Glamour! Excitement! Clowns!

I'm pretty busy trying to draft the second essay for my creative non-fiction class which is due early next week, and finish a short parody for a contest that has an upcoming deadline, and flesh out a draft about a quantum bookshop...and trying to prep for a possible new family member (of the canine persuasion). So, in lieu of fresh content, I'm posting the personal essay I submitted as the first assignment for my writing class.
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I mark time at work by the days off that represent freedom – weekends, vacations, holidays…the rare hurricane day, Florida’s equivalent to everyone else’s snow day. The calendar on my wall is my compass, orienting me to my True North: my next day off. This wasn’t always the case. For four years I watched the span of my work shift pass nightly in one-hour increments. This was a necessity more than choice, because I worked in on-air live show production for one of the nationally televised home shopping channels.

The show schedule was blocked by the hour, and it was the luck of the draw, based on the whim of the Coordinating Producer, what you’d be handed at the beginning of the shift. On good days, you might get shoes, a couple hours of jewelry, then an easy fashion block, maybe a remote or one of those Esteban shows where all you had to do was sit in a tiny studio, doing everything you could to avoid getting into a shot and pretending to be enthralled by mediocre flamenco guitar standards. On bad days there would be high profile cosmetics, with prep sheets and props, complete with nerve-wracking guests and mysteriously disappearing product samples. On the worst days we’d be stuck with bedding. Or, my personal nightmare, a 24-hour doll shop.

Only one thing is as creepy as dolls, and that would be clowns. Occasionally, some demented doll “artist” would combine the two into some twisted composite of evil incarnate. Unsuspecting, I’d start unloading tulle-and-lace clad princesses and eerily lifelike babies from their cardboard coffins, and suddenly be faced with some new form of porcelain horror. They were heavy and unwieldy, too, so that prepping them could be considered grounds for hazardous duty pay. There were many nights as I transported a couple hundred pounds of painted porcelain on wobbly-wheeled carts that I would hit a bump in a corridor or the call center. The resulting crack as a doll met the forces of gravity was both gratifying and horrifying - especially if that was the only one in the inventory at the time.

Sometimes I’d try to be clever and check the programming guide only to be thwarted by my supervisor assigning me to the no-man’s-land of the clearance channel. Even the Spanish-language shopping channel, while it existed, had more credibility. There were no guidelines, no rules…and no budget. As a result of the unspoken rule that the clearance channel was where the rejects were relegated to, the crews tended to resemble rag-tag gangs of retail television misfits. But what we lacked in show notes and props we more than made up for in imagination and ingenuity.

My favorite show blocks were jewelry, especially being assigned to the backstage turntables, which, for some reason, a lot of people didn’t like. We used a motorized turntable, which was more or less a big motor with a plate stuck on top, to get close-up shots of the jewelry. The goal was to get the item up, within the frame, free of stray hairs and fingerprints and without any visible globs of the hot glue we used to get the items to stick to various props. By the way, they call it hot glue for a reason. You didn’t work the turntable and escape a good burning. I still have scars.

I can remember the plastic bins full of silk flowers and fabric remnants that were verboten in the main studios, where we were consigned to strict guidelines regarding jewelry. I found the standardization and conformity boring. In the clearance studio, I could work a sort of magic out of those piles of scraps and cast-offs. I used the color-wheel, the rules of contrasting and complementary hues, to bring out the intensity of the stone. If it was a pale yellow citrine, I would add a splash of blue camera left. If it was an amethyst the size of a marble, tans and peaches were employed. I took a lot of pride in my ability to make those shots beautiful. In my mind, I was creating art, sixty seconds at a time.

During a show block, you may have only had a matter of seconds to get one item down from a turntable or off set and get the next on the set or framed for the close-up. There were times when a turntable would just stop working or a camera would break, so instead of the normal two cameras for these shots, you only had one. Trust me when I say that an amazing amount of things can be accomplished in ten seconds. It’s as if TV time isn’t like regular time. It has the same properties as TV food – it is designed to have an extended shelf life and often accomplished through slight-of-hand. A lot of television is just smoke-and-mirrors…and sometimes lard and whole chickens that have been shellacked.

One secret I tell people, if they happen to ask, is that all cosmetic samples a host or guest uses on-air have been duped, which is to mean, they’ve been cleaned and refilled. Typically, the samples are overfilled. When a customer orders that item, they will probably get half the volume. We call that “some settling may occur during shipping”. The question I get asked the most is whether I have any funny stories about any of the celebrities I got to work with. I usually ask if they’re being ironic when they use the term “celebrity” to refer to Richard Simmons. Among the people I worked with at one point or another are B.A. Baracus, Chrissy Snow, Erica Kane, Rocky Balboa’s third wife, and the entire family of the 9th contestant on ‘The Bachelor’.

It was live television, so it probably goes without saying that it was fast-paced and often hectic. The set crew was required to wear headsets, which I think can only be described as being what I imagine it’s like to be slightly schizophrenic. At any given time, there might be at least eight other members of a production crew all on the same frequency. In addition to learning how to weed out the extraneous chatter and pick up on cues, a set coordinator had to be aware of set and studio changes, ready to do a product swap at a moment’s notice, and still be able to gauge the occasionally mercurial moods of show hosts. A ticked off host with a diva complex and poorly organized product cards could result in one soul-crushing evening, if you weren’t careful. A peace offering of a cup of coffee and a smile might be your only chance at redemption.

Despite all the stress, it was probably the best job I ever had. As the old curse says, “May you have an interesting job.” Or something to that effect. Marking time from jewelry to quilts to ice cream makers that took the term “soft serve” to new and unrecognized levels, I felt a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie that watching time tick away sitting behind a desk just doesn’t provide. I’m looking at a wide swath of vacationless days through the spring and summer, and at this point I’d almost welcome a batch of clown dolls wearing quilts to break up the monotony.