Lacey
And it’s with our deepest regret we share that we will not be moving forward with your application.
“No surprise,” Lacey grumbled to herself as she glanced over the rest of the vacuous email.
We receive thousands of applications each season, and our specialized team of recruits has crafted a rigorous process that supports us in choosing the best applicants possible. However, the surplus of talent we process translates to multiple instances in which our team is unable to consider even the most qualified of potential candidates.
Do not give up; click HERE to sign up for next year’s application round!
“How about I click this trash icon to send you to the dump where you belong?!” Lacey sighed as she reclined back in her vanity chair. It truly was a long shot to think that she’d be accepted into Brooklyn’s best publishing house for mustering the courage to get her soul crushed by discerning hires again; her portfolio hadn’t seen a decent writeup in years.
And it wasn’t like she’d be able to sneak a proper addition to her portfolio anytime soon. Her days consisted of either working, looking for work, or resting from work. Potentially, she could fit some freestyle writing into it as well—similar to every other New Yorker in the media business, Lacey was already a zombie on stilts at most hours, which a few minutes less of sleep wouldn’t change. Alas, it took more than availability to write meaningful journalism. And Lacey just wasn’t sure if she could bring herself to gather the conviction necessary again.
Right now, she had a lot of things to look after, and dreams cost everything. She wasn’t going to get lost in some childhood fantasy while her landlord was growing more and more into a residential Voldemort by the day.
“Rolling in five!” A crewmember quickly poked their head through the crack in Lacey’s door, and as quickly as they appeared, whisked off. Lacey took her cue to brush up on a dab of finishing powder and head to her set.
Lacey’s workplace was little more than a jungle of wires and OSHA violations at its foundation.
But when you looked at it from a holistic viewpoint, as her friend Marie so often encouraged her to do, it was more of a testament as to how long humans could survive under blatantly murderous conditions.
After getting nearly hoisted in a tangle of wires that seemed to extend all the way to the condiments area over at the set of Sunny BC’s, Lacey finally reached her professional home, the chair of celebrity gossip Lippy Lacey. Who, yes, also gagged audibly when she was informed of her show’s embarrassing concept.
On the Internet, Lippy Lacey was the divulger of all trashy things Hollywood—alleged breakups, industry spills, and rumored feuds. She wasn’t a monopolist with premier access to the major drops like her larger competitors were, but the real Lacey cared so little about her show’s longevity that she never tried to cozy up to influential sources.
“Barlow! Since when does makeup take a full freaking hour? Should just be a fluff-fluff here and there for Christ’s sake. I told you we were going to try blocking today,” Angelino, Lacey’s zealous boss, shouted.
“I have to correct you on that one—I was away for only thirty minutes, which is pretty good considering our makeup artists have been MIA this past month for reasons undisclosed to the lot of us,” Lacey said. Truth be told, everyone from the technicians to the runner knew that the studio’s epidemic of “missing workers” was an inevitable consequence of Angelino’s delayed payroll. Practically everyone in New York knew how to grimace through a micromanaging employer; few other than Lacey herself knew how to bear through absent paychecks.
“Good to see you have some feist in you, because we’re gonna need you to be like a hawk for the new segment we have lined up for this shot. Read over this script revision and think about how you’re gonna get this done,” Angelino curtly replied, and with that Lacey was left to no other partner than a crumpled paper Angelino shoved into her possession. She unfurled it to clarify its contents.
The profile in question was that of Harry Quigler, known to the general public as Hawk. He was once an outspoken musician based in the US, but more recently was making headlines for his application for asylum in Northern Europe following a long court case concerning unpaid child support. He was currently under fire in Sweden for unrelated “public disturbance” charges.
“Ay, Jerry, why are you holding the boom up like it’s a chandelier? People can’t hear shnaz from that angle!” Angelino yelled over the blaring chaos of the scrambling set. His frazzled assistant adjusted the giraffe instrument mere inches, which somehow was enough to appease Angelino from his former home decor denunciations.
“OK, OK, everybody in position, everything should be ready by now! Get the livestream up and we should be rolling in one.” Angelino clapped everyone to pace. Lacey filed her new prompt away into a fake prop drawer. Or semi-fake, since it had the proper functions of one.
“Action!” Angelino shouted. The tech guy’s eye roll communicated the stream was far from polished, but the only thing worse to Lacey than showing up to Angelino’s studio was trying to reason with Angelino himself. In her character’s fake-chirpy voice, she took on the role of an inquisitive gossip mill with no passion other than tearing apart dazzled personas she’d never met.
“We’ve all heard the news this Friday—no, not about Leeza’s lip-sync fail at her Tokyo Dome concert, because at this point it really isn’t a Leeza performance if you get to hear actual singing,” Lacey stated. The virtual audience was already overflowing with gibes and shared laughs, which Angelino took obvious satisfaction in.
“You all remember Hawk, right? The rapper who we both loved and hated for his on-the-nose political commentary? Well, it turns out he is making a name for himself abroad as a political martyr, by taking the ever-so-honorable act of getting fined for PEEING in a Swedish IKEA!”
