by Nic Tatano
"You know," said Jillian, stabbing a bit of her blackened chicken salad and pointing her fork at Amanda, "I think I like her."
"Fuhgeddaboudit," said Rica. "I'm in love."
An attractive young man walked by our table while his eyes made the rounds. He locked on Neely, who smiled back at him. Then she turned back to Amanda. "So, what you're basically saying is that women are the new men," said Neely.
"Oooh, I love that," said Amanda, grinning wide. "And there needs to be an underlying tone in the broadcast as well. I mean, you still need anchor teams like the ones you have in your stations, but the stories all have to reflect our agenda. You can't just do a regular style newscast. The product has to have a lifestyle feel to it. Viewers need to sense that women are in control of everything and that men are—"
"Oooh, oooh!" Neely put up her hand and waved, chewing fast, making us all wait till she swallowed. She gulped, took a swig of water, and almost jumped out of her chair. "I've got it! Men are the new women!"
"Yes! I think I love that even more," said Amanda. "Neely, we might have to turn you loose on the promotions department."
"So basically it's all women, all the time," I said.
"Twenty-four seven," Amanda said as she nodded. "If I turn on our news network at four in the morning, I want to see a hot middle-aged woman with… what did you call them?"
"Trophy bucks," said Jillian, through a mouthful of lettuce.
"Right," said Amanda. "And I want to see a story talking about the lifestyle that is possible for a woman who takes charge. Viewers need to come away with that notion when they're done watching."
"Oh, Amanda," said Rica, "I meant to ask you something. What are we going to be calling the news channel?"
Amanda's face lit up. "Well, I was saving that for down the road, but since you guys are going to be running the thing…" Her eyes sparkled. "This is the best part, and it's going to leave no doubt as to our agenda. We're the Consolidated Group Report. But we're just going to call the channel CGR."
Oh, you gotta be kidding. "C…G…R?" I asked, speaking each letter slowly.
She smiled and nodded. "Yeah. Get it?"
"Not exactly a brainteaser for the Jumble," said Rica. "If you're a woman who can't figure that out, you shouldn't be watching anyway."
"I like it. It's really sort of in your face," said Jillian.
"Subtlety is not my strong suit," said Amanda. "In business or in life."
My appetite switch turned back on. Suddenly I was ravenous and attacked my steak, savoring the hot, juicy rare beef that had been seasoned with fresh peppercorns and topped with garlic butter. I saw in Amanda a woman who was supremely confident in what we were about to do, and I liked her immensely. We all did. She was obviously very smart and had a plan that made sense, incredible as it was. If it actually worked, it really would change the face of broadcasting.
That face wore eye shadow and bright red lipstick. That face was over thirty and might even have a few character lines. It would speak words that told the world who was in charge.
But I couldn't help but wonder.
Had Madison briefed Amanda on our benefits package and reference checking?
"Amanda," I said, wiping my mouth with my white cloth napkin and dropping it back in my lap, then folding my hands. "I need to ask you about—"
She put up her hand and stopped me. "Syd, I don't care how you hire people or anything about any… arrangements… you might have. Yes, I've read the tabloids. Madison told me how the system works. The point is, it works very well. I could care less if you turn your offices into Caligula's palace as long as you deliver the product we need. No one's going to give it a second thought if ratings are good. Put anyone that you like on your to-do list."
I relaxed and sank back into my seat. I could see my girls all doing the same.
Hello, Jason? Yeah, we're still good to go for tonight…
A young, attractive waiter with light brown hair, deep-set blue eyes and a strong chin arrived with a bottle of wine and began to refill Amanda's glass as she quickly glanced down the length of his body and back up again. "Would you all like to see the dessert cart?" he asked. "The tiramisu is fantastic."
Amanda lightly put her hand on the man's hip, then tilted her neck so she could get a better view of the man's tight backside. "What I want isn't on the menu," she said, staring up into his eyes. She reached into her purse, pulled out a business card, wrote a number on the back, and handed it to the waiter. He looked at it, turned it over, and smiled.
"I get off at nine tonight," he said.
"Apparently, so do I," said Amanda, who locked her eyes on the waiter's.
Whoa. And I thought we were slick.
Eyes widened and jaws dropped around the table as the young man nodded, dropped the check on the table, mouthed "see you then" and walked away.
"Oh, you're smooth, Hollywood," said Rica.
"Long flights wipe me out," said Amanda, swirling her wine around in the glass. "A little… exercise… always perks me up. He looks like a good workout buddy."
"You know what they say. No pain, no gain," said Jillian. "Go for the burn."
Now I was the one who wanted details. "So Amanda, are you—"
"I wouldn't call myself a cradle robber," said Amanda, "but I do primarily date younger guys, and I tend to think of men as Kleenex."
"One blow and y'all are done?" asked Neely, laying on the accent pretty thick. Everyone laughed.
