Selective Process
There are beautiful young women, and there are young women with singing voices such as occur once in a great many. Then, some have personalities which can sack and drag a man’s heart away without the benefit of other attractive qualities. And somewhere, among the millions, there exist young women whose concurrence of all three traits simply commands the attention of the world around them.
The technology to reproduce sounds, images and sentences into infinity are propelled toward them by economic forces, and should one such female accept to stand under “the spotlight” – that visible place, to fashion themselves according to the world’s approving eye – the world will recognize its new icon of human beauty, and supply all the rewards – and hazards – to go along with the coveted position.
For two young twins it all started when a talent agent spotted Tiffy and Cheryl Bandera with their parents in an Orlando shopping center. The five-year-olds seemed an excellent prospect for advertising “two double cheeseburgers for the price of one,” especially as they were able to cite lines in that perfect, super-human harmony that is well known among identical twins.
It took only that first exposure to set the process in motion. People adored Cheryl and Tiffy for their fiery hair, bright green eyes, and the way they smiled and laughed. The phone calls came in for more gigs. Other talent agents even called to compete for their representation.
The parents found early on that their challenge was to moderate the growth of the public’s attention to their daughters. Their unusual likeness added to their interest only too well, and was less necessary to their promotion than it was to ease the fatigue of demanding production schedules. Cheryl and Tiffy could alternate shifts as they played a single character. They capitalized upon this asset well as they learned the rigors of answering the consumer-driven demand for the expression of art through sound and body motion on Saturday morning television.
By the time they made a recording debut as teenagers, the twin aspect was a virtual secret – the exposure of which could be held in reserve until their careers needed any such promotional boost.
In the early 1990’s, the girls began to claim their place in American pop culture. As Tiffy (they decided to go with her name) climbed the charts, and the Milli Vanilli scandal hit the airways, the Bandera family business was alerted to the red flag that the public possibly had little tolerance for any duplicity – so to speak. Therefore, Cheryl’s role changed to that of her sister’s protector: as the ultimate security double, and her dance practice was changed out for lessons in judo and karate, as well as security certifications.
It seemed a necessary move, as there was just something about Tiffy Bandera. She attracted too many male fans that seemed older than they should have been. She wasn't as talented as Elvis Presley or the Beatles, but she received a large amount of fan mail that conveyed an almost-heebie-jeebie level of obsessiveness. The overall volume of letters truly amounted to a tsunami the likes of which only a handful of artists have generated in the history of the entertainment industry.
The likelihood of any one letter being touched by human hands (let alone Tiffy’s) was small – until it was realized that the value of small pieces of jewelry and other gifts included with the correspondence was quite significant, enough to easily pay for a staff to go through it. The ethical problem of disposing such things as engagement rings was addressed by having one of Tiffy’s charities set up the sifting operation under its own name. As a contract fulfillment in exchange for this lucrative work, the “Birthday Candle Foundation” (a Make-a-Wish copycat) provided marketing data from the letters back to Tiffy’s production company, Syynchro Productions.
That arrangement proceeded well until the first few of Tiffy’s most zealous fans had to be arrested – and then either jailed, mentally rehabilitated, served with protection orders, or some combination of those unpleasant outcomes. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to emulate Tiffy Bandera, it seemed there were a few who rated their personal feelings above the safety and well-being of the very girl they adored. When one particular individual who grabbed Tiffy’s arm through her SUV window was found to have a roll of duct tape in his own car, along with other frightening items, further questioning revealed that he had written over a dozen letters which had gone through the charity’s inbox, under its nose, and straight to the recycling bin.
Thus, the charity’s contract was revised to include the provision of “marketing and security data,” as a generous new Syynchro-nous donation included some state-of-the-art computers and scanners, complete with handwriting and keyword analysis, text recognition, and database software to make their new task level smooth and efficient. The flow of paper to the recycling bins was reversed, and a backlog of un-read correspondence was whittled down until every letter written to Tiffy Bandera was analyzed. Actions against those rare, most-threatening fans increased only for a time according to tolerant criteria, less strict than that provided by anti-stalking laws of the time. From the Banderas’ point of view, yanking the heartstrings of all kinds of people was just business.
