Chapter 2 High Heels and Strobe Lights
Hal had been in the building for forty minutes and three separate people had already asked Mina, in Tagalog, whether he was aware of how large he was.
“He knows,” she said to the second one, a lighting tech named Boyet who had known her since she was twenty-two. “He has been informed. It came up during the shipping.”
She watched him from the mouth of the corridor while wardrobe worked on her.
They had put him at the craft table with an iced coffee and he had made the mistake of being polite to one person, and it had spread.
The dance corps had him now. He was standing with his weight back on one heel and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, listening to a nineteen-year-old named Kaye explain something at enormous speed with both hands, and he did not understand a single word of it and was giving her his complete attention anyway.
Mina had brought exactly two people to a taping in ten years. One had spent the afternoon on his phone in a folding chair, checking whether he was in any of the shots. The other had asked her, in the car home, how much she thought the network paid for that kind of lighting.
Hal had asked her, in the car in, whether the building had a service elevator, and when she said yes he had said good, because he had counted the corridors on the way from the lobby and could not work out how they got the sets in.
“Ate.” The wardrobe girl, through a mouthful of pins. “Arms.”
Mina put her arms up.
The costume with the hydraulic component weighed nine kilos and took four people to get her into, and Mina Hermosa had been standing in it for eight minutes waiting for a light to be fixed.
“Ate Mina, sorry po,” said the boy on the ladder. “Sandali lang.”
“Take your time, anak. I am extremely comfortable.”
Behind her somebody snorted. Studio 4 at Sinag Broadcasting Network held four hundred audience seats, a band riser, a rotating platform that had been broken since April and repaired in a way that made it worse, and roughly eleven thousand watts of light designed by a man who had died in 1998 and whose grid nobody had ever been brave enough to redraw.
The air handling had two settings. The room was on the one they called Baguio, which meant that in nine kilos of feathers and structural steel Mina was damp rather than cooking.
She used the thirteen minutes.
From the mark she was standing on she could see the studio door to the corridor, the door to the band’s green room, the door to wardrobe, the fire exit that was chained, which was a violation she had reported twice, and the double doors to the executive corridor where the network’s guests were kept behind a rope and given halo-halo in glass bowls.
Undersecretary Vicente Calderon was behind that rope, in a barong the color of weak tea, laughing at something one of the producers had said.
He had been there since three forty. He had arrived with four people.
Two were staff, one was a nephew, and one was a bodyguard who had positioned himself with his back to a wall and a sightline to both doors, which meant he was better than he needed to be for a noontime variety show, which was interesting.
“Mina!” The floor manager, Tess, came out of the dark with a clipboard held against her chest like a shield. “Block C, then break, then the letters, then you have wardrobe for the finale.”
“How long is my wardrobe?”
“Nine minutes.”
“Tess.”
“Eight and a half. There is a Colgate spot and a government thing and then the promo reel.”
“Eight and a half,” Mina said, and smiled at her, and Tess, who had worked with her for six years and had a daughter named after her, did not notice anything at all.
Eight and a half minutes was tight. It was not impossible. She had done a phone in six.
The light came on. The boy came down the ladder.
Beside her, Rowell arrived on his mark smelling of the cigarette he was not supposed to have had, and Cheska arrived on hers still arguing with her own earpiece, and Boy Sagrado, who had been hosting noontime television since the Marcos years and had outlived four networks, arrived on his without appearing to have walked.
“Anak,” Boy said to her, out of the side of his face, “your American.”
“He is Puerto Rican.”
“Your Puerto Rican is talking to the dancers.”
“I know.”
“He has been talking to the dancers for one hour.”
“I know po.”
“I am only saying,” said Boy Sagrado, to the middle distance, in the two seconds before the count, “that in nineteen ninety-four I brought a girl to a taping and by Friday she was in the dance corps and by Christmas she was not talking to me.”
“Tito Boy.”
“I am simply providing history.”
Somewhere above them a voice in the control room said something to Tess through her headset and Tess raised one hand with four fingers up, and folded them down, and the band came in hot on the downbeat, and Mina Hermosa walked out into eleven thousand watts and four hundred screaming people and became somebody else.
