Fishing With RayAnne (2 page)

But RayAnne knew a few hints and a name change alone weren’t going to cut it. To raise the show from the ashes, they needed a host who would be a diamond-in-the-rough discovery. She scheduled another meeting to run tapes, and while producers and staff were all on the edges of their seats, she already knew, having been in the boat with the “talent,” that they hadn’t even come close to finding a viable replacement for Mandy. RayAnne’s mind had been elsewhere, thinking ahead to job possibilities. Settled for the first time in a dozen years, living in one place and finally always knowing where her favorite bra was, the last thing she wanted was to go back out on the pro-fishing circuit. While the others watched the auditions, she was concentrating on her résumé, knitting together a mental list of accomplishments that might impress somebody at sporting goods giants like Cabela’s or LunkerLand, hoping at best to land some spokespersonship or PR gig, maybe a sales rep position, or, scraping bottom, demo work at the expos and shows.

She barely looked at the screen as her on-camera-self prompted yet another Nordic delight: “Okay, Kelsey, that was a little better, but try speaking
to
the camera, like this.” RayAnne squared herself to improvise, recalling shards of sound bites heard on the radio during her drive in. “Today we have a North Dakota grandmother of three on board. Ida Lott survived four days in a prairie blizzard while buried in her Camry, keeping a journal on grocery bags and drinking melted snow. You might know of those scribblings on Roundy’s bags as the runaway bestseller,
Five Days on a Chiclet
, soon to be a film starring Dame Judi Dench.”

One of the staffers had looked curiously from the screen to RayAnne.

Sighing, RayAnne had leaned to Cassi. “They
say
they don’t want another Mandy, yet look who they send me.”

In the next screen test, RayAnne coached a gormless blond indistinguishable from any of the Megans on Fox, pleading, “Try more
voice
.” Physically turning the young woman to the lens and speaking over her shoulder, RayAnne sounded chipper and engaging: “On board with us this morning is Italian meter maid Parmesana Cannelloni. You may remember her from the recent YouTube viral video wherein Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took time out from his busy schedule of
presidente
-ing to dry-hump Ms. Cannelloni near his motorcade in Bologna.
Mama mia!
”

Staffers made curious harrumphings; a few chuckled. RayAnne looked up from scrolling through her résumé to apologize. “Sorry, I was a little punchy by then. She was like number eight or something.”

They watched a few more, then the whole series of a dozen demos was run again from the beginning. Glances were exchanged over RayAnne’s head. Halfway through the second run-through, the executive producer hit “Pause” and cleared her throat. “Roxanne?”

Cassi stage-whispered, “
Ray
Anne.”

“Right.” The producer smiled tightly. “Of course. RayAnne?”

“Here.” She looked around to see all eyes on her.

“Didn’t you guest-host for a season on
Cat Fishing
?”

“Yesss.” RayAnne sat up, immediately wary. “But only for three episodes, when Cat went to Argentina to get a new liver. Why?”

“Well, until we can find a suitable replacement . . .”

“Well, a
replacement
I might be able to get . . .” RayAnne’s voice trailed off as she’d looked from face to face, understanding slowly dawning.

“What? No.
Me?
No-no-no. No
way
.”

And now the first season is over and, twelve episodes later, she is still the sub. The race to find a replacement has slowed to a stroll as positive viewer responses and ratings pile up.
Something
has been working, but no sooner than the show’s begun wriggling nicely into shape, producers are keen to ratchet up the numbers by devoting the top third of the hour to celebrity guests—ingenues plugging films, chick-lit writers with hit books, singers and musicians flogging CDs and concert tours. B-list, but celebs nonetheless. The rest of the hour they will grudgingly leave to RayAnne and her kooks.