It was during a routine company meeting that Birthday Candle’s Syynchro Market Research Director brought up the matter that there was an increase in the fan’s complaints that “Tiffy never answers back.” There was a rise in public perception that Tiffy was becoming a xenophobe, and was now continuously hiding out from the public – no longer interacting with her fans like she used to.
“I’m sure the inability of one person to respond personally to twenty thousand letters a week is not lost on them,” Betty Pavloche said to the rest in attendance. “But Tiffy’s fans seem to hold the unique point of view that they are not just another face in the crowd; that he or she (usually a he) should be significant in Tiffy’s life for whatever reason – they try not to get around to the real reason too quickly and easily, as (you know) that is no way to market one’s self.”
Tiffy’s mother, Elaine, considered that with blinking, folded-arm silence.
Elaine’s husband, Ted Bandera, scratched his face lightly in meditation on the words, “market one’s self.” It was a hard thing to consider that every letter represented such hope and effort on the part of a single individual, and that his daughter was the focus of it all. Indeed he was proud of both the twins, but the feeling was different than if it had been a son. There was more of a protective urge, and a feeling of guilt that he had worked to create this monster. But in another way, it eased that other guilt: for the friends left behind, and the abandonment of a less-sheltered lifestyle that necessitated that soul-healthy inter-reliance with those former friends. His family's success was one that had a price, to be sure. For any observer who might challenge his perceived embrace of decadence, there was that easy, all-purpose answer. What could move him, though, was a challenge more like Betty's. What she was getting around to, (and not too quickly), was more along the line of whether he had “game." She was coming up with one of those outside-the-comfort-zone proposals; he could tell.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s your idea?”
“Our soft drink sponsor,” said Betty, “has oft repeated the notion of a ‘Win dinner with Tiffy’ bottle cap contest.”
“Average guy wins a date with Tiffy!” Ted said with suppressed sarcasm as he looked aside at his daughter's expression. “Yeah why not? Those average fans are the bread and butter, right?”
Tiffy wore a smirk, her sister Cheryl more of a smile. The girls’ achievement in their field was driven by a spirit of competitiveness that is known between female twins. It was a little tiring and almost petty when they were little, but along the way it had become much more before the eyes of their parents. Their constant comparison to one another led them to mutually perfect one another’s attractive qualities. With respect to the recording career, this “ism” of theirs had to accommodate the disparity whereby Tiffy took the warm spotlight and Cheryl honed her athletic ability. Cheryl delighted ever-so-slightly in the difficulties her sister faced with the lion’s share of the glory, without approaching a true shadenfreud.
Cheryl had a counterpart to her sister’s show qualities anyway. Bluntly put, it was the ability to whoop ass when necessary – even a man’s, and a fairly strong one at that. It was an unsettling fact to those who suffered to know it (suffer being the apt word to certain zealous fans). Combined with the twin aspect, the power of the Bandera twins’ charm could be cinched or snuffed, depending on the eye of the beholder; a strong female was a turnoff to some, and to others just another attraction. An interesting fact of Betty’s was that those fans who knew about Cheryl and liked her were not so much the inner-city-wanna-be white teens who seemed to revere street violence, but were rather fans of the X-men comic book series. They saw the girls as mutant clones or something; too pretty, too talented, too plural to be normal – and that was cool.
Tiffy felt Cheryl’s eyes as she stared straight ahead at Dad, shared his sarcasm and was unflinching at the suggestion of any “real” date outside of her years-long “secret” relationship with one of her fellow actors from the old Saturday morning show. It was denied publicly to allow the enamorous male fans to feel as if she was “available.”
“Dinner with a fan,” Ted summarized. “Could be a girl or a guy?”
“Of course,” Betty said.
Ted looked at his super-star daughter. “Dinner with ’em once. Can you handle that?”
Tiffy’s expression remained unchanged. Cheryl and she took regular interest in one another's specialties. Cheryl would sometimes try on Tiffy’s moves in the dance studio, and Cheryl would show Tiffy how to grab a guy's arm and karate-flip him. What Tiffy had been noticing about her sister lately was that her security training was giving her more confidence around un-familiar people. And, that confidence was leading to friendliness in the camera lights. That was why the fan mail was saying what it was saying; Cheryl was creating a contrast.
