The kid behind the camera guffawed.
Jess blinked innocently. “What?”
Gina reached over to the tray of ingredients her prep cook had placed on the countertop, and grabbed the plastic tub of grated cheese. Without her reading glasses, she had to hold the tub right up to her face to read the label.
“Cheez-Ease? Is this what we’ve come to? Y’all have sold my soul for a tub of dollar-ninety-eight artificial cheese made out of recycled dry-cleaning bags?”
“Please, Gina,” Jess said quietly. “Can we just finish this segment?”
Gina dipped a spoon into the pot of grits and tasted. “I knew it,” she said. “And that’s not cream, either. Since when do we substitute canned condensed milk for cream?”
Jess stared down at her notes, then looked up, a pained expression on her face. “We’re having budget issues. Scott told the girls they should substitute cheaper ingredients wherever necessary.”
“He didn’t say anything about it to me,” Gina said, walking off the set and toward the table where Jess sat.
She hated to make a scene, hated to come across as a prima donna or a food snob. But you couldn’t have a show about healthy southern cooking, a show called Fresh Start, for heaven’s sake, if you started to compromise on ingredients.
“Jess,” Gina said calmly. “What’s going on around here?”
Jessica’s pale, usually cheerful face reddened. “Let’s take a break,” she said. “Everybody back in ten minutes.”
Chapter 2
The crew scattered. Watching their retreat, Gina noticed for the first time that the cameraman wasn’t the only new face on the set. Jackson Thomas, her sound man, had been replaced with a chubby-cheeked black girl with a headful of dreadlocks, and Andrew Payne, the lighting engineer—sweet, serious Andrew, who approached lighting as an artist approached a canvas—had been replaced with two pimply-cheeked youths whose bumbling around reminded her of Dumb and Dumber.
“Jess,” Gina said, sliding into the empty seat beside the assistant producer, “where’s Scott? And Jackson?”
Jess picked up the thick production notebook that was her bible and leafed through the pages detailing the upcoming segment.
“Jess?” Gina gently took the notebook from her.
“God, Gina,” Jess said with a sigh. “You need to talk to Scott. Really.”
“I will,” Gina said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” the younger woman admitted. “He left me a voice mail this morning, telling me he had a meeting, and he’d be in later. That’s all I know. Honest.”
“What about the crew? Why all the changes? And why wasn’t I told anything about budget problems?”
“Scott said—” Jess bit her lip. “At the production meeting Friday he just said there were some issues with the sponsors. We have to tighten our belts to get through the rest of the season. He asked Eddie and Jackson and Andrew to stay after the meeting to talk to him. And when I got here this morning, the new guys showed up and said Scott told them to report to me.” Tears glistened in Jess’s eyes. “I’m sorry. That’s all I know.”
“It’s okay,” Gina said. “But no more surprises. What’s going on with the next segment? The herb-crusted salmon. You’re not going to tell me I’m supposed to take Chicken-of-the-Sea and make it look like salmon steaks, right?”
Jess looked off at the set, where the prep cooks were setting up the ingredients for the next shot. “Actually, you’re using mackerel.”
“Mackerel!” Gina shot out of the chair. “I’ll kill Scott when I find him.”
Although Fresh Start with Regina Foxton aired on Georgia Public Television, the show operated not out of GPTV’s handsome headquarters in the shadow of downtown Atlanta but out of leased production and office space at Morningstar Studios, which was a bland complex of single-story concrete-block buildings located in a light industrial area five miles away in Midtown.
Two years ago, when she’d signed on to host her own show, Gina had thought the Fresh Start set the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. That was when everything about television was new and wonderful. Face it, she’d had stars in her eyes, big-time.
But what could you expect from a girl from small-town South Georgia? Odum, her hometown, wasn’t exactly Hollywood. Not even Hollywood, Georgia, let alone Hollywood, California.
She’d majored in home economics at the University of Georgia, gotten interested in writing there, and after a series of reporting stints at small-town weeklies, she’d ended up with what she considered her dream job—food editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At twenty-six years old, she’d been the youngest woman ever to hold that position. Back home in Odum, her mama and daddy were beside themselves with pride for their oldest girl.