Sharyn McCrumb - The Windsor Knot

The pageant had not been a total loss, however. One of the judges had been an executive from the local television station, and he had seen a perky quality in Jenny Ramsay that he thought would add just the right spark to the Channel Four news team. They already had the anchor duo-Bill (an overgrown Boy Scout) and Victoria (dark-haired and serious)-and sports announcer Badger Darnell, whose knee injury had sidelined him from a pro baseball career. Jenny was young and inexperienced, but the station thought that with a little coaching, Jenny Ramsay could corner the ratings for north Georgia.

She was hired to announce the weather on the six o’clock news, but although the public saw this as her principal function, it was, in fact, a small part of her duties, mostly involving reading prepared forecasts supplied to the station by actual meteorologists. Jenny’s part in the process was to wear cute outfits, read the teleprompter with accuracy and convincing sincerity while pointing to the correct spot on the map (you had to know which one was Alabama and which one was Mississippi), and to function as the so-called little sister of the news team. Jenny was the one who cooed over feature stories about animals and who talked about snowball fights with Badger when snow was in the forecast.

The station’s plans for Jenny involved much more than telling people whether or not to take umbrellas to work. They wanted a princess. Local news teams were small-town America’s answer to royalty, they reasoned. Actually, they didn’t reason it, as hardly anyone in television ever comes up with an idea independently. What they did was to go to a broadcasters’ conference in Chicago, where they attended a seminar on “The Rating Value of News-Team Members as Community Celebrities.”

The workshop speaker had, in fact, explained to the audience that media personalities performed the same functions in Middle America that the British royals did for the public in the United Kingdom. They lent their names to worthy causes, rode in parades, and served as figureheads and spokesmen for various civic projects. For the royal family, the rewards were an allowance from the civil list and a few castles to live in; for their American counterparts, it translated into ratings for the news-team celebrities’ television station.

The Channel Four executives discussed this revelation on the plane back to Atlanta and they decided that of their four newspeople, perky blonde Jenny Ramsay had the most potential for the role of community royal. She was wholesomely pretty rather than sexy, so that while men would find her attractive, women would still approve of her; she was young, inexperienced, and unmarried, which meant that her salary was not great, and her chances of relocating were small; and best of all, she was not terribly bright, which meant that she could discharge the endless social functions without going insane from boredom. Jenny Ramsay, the Weather Princess, was Channel Four’s answer to prayer.

They sent her to Atlanta for two weeks of charm school, in which she learned to walk like a model, moderate her Southern accent for the benefit of a microphone, and to turn her best side toward the cameras. Her instructors brushed up her table manners, fashion sense, makeup skills, and posture. When Jenny Ramsay came back from Atlanta, she was not perfect, but after a few months’ practice she acquired the polish to seem perfect. Although, as news anchor Victoria remarked privately, “The light in Jenny’s eyes is the sun shining through the back of her head,” most people were too dazzled to notice what a dim star she was.

The one thing that coaching had not taught Jenny Ramsay was the Manner. That she had learned on her own. It had not happened overnight, but gradually, Jenny had come to realize that all celebrities have a public persona as well as a private self. It isn’t acting, exactly, and it isn’t necessarily insincere; it’s just a way of coping with strangers who expect to be treated like old pals.

After a few months of appearing on Channel Four, Jenny began to receive fan mail from people who obviously felt that she was one of the family. We have dinner with you every night at 6:15 , one of them wrote. Strangers began to hail her by her first name in the supermarket, and people would stop her on the street and tell her long, pointless stories about themselves, or ask her personal questions, like whether she was married and what kind of car she drove. At first these intrusions were frightening to Jenny, because she thought that the intruders might be planning to kidnap her or drop in for breakfast or something equally repugnant. Finally she realized that people liked talking to her because she was famous, and that later they could recount their conversation with her to the guys at the office.

The station assigned her to be the March of Dimes chairman and the parade marshal. After they had her read children’s letters to Santa Claus on the air and the newspaper pictured her cuddling the animal shelter’s pet-of-the-week, she became the Patroness of the Valley. Thereafter, she could no more snub her constituents than Congressman Williams could.

By that time Jenny Ramsay had learned what the public expected of her and she could give it graciously on an instant’s notice. She called it Sparkle Plenty, after the character in the Dick Tracy comic strip. Sparkle Plenty meant that you smiled in public much more than anyone actually does and that you showed a degree of enthusiasm otherwise limited to two-year-olds and puppies. The voice, too, took on a quality of delight and emphasis that was quite absent from one’s private conversations. When greeting her fans, she spoke in italics. “How nice to mee-eet you! It is soo-oo sweet of you to say so! My autograph? Well, of cour-rse!” Jenny had learned that if you didn’t do that-if, in fact, you treated people as you normally treated your friends and family-they thought you were reserved or stuck up. But Sparkle Plenty was a very tiring activity. After a daylong broadcast from the county fair, Jenny found that her whole face ached from the muscle strain of constant smiling. Still, she was thoroughly proficient at it, and one always came away from an encounter with the Weather Princess feeling that one was her true friend, that she was “just like anybody else.”

She Wondered how she ought to act at Elizabeth MacPherson’s wedding. Technically, of course, it was a private occasion, requiring the participation of the private Jenny Ramsay, and not the Channel Four Weather Princess, but lately it had seemed to her that she was recognized every time she went out in public, so that now she had to put on full makeup and dress clothes just to buy a quart of milk. Jenny was beginning to wonder if she could be Jenny Ramsay in any gathering at which strangers were present. She would have to see how it went.

A voice from the endless drone of the meeting interrupted her reverie. “What about you, Jenny? How do you feel about Dusty Miller?”

Jenny summoned a perky smile. “Great! My folks have a bunch of his records.”

An instant later she remembered that this was a beautification meeting, and that Dusty Miller must be some kind of damned plant, but the committee members laughed merrily. Later they told people that Jenny Ramsay, while perfectly natural, was much wittier than she seemed on television.

Geoffrey turned off the Channel Four six o’clock news just as Jenny Ramsay was assuring a Stetson-wearing majorette that it would not rain on her parade. “I believe she is traveling in a mice-drawn pumpkin,” he muttered. “How else could it take this long to get here from Virginia?”

“Antique shops,” grunted Captain Grandfather from behind the pages of the Chandler Grove Scout. “Outlet malls. Even petting zoos. I think Elizabeth would stop to watch grass grow if somebody advertised it on a roadside billboard. Her mother’s the same way.”