Smiling for five hours straight is...

Smiling for five hours straight is not one one of life’s easier tasks. Smiling AND keeping up a steady stream of conversation is harder still. Yet Anita Carson, a woman who 14 years ago spoke no English, does this Monday through Friday, on camera no less. The 32-year-old Carson is one of eight regular hosts on America’s Shopping Channel, a 20-hour-a-day cable television program that gives viewers the opportunity to buy everything from jewelry to tackle boxes, all in the privacy of their own homes. The on-air sales job is a return to television for Carson, who did commercials and film work for the American Film Institute before moving to San Diego two years ago. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Carson at the shopping channel’s El Cajon studio, and David McNew photographed her.

I was raised in a small town on the Belgian-Dutch border. I was really born in Java, Indonesia. When I came to the United States as a teen-ager, I didn’t speak any English, and I was thrust into a school of 2,500 students where I really didn’t even know how to get from Point A to Point B and didn’t know how to make that known to anyone.

I was accustomed to living in an environment where everyone gauges you very closely according to how you live, what you wear, what you eat. Because I came from a very small Catholic town, I had gone to Catholic school. And you would have your priest stop by for dinner and talk about your church, why you were not attending. We would have teachers over to discuss our school work, and they would come over for dinner or come over for tea in the afternoon. That was a part of daily living.

Here, it was just such openness. People couldn’t care less if you wore blue shoes or green shoes or whether you were in church or not. The ability to truly live a life style that suited you without a concern about who was looking and who was watching . . . it created an inner peace, I think, for me.

I think a lot of people look at shopping hosts as “Well, geez, they’re just up there for five hours, and it’s a very frivolous job.” But, I don’t know even the most consummate actress who can do a scene for five hours fresh and with no breaks. Hosts on game shows and whatnot have commercial breaks, which we don’t have.

It’s the people who keep it fresh. The individuals who call in offering you perhaps a change of pace from the fact that you’re not able to make one product work because there are no batteries or whatever. Their friendliness . . . if I had to sit up there for five hours and not talk to a human being and just look at a cold, black camera, I think it would make the job that much more difficult.

People who call me up, it’s almost you have to be a psychologist, a mother, a teacher and a salesperson all at the same time because you’re not just up there selling. People want to obtain information. And, when they’re disappointed with a product, you have to console them somehow and keep them enthused about purchasing something later on in the day. It’s that ability to work with people constantly and really try to understand what it is they’re looking for and what it is they want.

We show a minimum of 60 products a shift. I have shown 137 products in a five-hour shift. Juggling is required as far as remembering pricing, getting very creative about the various uses of a product. You’re trying to give your viewers as many ideas as you can. You certainly don’t want to limit it to just being a vase or it just being a pencil holder. It sounds very frivolous, but a lot of times it’s emotionally exhausting to do that, to take these products and make the most out of them in a five-hour shift.

I feel very good about being able to do this, to work with the viewers. I get everything from baked cookies to presents for my pets, letters, post cards when they go on vacation. I’m almost like an extended member of their family. That’s how most of them look at me and other hosts too. Somebody they can confide in, somebody they can talk to. Someone who is invited into their home every single day, so you’ve become more than a salesperson.