This past fall, in the midst of the campaign to repair Lane’s celebrity image, Michael Colleran stood onstage at the Back on Your Feet fund-raiser at World Cafe Live to welcome the sneakered masses — the station co-sponsored the event — and listed the members of his Eyewitness team who’d made appearances that night.
“We’ve got Larry Mendte, and Alycia, and Kathy Orr,” Colleran said.
Just “Alycia.” Like Lindsay. Like Britney. It was his $750,000 single-name brand: “Alycia.” Once a person is on Page Six, a person’s on Page Six.
And now that they’d all made it through to the other side, now that the situation was under control and Lane was smiling hopefully at new beau Chris Booker in the back corner of the dance floor under a gigantic disco ball, maybe Colleran was thinking that a little Page Six wasn’t so bad for the station after all.
ALYCIA LANE COULD have been fine.
And she would have been fine — if she’d been laying low, tempering her impulsiveness, keeping herself under control. In other words, Alycia Lane would have been fine if she hadn’t been Alycia Lane.
Because it was Alycia Lane who chose to get out of that cab in New York around 2 a.m. on December 16th. It was Alycia Lane who got involved. It was Alycia Lane who, after thinking this through all night in jail, tried to call the Governor — right around the time she was supposed to be at the CBS 3 holiday party with the people who’d been working so hard for so long to save her face.
So the outcome was inevitable. Alycia Lane got out of the cab. She stepped onto the street, the same streets in the same city where she’d started 10 years before, when she was getting paid $28,000 and begging to go out and get the story, all alone, carrying her own camera. Except that person was long gone. In her place was Alycia, out with her celebrity DJ boyfriend and a powerful radio exec, wearing that expensive black designer jacket, her makeup as perfect as it always was on-air, pulling out her iPhone and snapping shots of what she must have thought was news. And then she said the words that both begin and end the story of Alycia Lane, the words that describe who she had been, and had lost, that might actually sound somewhat poetic, in the desperate way that famous last words always are.
“I’m a reporter.”
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