My First 15 Minutes

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This came back to me while walking to pick up Thai food:

When I was 11, a friend of the family called and asked if I wanted to be on television. Of course I did! Didn’t everyone? (With no crystal ball at my disposal, I could not know that a) I would later appear on the pilot for a CBS kids show b) I would be captain of my high school’s It’s Academic team, appearing four times on local television c) I would be forced to sing in a television commercial for my then-employer, the San Antonio Light d) CBS’s Anthony Mason would feature me for a shockingly long period of time on the Sunday Morning show’s “Fine Print” feature e) I would be an extra on “Homicide” f) I would appear on local television so much that I would actually get to the point of completely forgetting an interview g) I would follow the farm report on a Madison, Wis., newscast. h) I would be forced to be the Sun’s official questioner in the 1998 gubernatorial debate because I was the least valuable member of our team, and the real political reporters needed to cover the event.)

The show in question was some sort of public affairs program and my job, as it turned out, was to show that adolescent girls went through a period of development in which they could not do the kind of sit-ups that involved thrashing violently forward and touching one’s toes, then falling back, boucing up again, etc. etc. (This sit-up was later discredited as a form of exercise, and the physical limits of adolescent girls had nothing to do with it.)

So there I was on local television, in a leotard. Was there a chroma-key reading “Can’t touch her toes”? No, that detail is too impossibly perfect to be true. The leotard was pale blue and not particularly flattering. I looked very hangdog, with my wire-rims and my straggly hair, the front ends pulled back with a barrette, in the style of the day. Well, it was the style at School #201 and I’ve got the photographs to prove it. I looked, in short, like an idiot.

But I was famous.

Please feel free to share your ealy tales of celebrity or humiliation here. And if anyone can link this back to Thai food, I’d be much obliged.

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8 thoughts on “My First 15 Minutes”

  1. Well, my humiliating tv moment was when I was on Romper Room and I was reprimanded by Miss Jean for fiddling with a box of toys or something they had put down in front of each of us. I was supposed to be paying attention to her. Well, what did they expect.

    I ended up being on local tv a few times as a kid. After the infamous Romper Room incident, I was also on Big Brother (not of course the current show). When I was a couple of years older my mother would get tickets for shows as part of our birthday party. So I was on Boom Town, Bozo, and another show whose name I can’t remember. Got my own scene on Boom Town when I was selected to walk in the background looking at pictures on the wall as Rex Trailer talked.

    And of course I always wanted to be one of the kids on Zoom despite the fact that I wasn’t outgoing enough to qualify.

    Mary

  3. When I was 19 years old I was the editor of my inner-city community college newspaper. Trying to be controversial and boost our sagging readership, I wrote a piece about how hard it was for middle class white males to get financial aid and at the end I made some leaps of logic and fancy and ended up concluding that if things didn’t change soon, middle class white males would be the new minority in schools and the workforce.

    I was not prepared for the riot that followed.

    First I received death threats and had to have a campus security escort me out to my car. Then the campus black caucus started fighting for me to get thrown off of the paper and this all culminated in a big protest rally on campus that was covered by the local TV and newspaper and was even picked up by one of the Detroit stations.

    I was interviewed at the rally by the TV crews and there was a great pic of me on the front page of the paper with three of the largest guys I have ever seen pointing at me and looking like they’re going to kill me. I keep it framed on my desk. :) I also still have the tapes of my appearence on the news.

    Laura will like this next part.

    The next day, the school set up a meeting between me and the president of the black caucus that was covered by the TV news. We had a sappy handshake for the cameras and then went out to the Bankok Peppers Thai restaurant to have fun and talk about how famous we were going to be.

    There wasn’t a single copy of that paper to be found anywhere on campus after that.

  4. Let’s see – I thought it was”Come on and give it a try” but I’m too old to claim to have watched Zoom as a kid. (back in the early 90s when I was sort of housebound after ending up on disability, I rediscovered some awesome kid’s television. Ask me about “General Mathpital” and Sergeant Tuesday, or was it Wednesday?
    Sixth grade – was sent to NYC to be part of a kid’s tv show modeled after “College Bowl” for the elementary school set. It was called “Do You Know?” and my team lost, but not by much.
    A “Streets of San Francisco” episode you can find me walking across the street; I was visiting my sister, and spent a couple days following the show around town to various location shots. A 2nd assistant something got me into the shot; and I got to ask Michael Douglas how “Cuckoo’s Nest” was going. Oh, wow, man, swoon city.

    So Laura, speaking to television and exercise (now how’s that for a bad segue), I got nostalgic and sniffy last night watching some women’s eights during the Olympics. The _only_ team sport I ever loved was rowing; my only time participating in it was in college, but I was in the same eight as Anita deFrantz, Olympic medalist and IOC member.

  5. During my first on-camera experience I froze. Completely, embarrassingly, miserably.

    I was 4 or 5 years old, and my mother took my brother, sister and I to appear on the Lorenzo Show. Lorenzo was a sad-faced hobo clown, and his show was a low, low budget Baltimore based Saturday morning kids program. The audience sat around the perimeter of the studio in hard, uncomfortable chairs while Lorenzo did his shtick. So depending on where you were seated, and where Lorenzo stood in the studio, there was a good chance the camera would pick you up in the background at some point. I don’t remember much about his show, but towards the end of the program he would have the kids come out and dance with him, while his theme song, Yackety Sax, blared. The camera would then pan the dancers. When the big moment came, I stayed glued to my seat. My older brother, and more outgoing sister immediately jumped up and joined the party, but I was too intimidated by the crowd, the noise, the lights. Then, the big man himself came over. Lorenzo leaned over to me and held out his hand to join the converted. At that moment I knew complete terror. I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I turned away from Lorenzo and grabbed on to my mother so tightly I think she had trouble breathing. I guess Lorenzo knew that a cringing fearful child on a kids show wouldn’t make for decent ratings, so he quickly turned his attention to happier, more outoing members of the audience.

    Fourteen years later I returned to TV. Like you Laura, I made it on It’s Academic (same year in fact). The emotional scars from Lorenzo had long healed, and I enjoyed the experience. We managed to win our first match, but weren’t as successful in the second. Some of my buddies later said that we would have done better, but a team-mate couldn’t seem to get his answers out. They said he “froze.” I think it was just that he met his Lorenzo.

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