Being a nutrition guru on the side meant that Tiffy didn’t want to make up the difference with anti-anxiety meds; that would be cheating. Additionally, Cheryl's martial arts prowess lended itself to dancing so well that it seemed to Tiffy that she was just falling too far behind her sister overall. Her lack of expression to her father was a poker face of sorts, to minimize the expression of those feelings that everybody knew to be lurking within.
“You can handle that,” said her father. He had been critical in the past of the way Tiffy seemed to hate her fans at times. Now he seemed to avoid making that direct criticism, as if he had given up or something.
Reassuring herself Tiffy thought, “I don’t have to feel bad about the way I feel toward fans. Yeah I can handle a blind dinner date.” If a guy did win, he would probably spend all week getting ready as if he were getting married or something, and for her it would be just one more gig-and-goodbye. As she would say of the exclusive league to which she belonged, “it takes one to handle one.” An average fan was to her as the hollerers from beyond the security barriers in whatever city she held a concert. To say that she could “handle” them was an understatement; they were as bugs on the bumper of her tour bus, their dismissal as natural to her as the action of a windshield scrubber at a fuel stop. It was how the sum of her young life’s experiences made her to feel about it. It was a course set years ago by none other than her Dad.
“So,” said Tiffy, “This contest thing… I’ve got twenty thousand fans writing to me every week, but only one guy’s going to win this thing, right?”
“There could be more than one,” teased her father.
Tiffy glared back at him. Everyone else in the room was laughing with him, so she thought she would skip the outright accusation that he was pimping her. “I’ll do a lunch date,” she said, knowing full well that she would change it back to a dinner date. She wasn’t fourteen any more after all, and as she thought about it, whoring was becoming so “in” anyway. “So,” she continued, “anybody can win, and you do mean anybody.” Tiffy eyed her father’s expression as she pretended to look aside, testing his reaction to the “what about my safety” card.
“That’s why the soda company is going to pay two point seven million,” said Betty before suppressing the urge to laugh for the sake of her career.
Tiffy sighed, and swept her fingers through her hair in a comically snobby gesture. “Okay then. But seriously, how do we stop the extremoes from winning it?”
Cheryl rolled her eyes and addressed her sister. “The extremoes… that’s imagining the worst, Tiff. Those guys are a tiny segment of your fan base, which can’t do a darn thing to improve their odds of winning over the next guy.”
“That’s not true!” Tiffy said with a head-shake. “They’re gonna collect more caps. They’re gonna hoard ’em. And when one of them wins, they won’t transfer their prize for money, or anything else.” She shook her head. “It just makes me sad,” she told her father.
“Hmm,” said Cheryl, realizing Tiffy might well be correct after all.
Their mother voiced an idea. “One entry per contestant, then?”
Betty replied that she knew that the cola company would not want to discourage anyone from buying three hundred bottles of their product in hopes of winning Tiffy or any other prize.
Cheryl sighed. “I could double for ya and go out on the date, if he’s a damn whacko.”
“I can do it,” Tiffy said, not to be outdone by her sister. “Just rig it a little bit.” She thought momentarily about precisely what her demand should be, and then stated it. “The guy who mails in just a few, he’s the one the computer’s gonna favor to win. Just don’t tell that’s how it is. Don’t advertise it.”
Betty tapped her pen against her notepad a few times, thinking. “There are legal criteria,” she said. “They have to state the contest rules somewhere, but they can hide it in the fine print maybe. Then, they gotta have independent observation. And, they want to gear it to the internet somehow. There’s gotta be something. I’ll talk to them.”
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“Some of them are,” she retorted. “I just have a not-so-good feeling about it.”
Cheryl smirked at that. “Well, whoever Mr. Lucky turns out to be, I’ll check him out for ya.” She looked over her sister. Her red hair framed her face beautifully, her contact lenses making the green of her eyes almost fluorescent. She was beyond attractive; of course everyone wanted her, the way she looked. It would be extreme enough if she wasn’t virtually groomed for a living. Yet, she was. “You need a bag over you’re head, you’re too darn hot,” Cheryl said. “What’s you’re cell phone number, baby?”
