crash and burn by aj anderson

by aj anderson
(washington, d.c.)

In a town of over-achievers, (Washington, D.C.), in an era of delayed-onset adulthood, (21st century), Channel One News Producer, Karen Wilcox, is belatedly coming of age in her thirty-first year.

Crash and burns are standard operating procedure in television news, but Karen’s career and personal life are crashing and burning, too.

Her boss, News Director Bill Smiley, resembles a hulking Huck Finn. Or a maniacal scarecrow, depending on his hangover. He hosts the daily Moron Meeting while watching, “Big Breasted Women”, in a workplace so dysfunctional, the elephant in the newsroom hired painters.

Peanut, the franchise anchorman, pirouettes on construction scaffolding. Naked. With man boobs and a beer gut. Tipped to a dead body in an open-air drug market, Peanut brings D.C.’s drug trade to a screeching halt while crack and whack dealers help him search for a body. Failing to find one, Peanut implores Karen to soothe his savaged soul (and other key parts of him) with “joint exercises” in a hotel bedroom.

Karen’s husband, a former Senate aide, works on a Presidential campaign. For free. So far, he declines to consummate the marriage.

And, if it’s not one thing, it’s Karen’s mother. A petite Fashionista who eats nails for breakfast and litigates for a living, she and Karen have little in common. It’s a clue to a secret, coming unraveled, but Karen remains unaware.

Karen’s bosses promise to promote her, but don’t. A Serious Journalist, she is treated like a Boy Toy. When she’s assigned to the wildly popular feature, Your Sick Pet, could it get any worse? Of course it can! And it does!

While producing a homeless boy series for Serena Evans – the legendary, first Black anchorwoman in Washington – Karen lands in a D.C. housing project, dodging bullets and navigating tricky issues of race. She wonders if she could be pregnant. Given her marital circumstance, this might seem impossible except for the emergency field trip she took to her hunky college boyfriend’s houseboat in Sausalito, California. After days of tacking and jibbing and coming about quite properly with utmost marine propriety, Karen succumbed to temptation. Now, she worries she will burn for eternity in Hell.

Back in D.C., anchorwoman Serena Evans turns up dead. In the ensuing crash and burn, Karen views a videotape that exposes a secret. Staring down the barrel of a gun in the shaky hand of her surprise grandmother, she learns who she is: The daughter of anchorwoman, Serena Evans.

Fending for herself in matters of race, character, fidelity, marriage, identity, death, and newsroom absurdities, Karen frequently feels like the lone, microscopic dust particle of reason in a desert of insanity. Not to mention, she is trying hard to survive.