Becoming the Storm
25 Countermeasures
ELAINE: It shouldn’t be that hard! I just want a good-looking guy who dresses nicely and has good hygiene. Even if he’s not a GQ model like Adam Wolfe, dressing nicely and good hygiene are critical. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked down the street and have seen nice-looking women—hair neatly coifed, makeup just right, painted nails, nice dress—and they were walking next to a guy who looked like he just crawled out of the gutter. Ripped jeans hanging around his butt, beer belly, day’s growth of beard or three, greasy hair, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. You probably know the couple.
Ladies, I have a secret to tell you. He isn’t making you look any better. You know that old high school game of hanging around someone who isn’t as pretty as you so you look prettier? It doesn’t work. Never did. Smart guys have always known that you should talk to the second prettiest girl in the room. She’s the one who never gets attention and would love to talk to you. And guys, look in the mirror. Don’t look at yourself. What you are seeing is what your girlfriend or wife will look like in five or ten years. She’s going to quit trying. If you don’t care, why should she?
Of course, it’s not all about looks. I want a guy who is intelligent and a good conversationalist—who has more words in his vocabulary than what he read on the sports page. I’m not against sports. I just don’t want that to be the only topic we talk about. Tell you what. I’ll go watch football with you and even with your kind of drunk buddies if you’ll watch a Bette Midler movie with me and sip white wine. Did you see Beaches? Funny. Pathetic. I cried. I needed your shoulder. We could have talked about that movie all night long!
Rich is not a requirement. Caring and providing are. Honey, I don’t care if you spend your time changing oil in a garage or picking up the garbage. If you’ll take the time to shower and clean up for dinner, I’ll live within our means and love you for it. I just want a man who is sensitive and caring.
Oh, my God! I want to marry a gay man!
Just think. He could even help me with my makeup. He probably has better fashion sense than I have. And he can dance. Leonard! I think I love you!
What? What about sex you ask. [Glance left, right, and then to aside camera. Whisper.] Honey, that’s what girlfriends are for. And they have these little contraptions that look and feel just like the important parts and aren’t nearly as messy. And if you want to have a baby, certainly someone could help get the stuff needed from point A to point B.
I think Heaven got it right. She and Adam share their career goals and travel in the same circles. They love each other and are supportive of each other. They are happy, funny, smart, and happy. Did I mention that already? They are just the kind of people I’m glad to welcome onto my show today. Ladies, welcome Heaven and Adam Wolfe.
The taping went well. We’d pretty much called together an emergency production to get everything together. Jess filled in as Hannah’s third cameraman. We managed to get an audience of friends from the cheerleaders and girlfriends of the football players. There were a few guys on the team who were offended about having had a gay guy in the locker room, but most of the team had rallied around their teammate. Adam was just a guy that they all liked. Hannah and her editor, Joyce, took all the tapes and ran to the University studio to do the final mix. They duplicated the tapes and replaced the Monday morning program in the shipment that was scheduled to go by UPS to all the stations on Wednesday morning. It was a good test. Many of the stations had been pressuring for more current programs rather than programs that were taped months in advance. They would be pleased with this one.
Hannah had no more than left when I got a call from our contract lawyer, Barb. I called Maggie into the office with me. Heaven looked at me and I motioned her and Elaine to come join me. We put the phone on speaker.
“Oh, you are going to love this, Brian,” Barb said. “I’ve had all our lawyers review the contract and we are in good shape.”
“You mean they can’t actually cancel the show?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. They can certainly cancel the show. And they still have to pay you for every episode. But they can’t stop the show from being broadcast,” she said. I must have looked really puzzled at Maggie because she shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, too. “When Heaven’s manager got involved and insisted on the contract with LWN, we worked over the contract pretty thoroughly. The contract clearly states that LWN has first rights and non-exclusive rebroadcast rights for the show. It also states that Hearthstone can sell second run rights sixty days after the release date.”
“But if they don’t release it, how does that help us?” I asked.
“You release the show. They broadcast it. The way we worded the contract, after sixty days from the scheduled release date, you can sell second run rights. We’ve withheld exercising those rights because LWN was giving us good air time. They were broadcasting each episode at least three times and according to their stated plans, intended to run the entire series of this year’s and last year’s episodes at the end of this season on a daily basis. But, sixty days from your release date, you can distribute the shows anyplace else you want,” she said.
