***
“I’ve got one question,” said the publisher. “Why?’’
It might help if you can imagine the publisher has a broad Queensland accent. He doesn’t know it, but the newsroom calls his office “The Pineapple Cave”.
“Why did you use over-ripe bananas in that photo shoot?”
My reply is meek: “I think the stylist was trying to match the speckle on the banana to the leopard print on the heel…”
Once I was a serious journalist who went undercover in Sumatra to investigate the social and ecological impact of the New Zealand dairy industry’s demand for palm kernel expeller feed.
I couldn’t walk a block in those heels.
Photo / Brydie Thompson
Cover page brainstorm. Topic: Female desire.
“Orchids,” said the very clever deputy editor. “Different kinds of the same flower, representing that we’re all women, but we’re all different.”
I take the proposal – a gorgeous trio of lascivious, fleshy pink orchids – into The Pineapple Cave.
Him: “How does this relate to the story?”
Me: “Well, over the centuries artists have used the orchid to represent, um, certain aspects of, um, femininity. The story is about female desire. And if you think about where female desire might be centred … what we haven’t done is provided three illustrations of that.”
The publisher is still frowning.
Me: “Female readers like pretty flowers?”
Tick.
***
Yesterday, we gave a potential new advertiser a sneak preview of the home design pages. Two of their products were featuring and maybe they’d like to capitalise on that? It was going quite well until they noted the caption for their $30 doormat had been printed underneath the $5000 Zambesi rug.
***
A reader writes to our sex columnist: “My 5-year-old granddaughter masturbates constantly and is now complaining of a sore vagina. What should I do?”
An editor writes to her sex columnist: “The publisher will fire me if I run that letter. What should I do?”
***
Tomorrow is the photo shoot for my editor’s note. I squeeze into suck-it-in knickers and a bra that should have won an engineering award. I can’t breathe but 23 years of journalism will count for nothing once this picture is published. What I look like will, to the readers of this magazine, define their opinion of me. I ignore 1,000 versions of the same black dress and choose jeans, a loose shirt I bought at an op shop and underwear that doesn’t require restorative kidney surgery. I look like me. When the picture is published, my mum emails to tell me I look pretty.
***
The Seekers.
This week’s cover story tracks 40 years of the song I Want to Teach the World to Sing.
Our deadline is Thursday. Everything, including the cover – a quirky choir boy, mouth open mid-song – has been sent to the printers. Shit. I forgot to take the cover to The Pineapple Cave.
He hates it. Alternatives?
“Well,” I say, “I thought a photograph of The Seekers might alienate a younger audience.”
“The Seekers!?”
“They’re coming here, and they’re performing that song. That’s why we’re running this story.”
“I LOVE the Seekers.”
Tick.
***
Rachel Hunter.
“Here’s the thing,” says the celebrity agent. “You tell your bean counters I’ve got a $20,000 offer for ‘the greening of Rachel Hunter’ sitting on my desk.”
The vision includes a supermodel, a kākāpō and a South Island mountain range.
My budget does not include a helicopter, stylist, photographer, makeup artist or critically endangered wildlife.
We’ll have to go with our cover on the rise of dystopian youth literature. The Queenslander is on holiday and this week’s sign-off is with the editor-in-chief. “What’s dystopia?” he asks.
I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds. “The opposite of utopia.”
***
A reader writes to a food editor: “I tried your sumac chicken with lemon, fennel and potato salad tonight. I didn’t have the chicken, the sumac or the fennel. I substituted rump steak and spring onions (from the garden) and even though I had mint and parsley, I used coriander instead.”
***
A reader writes to the editor: “In view of almost 50% of [redacted] magazine being devoted in some way to fashion, I find it totally incongruous that you should drape your slightly non-svelte figure with a cast-off curtain. Can’t you find something better to wear?”
***
A reader writes to a columnist: “I subscribe to the [redacted] and enjoy keeping up with the news. Your article showing the bonobos apes particularly interested me as, some years ago, I read the following: ‘Bonobos and humans are unusual among primates in using the missionary position’ … I read your article twice but didn’t see this mentioned so I thought I would let you know. I don’t remember the magazine I cut it from but I have kept it in a pocket in my handbag ever since.”
***
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Photo / David St George
At the Auckland Art Gallery, the fashion and beauty media gather.
