Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Babe
Introduction
My goal is to publish a
new chapter every week
with episodes inspired by
real events.
• Real stories of
unfairness to fictionalize
in episodes.
• Images, video and audio
to illustrate the fiction The Sucker Punch
• Proofreading, fact The worst day of a young life.
checking and fill in the Why did this happen?
blanks. Not everything is black and white
•
--author
Chapter One: "You're Fired!
"Sharee, I really need to speak to you right now ... that other
stuff can wait."
Sharee stands up ... and up ... and up. Her tousled mane
doesn't really match the custom-tailored gray cardigan that
wraps snuggly up her six-foot height.
The news staff had begun looking at Sharee with new eyes
ever since that episode with the Brazilian Bomber several
months ago when his Entourage swept into the newsroom,
beefy bodyguards first, effete hangers-on next, then the
Heavyweight Champion of the World himself.
Everything was set up for D-I-N's new star in the chilly main
studio. As Roberto Silva paraded into the newsroom he did a
kind of radar sweep, then spotted the blonde almost hidden
behind the back desk.
The producer and the news director argued with the Champ's
“yes” men.
"Sharee is too new and she really doesn't know the whole
story" they begged, "Michelle has already been briefed and
she is our top news personality."
"I don't give a damn if she is the Queen of Sheba, If you guys
are going to rip me apart at least I am gonna choose
someone I can feast my eyes on !"
Sharee tries to guess what this is all about. Maybe it's a big
thank you for the mini-series on the Champ who was as
good as his word. Flying her and Julio, D-I-N's best
videographer and Puerto Rican. I guess the news bosses
felt Puerto Rican was close enough to Portuguese ... as the
producer said flippantly, "Same shit different bucket."
There are two other people in the cramped room ... barely
able to fit around the large desk. Sharee recognizes the
Human Resources Director and gets introduced to his
assistant, a small older woman.
It was the first time that a Point of View led the broadcast.
Michelle took full advantage, yanking position points from
her recently unsuccessful campaign for Congress. It was
little more than a stump speech snaked with snarkieness.
Of course not just anyone could pull this off. This tour de
force took the right, almost mystical, mojo. The talisman--
the recently dyed ravishing red hair --eye candy for high
definition--the bust line, legs AND the partisan resume.
She was the only one of the stable of “talkers” who had
readily strayed from objective news analyst to subjective
opinion maker. Only a handful knew the bean counters in
the background would eventually put financial pressure on
the unsustainable expenses of a news-gathering operation.
The real risk of course was whether the audience would
accept the format changes and more importantly ... accept
Michelle, red-hair and all.
Mike Milano also knew that this was a game changer. No one
noticed that he had retreated, turned off his office light,
shuttered the windows and begun furiously shooting out
emails.
Milano buried his head in his hands and teared up. Yes,
cried. This is a man who never cried. He wept quietly, no
one heard him ... but he really didn't care.
His entire worldview flipped. He predicted what would
happen next. He would challenge the changes, of course,
but his arguments would fall on deaf ears. His bosses would
roll their eyes, the marketing and programming people would
pooh pooh his concerns, the correspondents and producers
would not back him up because they were too busy to see
the threat. The public would not really care because they felt
journalists were elitist snobs anyway and laced with liberal
bias. Truth would be called a lie ! A new mishmash of
consultants and accountants would celebrate cost-benefit,
cheap citizen journalists, and ignore the Amateurization of
America.
Milano would not tell family, not even his wife, to avoid
needless worry or to know that he was worried sick. He
would quietly send out his resume and begin networking,
But Milano knew it would be much tougher to find something
at his age and he would be lucky to get a news jobs at half
what he is making now.
But perhaps what was most stunning to this old marine was
the direct threat to the democracy he fought for as a soldier
in the first Iraq war, and supported his work as a field
producer during the second Iraq war.
Sharee can hear her God chuckling at all her public and even
private plans...stuff no one at D-I-N knew about. Like the
effort it took to relocate her secret son, find medical care,
track down her wayward father, ferret out discrete addict
support groups, haul all her stuff to the condo. It had taken
all her savings, to buy the clothes she needed for the job, to
pay for the trips to hospitals in Providence, Boston and
Atlanta.
Time splits, diverges, veers away. As if the three who know
what has just happened are in a different dimension from the
people outside in the newsroom --- who have no idea that
their new star has just been fired.
What was it Michaels told her when she got the original call
from the network to come up as an August sub for a
correspondent on vacation?
"Be ready, you might be on the Jane Pauley fast track," her old
college news director alerted her. (Whenever one of his male
former students seemed to be moving up the ladder he would
use Peter Jennings as the example. Both made their big
network splash in their twenties.)
Sharee certainly thought her career was taking off ...
especially when she remembered moving up to the anchor
job a month ago. Was it just a month ago? Her mind
continues to wander back.
"... had to demote Ted. Took him off weekend anchor and
reassigned him to cover consumer safety stories. I told him
over and over to get rid of that part in the middle of his
head.”
“...with his pitch black hair, his white skin, looks like a bolt
of lightning on the screen whenever he looks down at his
copy to read !"
"My God !" said Cindy, "What if you didn't get the full time
gig? I don't spend that kind of money on clothes in three
years! I'm always telling Frank not to buy me expensive
stuff.
He's always trying to get me jewelry. Hey, I'm not that kind
of girl."
Mr. Gomes had left the family long ago and settled back in
the area while he had gone back to graduate school. It's
also where a large community of Cape Verdeans lived. He
finally felt at home after stops in the Cape Verde islands,
Sierra Leone, London and Florida where he lived with
Sharee's mom.
Cindy must have had reason to fear for her life. She was a
vibrant 26 year old when Sharee had chatted with her
before ... now she was mush, visibly aging from the stress.
For some reason, she began spilling the beans to a reporter
whom she'd just met... all about her love affair with the same
guy she would have to testify against if she wanted to avoid a
handful of fraud charges as an accomplice. Cindy is a
licensed mental health therapist, who started her own
practice when she had gotten tired of working her butt off
for someone else, for little or nothing.
They met over dinner several times during the next three
months. He was, despite his age, a very charming fellow. At
close to 70 he was still a very vigorous man and flush with
money. After dinner he would always have an after party at
his condo. A dozen or so people over to play cards, or sit
around yak-king about how to save the world.
Like all small businesses ... it struggled during the first year.
Frankie advised her to hire a marketing and development
person to help drum up business, and recommended a
woman who had contacts with area medical clinics.
Suddenly, patients started rolling in and the medicare
applications for reimbursements began to clog up the
process ... so they had to hire a medical records person to
handle the workload. Frankie had run across these new
employees in his previous businesses.
Three years into the effort, the money began to flow in, so
much so, that Cindy observed a change in the lifestyle of
some of the new people on staff. While she continued to
wear the middle-class clothing of a typical licensed mental
health therapist ... she noticed the new hires began coming
to work dressed to the nines. She became suspicious when
the medical records person drove up in a BMW.
"Please hold on to this. It's the only thing I didn't hand over
to the federal prosecutors." She whispered,"It's an off-the-
books record that we began to keep, detailing our actual
costs in providing mental health therapies, and the changes
we made to requests for Medicare reimbursements for drugs,
and physician care."
All the executive saw was the dark face ... he blanched. He
could not reconcile the black face in the photo with the
image of the very white-looking young reporter standing
there in front of him.