Heaven’s Gate
7 Replacement
REESE SHOWED UP FRIDAY and slid into her role as guest chef smoothly and easily. It turned out that the principal was pretty enthused that two of his graduates were doing gigs for Hearthstone Entertainment. Even though Amber had only been at West Monroe for one year and had hardly known anyone, being Elaine’s regular guest host was not lost on him. He immediately contacted Rose to discuss possible internships either during the summer or as work release when classes started again in the fall.
One of our goals had always been to give something back to the community and being able to provide some sort of work experience for kids in the community was one way to give back. We’d tried to include and influence younger kids in our productions and even though we were targeted toward upper teen and early twenties, generally speaking, Elaine’s content was acceptable for younger kids. We were going out over broadcast airwaves, after all. We’d had Job’s Daughters and DeMolay, 4-H Food groups, high school honor societies, Young Rotarians, and such on the show as guests and audiences. That got me thinking. I walked into Stall One and asked everyone generally:
“Say. If I wanted to look up a specific episode of Young Cooking and knew who the guests were, how would I get the video tape so I could watch it?” The room went quiet.
“Database,” Jen said. “If it’s too long ago, it’s on the Macs and Courtney might have to get a backup disk out. All the shows from the first summer camp on are in the general database.” I had to think.
“I believe the episode I want is from the first summer camp,” I said. “I should sit down sometime and just watch them all.”
“Now that would be a cooking marathon,” Hannah laughed. “You’ve logged over 600 episodes. There have been 300 since we went live last fall.”
“Crap! How can people stand listening to me or watching me that long?”
“You’re cute,” Sam said.
“Well-hung,” Louise confirmed.
“You can’t see that on the tapes!” I said.
“No. We can just dream about it,” she giggled. Oh, crap! It was getting close to Brenda’s birthday. Louise always got a little squirrely when we headed toward that celebration.
“So where is this mysterious database and how can I search it? And where do I find the tape when I figure out which one I want?” I asked.
“Courtney,” Jen answered. “It’s Saturday. She’s probably in the computer room in the house with Bea Clinton. Bea’s been maintaining the database.”
“Don’t we run around naked on Saturday?” I asked.
“Bea leaves by the front door and doesn’t come into the rest of the house unless invited. Just put clothes on before you go into the computer room.”
Right.
“So what episode do you want to see?” Courtney asked. Bea was, indeed, sitting at a computer entering data from this week’s production schedule.
“I’d like to get the one we did during summer two or three years ago in which we had the local 4-H Foods groups in.”
“Hmm. I think if we just search 4-H we’ll narrow the field down enough to scan through each record. We do at least one 4-H group every summer. It would be better if we knew the name of someone in the group or the exact name of the club. Let’s see what I can find.”
Courtney tried a couple different searches and then jumped.
“This is it. July 29. It’s the episode you did with Miss Polly and the Scarlet Tanagers 4-H Foods Club.”
“That’s right. We did our first combined Chick Chat/Young Cooking show that day. Where’s the tape?” I asked. Courtney scowled at me.
“You actually want the tape?”
“Yes. Why? What’s the big deal?”
“Do you have any idea how many video cassettes we have down there?” Courtney asked. Bea giggled.
“I don’t even know where ‘down there’ is,” I said. “Don’t we just keep the old tapes in one of our fireproof files?”
“We have a fireproof room for them,” Courtney sighed. “Come on.” She led me to the basement. It’s not like I’ve never been in the basement. That’s where our laundry room, the utilities, our canned goods pantry, and the big workout room are. We had a couple of spare rooms down there, too. Courtney took me to a spare room.
“Holy shit!” I whispered. “What is all this stuff?”
“This is the archive,” Courtney said. “We have been producing shows in our studio for four years. Close to fifteen hundred episodes when you include Redress. And don’t forget the birth special, the home building special, the contract documentary, and the little side productions that people are constantly throwing together like the ranch tour for CEN. Each episode is a tape in the collection. In addition to that, with multiple cameras and editing, we shoot an average of six hours of tape per half-hour completed unit. That brings us to something in the vicinity of 24,000 hours of video tape that is stored in this room. We’re running out of space already. With the addition of your new show this winter, I project we will have no more storage room in the vault by midsummer. Rose has already talked to Ron about building out the rest of the basement. He fireproofed this room two years ago when we ran out of room over in the studio.”
“Jiminy Christmas! Can we have it moved to some professional storage company?”
“Of course we can. But then when a producer or star comes in and says I’d like to see the tape of a three-year-old episode, he’d have to wait a week or two while someone went to the storage facility and found the right box.” She pointed to a stack of banker’s boxes. “We need to shift this batch over in order to get to the row you want. Be careful when you lift down the top boxes. They are heavier than they look.”
They were. It took twenty minutes to shift the boxes down and over so we could get to the stack I wanted. Of course, the box I wanted was near the bottom of that stack, so we had to shift them, too.
“You are responsible for returning this tape and restacking the boxes, Brian. Don’t make me have to watch you.”
“Yes, Courtney. Geez. I had no idea.”
Well, I guess that’s what happens when you have a business and so many people involved in it. It turned out that Rich had been the one principally involved in boxing and storing all the tapes. It was amazing.
When I got to the family room and popped the tape into the video player, I was suddenly surrounded by hearthmates, stripping off their clothes. Hannah pulled mine off and pushed me into the big chair where Dani and Xan settled into my lap. Hannah settled in next to her.
“This isn’t porn, is it?” Dani asked. “I mean we have the baby.”
“No, we don’t do porn,” I laughed. Xan crawled across Dani and Hannah to play with my lips. I clicked the remote and watched the episode come to life. I was nodding as we reached the end of the tape.
“So, it was a fun and nostalgic episode,” Elaine said. “We worked so hard that summer, I hardly remember any of it. But why the big deal about watching this particular episode?” I rewound the tape a little, stopped and hit play for a second, and then rewound farther. This time when I started it up I let it run and then paused the playback.
“There,” I said. I had just reached around one of my assistants to help her flip an omelet. “It was her fourteenth birthday and she chose to celebrate by grinding her butt against me as I helped her flip her omelet.”
“Brian!” Hannah exclaimed. “You never said a thing.”
“I was kind of concentrating on helping and being on television. Whatever she thought she’d find when she did that, she didn’t. I just thought about it this morning.”
“And what made you think of having a cute fourteen-year-old rub her butt up against you?” Hannah asked. “I really want to know!”
“That’s Reese Mendenhall. Our new face of Young Cooking.”
“How did you ever even figure it out?” Hannah asked. “I’ve seen two or three thousand faces in the studio in the past three years. I wouldn’t recognize one of them.”
“I didn’t think I would either,” I said. “I was kind of daydreaming after the show yesterday, thinking back along the run. I was thinking she would draw younger audiences again. Maybe boys. It just came to me.”
“It’s true,” Courtney said, holding a paper in her hand. “We have a release signed by her father for that date.”
“So is this a problem?” Rose asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “She doesn’t have the feel of a stalker. She never mentioned anything about having been on the show. There was no sign of hero worship. No ‘I never miss your show’ kind of thing. I’d guess the appearance was influential, but she went after this job to have this job. I don’t think she’s a threat.”
“Well, if it ever looks sketchy, tell me, Hannah. I think it would need to be me, rather than anyone on the show, that stepped in if she started acting weird in that way. And especially not Brian,” Rose said.
“I don’t think there will be a problem,” Hannah answered. “I think she just wants to do this show. And she’s really good. She’ll be a great complement to Elaine.”
“Okay. Brian, just remember she’s seventeen and you are twenty-three. Protect yourself.”
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