December 15
With varying degrees of dread, TV crime reporter Cassidy Shaw and five other people seated in swivel chairs in Channel Four’s dressing room watched Jessica Lear. Jessica was a high-definition makeup consultant the station had flown up from LA to teach them how to prepare for the high definition-era.
HD was five times sharper than regular TV. That meant every line, spot, and lopsided lip would be in sharp focus. You could even see nose hairs, which made Cassidy shudder just thinking about it.
HD also allowed TV sets to show more colors. For years, government standards had limited the range of colors available to broadcasters. But HD allowed the use of some formerly forbidden shades of red. That meant that every blotch, pimple, and tiny broken vein showed up on-screen with the brutal clarity of a surgery textbook.
When she first started out on TV, Cassidy had been taught that she needed to define her face with eyeliner, eyebrow pencil, lip liner, blush, etc. It was almost like paint-by-number. Because studio lights made everyone look pale and washed out, the end result still looked natural on-screen. But that era had come to an end. It had started with the national programs, but as more and more viewers made the switch to HD, it had begun filtering down to all the regional markets—including Portland.
Now all of the on-camera talent had gathered in the dressing room for a makeup application lesson. After the consultant left, they would be on their own. The guys were used to a quick swipe of pancake to hide five o’clock shadow. The men who worked in the field weren’t even asked to do that. But now everyone—anchors, reporters, even the weather and sports guys—needed to learn how to look good on the new HD sets.
Jessica, who could have been any age from thirty to fifty, said, “Traditional makeup looks too theatrical in HD. It looks cakey and fake. But wearing no makeup at all would look”—she paused while she found a diplomatic term—“distracting.”
Old, Cassidy translated. Old and ugly. And Cassidy was determined never to be old and ugly.
Her parents had raised her to believe that being beautiful was a woman’s top priority. Good grades had meant little to them, but let Cassidy gain five pounds or go without makeup, and she heard about it. Her bone-deep determination to stay beautiful was what kept her a size 2—well, maybe a 4, if she was being honest, but she was a size 2 on her good days.
The drive not to be old and ugly got her butt into a spinning class six days a week. It made her go to the dermatologist for another round of Botox and laser treatments. It led to regular trips to the nail salon, hair salon, and spray-on tan place. It maxed out her credit card. But it was better than the alternative.
“This is an arms race,” Jessica said. “We’d all like to go back to the old days. But we need new weapons. We can’t slap on powder when every grain looks like a boulder.”
“What about plastic surgery?” asked anchor Brad Buffet (Boo-fay, as he insisted on pronouncing it). He turned sideways to regard his sagging jowls.
Jessica shook her head. “That’s iffy too. In HD, when you’ve had work done, you can actually see the seams. You could end up looking like Frankenstein.”
“So basically, this is like being naked,” Anne Forster, another reporter, complained.
“It’s only like being naked if you don’t learn how to cover everything up,” Jessica said, and then named a big star in movie comedies. “On regular TV, she still looks great, as sexy as ever. But in HD, she’s nothing but a mass of wrinkles and unfortunate pockmarks.”
Cassidy leaned closer to the mirror. In HD, the faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes would probably look like folds of origami and her pores like giant shell-blasted craters.
“So,” Jessica said, holding up a metal gizmo about six inches long with an open bowl on the top to hold liquid, “we airbrush.” The applicator looked like something a house painter might use to paint the home of an elf. “Can I have a volunteer?”
Cassidy was the first to wave a hand in the air. After pinning back her hair, Jessica told her to close her eyes and hold her breath. The air compressor fired up, making a weird bubbling sound as it aerated the liquid.
Two minutes later Cassidy was so close to the mirror she could kiss it, the way she used to do when she was twelve and desperately wanted a boyfriend. Her skin looked perfect, a flawless sunny beige. No wrinkles, no bumps, no broken veins, no blemishes. It was all still there, of course, but it was now covered with a very thin layer of paint.
If Richard Nixon had had this, Cassidy thought, Kennedy would never have been elected.
MYSPACE.COM/THEDCPAGE
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