it was how to trade on resentment to get information. Safe to say that if this Rafan Yoosuf was taking dirt from one island and larding it on another, there would be resentment afloat, never more so than when land meant life.
CHAPTER 12
Blame it on the Barbie Master and Halloween. Jenna could not escape the wardrobe chief’s red footwear. First, it was the booty-boosting, toe-crunching high heels that she’d intentionally ruined in the torrential rainstorm. Now it was slippers. It was as if the Master had fetishized the color … or her feet. She glanced down. Well, at least these things didn’t have those confounded heels. No, these were just ruby-red slippers, but with sequins—replicas of the ones that Dorothy wore so memorably in The Wizard of Oz. The slippers formed the foundation, so to speak, of Jenna’s costume for the annual “trick or treat” shenanigans on the set of The Morning Show, when all but one of the regulars dressed up for viewers. It seemed like a good, even wholesome idea the first year they tried it, but Jenna had noticed that the women’s costumes had been getting steadily trashier, shrinking in the hot wash of network competition.
“I’ve got the sexiest outfit for you,” Barbie Master said, looking up from carefully tweezing his dark and narrow eyebrows in a vanity mirror.
Jenna wasn’t sure “sexiest” was an adjective that ought to describe any clothes—costumes included—that she wore on morning TV. But as her executive producer and twit extraordinaire Marv Balen put it, “Barbie Master knows best.”
The head of wardrobe offered her a blue Dorothy dress so mini that it might have provided modest cover for the teenaged—and diminutive—Judy Garland herself. Shamelessly short. “There’s no business like show business,” Barbie Master sang. Jenna sighed. It could have been worse: He might have dolled her up in a little French maid uniform with black hose, black garters, and more booty-boosting heels. Wait till next year, she thought.
Still, Jenna’s costume wasn’t even the raciest surprise of the morning. That honor fell to Andrea Hanson, who, despite her pregnancy, was posed as a hyper-sexed Daisy Mae from the Li’l Abner comic strip. Her idea, or Barbie Master’s? You never knew with Andrea.
Jenna took a bracing breath and swished onto the set, her stratospheric hemline ogled by virtually every eye in the studio. Do not bend over a frickin’ inch, she told herself.
Moments later, Andrea greeted viewers, joking about her own “PG-rated” appearance, though considering that the host was in her sixth month, Jenna doubted that many viewers were laughing along. More likely they felt like squirming at the mother-to-be’s swollen appearance in Daisy Mae’s button-popping, polka-dot blouse.
“Hanson, you are such a hottie,” gushed the usually staid Phillip Gates, the show’s news anchor—wearing his customary suit. Gates’s manner suggested a penis with an untoward regard for expectant mothers. After his breathy appraisal, Gates composed himself and began to deliver the news:
“Halloween took on real horror for Roger Lilton’s presidential hopes this morning when a team of FBI agents knocked on the door of his Washington campaign headquarters with a search warrant.” Video of dark-suited men appeared. “No trick or treat here as agents arrived only hours after the brutalized body of Pagan leader and self-described witch, GreenSpirit, was found in a remote cabin in upstate New York.” A shot of the cabin, taken with a long lens, filled the screen, followed by three-day-old footage of the candidate. “Lilton was once linked romantically to GreenSpirit, and that relationship has become the election season’s biggest controversy.”
Lilton’s press secretary, Jean Mayer, popped up next, calling the FBI raid “a political smear engineered by President Reynolds.” Over file footage of FBI chief Martin Aimes testifying before Congress, Gates read Aimes’s statement, released that morning, characterizing the visit as “routine,” and saying that it did not mean that Lilton was a suspect in the murder.
He didn’t rule it out, though, Jenna thought.
Two and a half minutes later, Daisy Mae Hanson turned to Jenna in the Weather Center.
“Here’s our own Jenna Withers, eagerly awaiting her unveiling—I think that’s the right word—as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Jenna, that has to be the shortest Dorothy dress on record. Better hope nobody sneezes in your neighborhood.”
Better hope Li’l Abner doesn’t demand a blood test, Jenna almost shot back, but she kept her demeanor bright and cheerful, in accord with the unwritten rule of the show that you took Andrea’s handoffs with a big smile no matter what.