Business & Tech

ENCORE: Johnston Makeup Artist Still Feeling the Caucus Love

Lindsay Donald — a West Des Moines Valley graduate — is the unofficial makeup artist to rising political stars.

Primping the presidential hopefuls at Saturday’s Republican debate was “a crazy awesome experience,” said Lindsay Donald of Johnston, whose job as lead makeup artist gave her a glimpse of the candidates the 7.6 million viewers watching the nationally televised debate didn’t see.

“The candidates put me at ease,” Donald said. “I don’t get nervous, but at the same time it was a big deal — to walk into their room and see they were calm. I was surprised at how willing they were to engage in conversation when, in 45 minutes, they were going to be in this huge debate. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Or is it?

Since Saturday’s Republican presidential candidate debate, Donald’s cell phone has been blowing up.

She did a “live hit” for Gov. Terry Branstad Sunday morning before his appearance on “Meet the Press.” They gossiped a bit about Ben Silbermann, the founder of a social media platform that allows users to “pin” and share things they’re interested in, being from Des Moines.

“I asked him what he thought about the debates,” Donald said. “He said they went really well and everybody did a good job. I said, ‘You must be exhausted,’ and he said he’d just come back from San Francisco, Palo Alto and Kentucky.”

It was a nice moment for the Valley High School graduate.

Tuesday morning, CNN booked her for an interview with former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

“I mentioned that I was at my parents' house one day when (her mother) was making phone calls for him and left message,” Donald said. “He asked, ‘Do we have their vote?’ I said they were still undecided. He went and did his interview, and as I was removing his makeup he asked, ‘Did I win your vote?'”

“It was the first time any candidate running for anything — whether it’s president or senator or a state office — acknowledged that I am a voter, too.”

That was a nice moment, too.

The past week has been full of them for Donald, whose usually uneventful December has given way to a flurry of freelance jobs as the candidates put their best faces forward under the media spotlight’s glare.

"It started off this week with two local shoots,” she said. “Now it’s a bunch of caucus-related stuff. That is pretty cool.”

She’s even had to turn down some gigs, including an encore of her debate performance Thursday in Sioux City. She already had an early Friday morning video shoot in Des Moines and, alluring as the opportunity is to rub elbows with someone who may be the next president, she didn’t want to stiff her bread-and-butter local clients.

But, she told CNN, “if you really can’t find anyone, I can make it work.”

She doesn’t want to burn the bridge. “CNN talked about some dates after Christmas leading up to the caucuses,” she said.

At Saturday’s debate, Donald had one of the best vantage points in the house: backstage with ABC producers, so she’d be at the ready to do touch-ups during commercial breaks.

When Mitt Romney made his now infamous offer to rival Rick Perry for a $10,000 bet over what he’d written about using Massachusetts' health-care mandate as a national model, the gasp backstage was audible — as in “Did he really just say that?” Donald said.

“Every time someone got a dig in or said something good, we got to see the reaction from the staff,” she said.

Donald’s biggest surprise?

“Michele Bachmann is lovely,” she said. “She is just a genuinely nice person, which was very refreshing because it’s not what you read.”

The other big surprise?

“I got a little insight into how news works,” she said. “I don’t think I will ever get over, whether I’m doing local TV or somethin as big as national TV debate, how many people it takes to pull something like that off. It’s amazing.”


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