Laying Low in Hollywood by Jean Marie Stanberry Read Free Book Online Page A

course, it was all about the ratings.  Jorge didn’t care that teaching Ron Brannon to skate, would be a lot like teaching a dog to whistle, it just wasn’t happening!  Jorge did not share any of my reservations, in fact, I was realizing that all Jorge really cared about, was having Ron Brannon’s name in the credits.  I tried to conceal my troubled frown, I was totally screwed!
     
       I was more of a baseball fan, than a football fan, so I really couldn’t get all that excited about having Ron Brannon on my team.  Of course, I wasn’t completely naive, I knew the value Jorge placed on a celebrity like Brannon.  I hadn’t just crawled from beneath a rock, I’d heard his name before and seen him on TV commercials, but I really knew nothing about him personally.  Jorge told me that Ron Brannon was one of the greatest quarterbacks ever!  Now he was retired from football and he worked as a sports commentator in New York.
     
       Jorge told me all I had to do was dress Ron Brannon up in a sexy outfit and the ratings would soar.  Apparently Mr. Brannon was quite popular with the ladies, and of course, as far as the network was concerned, it was all about the ratings.
     
       I sighed in resignation, it was, what it was, there was nothing I could do about it.  I could only hope that Ron Brannon would be able to pull in the ratings for the show based on this good looks alone, because I seriously doubted that I was going to be able to make him into a professional pairs skater. 
     
       I could only chuckle when I thought about it.  All I could think about was the fact that Ron Brannon was built for football.  He was a huge, black man, who paired with my skater, who was petite and blonde, was going to look completely ridiculous!
     
       Unfortunately, my luck in the professional skater draw hadn’t been any better.  My skater was Elena Denkova, a tiny Russian skater who was about ten years past her prime.  I didn’t remember her from the height of her career, so I assumed she had never been to the World Championships.  Elena was twenty nine years old and she apparently had retired from competitive skating because of a bad knee.
     
       I shook my head disgustedly, this wasn’t fair!  I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it past the first week in this competition!  I had already resigned myself to working with Ron, but geeze, at least give me a decent professional to work with.  Elena had never done any pairs skating or ice dance and she spoke only limited English.  She was just a tiny thing, barely 5 feet tall, and approximately ninety pounds.  About the size of one of Ron’s legs!
     
       Of course, our first day on the ice was a complete disaster!  Ron didn’t even know how to put the skates on.  After I helped him lace them up correctly and helped him to get them tight enough around the ankles, he landed flat on his back on  the ice, with his very first step out of the gate!
     
       I sighed miserably as I watched him floundering around on the ice, like a fish out of water.  I was trying to avoid getting discouraged, but I already had a pretty good idea which team would be the first one going home.  I had expected that the network would have chosen people who could, at the very least, stand on skates. 
     
       I was happy that Elena seemed to be able to skate good enough, even with her knee bandaged, she could skate circles around Ron.  Her downfall was going to be her stubbornness, she wanted everything her way, and communicating with her at times was a challenge, she spoke English, but not well.  If you told her something she didn’t like, she would just pretend she didn’t understand you.
     
       As I watched Ron struggling to get back to his feet, I sighed miserably.  Why did I take this job?  What the heck was I thinking?  Then I remembered what Justin had told me.  I needed to do something different, something out of my comfort