Tiffy smiled and shoved her sister in response to her “drill.” It was an inside joke borrowing from one of their boundary-setting lessons from a self-defense class.
A female co-worker entered the room unnoticed by him. “So, you like Tiffy Bandera, huh?” Jennifer had followed his eyes. There was a detectably mocking ring to the way she said it, and the man looked down at the table to take another lonesome bite of his peanut butter sandwich. He didn’t like being teased. It was like the way she said “Good morning,” to him every day, not so much to be nice but rather to always remind him that he never said it first. He didn’t know why he couldn’t remember such verbal etiquette any more than he could understand why most people tended to use it so much. Was it a good morning? Some mornings were and some weren’t. To just say it like that seemed as if to assume that it always was. What if he were to say that to Jenny? What would she say back? He processed that a moment as Jenny took her Snapple iced tea out of the fridge.
It came to him that she would say, “No, when you say ‘Good morning’ to someone you’re not being assumptive in any way; you’re bidding them a good morning. You’re wishing it upon them. And in return, they wish you a good morning right back.” That was what she would say.
“I suppose,” he thought in response.
Bryan saw her rear back and stretch her arms behind herself, allowing part of her shirt to come up and expose her pretty belly button. The top of her panties peeked just above the waistband of her tight hip-hop-styled slacks. She was only showing off in order to agitate whatever he had for a sexuality, and for the challenge of getting a reaction from him; a pickup line, a comment to the effect of “that color looks all right on you…” She finished her stretch and casually met eyes with him.
He looked away first.
Jenny sighed, took her Snapple, and left to go sit in her car and listen to her stereo.
“I can’t understand people,” Bryan thought. What did they want from him? Why did they want to talk all the time? He clattered his teeth together rhythmically, fidgeted his leg and swayed to the beat of the distant shop radio as he watched the TV screen for the next interesting thing. He would try to remember looking over at the punch clock once in a while to avoid clocking back in late. Boss man Dave might be removing the TV any day for that reason, and because girls like Jenny were stealing time to keep up with their soaps.
The TV wasn’t interesting today, so he closed his eyes and thought about Tiffy Bandera again. “I had a girlfriend once,” he thought. She had broken up with him before he got to home base. He remembered one of the last things she had said to him, regarding his hopes for ever finding another girlfriend ever again. “Lose the weight, buy some new clothes, get a personality… you never know.”
Bryan stopped swaying and opened his eyes at the television screen that had aired the commercial, wishing it would play again. Didn’t television networks make money from commercials? Why couldn’t they play that one more? There had been a very nice girl on there. How could he meet that girl?
The commercial said something about a contest; that was what it was about.
Bryan took notice of the soda bottle in his hand, the one he had emptied within two minutes after opening. Yes, it was one of those soda bottles. He picked up the cap and looked at the underside to find a series of numbers and letters. “Mail in the numbers, keep the cap,” the commercial had said. The complete instructions were on the inside of the label.
“This isn’t the one,” he thought. He looked at the empty bottle. “And this stuff makes me fat.”
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“Is that who won?” asked Katy, the assistant who’d brought it in.
Cheryl smiled. “I prefer to think of it as who my sister won.” With Tiffy away getting work done on herself and her outfits, the only thing to do was to go ahead and look.
The cola company had done the type of cursory background check on the winner that any PI could order up with a few phone calls inside of fifteen minutes: there was a soft credit report, a (clean) motor vehicle record, and a blank criminal justice record. The only thing on the credit report was some past information on a student loan and a medical bill. The New York State MVR included the driver’s license photograph: it was a guy all right. He was a brown-haired, Caucasian upstate New-Yorker of twenty-three years. As Cheryl further examined what little there was, she noticed something a little unusual about the license: it had been issued only one month before. Had the man’s first DL been issued at the age of nineteen, or twenty-three? Had he misplaced and replaced it?
