Hearing America Singing . . .: . . . and watching it eating, and . . .

Hollywood

A friend of mine filmed a television pilot last year. A "pilot" is a trial episode of a proposed series. What you do, essentially, is spend anywhere from $750,000 to $2 million on 22 minutes of film, hopeful that one of the big television networks (or, hell, one of the small television networks-you've just dropped some fat coin, why be choosy?) will spot some long-running potential, order more episodes, and put you on the air.

So my friend films his pilot, and he and his partner, the director, take it to one of the market-research facilities here in town to be market tested. Thirty or forty scientifically assembled participants (culled from the local tourist traps) wait in the broiling sun for an hour or two until they are led into a dark room with a one-way mirror and told to watch the pilot, after which they will be asked for their responses, and after that presented with a crisp $20 bill. These drowsy, hungry, grouchy folks with a lifetime of unfulfilled longings hold the future of a $1 million piece of film in their mitts. I often wonder why they always give them the money after the session, and not before, to cheer them up a bit, but this is the way they've always done it so this is the way they do it still.

The testing goes quite well. We call it testing the pilot around here because of the grim clinical connotations of the word and because no one can bring himself to use the term that really comes to mind, which is biopsy. As in: They biopsied my pilot yesterday. The news was not good.

In my friend's case, the focus group enjoyed the show, giving it a "will watch" designation, which is about the highest possible rank. They were unanimously negative, however, on one point: a particular actress they all despised with equally high intensity. In the guided discussion that followed the screening-called a "focus group" in industry jargon, a phrase which, with a slight vowel shift in the first syllable of the first word, suggests a more accurate definition-and the questionnaires they filled out, the participants, to a person, remarked on the general badness of this particular actress. They all hated her. They hated her face. They hated her voice. They hated her body. They hated her totality. At one point in the show she is standing next to a box of newborn puppies. They decided that they also hated the puppies, which was a market-testing first: puppies, kittens, and children in wheelchairs always test very well.

The problem was that the actress was married to the director. And the director was behind the one-way mirror, listening to America tell him how repellent his wife was. Also behind the mirror were representatives from the studio that produced the pilot, the network that bought the pilot, and the writer, none of whom had the courage to so much as steal a sidelong glance at the director, who, presumably, stared straight ahead into the middle distance, with that vague, abstracted smile people get on their faces when they don't know what else to do.

In the end, he took it like a professional. He knew that she had to be replaced. "I'll be honest with her," he said. "After all, what's she going to say? That America is wrong?"

America, though, wasn't really the problem. After all, these were just a dozen or so people pulled out of a crowd in a rough representation of American tastes. These people didn't-couldn't-accurately predict America's response to my friend's TV show. But if you live in one of the tony parts of the country, a focus group is about as close as you ever come to understanding the country you live in, and the people who live in it.

You see, those of us who live in the 310 telephone area code-and to be fair, those who live in the 212 and 202 codes as well-live in a bubble I like to call the Ahi Tuna Envelope.

It is possible, through a judicious selection of airplane flights, to eat Sesame-Encrusted Ahi Tuna on Spicy Greens with a Port Wine Glaze for dinner in Los Angeles, catch the red-eye to Dulles, have Seared Ahi Tuna Salad for lunch in Washington, D.C., dash to Reagan National, catch the shuttle to LaGuardia, and tuck into an Ahi Tuna Steak au Poivre with Baby Carrots in a Red Wine Fig Reduction for dinner.

In the Ahi Tuna Envelope, you are never more than a few minutes away from a plate of ahi tuna. In the Ahi Tuna Envelope, it's impossible to grasp that there are parts of this country where it is unusual, not to say unlikely, to find ahi tuna on the menu. In the Ahi Tuna Envelope, you have to pay people $20 to tell you if your TV show is any good, if the jokes are funny, if your wife is attractive.

