The Scribe Inside: Memoirs of a White House Advisor. Good morning, Mark. So nice to have you here.”

      “Good morning to you, Ken. It’s nice to be here.”

      Oh my God. “That’s Mark Thurber?” I asked Caitlin, who had come to stand between me and the EP (it was her turn to gauge his take on things). She didn’t answer, though. She didn’t have to.

      “Are you enjoying your visit to New York?” said Ken. “It seems we hardly ever see members of the administration outside of D.C. these days.” Cue large, fluorescent white smile.

      Thurber laughed and said something about the terror threat being too high to allow high-ranking officials into the pubic eye. “But I’m glad I risked it today. I’ve quite enjoyed meeting some members of your staff,” said the man People magazine had recently named Washington’s Most Eligible Bachelor.

      He looked different in person than he did in those airbrushed photos. A little more weathered and more, well, like a lot of guys I know: healthy, a bit on the thin side (I read somewhere that he was a marathon runner), dressed according to the preppy-chic suggestions of the latest J. Crew catalog. Job aside, I wouldn’t say he was all that exceptional. Except look at that smile. Look at those dimples.

      My cheeks started to burn. And at that moment, though of course I didn’t know it at the time, the trajectory of my life was rerouted onto a different track.

      Dear New Day USA,

      I just want to thank Ken and Faith for being there for me each mourning (sic), bringing the important events of the world into my home. They are both so smart and well informt (sic) and Faith is so lovely and Ken is like the brother I never had. Would it be possible to have them send me autographt (sic) pictures? It would mean the world to me.

      George Albridge

       Allentown, PA

      CHAPTER TWO

      IT SOUNDED LIKE A BROKEN RADIATOR, THE ALMOST deafening hiss that blasted through the Sweetwater, Texas Convention Center. And it was palpable, how the moist summer heat helped the noxious odor cling to my hair and my clothes. The smell was urinelike, and was particularly intense near the large pits in the center of the floor. Like at the pit I was standing next to as my correspondent, armed with freshly applied lipstick, protective gear and a poker, was learning how to extract the venom from a rattler who, unbeknownst to him (or maybe her), was on his way to the slaughter two pits down the way. I was in the depths of what a logical person might have thought to be the worst cliché of a Freudian nightmare imaginable. There were, in the space surrounding me, about five thousand live and very angry rattlesnakes. We were shooting a few interviews and some footage for a feature piece before we went out to participate in what was and probably still is the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup. This wasn’t exactly the place I would have liked to be when my phone rang—and the person calling was the guy who had become the subject of a more preferable variety of dreams. I probably wouldn’t have even answered except I didn’t know it was him because the caller ID was blocked.

      “Hello? This is Annabelle,” I said, sounding very serious. When I answered the phone on work time, my voice tended to drop a few octaves (sort of like Faith’s, I suppose), something my friends ribbed me about to no end. My normal voice, my casual voice, was (and is) a bit on the high side; telemarketers often asked if my mother was home.

      “Hello? Hello?” He didn’t introduce himself, but having watched the tape of his appearance on our show too many times to count, I knew his voice. Mark Thurber’s soft but masculine lyrics “I’ve enjoyed meeting your staff” had become the sonnet that lulled me to sleep at night. And, because Caitlin told me she had given him my number, I had been anxiously anticipating his call for the past few days.

      “Hi!” My response got caught in the back of my throat and came out like a chirp.

      “Hello?” he said again. “I’m sorry. I think we have a bad connection.” Now he was almost yelling. “There is a loud hissing sound. I’ll call back.”

      “It’s just snakes!” I said, basically shrieking. He hung up anyway.

      “What’s next?” said my correspondent, who was gripping the neck of a fanged rattler with her manicured fingers, gripping it so he couldn’t bite her and, understandably, at arm’s length.

      “Did you get a tight shot of the fangs?” I asked the cameraman. He glared at me as if it was a dumb question, because it was. I looked back at my correspondent. She was looking a little ashen under all the foundation and blush. She was, after all, standing in the middle of the pit, as opposed to standing comfortably on the other side of the wall with me. There were snakes trying to strike at her steel plated boots, and more snakes slithering between her feet.

      “Drop it and get out,” I said. And if that isn’t power, I don’t know what is.

      The dynamic between producer and correspondent is a delicate one. On the one side you have an outwardly needy and demanding ego, and on the other, an inwardly needy and demanding ego. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. It can get incredibly tense, but without each other, we would both be unemployed; I look like a Muppet in front of the camera, and some of the correspondents I worked with couldn’t write themselves out of, well, a rattlesnake pit. To be fair, not this correspondent. This one I liked. We might have covered a lot of really silly stories, but given the opportunity, she was a good journalist—and she could write. More importantly, she was a friend.

      “Oh my, he called, didn’t he?” Natasha said as she climbed out СКАЧАТЬ