My mother cut me off. “I was talking,” she said, icily, “to Andrew.”
“Oh.”
She put her arm around me. “I’m your mother, darling. I’m supposed to be a pain in your ass. It’s in the job description.” She looked at the list of Emmy nominees again.
“This does get me thinking,” she offered.
Andrew and I looked at each other with an unspoken “uh-oh.”
“I’m never going to be nominated, let alone win this thing, unless we start doing some more serious shows around here.”
“Serious?” I asked.
“Let’s face it.” My mother sat up on the sofa, her posture eager and determined. “Nobody’s getting any awards for shows like we’ve been doing. Yes, it’s all very entertaining to interview transvestite dentists and the women who love them, but it isn’t the kind of serious-minded feature that’s going to get me recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.”
She knew the name of the organization that awarded the Emmys? I was impressed. It must have shown on my face.
“See?” she said, smugly. “I can use the Google.”
“Really? I bet Nancy looked that up for you,” I asserted, crediting my mother’s personal assistant.
“So what if she did?” my mother answered. “I can use the Nancy. The point is: I get things done. And it’s all up here,” she said smugly, tapping her forehead the same way I had moments before when talking to Andrew. I shivered in the way I always did when noticing any resemblance between us.
“Which is why,” she continued, “I think we need to tackle some bigger stories. If I want to play in the big leagues, I’m going to have to show I have the chops to do investigative reporting like a real journalist. Like a Barbara Walters. Or a Kelly Ripa.”
“Don’t forget Sherri Shepherd,” I offered.
“Exactly!” my mother enthused. “We need to dig deep, team. Find the big stories. Expose injustice. Make some headlines.”
Suddenly, my mother was turning into Perry White. For no good reason, I wanted to run around the offices like a lunatic screaming, “Stop the presses!”
“Those are great ideas,” Andrew agreed with the patience of a man who’d spent the last two years working with a woman even more deluded than my mother. “We’ll get right on it. I see no reason why we can’t combine the fun lifestyle advice and entertaining human interest topics we normally cover with some harder-hitting reportage.”
I knew my mother would be impressed, if by nothing else, Andrew’s use of the word reportage in the same sentence as the nonsense we usually aired. Sure enough, she sprang up and pulled the seated producer’s head to her in an embrace that threatened to suffocate the poor boy in her ample bosom. “I knew I could count on you,” she beamed.
“You too,” she told me. “Except, not for anything constructive.”
“Nk ooo,” Andrew said.
“Sorry,” my mother said, releasing him from the deep valley of her breasts. “What was that, sweetheart?”
He gulped in a breath. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, ” my mother gushed. “I can’t wait to get something I can really sink my teeth into.”
Instinctively, I put my hand over my jugular.
7
“Trust me,” I’d told Andrew, the minute my mom left his office, “in a few days she’ll have lost all interest in becoming the next Diane Sawyer. We just have to provide a distraction. I say we go for an episode where she takes some of her girlfriends to Chippendales. They start all embarrassed and silly, tentatively slipping dollar bills, with the delicacy of vestal virgins, into the dancer’s G-strings, and by the end they’ll be kneading those boys’ buttocks like dough. That’ll take her mind off things.”
It’d improve Andrew’s mood, too, I reckoned. Although maybe the last thing he needed was more testosterone-fueled narcissism.
Andrew drummed his fingers on his desk. “I don’t know,” he said, a little dreamily. “Have you considered your mother might have a point?”
“Crazy say what now?” I asked.
“Listen.” Andrew leaned forward, his eyes a little brighter. “I’ve spent two years producing hundreds of hours of daytime television that, combined, have had about as much impact on the world as a butterfly’s fart. That’s a lot of my life to waste on nonsense, Kevin.”
“It hasn’t all been nonsense,” I countered. “You’ve entertained a lot of people. Touched some, too.”
“Not enough,” Andrew said. “I think she’s right-we should set our sights a little higher. We reach millions of viewers a week, Kevin. We could be educating them. Enlightening them. Instead of being satisfied feeding them… drivel.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I argued. “Too hard on the show, too. This isn’t the CBS Evening News. It’s a fun, gossipy talkfest with a wacky hostess who the audience, god help us, seems to love. It’s exactly what the people who watch it want it to be.”
“Is it? And, even if that’s true, is it enough? ” Andrew ran his hands through his hair. “Maybe I’m stuck on this thing with Brock. He was so focused on giving me what he thought I wanted, there was no chance I’d get what I needed. By pandering to my expectations, he wound up putting a lot of effort into leaving no real impression whatsoever.
“It was all artifice and no substance-stunts and clown cars. Cotton candy-eat as much as you like and you’re still hungry. It’s sweet going down, but it dissolves into nothing before it even reaches your stomach. In the end, you feel as empty as you did before. Is that what we’re serving?
“Maybe-every once in a while-we can provide something a little more filling.”
Great. Andrew was having a midlife crisis in his twenties. He’d bought into my mother’s insane idea to disrupt the formula of her inexplicably popular show. Whatever happened to “Don’t mess with success”?
Not to mention the absurdity of imagining my mother as some bastion of journalistic truth seeking. Unless you count the TV listings or coupons, I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. As far as general information, if it wasn’t covered on Entertainment Tonight or in US Magazine, she didn’t know it happened.
And yet… my cynicism wasn’t particularly attractive, either. What, exactly, was so threatening about my mother’s and Andrew’s enthusiasm? Instead of being appalled by their desire to elevate what they did, what if I let it inspire me? Hadn’t I just done it with my own life-left the safety of easy money and the freedom to do as I pleased for the chance for a “real” job and a life with Tony?
It was easy to be bitter and sarcastic and predict disaster. Yeah, my mother doing any kind of real investigatory work had the potential of being a total fustercluck. But even a possible train wreck is better than staying parked in the station your whole life. At least it’s forward motion. Maybe, just maybe, we could even stay on the tracks and get somewhere. Somewhere better.
Who was I to say otherwise?
“Okay,” I began, “if we were going to do this, where would we start? It’s not like we have a crack team of reporters to get on the case.”
“How hard can it be to find news in New York City, Kevin? Everything happens here,” Andrew said. “Keep your eyes open. Watch what’s going on around you and look for angles no one’s seen yet. There isn’t a place in the world with more stories, Kevin. We just need to find one.”
I went back to my office and thought about what Andrew had said. What stories did my life offer?
