Undercover in High Heels by Gemma Halliday Read Free Book Online Page A

clothing racks. “And Mia’s are here.” She ended by pointing to a row of clothes stuck on dry-cleaning hangers and swathed inplastic. “Mia has her own wardrobe person, so you’ll mostly just be making sure the others have the right outfits for their scenes and doing a little damage control. You know how to hand-sew, right?”
    I nodded.
    “Great!” Dusty said, tucking a purple lock behind her ear. “Any questions?”
    Only about a million. The second Dana and I had walked onto the Sunset Studios lot that morning it had been like entering some alternate reality, and I was still trying to get my bearings.
    We’d parked my Jeep off-site in the designated parking garage behind the lot, then hoofed it—along with the other cast and crew not quite somebody enough to have their own on-set parking places—to the studio’s gated rear entrance. We’d stood in line with women toting wardrobe bags, and a seemingly endless supply of guys with tool belts and little walkie-talkie headsets while the two-hundred-year-old security guard (give or take a year) in Coke-bottle glasses checked our names against his list. Wonder of wonders, when I got to the front of the line mine was actually there. The guard even gave me a “Good day, Miss Springer” before passing me through the gates onto the sacred grounds of the Sunset Studios.
    The best way I could describe the studio lot was to compare it to a life-size dollhouse—every corner dressed within an inch of its life but none of it real. Just beyond the rear entrance lay the Sunset Studios “city, ” which was basically a maze of city streets with hollow buildings made to look like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and, of course, a generic middle-American suburb.
    Beyond the “city” were rows of squat warehouses with the names of hit shows painted on the outside. All buzzing with activity. I spied a group of extras and guys in headsets milling around outside stage 3F, where the sign said they shot that new cop drama. Outside stage 4B was a catering truck handing out breakfast burritos, and the guy who’d played Screech digging into a box of morning Krispy Kremes.
    I would have loved to do a slow celebrity-gawking tour around the rest of the lot, but since I’d hit the snooze about a dozen times that morning (If God wanted people to be awake at 6:00 a.m., he wouldn’t have invented late-night TV.), we were already running ten minutes behind, so instead we’d hightailed it to stage 6G.
    The assistant director (or AD) quickly ushered Dana to a holding room with the other extras. She’d given me a conspiratorial wink as she headed off, which I’d tried not to roll my eyes at. (Okay, fine. I hadn’t tried very hard.) And only thirteen minutes late (but who was counting?), I’d made my way into the wardrobe department, where Dusty was currently filling me in on suburbanite fashion, Hollywood style.
    “So, basically the outfits will be hung up here for you ahead of time.” She pointed to a rack along the wall where clothes were clumped together and tagged. “All you have to do is make sure the right person is wearing the right thing for the right scene.”
    “That’s it?” And people were going to pay me for this?
    Dusty laughed. “It’s harder than it sounds. Getting actors through wardrobe is like herding cats. Especially if they aren’t happy with what we’ve picked out for them. Speaking of which, watch out for Margo.She’s notorious for adding her own accessories.” She did a mock shudder. “Costume stuff and cheap as hell.”
    “Margo?”
    “She plays Nurse Nan on the show. You know, Ash-ley’s evil twin sister who just escaped the mental institution and is secretly living in Ashley’s attic?”
    “Oh, riiiight. Nurse Nan.”
    Dusty chuckled again. “You’ll get used to calling them by their real names, don’t worry. In the meantime, how about we go get some coffee and I’ll introduce you around.”
    Grateful for a moment to absorb it all, I