Lucky Stars by Jane Heller Page B

curious about what they plan to talk to your mother about, aren’t you?”
    Was I curious? A little. I just figured that since Terwilliger appreciated my mother’s bluntness, he wanted her blunt opinion of the agency’s ideas. Mostly, I was just glad I wasn’t the recipient of her bluntness for a change.
     
     
    C orbin and I followed them back into the conference room, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened.
    “Sorry this is so impromptu,” Peter Sacklin was saying to my mother, who had been given a prominent position at the head of the table, to Mr. Terwilliger’s right. “Obviously, we haven’t had time to prepare a storyboard, let alone a script. But as you heard before, Mrs. Reiser, our client has rejected our latest TV ad campaign and our backs are against the wall here. We need to go on the air with something dynamite and soon—something that will gain market share for Fin’s, something that will really grab the public. Star-Kist has Charlie the Tuna. Chicken of the Sea has the mermaid. And Bumble Bee has the bumblebee. What we want—what we n eed—is for Fin’s to have you, Mrs. Reiser. Just you, talking to the camera in the same tough, no-nonsense manner that you used with us.”
    I bolted up in my chair, felt my stomach tighten, felt my eyes bug out of my head. They wanted my mother to star in their commercial? My mother, who didn’t have a nanosecond of experience as an actress? My mother, who was, well, my mother?
    Ridiculous, I scoffed. She’ll never do it. She hates show business and everything remotely related to it. They’ll have to hire some other complaining consumer as their pitchwoman.
    “I’m very flattered,” my mother responded, “but I can’t imagine why you’d put me, an ordinary woman in her sixties with the crow’s feet to prove it, on TV. Not when you could get a young one like Heather Locklear.”
    Everyone laughed. Everyone except me. Why didn’t she say, Not when you could get a young one like my daughter Stacey? Did she suddenly develop a brain cramp and forget that I did commercials for a living? Did it slip her mind that I was in a goddamn Jim Carrey movie? Did she go nutso during the tour of the cannery—someplace between the fog room with the 100 percent humidity and the thawing room with the smelly fish fumes?
    “The reason we want you, Mrs. Reiser,” W&W’s creative supervisor piped up, “is because you’re so credible, so real. When you tell the public about Fin’s, they’ll listen. They’ll listen and they’ll buy.”
    “Exactly right,” said Terwilliger, the big cheese. “You have that bluntness we discussed earlier, Helen—a directness that translates into trustworthiness. If you say Fin’s is the best tuna, everyone will believe you.”
    My mother tapped his arm. “But I found a bone in my can of Fin’s,” she reminded him. “That’s why I came here in the first place—to complain about your tuna. Now that I’ve seen your operation and met your employees, I understand that mistakes happen every now and then, but it doesn’t mean I would I go on television and endorse your product. I have no intention of lying to the viewers. A bone is still a bone.”
    “We don’t want you to lie,” said W&W’s copywriter. “Just the opposite. What we’re playing with at the moment is a problem-solution type of ad. You state the problem, which is that you found a bone in your Fin’s tuna, and then you explain the solution, which is that you visited the cannery and were so impressed with what you saw that you agreed to work for Fin’s, to be the public’s eyes and ears within the company, to make sure that those mothers you talked to us about—the mothers who need to feel secure about the foods they feed their loved ones—will never have to worry when they open a can of Fin’s premium tuna.” He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “I don’t know about everybody else in this room, but I think we’ve got an award-winning commercial