The scene backstage at a fashion show is one of chaos, nerves, and confusion. But up in the control booth – overlooking the runway and the twittering crowd – it’s a different story. Especially when Lynne O’Neill is in charge.

This pint-size pillar of calm has been producing and directing fashion shows since the 1980s, first at Macy’s San Francisco, then here in New York. She’s worked with everybody from Versace to Betsey Johnson, Lane Bryant to Levi’s. She’s put on fashion shows and events for Conde Nast magazines, Nike, and retail outlets such as Target and Bloomingdale’s. During this Fashion Week alone she’s involved with 12 shows, including Luca Luca, Carlos Miele, Cynthia Steffe, and Perry Ellis.

Ms. O’Neill is so much a part of the industry that she inspired a character on “Sex and the City.” Remember the episode when Carrie is cast in a fashion show, and then falls in the middle of the runway? In it, comedienne Margaret Cho played a tough-talking show producer named Lynne Cameron, a character based on Ms. O’Neill. (At the time, Ms. O’Neill’s name was Lynne Manheim. So “Lynne Cameron” – as in Camryn Manheim – was a little inside joke.)

“I’ve always loved Margaret Cho,” said Ms. O’Neill. “It’s just thrilling for someone you admire to be playing you.” But she did have one tiny complaint: “For the record, I don’t use the F-word like Cho did.”

What was realistic about the episode, though, was the spill. “Falling…that happens. The shoes are really high. The dress is too tight. They can’t see because of all the lights. But the models are so great. They cry, then they get back out there,” she said.

Indeed, it takes more than “fashion road-kill” to shake up Ms. O’Neill, 52. “There’s always a lot going on,” she said. “I can’t get hysterical about it. I try to be really calm.”

It is, in essence, her job to be calm. The list of things a show’s producer oversees includes just about everything but the creation of the garments. Not every designer needs the same amount of support, but according to Ms. O’Neill, the job can include supervision of the people responsible for any or all of the following: lighting, music and sound, staging, casting, styling, dressers, venues, budgets, transporting garments, and fittings. Depending on how much work a designer is asking for, the process of meeting and deciding things can take about two months. Or it can happen at the last minute – when a designer calls for more hands on deck.

The only constant from one show to the next is that Ms. O’Neill is the director. She’s the one with the headset, communicating with the backstage people and giving the models the cues to start walking. “I call the show,” said Ms. O’Neill, allowing her perky, cherubic features to turn just a touch serious.

Indeed, when she wants to make a point, she does a little pursing of her lips – which are painted only in the “Heatwave” shade of NARS lipstick. (“It’s my signature,” she said.) It’s a stern, effective gesture that communicates, ever so gently, “My way or the highway.” And it is perhaps the measure that girds her from major catastrophes. Though Ms. O’Neill has been around for years, she had a hard time coming up with cringe-inducing nightmare moments from fashion shows past. “I usually don’t have too many of those,” she said.

After thinking for a bit, she finally came up with a story from a New York show from the days before 7th on Sixth moved its whole operation to Bryant Park. It was a men’s show, and several of the models were missing. No one could find them. Outfits had to be reassigned. The order of the show was changed, until finally, it had to begin. “I mean, the lights were going down, and we still couldn’t find four of the models,” she said.

Just before the lights were to go up, the models appeared, running straight up the side of runway into the backstage area. “They came running in with their backpacks. They had been getting their hair done for the show after ours,” she recalled.

But that level of disorganization is much less common these days. “People know how to do fashion shows now. 7th on Sixth has been like the Harvard of fashion shows,” she said. “They’ve got great vendors. They’re very, very organized. So much is done for you – there’s security, and volunteers to do seating. It’s educated all of us.”

If it sounds like Ms. O’Neill enjoys her work, that’s only the beginning of it. “I never think about what I do as business,” she said.

And indeed, fashion is sort of a sideline for her. When the fashion world is not pitching tents at Bryant Park, Ms. O’Neill spends her time upstate in Barryville, N.Y. Her involvement in country life has grown steadily since spring 2000, when her business partner Mark Veeder – owner of EventQuest – suggested that she rent his guest cottage in Sullivan County.

“I never had a weekend share or anything like that,” she said. “I thought, ‘Bugs, trees, animals? What am I going to do?'”

She ended up living there for six months, then bought her own house. Four months later, she met a certain Bobby O’Neill, and by September 2001 they were married.

Ms. O’Neill co-founded the Barryville Chamber of Commerce, a small organization that supports businesses like the 1880s boarding house that she and Mr. Veeder renovated and opened in 2003. Spring House Commons, which sits along 300 feet of the Delaware River, includes residential apartments, three hotel rooms (Slumber at Spring House Commons), a coffee house, a pet shop, river-front yoga classes, and an art gallery space.

So Ms. O’Neill seems to be that rare New York woman that has found balance, even if it is a balance of work and more work. But whatever it is, it seems to be entirely pleasurable. Ms. O’Neill loves her fashion work in the city – which she operates out of her apartment in Greenwich Village (decorated in “modern Hawaiiana”) – and seems refreshed by her development work in the country. While she feels responsible for promoting Spring House as a viable business, she keeps her fashion work going only by word of mouth. “I’ve always stayed really quiet. I want to work in my own way,” she said. “It’s a business about youth and the new, hottest thing. I’m really happy I’m still here. I really love what I do.”