"Neely, you really do have a future in promotions," said Amanda, shaking her head as she finished her wine.
"By the way, what exactly was your job in Hollywood?" asked Jillian.
"Well, I wore many hats," said Amanda, "but I spent seven years as a casting director. It has its… perks… when men really want the part." She took a sip of wine and glanced at her watch. "I assume all your questions about business practices have been answered?"
“Actions speak louder than words,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
ONE MONTH LATER…
Getting all the girls to move to New York in May wasn't a problem, though we all had to work on Rica a bit when it came to finding new living accommodations. Jillian and Neely both settled in on the Upper East Side near me, each renting a townhouse. For whatever reason, Rica actually considered moving back to Brooklyn. Neely finally hit her with a dose of her own medicine one night and yelled (or tried to yell) "fuhgeddaboudit", which was so long and drawn out it didn't carry the same punch as it did coming from a New Yorker and sounded more like a Southern belle come-on to a man searching in vain for a condom. ("Sweetie, just fuhgeddaboudit and get on top of me before y'all start floppin' around like a catfish.") Rica finally relented and agreed to live in Manhattan, on the condition that Neely, as she put it, "Leave my slang alone, and I won't try to say y'all." Though Rica's y'all sounded more like a plea for help from an adenoidal patient in the office of an ear, nose and throat specialist.
Living arrangements taken care of, now to the hard stuff. Building a news department from scratch, I've done. Building a twenty-four-hour network, well, that's another story. Thankfully Madison and Amanda had taken a lot off my plate, renovating our new home while coordinating the things like sets and equipment. They told me to focus solely on hiring air talent.
(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that in television news, people in front of the camera are referred to as "talent", regardless of whether they possess any. Often they don’t, but then again this isn't rocket science. I can't remember the last time I heard the word "journalist" in a newsroom. So in reality, it really is a lot like Hollywood.)
We put our four pretty heads together and figured we'd need two dozen full-time anchors to cover all the shifts and allow for sick days, mental health days, vacations, etcetera.
Twelve mature female anchors with experience.
Twelve trophy bucks to sit next to them, read, and look good. In case you hadn't guessed, no experience necessary. (Don't look at me in that tone of voice. The p
ageant fembots have been operating under those rules for years.)
And once the word got out that we were staffing a new network and had two dozen openings, the floodgates of the United States Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS opened in a nanosecond.
Every former female anchor who had been put out to pasture at thirty-five dusted off a resume tape and overnighted it to me.
Every male anchor over thirty who thought of himself as distinguished or authoritative or experienced sent a tape. Which meant just about every man in an anchor position in the United States.
Jillian took care of sorting the mountain of tapes that filled the mailroom. She promptly threw every tape from the men over thirty in the trash. Men under thirty were put aside. The reverse was true for the women. By the way, I'm always amazed at the way women, especially those with pageant or modeling experience, apply for jobs. They don't seem to understand, we are hiring people to work on television, yet they send eight-by-ten glossies, bikini shots, modeling portfolios. Geez, do they think we're gonna hire people based on their looks alone? (Okay, don't answer that.)
Anyway, we weren't close to being done. We now had to start sorting out the hundreds that were left. Though I'm using the term "sorting" in a way you've never encountered.
(At this point you're about to see how incredibly shallow news executives are. We make guys at a singles bar look deep and thoughtful. And we learned all this from men, so please, don't blame us.)
We took all the tapes (actually, they were mostly DVDs with a few scattered VHS cassettes) to the conference room, ordered pizza and beer for the evening, and began our own personal gong show.
What, you're thinking we're going to sit down and watch twenty minutes from every job applicant and evaluate their journalistic abilities? Rate them one-to-ten on things like interviewing skills and mastery of grammar?
Pfffft. Ah, grasshopper, you have much to learn before you may roam the earth.
You could have the interviewing skills of Mike Wallace, but if you look like Jabba the Hutt you're gonna get gonged. Of course, every News Director in America will deny this because they'd get sued out the wazoo, but if it comes down to a choice between a credible Quasimodo and a woman who looks like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose without smearing her lip gloss, the woman who can pass the oral exam wins every time.
The rules of a television news resume tape gong show are similar to those of a courtroom, in which lawyers have peremptory challenges when choosing a jury. If an attorney doesn't like a prospective juror, said attorney can send that person packing without justifying the reason. But lawyers have a limited number of jurors they can dismiss without cause. In teevee land, any manager can veto an unlimited number of candidates for an unlimited number of reasons.
And we always have cause.
And it's always, always, always superficial.
Too fat, too old, too young, too wrinkled, bad teeth, bad hair, wrong color hair, not enough hair, big ears, Samsonite under the eyes, no chin, too many chins, no neck, pockmarked complexion, too flat-chested, too top-heavy, too bottom-heavy…
Got it? Ready?
