Boss Girl

"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 (#u2e8e3d97-6683-50b1-9e76-7312739992b9)

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 pageant 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.