Block C was a dance number, a game, and a live commercial for a brand of instant coffee she genuinely drank.
The dance number involved the hydraulics.
Halfway through the second chorus the costume opened along a seam Mina could not see and did not control, and five meters of gold fabric deployed behind her in a hard mechanical snap, and the audience made a noise like a wave hitting a seawall, and Mina, who had been doing this since she was nineteen, hit the mark inside the fabric with her arms up and her chin at the angle the lighting grid wanted and thought, with the part of her brain that was never on camera, about the bodyguard’s sightlines.
He was watching the doors. Not the show.
Nobody watched the doors at a noontime taping.
Nobody. There were four hundred civilians in this room and half of them had won their tickets in a text-in draw, and the biggest security event in the history of Studio 4 was a man in 2019 who had climbed onto the riser to propose to a member of the dance corps.
The game segment was Ano’ng Nasa Bag? Two housewives from Marikina against a tricycle driver from Novaliches.
The tricycle driver was named Ronaldo and was funny, and Mina let him be funny, which is a skill, and took the loss on his joke about her height with an open-mouthed outrage the audience adored, and gave him the eleven thousand pesos and the rice cooker.
Then the letters.
That segment was called Sulat, and it was the oldest thing on the show, and it had been on the air since before Mina was born. Viewers wrote in. The show read a few. Sometimes they helped.
Tess handed her the card and Mina read it cold, on camera, the way she had read four thousand of them.
It was from a woman in Barangay Isla Puting Bato in Tondo.
Her name was Josephine and she was fifty-one and she had written to say that the water came into her house eleven times last year, and that it used to be four or five times, and that the pumping station at the end of their road had not run since February, and that when they asked about it at the barangay hall they were told the budget was with the city, and when they asked at the city they were told the budget was with the department.
She was not asking for money. She was asking whether anybody on television could find out where the budget was.
The audience had gone quiet in the specific way they did for these.
There is a thing that happens to Mina during Sulat, and it had been happening for ten years, and no amount of professionalism had ever made it stop.
The letters came in by the sack. Boyet the researcher read all of them and the writers picked four and the show used two, and the ones that did not get used went into a room on the third floor, and Mina had been into that room, once, at two in the morning, during a period of her life she did not discuss.
What the country saw at noon was a woman in couture handing a tricycle driver a rice cooker.
What Mina knew was that roughly nine hundred people a week wrote to a variety show because the variety show answered and the department did not.
She looked at the card, and then at Camera 2, and then she did the thing she did, which was to make her face warm and open and to say, “Ay, Ate Josephine. Naku.” And the audience made a soft sympathetic noise.
And she promised, on national television, that the show would look into it, which the show would, in the sense that Boyet would make four phone calls and be transferred fifteen times and be told, in the end, by a woman who was not unkind, that the matter was with the department.
Then she looked up, past Camera 2, past the lights, at the executive rope.
Undersecretary Vicente Calderon of the Department of Public Works and Highways was applauding.
He was applauding with his hands up near his shoulder so the cameras in the room could get it, and his face was doing sympathy, and beside him his nephew was filming him being sympathetic on a phone, for the nephew’s own account.
Mina held the smile. She held it. It did not cost her anything at all, because she had been holding smiles at men like this since she was twenty-one and had learned before that how much a smile is worth and how little it costs.
“Salamat po, Ate Josephine,” she said to Camera 2. “Hindi ka namin kakalimutan.”
Tess’s hand went up. Fingers came down.
“AND WE ARE OUT,” said the control room, through Tess, through the floor. “Three minutes forty.”
Mina was already moving.
She got the corridor in fourteen seconds because she took the band’s door and not wardrobe’s, and because two assistants peeled the top nine kilos off her at a run, one on each side, in a maneuver they had refined over two years and which looked from any distance like an assault.
“Ate, the finale is the red.”
“I know.”
“They restrung the back because you said.”
“I love you. Go.”