Now a gong show has to be a well-oiled machine if you're going to deal with hundreds of resume tapes in a short time. So I'm at the front of the room, about to feed tapes or DVDs into the machines, while Jillian and Rica sit on opposite sides of the table poised to fire away, gongs at the ready. Neely has set up three large cardboard boxes on the credenza at the other end of the room and is stationed next to one of those five-foot giant plastic blue dumpsters on wheels. She has labeled the boxes "hot damn!" "doable" and "exponentially cute."
Two steaming pizzas loaded with every imaginable topping sat on one corner of the table and made the room smell like an Italian restaurant. The scent of garlic hung in the air along with the anticipation we all had of finding twelve Mister Rights. (We would take care of the women tomorrow. And we're just as brutal on our own gender, lest you think we're gonna hold anything back. But now that the rules have changed, we have actually gonged the pageant fembots without looking.)
It was going to be a long night. I twisted open my bottle of ice cold beer, grabbed a slice of pizza and took a bite of the hot pie before tossing it on a paper plate. Rich sauce did battle for my taste buds with sausage and mozzarella cheese as I grabbed the first DVD. "You guys ready?" I asked, talking through the pizza.
I got three nods and grunts from the girls who were as impressed with the pizza as I was and were shoveling it in.
(Note to television viewers: the hardest video to get isn't some politician cheating on his wife or a corporate CEO taking a bribe or even a UFO landing. The toughest video to get is that of women eating. Take a camera to a shopping mall, park it in the food court, aim it at the tables and the eating magically stops among females. If you left the camera there, all the restaurants would go out of business. Take the camera away, and you've got the scene in this conference room. Four women chowing down like they were about to be contestants on Survivor.)
I shoved the DVD into the slot and unfolded the corresponding resume as I waited for the disc to load. "Leading off… Todd from Wichita," I said. The monitor filled with the image of a mid-twenties man who already had the beginnings of a second chin to accessorize his lovely receding hairline. I glanced at his paper resume. "Three years as a reporter, one as an anchor."
"None on a to-do list at this network," said Rica. "Gong."
The other two nodded. I ejected the DVD, put it back in its plastic box, and slid it down the table. Neely grabbed it like she was pulling a cold draft off a bar counter and deftly deposited it into the trashcan in one sweet motion.
"Next up, Carl from Idaho." Tape in machine, man with noticeable overbite appears on screen.
"Gong," said Jillian, before five seconds had elapsed.
"Looks like he could eat an apple through a picket fence," said Neely.
I slid the DVD down the table. Neely grabbed it and made an exaggerated slam dunk with it into the trash.
I shoved a VHS cassette into the VCR. "Next up, Walter from Peoria."
"C'mon, Walter!" said Jillian, shaking one fist like she was warming up the dice at a crap table. "Momma needs to check some references."
Walter's moon face and bug eyes filled the screen and told us why he was still in Peoria.
"I don't need to check 'em that bad," said Jillian.
Neely made a cross with two fingers like she was warding off a vampire and leaned her head back. "Gong. Good God, y'all, that face could stop a clock."
"Bless his little heart," added Rica, without missing a beat. Even Neely laughed. I slid the tape down the table and she grabbed it with two fingertips, held it at arm's length like some lab experiment from a bachelor refrigerator, then dropped it in the trash.
"Not off to a very good start," said Jillian, slugging down her beer.
"Fear not," I said. "We have hundreds more from which to choose."
"It has occurred to me," said Neely, leaning on the end of the table with both elbows, "that this would be even more fun if we had an honest to goodness Chinese gong."
"If you can find one, I'll authorize the expense," I said, sliding another DVD into the machine. "Mario from Colorado."
I reached for another slice of pizza as I heard the disc whirring in the machine.
I didn't hear anyone call for a gong.
"Hello there, Mario," said Jillian, with a little lust in her voice.
The monitor was filled with a lean, rugged face that sported dark brown hair and eyes to match. The man's voice was pure dark silk pouring from his mouth, a deep baritone you wouldn't expect from someone under thirty. Kind of a Sylvester Stallone type, without the accent.
"No gongs?" I asked.
"He's a possible," said Jillian. "What's his story?"
I glanced at his resume. "Three years anchoring in middle-of-nowhere Colorado."
"Put him in a box," said Rica.
"Which one?" asked Neely.
&nbs
p; "I think he goes under doable," said Rica.
"Agreed," said Jillian.
I slid the tape down the table. Neely grabbed it and gently put it in the appropriate box.
Rica turned toward Neely. "Would you explain exponentially cute again?" she asked, as I popped another DVD in the machine. "I'm still a little confused."
"It's a guy who is beyond cute," said Neely, sipping her beer. "Cute to the tenth power. Not scorching hot, but incredibly good looking with an underlying boy-next-door appeal. If the boy next door regularly showed up in your bedroom wearing a Chippendales outfit, carrying two cans of Reddi-wip and a riding crop."