Ironical, but that same floor producer will call you “Fitness Wheel” because that's the slug written in your block on the schedule. It says “Investment Videos” for the slick guy's block. For the old man, the slug says: “Stain Remover.”

The blonde and the slick guy, them sitting on the reject leather sofa in the green room, cups of old coffee abandoned on the table in front of them, hanging over them a couple video monitors flicker high on the walls, in the corners, mounted up near the ceiling. On one monitor, you see the national talent talking about the ocean liner, then tossing to video support that shows a ship belly-up and the specks of orange life vests floating around it. On the second monitor, the blonde says, there's something even sadder.

Up in that other corner, you see the A Block bozo, the old comb-over guy who got out of his Motel 6 bed at 5 a.m. to be here and pitch his special stain-removing brush he invented. Poor schmuck. He gets miked and put onstage, in the “living-room set” with its rain forest of fake plants. He sits under those hot lights while the on-air talent does their opening “chat.”

The living-room set is different from the “kitchen set” and the “main set” because it has more fake plants and throw pillows.

This bozo thinks he's got a fat ten-minute segment because the station is playing the clock, not cutting to commercial until ten after the start. Most stations cut at eight or nine minutes. That way, we keep the audience from channel-surfing and get top ratings credit for the whole fifteen-minute block.

“Not pretty,” the slick guy tells our blonde girl, and he crosses himself fast as a good Catholic, “but better him than either of us.”

A heartbeat into his stain-removing demo, the A Block's cut off by the doomed ocean liner.

Sitting in this green room, on a ratty leather sofa in some double-digit ADI, the slick guy says he's got maybe seven minutes to teach an entire world to our Miss America.

ADI, that means Area of Direct Influence. Boston, for example, is the number-three ADI in the country because its media reach the third-largest market of consumers. New York is the number-one ADI. Los Angeles is number two. Dallas, number seven.

Where they're sitting is way down the list of ADIs. Day Break Lincoln or New Day Tulsa. Some media outlet that reaches a consumer market demographic totaling nobody.

Some other good advice is: Don't wear white. Never wear a black-and-white patterned anything because it will “shimmer” on camera. And always lose some weight.

“Just staying at this weight,” our blonde tells the slick guy, “is a full-time job.”

The on-air person, the talent here in Chattanooga, the slick guy says, the anchor here is a total straight pipe. Whatever they tell her over the IFD in her ear, those exact words will pop out her lipstick-red mouth. The director could feed her, “. . . Christ, we're going long! Toss to Adopt-a-Dog, and then we'll cut to commercial . . . ,” and that's what she'd say on air.

A total straight pipe.

Our blonde girl, listening, she doesn't laugh. Not even a smile.

So the slick guy tells her, other talent he's seen, one time on a live feed to location, a warehouse fire roaring in the background, the on-air person fumbled with her hair, looking straight into a hot camera and going out live, she said, “Could you repeat the question? My IUD fell out . . .”

The reporter, she meant IFD. Internal Feedback Device, the slick guys says. He points at the anchor who appears on the monitor, and he says how one anchor will always have that kind of lopsided hairdo. The hair swooping down to hide one ear. It's because she's got a tiny radio stuck in her ear to take prompts and cues from the director. If the show is going long or they need to toss to a nuclear-reactor meltdown.

This blonde, she's on the road with some kind of exercise wheel you roll around on top of to lose weight. She wears a pink leotard and purple tights.

Yeah, she's thin and blonde, but the more ins and outs your face has, the slick guy tells her, the better you look on camera.

“That's why I have to keep my before picture,” she says. Bending over in her chair, leaning over and over until her breasts press against her knees, she digs in a gym bag on the floor. She says, “This is the only real proof that I'm not just another skinny blonde girl.” She takes something paper out of the bag, holding an edge between two fingers. It's a photograph, and the blonde tells the slick guy, “Unless people see this, they might think I was just born this way. They'd never know what I've done with my life.”

Go on television with even a little baby fat, he tells her, and you look like nothing. A mask. A full moon. A big zero with no features for people to remember.

“Losing all that blubber is the only really heroic thing I've ever done,” she says. “If I gain it back, then it'll be like I never lived.”

You see, the slick guy says, television takes a three-dimensional thing—you—and turns it into a two-dimensional thing. That's why you look fat on camera. Flat and fat.

Holding the photo between two fingernails, looking at her old self, our blonde says, “I don't want to be just another skinny girl.”

About her hair being too “hot,” the slick guy tells her, “That's why you never see natural redheads in porn movies. You can't light them right, next to real people.”

That's what this guy wants to be: the camera behind the camera behind the camera giving the last and final truth.

We all want to be the one standing farthest back. The one who gets to say what's good or bad. Right or wrong.

Our too-blonde girl, going to blow out the cameras, the slick guy tells her about how these local-produced shows are broken into six segments with commercials in between. The A Block, B Block, C Block, and so on. These shows like Rise and Shine Fargo or Sun-Up Sedona, they're a dying breed. Expensive to produce, compared to just buying some national talk-show product to fill the slot.

A promotion tour like this, it's the new vaudeville. Going from town to town, hotel to hotel, playing one-night stands on local television and radio. Selling your new and improved hair curler or stain remover or exercise wheel.

You get seven minutes to put your product across. That's if you're not slotted in the F Block—the last block, where in half the ADIs you get bumped off the program because an earlier block went too long. Some guest was so funny and charming they held him through the commercial. They “double-blocked” him. Or the network interrupted with a sinking ship.

That's why the A Block is so choice. The show starts, the anchors do their “chat” segment, and you're on.

No, pretty soon, all this hard-won know-how the slick guy's put together, it will be no good to anybody.

Maybe that's why he's teaching her for free. Really, he says, he should write a goddamn book. That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

Still looking at her fat-self photograph, the blonde says, “It's pretty creepy, but this fatty-fat picture is worth more to me than anything,” she says. “It used to make me sad, looking at it. But now it's the only thing that cheers me up.”

She holds out her hand, saying, “I eat so much fish oil you can smell it.” She wiggles the photo at the slick guy, saying, “Smell my hand.”

Her hand smells like a hand, like skin, soap, her clear fingernail polish.

Smelling her hand, he takes the picture. Flattened out on paper, made into just height and width, she's a cow wearing a cropped top over low-rise jeans. Her old hair is a normal, average brown color.

If you look at what the slick guy's wearing, a pale-pink shirt with a robin's-egg-blue tie, a dark-blue sports coat, it's perfect. The pink warms up his flesh tones. The blue picks out his eyes. Before you even open your mouth, he says, you have to be presentable. Presentable, well-groomed broadcast content. You wear a wrinkled shirt, a stained tie, and you'll be the guest they cut if they run short of time.