The Pitch Set Me Up

This one goes out to all those who, upon being captivated whether in pleasure or in pain by a woman in a telly advert*, could not help, with the aid of a Cecil B. DeMillivanilli cast of thousands of results at Google and its Images offshoot, the IMDb and elsewhere, scratching just enough beneath the surface of undifferentiated drowser’s recognition to go from “Who was that pitchwoman hawking BrandX and hooking this RandY viewer?” to “This blowup poster of _____ I just got from the photo lab will look great on my ceiling mornings!”

*Those who swoon over such televised sandwich boards from among the unmammaried as, e.g., “Smilin’ Bob”, whose earning of his tag as “Chubby Santa” due to his “natural male enhancement”, amid a Beaver-meets-Como 50s whistle theme soundtrack, with a “gift that keeps on giving”, long lines of knee-sitting cup-cheeked office-party elves and all, will be recalled by AD 3008 answers to Dick Clark/Ed McMahon/Bob Saget/Tom Bergeron on TV’s All-Time Commercials From Hell, will have to await my conversion to The Other Team, and the Intersleuth assignments resulting…

The occasion for this post was this evening’s series of interstitial spoof interviews of America’s Incredulous Receding Misunderestimated Incumbent ["Face to Bush"] that Comedy Central – my round-the-clock answer to the Fox News addiction afflicting both family and loved ones alike – ran this evening between segments of standup comedy. The woman interviewing the PDI [Professional Dubya Impersonator, aka James Adomian] looked for all the world, to my supersoaked peepers, like the bubbly and well-named “Flo” from the Progressive auto insurance checkout-line spots , she of the troweled black makeup and beatified revelation over being able, with the money she saves insuring herself in-house, to afford a “big…tricked-out name-tag”.

I’m seldom wrong in such flash-frozen IDs: her name is Stephanie Courtney , a standout among the influential Groundlings improv troupe in Los Angeles (many a Groundlinger sunlights in the ad world, as it happens – in a racket as fickle as the screen grind, thespian-aspirants with landlords and stomachs and/or dependent mouths and without trust funds seldom wrinkle their noses at commercial work, especially pre-Oscar). And as dozens of posters at her IMDb page indicate, she has defied gravity twice metaphoric in lifting off the floor like an oversized gray cartoon hand everyone from teenaged hormone depots unable to render in mere words their helpless primal attractions to a character not glamorous in the accustomed sense (it seems the “bubbly” optimistic factor, in our age of backbiting suspicion, afforded the Gladwellian Tipping Point), to babies still shy of two years, whose mothers report them dropping their accustomed distracted gurglings once Progressive Lady Flo activates the universal remote of her inverted charisma and pipes her pied pitch to insured and uninsured alike, with the babies, at least, reported to abandon Flo/Stephanie to the primordial asteroid bombardments of the infantile preconscious instanter upon fade to black.

Update: See also “The strange allure of the Progressive insurance girl“: “What makes normal people fall so hard for the cute and perky pitchwoman known as ‘Flo’?”

Other pitchgals from recent years earning their 15 minutes in 30-second residuals: Sabine Ehrenfeld , the German-born former siren for Overstock.com (“It’s all about the O” – as said another Germanophone multiply-entendring O-zoner from Vienna, and veteran quizmaster of The Family Freud, for whom Oedipus turned Overstock, atop C20 Everests of psychoanalytic haute-vulgarisation), a one-woman Swiss Army knife in her offscreen Jane Bond versatility**;

** Seth Stevenson, Slate: “In addition to German and English, Sabine speaks French and Italian. She is proficient in basic tactical pistol skills, because she thought it would be a fun thing to learn. She also has a private pilot’s license and 350 hours in the air. After reading the Richard Bach book Biplane, she was inspired to fly solo—in an old-style, aerobatic tailwheel plane—from California to Montana. With camping gear in the back so she could land along the route to sleep and refuel. I am not making this up…”

Margaret “All You Need Is a Clear View of the Southern Sky” Easley , another Groundling comedienne known to many for her yeowoman years as drummer across cable and satellite for the HughesNet [formerly DirecWay] satellite internet service; and Felicia Day, an accomplished actor of formidable gifts in math and music whose comic-noir turn in a popular “Orange Underground” spot for Cheetos saw her respond to a passive-aggressive altercation with a rival female dryer-user in a laundromat by tucking a handful of the cracklike cheesepuffs into her interlocutor’s next load [Jello knees in her presence ? Guilty! - Ed., whose history of seeing red within when, er, seeing red without is written all over his future analyst's eat-your-heart-out-Portnoy airport confessional].

Subjects for Further Research In This Space: 1) Anne Marie Howard , the DiTech pitchstress, 2003-2007, also a veteran soaper [Another World, Days of Our Lives ]; 2) the smiling thirty-something with the smooth jet-black shag-cut and aquiline features who almost always appears playfully in action-packed spots with small children, most recently as a primly-skirted real estate agent; and 3) the chin-length straight-golden-blonde from early this decade who recalled me to my childhood crush on Elizabeth Montgomery, who appeared in commercials for a sleep aid, for a Visa [Citicorp?] card, paired with male mate in a department store, and for Just for Men, the hair “rejuvenator” for those for whom éminence grise signifies not so much reticent Richelieus of the realm as receding russet on the rug:

He [interior monologue miked sotto voce in an apparent echo-chamber, while filmed on her streetlit doorstep après-spree]: I wonder how I did tonight?

She [unwitty mindreader, aloud]: Would you like to come in?

The ticket-punchdrunk among you, hang on to your tot-Hoovering Angelinas, your Julias of labial cranial-circumnavigation, your studies in Scarlett, and your choco-cupped Reeses witherspooned on opening night: at least one blogger has his eye on those who are, “in spots” [like the goodness of the fabled curate's egg] as it were, only honeyed for the money…