Cheryl looked closely at the photo. It seemed too high-quality to be a DL photo, one of the possible indicators of a fake. Even Tiffy’s license showed her with a slick, shiny face – testament that even the pros of the image business can forget to bring face powder to the DMV. But this guy hadn’t forgotten. He was smiling, too, almost as if he knew who would be looking at his license photo – and why.
Cheryl pointed out these details to Katy. “Now, I know the CEO of the cola company didn’t hand the prize to his nephew or something,” she said suspiciously.
“Oh yeah...” Katy seemed to agree.
“Cause if he did,” said Cheryl, “he could at least cover it up a little better and avoid handing us a bunch of bad flap.” Cheryl thought about whether it was well enough to just put the responsibility on the soda company if it came to a scandal and take their money, or to pro-actively make sure they had conducted a real contest. She remembered what prompted them to agree to participate in this thing; the perception by the fans that Tiffy was afraid of them.
“I think you’re right…” Katy said.
“I’m gonna get on the horn,” said Cheryl, “and then talk to the company that observed the contest… hire our own guy to check out this dude.” She started to dial, but then hesitated. She pressed down the hook and held the headset to her shoulder, thinking.
“What?” asked Katy.
“The reverse order of what I just said.”
Katy nodded. “That’s how I’d do it.”
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Brian looked around at the rest of the bindery. The Greeley Summer Camp Newsletter was in full production, with the collators and stitchers working at capacity, and using up their materials quickly enough to make him feel a little important; there were going to be people standing idle unless his folder behaved itself.
He carefully oversaw the line of folded pages marching up the conveyor to their mechanical beat. He kept one lightning-quick hand on the feed lever as he watched for any sign of a jam. Enjoyable songs were blaring from the shop radio over all the noise, helping him get lost in personal thought. It was fine to enjoy the company of co-workers and pass this second half of the day in a trance. It would be time to go home before he knew it, and a decent day’s work would be done.
Brian sensed the approach of one of his less-pleasant co-workers, Pete. As he turned his attention away from the machine, the sound of crackling paper signaled a jam, sure enough. It was a simple matter to throw the lever forward and remove the crumpled pieces. So, when Pete shut down the entire machine, Brian returned with a palm-upwards, “what gives?” gesture.
“You gotta go see what she wants,” Pete said with a head-jerk toward the doorway to the customers’ area.
Brian looked over to see a young woman. She was too attractive for this to turn out to be anything good; a couple of leagues above himself, he reckoned. There must have been a service issue that was coming back on him. Casually he walked toward her, deciding to wait until he was close to start making eye contact.
One of the large duplicators on the other side of the paper racks shut down, and another one threw its ink rollers as another pressman lost all interest in work. Brian turned his eyes forward again to see what the fuss could be.
When he did, he was met with a disturbingly warm smile. He began to slow down. “Uh oh,” he thought. An encyclopedia of a million rehearsed lines and conversation-starters sped through his mind, in case such a thing as this should ever happen to him. Memories of things he wished he had said in past situations (but never did) jogged themselves to the ready, should they apply to anything that might come up in a discussion now. “Think of something funny...” he thought to himself.
He looked over at a shelf where one of the pressmen had a pack of heartworm medicine he’d picked up on his lunch break. “Hartguard,” it read. He picked it up and pretended to swallow something from it, and then extended a hand to the girl as she started laughing. “I’m Brian,” he said.
She did not respond right away, but turned her head inquisitively aside as she gripped his hand with surprising firmness.
Brian blinked. “Brian Gullen,” he said.
“Cheryl Bandera,” she responded, and she leaned comfortably backward against the door molding.
The name “Bandera,” and her beautiful face rang alarm bells in Brian’s head. He had heard the name. He’d seen the face. His loss of touch with pop culture made it necessary to inquire. “Are you in entertainment? I’ve seen you.”
“My sister Tiffy is a recording artist,” Cheryl said with a nod.
Brian inwardly remarked to himself that the quality of her voice went right along with that too. His own thoughts raced a few moments about whether it was cooler to be not just another star-stricken fan, or whether she preferred that every last person in the world did recognize her. He watched her take the gathering attention in stride, as reflected star power seemed to work just like real star power. His sense of sheer disbelief was under control so far.