“Total yikes, isn’t it? Instead of making sense of this train wreck for ourselves, however, I’ve done us all a favor and invited the man himself onto the show to help us understand what exactly is going on with his career. I mean, should we expect weekly mug shots to become his new paparazzi candids?”
She proceeded to release an exaggerated sigh. “I’ve always been told to be an optimist, so I am truly hoping for the best with this interview. Hawk, are you able to catch our sound?” On the projected screen, Hawk’s tattooed face took pixelated form. His hair had more color variety than an executive board at a New York publishing house—which to be truthful, was not saying much—each plait against his pale scalp reflecting a different color of the rainbow. His eyebrows were bleached platinum, and his chipped yellow teeth almost shared the same shade as his many grills.
“Yeh, I can hear you.” The frame rate on his end was so poor his reply hardly translated to more than a few robotic notes, but the viewers got the gist. If the studio were decently profitable, they could’ve sent equipment over to ensure Hawk used something more advanced than a medieval hilt, but that wasn’t the case, so Lacey would have to make do with the glitched blips that could be heard.
“So tell us, Hawk, what really is going on over there in Sweden? Because we’re getting a bunch of reports saying that you’re getting in trouble for this and that, and for so much controversy we have to know where you stand on the situation.”
“Where I stand is enough to see you are one fine lady. Didn’t have pretty girls like you on the news back when I was in the States.” Hawk licked his lips hungrily, to which Lacey reddened over with fury. The virtual audience exchanged mostly awkward reactions, though many fans of his were enamored by his audacious display.
Lacey had been in the business long enough to tell that Hawk knew what he was doing—treating her as some spectacle that people could fawn over or judge, and because she was a woman in a visible position she was more likely to be judged by viewers for the incident. As if she somehow asked to be dissected like a piece of curvaceous meat.
Simply for doing her job, Hawk wanted to see this woman degraded, and there was no way she’d allow him to easily get away with it.
“Now, in case I haven’t clarified it properly—I’m referring to your recent drug charges. We are aware that you have unpaid child support bills your former partners allege were pushed aside for your recreational … expenses. Care to confirm or deny that?” She would continue prying, making him think his flirts completely flew over her head. If he continued to give empty replies, she would get closer to figuring out his weak point, anyway.
“Can you confirm whether your figure looks as amazing under that dress? I wouldn’t mind being the arbiter.” Hawk smirked, and the crewmembers broke into anxious laughter. Lacey flitted a quick glance over at Angelino, and his only concern seemed to be hushing the set so that they could pick up the audio with even more precision. Accurately capture the moment of humiliation that they’d let her endure, because she was simply a token to getting the dramatic headline they wanted out of this man.
Lacey took in a deep breath and pressed on. “An anonymous source mentions that you were once so impaired by drugs that you attempted to seduce your own daughter at a party. She didn’t know of you two’s relation until finding it out through a TMZ report years later.”
“Come on, you can’t be serious! TMZ ain’t telling my family nothing about who we are, because I taught them to be prideful in what we feel and ignore what others see. No way a daughter of mine is running up to them stupid reporters with their rubbish twists of the truth.”
“You suggest that multiple tabloids have twisted a falsification of the truth you observed. Doesn’t that open up the possibility of recent circulating stories being the interpretation of someone else you haven’t yet verified? Shouldn’t you take the time to clarify matters if this holds true?”
“That was a lotta words, and I bet a tall glass of water like yourself could figure this all out on your own anyway,” Hawk mocked yet again. At this point, Lacey overtly snapped.
“Ha ha, funny, Hawk. You know, I’d be hollering on the floor right now if I hadn’t seen the humongous joke that was your defense at last week’s court hearings. I mean, mistaking a humidifier for a urinal? Really?”
Caught off guard by Lacey’s retort, Hawk’s expression immediately darkened—the audience, though, was loving the budding tension. Oohs and “Did she just say that?” glances were exchanged all over; Angelino gave Lacey a wink that she had done well in amping up the drama, but Lacey pretended not to acknowledge it, still slighted by how the crew stood by while she was being publicly humiliated.
“You wanna talk funny, huh, big girl? Got all confident thinking that I actually wanted your cholesterol-clogged, bad-bodied self?!” Hawk shot back. Lacey could only mentally chuckle at how apparent his loosening grip of the conversation’s control was.
“Sir, I do have a job, which is what I’m performing right now by asking you this question. Do you have any idea of when you’ll answer it?”
“I don’t owe nobody no answers. Government been chasing me down since October without offering any goddamn courtesies so don’t act all cushy trying to get words out of me now. I know who you are, what the government you’re blind to is all about. Read the new age Zylum, nobody in America can call themselves a free man if they haven’t glanced a word of this truth bomb.” Hawk proceeded to ramble angrily for another half hour or so, and Lacey as well as a number of other news outlets—reputable and sensationalist alike—mined a wealth of headlines that could fuel another news cycle.