I thought a lot about ahi tuna recently. I was driving from Los Angeles to New York and taking my time about it. My theory is that those of us who live in the A.T.E. need to get out once in a while and see a slice of this huge unruly country. I would, in fact, make some kind of summertime road trip mandatory, if possible, for the upper tiers of the media and political club sandwich in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York. Say what you like about Pol Pot, the murderous dictator of Cambodia-and I'm not suggesting that the guy didn't have issues-but his idea about emptying the cities and driving the hipster urban elites out into the country does hold a certain attraction. It would be nice to see Katie Couric outside the Sonic Burger in Colby, Kan.; it would be useful for-oh, I don't know, off the top of my head I'm gonna say John Kerry, centimillionaire presidential candidate-to cool his heels on the steps of the Senatobia, Miss., city hall, as I did recently, waiting for the gal in the office to come back from lunch so he can pay his $60 speeding ticket, get his driver's license back, and be on his way; and what could be more richly satisfying than watching a glossy-haired Hollywood sharpie discover that everything on the menu can be filed under Carbohydrate, Brown?

I would send them off in the summer, when America is at her best, when the country is somehow the most like its true self. I would insist that they notice things like the smell of an air-conditioned supermarket when you walk in on a hot day; the smell of cooking oil; the smell of rain on hot asphalt. I would point out the flags and banners along Route 172 in North Carolina, outside Camp Lejeune, each one homemade, each one welcoming back some young person in the service. The self- satisfied snobs in my group would be led around the deepest parts of the Deep South, and at lunch at the Dinner Bell in McComb, Miss., would watch, as I recently did, as a young black man and a young white woman eat lunch together at a large communal table piled high with delicious food, and they'd discover that this happens a great deal in the Deep South, blacks and whites driving and eating and walking together, more than it happens in Los Angeles, say, or New York, places that flatter themselves into imagining they're a lot more progressive than the Deep Dark South.

My conservative Fresh Air Funders would notice that wherever you are in this country, you're never too far from a good old-fashioned liberal bookstore. Somewhere nearby is a college town, and in a college town you're bound to find a cappuccino. This will upset them, because conservatives like to think that the rest of the country-the "red states"-is a bastion of right thinking, but they're wrong. It's in the cities on the coasts-the Ahi Tuna Envelope-where people's politics clash. What they'll discover on their enforced march through the countryside is that Americans embrace an ideology so contradictory and inconsistent that each political party believes, with reason, that it alone is the people's voice. You could spend a lifetime on the road and never really know what America thinks of anything. This country has been tricking marketers and confounding generalizers since its birth. About the only thing you can be sure of is that you'll have trouble scaring up some ahi tuna.

On my recent trip, I thought about ahi tuna at Leo's Original BBQ in Oklahoma City as I denuded a pair of delicious ribs and sucked down a Pepsi. And I thought about it again half an hour later at Van's Pig Stand in Shawnee, chewing delightedly on a pork sandwich. And the next day, at the Rendezvous in Memphis during an early lunch of spicy, dry- rubbed ribs. And later, during the Late Lunch Hour at Corky's on Poplar Avenue, it came up again.

Slicing a hunk of perfect, mineral-rich steak from an obscenely huge slab of T-bone at Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, Miss., I heard vague, ahi echoes rumbling around my head, like an unformed thought or an indistinct memory struggling to sharpen. But it wasn't until a few disks of fried eggplant at the Dinner Bell, a dozen or so oysters at Wintzell's Oyster House in Mobile, and a platter or two (or three) of fried chicken at Mrs. Wilkes's Boardinghouse in Savannah, that I started to put things together.

Americans are fat. And that, pretty much, says it all.

We are literally fat, as everyone knows. How could we not be, with steak and fried chicken and 50 kinds of pie available all over the place? But we are also fat in another, more benign sense.

Drive along Route 98 in Florida, along the northern rim of the Gulf, and you'll pass through what some call the "Redneck Riviera." A long ribbon of white sandy beaches, with mild lapping waves, stretches from Pensacola to Apalachicola. And along the way, between long reaches of empty landscape, family resort towns have sprouted up. On the beach side of the highway are hotels and motels and RV campgrounds, and on the other side mini-golf courses, restaurants, water slides, and shopping centers. The hotels advertise their nightly rates on huge signs-I saw rooms for $39, with breakfast included, and some were even cheaper. At those prices, a working-class family could afford a beach vacation in the summer-room, dinners out, mini-golf-without too much stress on the family budget. What's so great about America? That's what's so great about America. And you don't need a focus group to find that out. All you need is a car, a few weeks in the summer, a tank full of gas, and an empty stomach.