She prefers to think of herself as a moderator. The word “host” only cues up biology-fraught images of tapeworms or roadkill doilied with maggots. RayAnne merely facilitates the interviews that begin as chats and polite palavers that often evolve—some might say
de
volve—into something more. Aboard the
Penelope
, guests tend to be either exhilarated or unnerved by the speed at which RayAnne pilots her boat (there have been memos). But even when just afloat, guests can feel more or less out of their element because they
are
—there is something about being on the water that distracts and disarms. Water lapping at the bow seems to wash away trifling thoughts so that guests sometimes nearly forget what they’d intended to say on camera. Like a clapping kindergarten teacher, it is RayAnne’s job to keep them focused, though she will as often follow their tangents off topic when they are being funny or revealing. Many are won over by RayAnne’s frankness with such questions as “Are you happy?” She is truly curious about her guests and about how the circumstances that have landed them on television have affected their real lives. They tend to answer honestly when asked
how
, for instance, they
felt
at the beach when their dog brought them the tennis shoe with the foot still in it. How they
felt
during the escape from the bunker, or after discovering their husband had three other wives.
How
indeed.

Guests can end up spilling, sometimes a little, sometimes buckets. Cassi, now the show’s production coordinator, rates these disclosures on a scale from sniffle-to-hurl in nasal Red Owl–clerk imitations only RayAnne can hear via the audio feed curling into her ear:
Spill in aisle two. Leaker in dairy. Thaw in frozen fish case
. Sometimes RayAnne must tune Cassi out, switch off the feed while pretending to scratch behind her ear as if at some bug bite. With Cassi cut off, the danger of RayAnne inexplicably snorting on camera lessens, but no Cassi also means no directives such as “Zip it!” when she chews her lip, or “Camera left,” should her gaze wander, or “Posture!” to snap her upright from her habitual slouching—all delivered in a tone one might reserve for obedience class. “Down,” in fact, is a frequent imperative—RayAnne is a toucher, a pawer, always has been and cannot help it. Guests from the Midwest often find it too intimate when RayAnne grasps their forearm like an oar or kneads a shoulder in sympathy; though most from coastal regions lean in as if they need the physical contact as much as they need to talk. Some, by the end of twenty minutes of revelations, are on RayAnne like burrs.

And while most have compelling stories, or are sincere or amusing, the occasional objectionable guests will let loose words RayAnne wants to mop up and cram back in their mouths. She’s been tempted more than once to tip a woman overboard—the previous week it had been the mediocre writer who’d sold her chick-lit novel to Hollywood for an outrageous sum, then had the nerve to enviously complain about her struggling writer friends, precisely because they
were
struggling—cutting coupons, shopping thrift stores, and buying lentils in bulk. “Because,” Chick-Lit had pouted, “that
is
the trend now, right? It’s hot to be poor.” She’d been a typical producer’s choice, someone in the throes of their fifteen minutes but not necessarily deserving of them.

From the beginning, RayAnne had set only two conditions: that the show take place on Penelope and that she get input regarding guests. Still, she’s had to wheedle to get her own discoveries greenlighted, like the soft-porn puppeteer, the former lumberjack now lumberjill, or the nun who raises money for Haitian orphans by bungee-jumping into gorges—as Sister pointed out herself, who
wouldn’t
pay to see a nun in a habit go off a bridge?

RayAnne’s notebook is full of lists of maybe-probables and sort-of hopefuls she’s discovered via blogs, Twitter, Boing Boing, Reddit, obscure cable programs, and numerous news-of-the-weird print sources. At the moment she’s optimistic about booking a racehorse masseuse, an ark-building climatologist, and a relationship coach whose seminars on harmonious partnerings are based on methods used by dolphin trainers. These are the sorts of women who provoke RayAnne’s curiosity, and she thinks—hopes—those watching might be provoked as well.

She looks around the conference room and stirs real sugar into her cup, stashing another packet to add later when no one is looking. The producer
ahems
and utilizes the majestic plural. “We are ready to talk about the guest lineup for season two.”