I haven’t shaved my legs for a month. It’s eight weeks since my last pedicure and I ran out of fake tan in February.
Dinner is one goat cheese ball, two squares of bread and salmon and four champagnes. Caught in the seam of the absolutely enormous goodie bag I find a single bottle of nail polish. “Have you ‘eared about it – an homage to Van Gogh” is from OPI’s Holland range. My artist boyfriend says it is the exact shade of old rice or dried skin.
“That nail polish,” he says, “is the colour of exfoliation.”
***
Secret tricks of magazine editors forced to attend a lunchtime product launch? When the petit fours platter includes a terrifyingly solid plug of whiskey jelly, drop it in a glass of water and wait for it to dissolve. Swallow. Repeat until deadline and/or they send you home with the goodie bag.
***
The lifestyle magazine I edit is tasked with making its female-skewed audience feel relaxed, happy, inspired, included and even a little glamorous.
“No,” I tell the PR rep, “I will not be giving away a vacuum cleaner in the Mother’s Day edition.”
***
“Confirming Louis Vuitton for 2.30pm tomorrow,” says the text from an ex-boyfriend. A friend from Tauranga asks what I want taken from the freezer for dinner. I scroll through my address book and every second name is Simon Gault. My life is unravelling and my new phone has replicated 4000 contacts to prove it.
***
Louis Vuitton Lionne Spawn bag and Prada Mini Promenade bag. Photo / Webb’s
The woman in black silk gloves has a $1000 bag clipped to her waist. She points to the wall display and says, reverently, “this design has been in production since 1856”.
Me: “I’m fascinated by the emotional connection between women and things. Why would anyone pay that much for a handbag when they could buy a knock-off? Could we do a story on that?”
In downtown Auckland, the PR manager for Louis Vuitton explodes into tiny, perfectly formed icicles. LV will never comment on counterfeit. LV will never go on sale. LV will never be discounted. LV, she says, cannot be accused of being an unattainable brand when some of its handbags sell for as little as $800.
***
We need a new beauty page so we can sell more beauty advertising. We need a story about Melbourne because an advertiser wants more people to go there. We need a particular designer’s clothes on our fashion pages or they might pull their advertising. We need to hire someone to stab me in the eye with a proofreading pencil. I would do this myself but I’m just too tired.
***
Dear Editor: I used to read [retracted] all the time. Then I started reading [retracted]. This weekend I read your [retracted] again and I hated it.
Dear Reader: I hate you.
***
Photo / Getty Images
Disaster. The chicken the designer has chosen to illustrate the new Pet of the Week column is the wrong breed.
It should have feathered legs, says the new Pet of the Week columnist.
This column is satirical. Its content is entirely fictional. The former leader of the Act Party does not, to my knowledge, own a chicken.
“Change the chicken,” I tell the designer. What do I know about chickens? Or satire?
***
Our Easter issue is as cute as a button. A cover story on rabbit fanciers and, inside, our wine writer’s top 10 reds.
The Queenslander picks up a black marker pen.
“Let’s drop the masthead font a couple of sizes, move it down so it doesn’t bleed off the page and put a glass of red wine in the top corner,” he says. “You look worried?”
“You’re suggesting a radical redesign of a masthead that was only relaunched six weeks ago …”
Him: “It’s not that radical.”
Me: “It is.”
Him: “It is not.”
There was no wine glass on the Easter cover. I cannot say the same about my actual Easter.
***
A very large delivery from Louis Vuitton has just landed on my desk. The box is beautifully wrapped, and I have only just realised how badly I want an $800 handbag. It is a book about a label no future lifestyle journalist will be able to afford.
***
“Real readers wearing real makeup looks”. Our new beauty page concept is fresh, clean and an adequate compromise between editorial credibility and advertiser demands. The women will wear plain white tees; a stark white background will allow us to showcase featured beauty products.
There’s no budget for specialist lifestyle photographers but the newsroom photo desk is excited. They suggest a black background. With lighting effects. I go back to my desk. Where is my monogrammed vodka?
***
A reader loves the magazine and also my editor’s photo. But he thinks my body shape requires different clothes. Leggings, perhaps, and a floaty top.
To illustrate this point, he has cut out my picture, pasted new clothes onto my body, and glued the entirety to the postcard that has just been delivered to my desk. I laugh and laugh and laugh.
When I take it home to show my boyfriend, he asks, “Have you called the police?”