Offstage moments.(City Desk)

GREEN rooms are offstage rooms where actors relax when not performing. The origins of the name are lost in the mists of time; the traditional guess is that the color green soothed eyes that had been staring into limelight. Limelight is long gone from theaters, and television never used it, but TV stations also have green rooms, for the use of talk-show guests. Any veteran trotter in the worlds of punditry or book PR has stabled in innumerable Manhattan green rooms, while waiting to run his course.

Green rooms vary with the prosperity of the station that is your host. CNN has moved into new quarters on Columbus Circle, which look like Mordor with a makeover--all sleek icy metal ("Sauron, that volcano was so Dungeons & Dragons"). The road to the green room at Bloomberg LP leads past winking tropical fishtanks. Other green rooms recall precinct houses, or Central American car-rental offices. All are simple, most are primitive.

Every green room has an attendant bathroom. "Never pass a men's room"--advice I have heard attributed to Nelson Rockefeller, and George VI. Some stations give you a key and an intelligence test--two rights, and a left. It's not hard, unless you're trying to think what to say about Social Security or Paris Hilton. Unisex bathrooms are likely to have stern, handwritten warnings against flushing tampons. Ladies, don't you already know this? Worst are the bathrooms with windows pried open, even in winter (though you reflect they would probably be worse yet if the windows were closed). High-quality shows provide refreshments. Firing Line, of blessed memory, had no place to sit, but you could nosh from trays of sandwiches, thanks to the Jewish-motherliness of producer Warren Steibel. My wife was astonished, one morning, at the caliber of the spread provided by the New York City version of the Today show. When the weather reporter on the monitor analyzed clouds over Oshkosh, my wife realized she was waiting to appear on the national version of the Today program ("You'd gone uptown," a friend in the business said). Lesser green rooms have sad little fridges holding the sustenance of employees; in least green rooms these are padlocked.

At some point you leave the green room to be made up. A woman sits me on a director's chair, puts a barber's cloth around my neck, and asks about my few sad last gray hairs. Would I like them brushed? I always refuse. She earns her pay on my face. Sometimes on your way out you can swipe a handi-wipe to get the crust off, which does nothing. Better to resign yourself to looking like a drag queen for the rest of the day. The make-up artists are typically pleasant, as are all the off-stage personnel. One woman I used to see at the History Channel was researching a light-infantry unit of Indians that George Washington had recruited during the Revolutionary War; they were distantly related to some modern casino-owners. I wonder whether she persevered.

Montel ...