Page 56 - Just Deserts

Revelation Research

studio audience seated, lights adjusted, evangelist powdered and
sprayed—but Wendell Fritley was absent.
The sound man, Ed Snooder, finally decided that someone had to
cover for his colleague. He reached for the telephone: it was during
crises like this that management discovered previously unknown or
unacknowledged talents among its lesser lights.
At that moment the door opened, staying Snooder’s hand and his
ambitions. But a stranger entered the dark crowded chamber, not
Wendell Fritley. The other men and women looked up from their
switches and control boards, pulling off headsets to attend to the
immediate environment.
“Who are you? And where the hell is Wendell?” Ed was blunt.
“Hi, guys,” came the cheery rejoinder from the youngish, bearded
but bland intruder. “I’m Dan DeLeone, moonlighting from WUZA
across town. This is not my idea of how to spend Sunday morning,
but we’ll just have to make the best of it. Wendell had some problem
or other—the front office didn’t go into details, but he got tied up
and couldn’t make it. Believe me, I don’t like doing this on short
notice any more than you do.”
Without pausing, the newcomer slid into the director’s chair and
quickly glanced over the electronics. “Same kind of board we use at
WUZA; no problem there. How many cameras out there? Five? This
is no budget production, that’s for sure! Where’s the script? Got it.
Okay, give me a sound check on camera two.”
Snooder looked at the graphics controller, Mattie Boardman, and
shrugged. It was a fait accompli. They had barely enough time to do
a hurried run-through with DeLeone before the show began. Ron
Schuster, a veteran at the tape decks, took pains to tell the new
director about the taped material he had to be prepared to roll in case
the action did not go as planned.
“No problem,” said Dan DeLeone. “You just have it queued up,
and I’ll switch right over. What’s the big deal, anyway? I thought
these religious fund-raisers were fairly cut-and-dried.”
“Oh, they usually are,” sighed Schuster. “But this one has really
been hyped—lots of advertising, extra operators on the phone banks
for pledges. And there was quite a line-up to get into the studio
audience: I heard that most of the people down there spent all night
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