The Madame Psychosis show (iii)
sound-checks the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered Madame Psychosis, whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth’s thick glass, her screen half-obscuring the on-air studio’s bank of phones […] She is hidden from all view by a jointed trip-tych screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel’s dials and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting cross-legged in its insectile microphonic headset, smoking.
Context
The radio staging as optics: even inside a blind medium she is screened, and what the engineer gets is a silhouette on lit chiffon — a projection, the shadow-play version of the veiled film star she used to be. "trip-tych" is hyphenated exactly so in the text ("triptych" appears unhyphenated a page later). The quote opens mid-sentence — the trimmed subject is the late-shift student engineer settling in at his booth.