Free Hostile Makeover by Wendy Wax

she’d reached at least one. Shelley read over the list one more time, hoping that it had somehow improved since the last time she checked, but they were still the losing propositions they’d been five minutes before.
    Cradling her head in her hands, she groaned in frustration. What was she doing here? What was she trying to prove? And what in the world was she supposed to do with these worthless accounts?
    She thought back to Ross Morgan’s irritating attempts to identify her “look” and asked herself: If this were a fifties flick and she were playing the Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day role, what would happen now?
    Drumming her fingers on the desktop she seriously considered the question.
    For one thing, Doris would do more than just show up. Doris would find a way to rub Rock Hudson’s nose in his attitude. She’d take the lemons he gave her and make them into lemonade, and then she’d find a way to beat him at his own game.
And
make him fall in love with her.
    Shelley pulled out a pad and pencil. What if she went ahead and pretended these were
real
accounts that deserved
real
attention? What if she actually thought about what she might do for them? Came up with ideas. After all, anything she produced from these underperformers would be a victory. All she had to do was start.
    Closing her eyes, she concentrated on opening her mind. It had been a long time since she’d done this, so she was a little rusty, but she told herself not to panic. Giving her imagination permission to wander, she sat and thought. Slowly ideas began to form. Pictures and words began to line up into concepts.
    She looked back down at the list and focused all of her energies on it. And somehow she knew where to begin.
    “Mr. Simms,” she said when she got the owner of Furniture Forum on the line, “this is Shelley Schwartz at Schwartz and Associates, and I just called to tell you that I love the TV spots you’ve been doing.”
    She listened to his surprised murmur of gratitude. Previous AE’s had spent their time trying to talk him out of appearing in his own commercials. Previous AE’s had failed.
    “And I think we can add a lot of production value to what you’re already doing.”
    She popped a Tylenol. “Your nephew Charlie is your videographer?” She wrote “nephew” next to the client’s name and really listened as Brian Simms praised his nephew’s production skills and explained that he’d been mentoring the boy since his sister’s death. There was a lot more at stake here, as far as Brian Simms was concerned, than just production.
    As she listened the solution came to her. She knew exactly how to get this client to buy her idea. “You know, Mr. Simms,” Shelley said, “we use an incredible director out in L.A. He and his production company could take your spots to a whole new level. And I bet we could get them to take your nephew under their wing, maybe even work out an apprenticeship of some kind. Especially if you’re going to be a long-term client.”
    Brian Simms couldn’t agree fast enough. Delighted, Shelley penciled in a meeting with him and his nephew for the following week. A smile spread across her face as she hung up the phone.
    Flush with success, she dialed Forever Remembered and got David Geller on the line. “Mr. Geller,” she said once she’d introduced herself, “have you watched the HBO series
Six Feet Under
?”
    As it turned out, the Forever Remembered CEO was a big fan. Convincing him that Alan Ball, the Atlanta creator of the hit series, would be the perfect company spokesperson took a whopping two minutes. Still smiling, she placed a call to the producer’s agent in L.A. and added David Geller to her schedule.
    When her stomach rumbled she remembered that it was lunchtime. Suddenly she was thinking falafels—those lovely balls of chickpea and breading sold in stands across the Middle East.
    “Yes, Mr. Awadallah,” she said into the phone after she’d introduced herself, “I want four