Cassi, never one to waste time, clears her throat and stands to present her PowerPoint, going a little too quickly over the list she and RayAnne have painstakingly compiled. After giving everyone a moment for the information to sink in, Cassi repeats the status of each. “We’ve got Marla from Tweakables, and—”

“Tweakables, that’s . . . what, again?” The producer is squinting.

Cassi inhales through pierced nostrils. “Links to this PowerPoint are in your inboxes and printed in the materials in your folders. Tweakables is a tattoo parlor that inks photo-realistic nipples onto the reconstructed breasts of cancer patients. Oprah has called Marla’s nipples ‘works of art.’” She back-browses until an image crops up on-screen, which prompts muttering and nodding and a debate over whether or not a tattoo of a nipple is allowable on camera since an actual woman’s nipple would not be. One staffer mildly objects, “I mean, this is Minnesota, not Denmark.”

Cassi manages to not roll her eyes. “It’s a
tat
.”

RayAnne lets them duke it out while pretending to pay attention, scribbling
tat for tit
on her notepad, double-dotting the
i
. Having actually read all the notes and Cassi’s thorough research on National Public Television policies, she knows how the argument will end. Once she stops listening to the individual words, such discussions are easy to tune out, just honks in the background like the adults on
Peanuts
.

The two new staffers have been staring unabashedly at Cassi. RayAnne is used to her appearance and barely registers the clanging bits of chain, the riveted strapping, and the boots that look like they might require tools to take off. Today she’s wearing a torn suede tube skirt over laddered tights as if to evoke a recent assault. The fishnet wrist-warmers seem a rather oxymoronic accessory in RayAnne’s view, though she can hardly claim to be any judge of fashion, as evidenced by her own ensemble of cargo skirt, T-shirt, and her wardrobe staple for such work meetings, the dress-hoodie. Fashion is a realm other people inhabit—she has enough to worry over without adding her own lack of flair, agreeing with her grandmother Dot’s assessment—that she doesn’t so much dress in the morning as get clad (“I
need
pockets!”). Just as well that Rinata, the sweet wardrobe lady from Barcelona, dresses her head to toe for each taping in a fusion of Filson and Michael Kors. Sounding always as though she’s holding pins in her mouth, Rinata assures RayAnne, “I can thave you from yourthelf.”

Cassi’s own mien has ratcheted up a notch since last season—a new constellation inked on her neck, one eyebrow stippled, and her naturally white-blond hair cut into a shag with its ends dyed in shades of charcoal and pewter, recalling a dog breed that is on the tip of RayAnne’s tongue.

“Odd-looking little thing,” RayAnne’s mother, Bernadette, had observed upon meeting Cassi, less in regard to her style as to the girl’s pallor, like that of a Nilla wafer dipped in milk, with veins nearly the same hue as her light blue eyes pulsing at her temple. Combined, it can all be disconcerting enough, but what gets RayAnne is how
still
Cassi is, so that she’s often startled when the postlike form next to her comes to life like a street statue or a surveillance camera, or edges out from behind something like an eclipse.

A staffer to her right barks a cough, and RayAnne shakes herself back into the meeting. Marla’s nipples have been given the all-clear, and Cassi moves on to the next potential guest.

“Miranda Anderson of Nashville, Tennessee, has had twelve plastic surgeries to make her look just like her corgi, Dibble.”

After some discussion and faces made at the screen, Miranda is deemed a
no
. As the mumbling dies down, Cassi brings up the next screen. “Here we have Babs Develara, Hollywood body-double whose booty has stood in for dozens of A-list celebs, appearing in numerous Oscar-nominated films and, yes, Golden Globe winners.”

The producer smiles and looks around the table with a full stop at RayAnne. “Approved.”

RayAnne frowns. “But how about
my
second pick?”

“Morticia of Brentwood?”

Cassi deftly clicks around in her PowerPoint. “Cosmetologist who does glam makeovers on average-looking corpses.”

“I’ve seen her homepage.” The director shudders. “Macabre.”