“Barb, what about the current batch? LWN has broadcast twelve episodes this fall and contracted for fourteen more, including the one they didn’t broadcast last Sunday,” Jessica said. “Can we release those to the Hearthstone syndicate and start airing them weekly with the new shows coming online in sixty days? We have enough of them to get through the dead air time.”
“That’s a good strategy, Heaven,” Don Randall said. He was our intellectual property rights lawyer. “Especially since there is another aspect of this that we haven’t gotten to yet.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The cancellation had nothing to do with the revelation of Adam’s sexual orientation,” Don continued. “It was planned. Probably all the way back when they contracted the show. LWN has been in production with a new series they plan to introduce in Heaven’s slot next week. What they wanted was to tie up Redress so it couldn’t compete against their wholly-owned production. That’s not public knowledge. They plan to introduce the show in Heaven’s timeslot this weekend.”
“Those bastards!” Elaine interjected.
“They’ve been known to play hardball with other production companies, too. That’s why we were prepared,” Barb said. “After the way they tried to run around us in our first negotiation, we expected something of this sort. Especially since ABC released Runway International. LWN’s new show will be called Dress for Success: At Work, At Play, and In the Bedroom. They are really going for an edgier and sexier look. Nothing as friendly as Heaven’s show. Since they’re cable, they can get away with a little more than the broadcast network.”
“We need to get to work and get this out to our syndicate,” I said. “Preferably with the first broadcast going out in Heaven’s normal timeslot on Sunday night, directly opposite LWN.”
“Agreed,” Barb said. “We’ll go to work right now. Be prepared to start shipping the first episode of this season tomorrow.”
Maggie took over the coordination of preparing tapes for shipment. Heaven decided not to bother telling her manager about our new strategy or what LWN was doing. We were duplicating tapes for the first episode as fast as we could on Wednesday morning when I left for class. I’d help box and ship later that night.
First, though, I needed to sit in the hospital all Wednesday afternoon while Whitney underwent arthroscopic surgery for her torn ACL. Whitney told me that she was awake during part of the surgery, though they’d given her a sedative to keep her calm and relaxed. That also caused her to nod off and enjoy a nap while they worked on her knee. They used a spinal block to deaden her legs.
She was pretty groggy for a couple hours after surgery and I waited with her mom in the recovery room. Whitney sometimes said things that didn’t make sense and we’d all laugh. Janet was relieved when we were told Whitney could go home. Theresa, Dawn, Cathy, and Angela—our resident medical team—were all on hand to help get her settled in. There was going to be plenty of help while Whitney recuperated. I had a feeling Janet would be helped, as well.
John and Bea’s new home in the village was slated for delivery on Thursday and they had already invited Janet to move in with them for as long as she needed to be with Whitney or to visit any time. I didn’t know what their move-in schedule was. John sat in the kitchen with me Thursday morning as I made coffee and prepared pancake batter. I’d been up at four-thirty and talking to Hannah, but John had not come down until five. I think he passed a naked Hannah on the stairs as she scampered back to the top floor.
“Coffee, John?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you. How good is our long-term welcome here? We may be stuck for a while.”
“What’s up?”
“Well it’s still snowing in Mishawaka. And looks like it is getting worse. There’s no projected letup in the next five days and temperatures are expected to be in the teens. If it’s too cold or too much snow, I don’t want to risk flying back to our grass strip,” he said.
“Wow! I never thought about the fact that you don’t usually fly in the winter. I’ll be back Saturday afternoon. I could run you back to Mishawaka on Sunday if you’d like.”
“I hate to impose. Especially when you are dealing with the production crisis. But I would appreciate it,” he said. “You always make the best coffee. You need to teach my wife the secret.”
“John! I can’t do that,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’ve given up your male responsibility to make coffee! That’s unbiblical.” John laughed.
“I know for a fact that there is nothing in the Bible that says men have to make the coffee.”
“Nineteenth book of the New Testament,” I said flatly. John looked at me expectantly. I didn’t say anything.
“You’re going to make me look it up, aren’t you?” I went to the study room and got my Bible off the shelf. I handed it to John. He turned to the table of contents and counted the books before turning to the back of the Bible. “Hebrews,” he said. “Now where does it say anything about coffee?”
“You just read it.”
“I didn’t… Hebrews?” It took another couple seconds before he groaned. Then he held his cup out for a refill.
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