“What the hell is this supposed to mean on page twelve?”
Jean Ann used her three minutes of weather to check her face in the small hand mirror and to lick her lips. She made her own grammatical corrections as she read from the TelePrompTer. That’s what made her so good on-air. She saw the mistakes coming and made some sense out of them.
Even when she couldn’t make that fast mental to verbal copy change, she would keep on reading as though it was perfectly clear and those watching and listening would only think they had somehow misunderstood. How could what Jean Ann Maypin said be gibberish?
They both sat, lost in their thoughts, as Art Novak chattered on.
16
“I can’t stand that song,” said the young woman who worked in accounting.
“What’s wrong with it?” Ellen asked.
“That stuff about dust blowing in the wind. I don’t think I’m dust in the wind,” she sniffed angrily. “I think I am way more than that.”
Ellen looked at the thick legs, the sturdy shoes, the short curled hair that should have been on the head of a middle-aged woman, not this twenty-two year old. But then, she had met the mother.
She came to see where her daughter worked. She carried a brown plastic handbag in the crook of her arm. Her hair was steel gray and tightly permed. She wore a bright blue polyester dress with a matching jacket and a thin, white, plastic belt. She wore dark pantyhose and white, thick-healed sandals. She was from Wisconsin.
Ellen watched as the woman’s eyes darted from the lights of the television monitors to the sounds of the scanners to the beige carpeting to the figures moving through the newsroom. She felt sorry for the woman who was so excited by her trip to the station.
“Hey, let me give you a tour,” she offered.
The tour included an introduction to Tom Carter who was curt and to Jean Ann who grasped her hand with both of her own.
“Thank you so much,” the mother murmured over and over again as they walked through the station.
“It’s nothing,” Ellen told her.
“That’s all we are in the end, isn’t it, dust?” Ellen now said to the daughter. “I mean, dust to dust and all that.”
“I think I’m more than that.” Her face was red with indignation. “Much more.”
She turned abruptly and walked away.
Ellen shrugged and looked over at Debbie.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I sorta like the idea.”
“What are you going to do for your series?” Debbie asked without looking up from her typewriter.
Chuck Farrell had warned them that if they didn’t come up with their series for the fall rating book, he would assign them ones of his own choice.
“I think I want to do something on that hospice down south,” Debbie said.
“Oh, that sounds like fun.”
“I think it could be good.”
“I’m going with the Klan,” Ellen said of the group that had recently started to make its presence known in the area.
“They’re recruiting,” she told Tony Santella, handing him a flyer she found posted on a light pole.
“Can you get all the visuals you need?” was his only concern. “Like it,” said Brown.
He did like it. Good subject, lots of interest, four or five parts. Talk to black leaders. One part shot at a Klan meeting, another with shadowed interviews with Klansmen. It would work.
Debbie’s first idea for a series had been one on bikers.
“Are you crazy?” roared Tony.
“What do you want to do, pull a train or something?” Jack Benton sneered.
“No way,” stated Brown.
“Why not?”
“They are scum,” Tony said.
“No,” she said, “that’s the story. Some of them raise money for charity. They do things for handicapped children. They do a lot of things besides wearing black leather jackets.”
It didn’t matter. Brown shuddered at the thought of long-haired men in black jackets roaring up to the front door, parking their bikes on the sidewalk, walking around his newsroom. No way. He didn’t want it and neither did the audience.
They might go for crashes and bodies, carefully shot, on the freeway. That was natural. They were curious about that sort of thing. But, they didn’t like sleaze and bikers were sleaze.
The Klan story, that was something else. They needed to know about it, that it was out there in their neighborhoods. Ellen would do it right. He could already picture the night shot of white-hooded men standing by some bonfire. Did they still do that? he wondered.
Do series during ratings, that’s what they said Back East. Series helped the ratings, gave them something to promote. The Klan was good, he nodded. But, what they really needed this rating book was some sort of uplifting, happy, hopeful series, something that would make them feel good. They could run it on the ten o’clock, the last story, the kicker, and again on the noon.
“You have any ideas for a light series?” he asked Debbie Hanson. “Something uplifting, you know, happy?”
All she could offer was the hospice and a title.
“I thought I’d call it ‘A Good Place to Die.’”
Brown stared at her, his hands folded on his stomach.
“Well, I suppose so,” he sighed. “But what we really need is something light.”
“Somebody Across the Street is doing a series on incest,” Chuck announced to anyone within hearing distance.
“Why don’t we get Kowalski to do one on rape?” Ellen called out.
“It’s been done,” Kowalski yelled back. “Won an award last year for some station in Colorado.”
George was listening. Any mention of a story cut through the clatter of the scanners and the constantly ringing phones.
“We could find a new angle,” he offered.
Chuck rolled his eyes.
“Right, George,” Ellen laughed, “a new angle on rape.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s always more than one angle, isn’t there?”
17
Chuck Farrell prepared his speech on all the reasons he deserved more money. He had been at the station four years. He pulled the early morning producer shift that nobody else wanted. He filled in on the assignment desk. He worked through the day and part of the night when there
