Olga Dies Dreaming(12)
“Look, Alex, I get it. We’ve got that hearing coming up. Let’s fly some UPR students up here, get them on TV, let people see these are just kids, like theirs, trying to get an education. Maybe we can make someone care about this?”
“Sounds good,” Alex offered, hovering.
“Anything else?”
“Yes, Arthur Selby’s office called to invite you to a dinner party next week.”
His pulse quickened. “Tell him that I’m previously engaged.”
“His secretary said he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Is Arthur Selby my constituent, Alex? The last time I checked he wasn’t even one of my fucking donors.”
“So, that’s a definitive no then, sir?”
But Prieto knew that it was not a no.
“Mark the info on my calendar and if I can make it, I’ll make it.”
REALITY TV
Becoming a post-recession, slightly better-than-’hood-rich wedding planner had required a significant amount of cunning on Olga’s part, but becoming a famous one had been surprisingly easy. Yes, there had been lots of grunt work, but like a ’70s game show, behind each door there had been opportunity. She’d started her business in the nascent era of reality TV and social media and discovered quickly that, if leveraged properly, something of a facsimile to real fame could result. She’d left the fancy college with not quite the right connections to secure one of those lucrative management consulting gigs, but certainly a good enough network to score her a one-off appearance on a Real Housewives franchise as wedding coordinator for Countess von Vonsberg’s third marriage. A decently written press release led to coverage in a magazine, which, when pitched correctly, led to an in-store appearance in the coveted registry department at Macy’s, which in turn got her booked as a regular on a Style Network wedding show. Along the way, she adopted each new social media platform as it was invented, humble-bragging every magazine feature, speaking engagement, and five-second clip in which she opined about wedding trends in advance of celebrity nuptials. For nine years, she did this with exhaustive frequency, until one day a call came with an offer of what was, to wannabe service industry celebrities, the holy grail. A widely watched cable network wanted to shoot her very own TV pilot.
It was an epic disaster.
The initial pitch had been “Sophisticated New York City planner goes cross-country fixing up people’s wacky weddings.” A cross between My Fair Lady, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Bridezillas. To Olga, it sounded like a hit, but from the first day of taping things seemed off. Reality TV is nothing if not completely fabricated, and Olga had done enough of it to know to act shocked at the cost of something that the network had already negotiated to get for free, or how to feign surprise when seeing a locale for the first time, even after you’d already done ten takes. It all helped the story in the end, and a good story was good for Olga. Yet, from the beginning of this shoot the producer kept giving directions that seemed both overly abstract and inappropriate for the situation. “Be more fiery!” he suggested when she entered a room. During a scene in a bakery they asked if she could have “more passion” when she tasted the cake. The requests irked Olga in a way she could not put her finger on. The shoot lasted several days and by the end, sensing her own irritability, she willed herself into a cooperative temper. When, in a reaction shot, she was meant to be pleased about something or another, the producer asked a question posing as direction.
“Do you think you might dance if you heard news like this?”
Olga pointed to herself, incredulously. “Me? Do I think I would dance when I heard that we found a string quartet to play Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ for their wedding ceremony?”
“Yes,” the producer said. “You’ve wanted to find something to make this wedding more elegant and now you’ve succeeded. It’s a moment of professional fulfillment. You know how excited it’s going to make your bride. Maybe you’d dance a little bit? It will be cute, really.”
Olga was skeptical but wanted to be a team player. She began to dance to the song that played in her head anytime she needed to be inspired to move: Teena Marie’s “Square Biz.” After a few seconds the producer chimed in again.
“Yeah, Olga, that’s great, but what about something a little more rhythmic?”
“I have rhythm,” she said, her jaw tight.
“Of course. But how about a little salsa! Huh? Channel your inner Marc Anthony!”
For a moment she stood completely still as the full picture crystallized before her. A voice, her father’s, whispered in her head: Is this what it’s come to? Dancing on command? Then, she reflected on the near decade-long slog, which had all been intended to build to this moment: her own show. The wedding business had been a hustle. On the surface, if one were counting social media followers or press mentions, few were more successful. But by conventional measures of a business’s health, she barely had her head above water. On her way to tape the pilot she’d stopped at a newsstand to buy a magazine one of her weddings was featured in. Her credit card was declined. The first time she had appeared on TV, she had redone her website and gotten a second phone line to handle all the calls. They came, but few of the leads were real. And though her clients’ budgets grew progressively larger, the workload scaled in turn. That meant more staff and more expenses. If she could get past this moment, this ridiculous request, ahead of her lay true financial opportunity: a party product line at Target, a spokesperson gig with Sandals Resorts, a coffee table book! She imagined herself, for a moment, the Puerto Rican Martha Stewart.