“Okay,” Brian said, “I’m sure I’ve enjoyed Tiffy's work.”
“It’s okay if you haven’t heard it,” she said with a smile.
Brian admitted, “I’ve heard the songs, but I don’t know which ones were hers.”
“Then how do you know if you enjoyed them?” Cheryl pressed.
Brian smiled as he thought that she must be testing his cool. “Okay,” he admitted further. “I haven’t got the slightest idea.”
“That’s honest,” Cheryl said, as if she were on the verge of a chuckle. “Say... I heard some cool things about you.”
Brian's sense of disbelief was now compounded. He noticed her eyes quickly looking him up and down, a sure sign that she was considering the prospect of being seen with him. His awareness of his personal appearance was becoming a hyper-awareness. With the slightest head-shake he asked her, “You heard about me... where?”
“Somewhere,” she said with a shrug. “They say you rarely talk, but you can read and write like normal. And that you know a lot about science, and nature.”
“Oh,” said Brian. “That’s a different Bryan, the no-talker. He spells his name with the ‘y’ in it.”
Cheryl wrinkled her brow at that information, as she glanced around the room. “Where is he?” she asked at first. Then she quickly changed her question. “How do you spell your first name?” She produced something like a wallet and craftily opened and shut it quickly, and said, “Because somebody around here won something, and I just need to verify…”
Brian widened his eyes auspiciously at that, and took out his driver’s license for her.
Cheryl smiled a jaw-jutted smile, her lips parted slightly as if to taste the air, first examining the ID and then moving her eyes askance back to him. “So, this other Bryan’s not your twin or anything?”
“Oh no,” Brian assured her.
“Well,” she resigned. “If you have no idea what I’m doing here, maybe we can go somewhere and discuss it after you get off o' work.”
“That sounds swell,” said Brian with a friendly shrug. “I like pretty much anything.”
“You didn’t have anything else planned?” Cheryl asked, testing him again.
Brian perhaps missed a beat as he mustered his reply. “After changing clothes, I was just going to see what trouble I could get into on the way home.” They agreed to meet out in front of the shop after quitting time to go to dinner on Cheryl’s treat. As Brian walked her toward her car, a pushy pressman Ralph got in the way and insisted on introducing himself with a handshake. “My daughter’s a big fan. Big fan.”
“Of my sister...?”
“Oh, both of you!”
“Well I guess that’s what we like to hear,” Cheryl said as she lightly punched Ralph’s shoulder. Then she turned to go. Brian thought, “She’s sort of tough.” It made him think about how one required people skills to wear the shoes of a person like Cheryl – just to move around. There were things that Brian never envied about famous people. Didn’t people act weird enough when you’re not famous? It seemed that the same personality traits were required as those that made a person successful at anything, like running a large business. Ralph went on, “Our daughter Ariel even has Tiffy wallpaper.”
Cheryl turned back around. “Really? Where in the world did you find that, you said wallpaper?”
Brian thought, “Wow, her businessperson side. On the lookout for unlicensed products.” Then, he noted how everyone liked Ralph, and how that guy seemed to get by with so much. Maybe there was something to be learned from him.
“The wallpaper, yeah uh...” Ralph confessed, “She made it herself out of magazine clippings.”
“Oh!” said Cheryl, wide-eyed. She dismissed herself out the door.
Brian gave Ralph a look, and called after Cheryl.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “See you later?”
Cheryl looked back at him and gave him a thumbs-up as she opened her Volvo to get in.
It was not the car that Brian had expected, for someone that young and well-off, and able to afford pretty much anything. But then again, the sturdiness did fit. It was extremely well kept too, looking fresh-off of a showroom floor even though it was last year’s model. “Nice without showing off,” he thought. And then, there was the interior. “There’s the money,” Brian thought. It was definitely a custom job in there. Yes, it would be nice to ride in that.
Stepping back inside, Brian met Jenny, the former Motley Crue groupie. “What happened?” she asked excitedly. “Did she..?”
Brian gave her the news.
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