Foam does not rise fast. That was the worst part. If it had exploded, someone would have yelled cut. Instead it rose the way bread rises, with total confidence and no sense of urgency.
On the control-room monitors, Opal Eckhart stood at the gold podium in a soft white drift up to her elbows. She was laughing. That was the first thing I checked, and I checked it twice. She was laughing so hard she had to hold the podium.
"That's fine," Preston said beside me. "That's the moment. That's peak visual presence."
"It's growing."
"It's settling."
On Camera 2, the foam reached the top of the podium and slid gently over the two buttons. BANK disappeared. BUCKET disappeared. The podium now looked like a gold wedding cake that had been frosted by someone with a grudge.
"It's settling upward," said Petey, behind us.
I want to be clear about one thing, because Edda wrote it in her report and I want it in this one. Nobody was ever in danger.
CloudBurst was exactly what its lab sheet said. It was soft, unscented and safe on skin. It was also, at ninety-three degrees, about forty percent more of itself than anyone had planned. That is not a safety problem.
That is a geometry problem.
I keyed the floor manager's channel. "Stop tape. Can we stop tape?"
"Stopping tape," the floor manager said. "Opal's asking if this is normal."
"Tell her it's new."
Opal had heard. Her voice came up on the podium mic, delighted. "First time for everybody!"
The audience roared. They had decided, all two hundred of them, that this was the best thing they had ever seen. The front row was already leaning forward with their phones up, which our audience coordinator was supposed to prevent and absolutely could not.
Then the foam reached the edge of the podium riser and began to spread across the stage floor.
It moved in a slow white tide toward stage left. Toward the plexiglass panel. Toward the one man in nine seasons who had never been touched by anything that came out of a bucket.
On Camera 3, Monty Ambler saw it coming.
"Not the hair," he said, into a live microphone, to two hundred people. "Ginny. Not the hair."
I was out of the control room before Preston could say my name.
Petey followed me down the stairs, carrying two towels and a push broom he'd grabbed from the hallway. Tobin was already on the stage floor with his squeegee. He was trying to wipe the foam back toward the podium, the way you might try to sweep the ocean back into a bay.
"It's not designed for volume," he told me. "It's designed for presence."
"It has plenty of presence."
Opal waved at me over the drift. "Hi! Am I the Finish?"
"You're the Finish," I said. "Are you okay? Do you want out?"
"Are you kidding? I fix buses. This is a spa day."
She scooped up a handful and studied it like a part she was about to order. "Does it wipe?"
"It wipes," said Tobin, with enormous relief.
It did wipe, to be fair. Opal walked out of the drift on her own, with Petey beside her.
Wardrobe met her at the edge with a robe and a squeegee, and she was clean in about a minute. She signed autographs for the front row while I worked on the actual problem, which was that the stage was now mostly cloud.
The foam had reached the Monty Wall and gone around it on both sides.
Monty had climbed onto the host stool. He stood there with both arms raised, exactly the way he did every Thursday when the bucket tipped. Only this time he was not welcoming a ship. He was surrendering to it.
"Ginny!" he called. "Eleven inches! It's eleven inches deep!"
"It's not going to get you, Monty."
"It's eleven inches from my shoes!"
"Your shoes aren't your hair."
"My shoes are adjacent to my hair!"
I took Petey's broom and cut a path to the stool. It took four minutes. Monty climbed down onto the cleared stretch of floor, completely dry. He straightened his jacket and patted his hair to confirm it was still his.
"Thank you," he said, with great dignity. Then, into the microphone, which was still live: "Folks. Four minutes. Four whole minutes of broom!"
The audience gave the broom a standing ovation.
We did not tape the second episode that night.
The foam was soft and harmless and absolutely everywhere. It had gotten into the podium buttons, so neither one clicked. It had gotten into the camera dolly track, so Camera 2 now moved in short, apologetic jerks. It had found its way into a floor vent and was, according to the building engineer, "having a time in there."
We sent the audience home at nine with extra T-shirts and a promise to bring them back. The crew stayed until two in the morning. That was eleven union crew members on overtime, plus the building engineer, plus Tobin, who spent most of the night apologizing to his sneakers.
At some point after midnight, Preston came down to the stage.
He did not say anything for a while. He just stood at the edge of the cleared floor and watched a grip vacuum foam out of the Monty Wall. His suit was still perfect. One shoulder had a single white fleck on it.
He reached for his pocket. Then I watched him remember that his lint roller was clipped to my binder, upstairs, in my office.
I went and got it. I came back down and held it out.
He looked at it. He looked at me. Then he took it and rolled the fleck off his shoulder, once, without a word.
"Page seven," I said.
"I know what page seven says, Ms. Ellsworth."
At two-fifteen, after the last grip had gone home, I sat on an apple box in the empty studio and opened the batch book.
Everything that has ever come down from that rig has a page. Around midnight, I had decided this would be no exception. I wrote the date. I wrote CloudBurst, Cumulus Effects, vendor supplied and Expansion, forty percent, as stated on page seven.
Then I came to the tester column, and I sat there with the pen for a long time.
In the end I wrote None. It was the first time that word had ever appeared in the book. It looked smaller than I expected, and much worse.
On Friday morning, Edda read the incident report aloud to the production office. She read it slowly, for the record, while Preston stood at the front of the room with his tablet held flat against his chest.
"Material: CloudBurst finishing foam. Expansion: approximately forty percent. Injuries: none."
"Contestant statement." She looked up over her glasses. "Quote, 'Best night of my life, tell the green lady I want to come back,' end quote."
"I'm the green lady," I said to Petey.
"Everyone knows you're the green lady."
"Additional notes," Edda went on. "Studio dark for one taping day. Overtime, forty-one crew hours. Dolly track replaced, floor vent still having a time."
Preston said nothing.
"And the online response," said one of the booking coordinators, holding up her phone. "Somebody in the front row posted it. It's at four million views."
She turned the screen around. It was Opal Eckhart, laughing in a white drift, saying First time for everybody! Then it cut to Monty on the stool, arms up, shouting about his shoes.
The caption said OPAL VS. THE CLOUD.
The comments scrolled past. Bring back the green. Who is the green lady. I would watch Monty on that stool for an hour.
"People love it," Monty said.
"People love the accident," Preston said. He touched his tablet. The screen behind him went gray. "We're not going to be a show that's beloved for its accidents."
He rolled the lint roller down his sleeve.
"The network has reviewed this week," he said.
"Effective with the season finale, the Finish will be a confetti drop. No foam, no gunge. And Ms. Ellsworth will be moving over to brand partnerships, where her attention to detail will be valuable."
The room went very quiet. Edda stopped typing.
Petey raised his hand. Preston nodded at him, because nobody ever said no to Petey.
"I just want to be sure I understand," Petey said. "No bucket?"
"No bucket."
"So the show's just called Night."
Up next: Brand Partnerships
Continue to Part 4 →