My 15 Minutes of Fame

The call came in shortly past noon, while I was eating lunch at my desk. I didn’t answer for two reasons:

1) I am in charge of customer service for my organization and if a complaint is not handled properly and works itself all the way up the ranks, it lands on my desk. This means I am often hit with phone calls from very angry people who want to drone on and on about their issue for a half hour. I don’t mind helping (if it is called for – many of these complaints are not valid), but I find it better to do it when on my time instead of theirs. So I rarely answer the phone blindly, preferring to call them back when I have a clean schedule and mind.

2) If you know me, you know I take eating very seriously, even if it is only a 220-calorie microwavable Chef Boyardee, bowl of salad, apple and yogurt. If I am eating, don’t mess with me.

But the 202 area code intrigued me, and I picked up the voicemail quickly. It was from an NBC Nightly News producer in Washington DC and he said he wanted to talk about my blog.

My first thought was he was calling about the blog we have at work, with work-related things. But I knew there wasn’t much newsworthy on there of late, certainly nothing that would generate a call from NBC Nightly News, so I wondered if he was referring to my personal blog.

That would be crazy, I thought.

But, yes, he said when I returned his call, this was about my blog on being an older father. He found it funny and interesting and thought I would be a good representative to speak on a story they were doing that night. It was about a study that showed children of older dads had an increased risk of falling victim to certain diseases and social ills.

I immediately started relating the story of our pre-birth scare when Sydney tested with a higher than normal chance of being born with the fatal disease Trisomy 18 and about our experiences with Tyson’s very serious heart defects.

He cut me off.

“I’d really just like you to talk about your experiences as an older dad. Talk about some of the things you worry about, the every-day things.”

“Oh, I have plenty of funny stories,” I responded.

“Great!”

Thus was born, what I believe to be, a misinterpretation by me. I’ll touch on that later.

First, he told me he was going to be at my house at 2:30. It was 12:30, I had a 1 p.m. meeting I could not get out of, and I had to pick up my kids at child care (he wanted shots of them). It was going to be tight time frame, but hey, how could I pass up on the chance to be on national TV?

I called my wife at work and asked her work colleague to have her call me back immediately. Word to my fellow fathers: if you are going to ever relay a similar message to your wife, make sure you stress to the person on the other end of the line that there is NOTHING WRONG. Otherwise, your wife will call you with panic in her voice, wondering if one of the children is maimed or dead. And when you innocently try to calm her fears by telling her that you needed to talk to her about a good thing, not a bad thing, she will yell at you. For a LONG time.

But once we got over that, I asked my wife if she was ok with the kids going on camera. Her response was a quick yes…”but the house is a mess!”

This is her main concern. Really?

“Oh, don’t worry, he can shoot around that.”

“No, you cannot have someone in our house right now! I am going to see if I can get off now and go home and clean before he gets there.”

OK. If it involves you cleaning and not me, I am ok with that.

That’s exactly what she did and our house looked better than it has since Sydney was born when I walked through the door two hours later. Amazing how motivating a potential public shaming can be.

My next call was to my child care provider. Amber was excited about the situation and said she would have the kids looking good enough to go on camera when I picked them up. True to her word, she accomplished that feat, which is no easy task with two toddlers.

So we were good to go when I rolled up about 2:30.

The camera guy, Ray, was already setting up. My wife had already done her Tasmanian Devil-like cleaning job. The dogs were locked upstairs.

Everything was perfect.

Then the light went on. This was a gazillion-watt light that lit up our house like a prison yard in the middle of an inmate escape. I am pretty sure you could see dust mites in the corner of the dining room 15 feet away. I knew at once this was not going to be good for my “look.” I’m old and craggly looking at this point in life, so anything above a 75-watt soft bulb is not BG-friendly.

But what to do? I didn’t want to appear vain and run upstairs to ask my wife for makeup. The camera guy said he had some powder, but “you look like you are ok.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

For the interview, we decided my wife would take the kids upstairs to avoid noise and then bring them back down when he shot B roll of us as a family. Surprisingly, the kids were ok with this and it worked.

Ray started giving me the logistics of the interview and I cut him off, telling him I do about 40 of these a year for my day job. I then asked if he wanted me to white balance his camera. If you ever want to look like you know what you are doing with a video guy, hold up a piece of paper and say, “hey, let me help you get a white balance.”

Totally impressed, he called the DC office and told them we were ready to roll. Soon, the guy from DC was firing out questions from a cell phone sitting next to me, which I answered, looking straight into the camera.

I told a funny story about how my wife, 15 years younger, gave me an ultimatum: kids are part of our future or we have no future. I caved.

I got sentimental and told him having kids was “the best decision I ever made.”

I told jokes about my main concerns as an older dad: being mistaken for grandpa; being in diapers at the same time as my children; being on social security when they graduate.

I was funny. I thought the interview went well. I thought that was what they wanted from me.

The guy on the other end of the phone line even said, “You nailed it.”

Then, my wife brought the kids down and he shot video of us together. I told Ray, “You have a very short window on this. These kids won’t sit still long and sooner or later one of them will cry about something or throw a tantrum. Get what you need as fast as you can.”

He must have been a parent because he understood. He moved quickly.

He got some great shots of me reading to the Sydney and coloring with Sydney. Tyson was either in my arms or in the nearby jumperoo. I looked like father of the year. When the camera went off, I turned them right over to my wife, the REAL parent in our family.

This is about the time I noticed Sydney’s scraped face from a run in with the corner of a wicker basket. She felt it would be fun to spin around and around in the living room as many times as possible, and on about the 13^th time around, she spun herself into a head-first fall.

This might not be a good look for national television, I thought. And, I am the spokesman for the local agency responsible for protecting children from abuse and neglect.

Was it too late to stop the interview?

Good husband that I am, I kept trying to get my wife in some of the shots, but the guy kept positioning us so she was not in camera range. He did not come out and say it, but I think NBC hates women. Or mothers.

He had the shoot wrapped up by 3:30. Then it was wait on pins and needles until 6:30 to see if we made the cut.

I celebrated with an early dinner of ribeye steak. Hey, I was home at 3:30 with a lot of time on my hands. And, I told you, I take my eating very seriously.

So 6:30 rolls around and we excitedly tune in. Right in the opening preview, they show a shot of me reading to Sydney! We made it!

In fact, we were the second story. I think they led with coverage of some war or whatever. Then they got to the important stuff.

I had DVRs rolling both upstairs and downstairs as they began our segment.

The first thing I noticed was that hi-def was absolutely killing me. I not only have a face for standard definition, I have a face for radio.

I could have used that powder.

Every blemish was highlighted and redder than a fire truck. My crow’s feet looked like ostrich feet. My goatee needed a serious trim.

Uggh.

The second thing I noticed is that all my good stories and jokes were cut from the interview. It quickly became apparent I had misinterpreted their intent. I thought they wanted me because I was an older dad who could provide witty commentary. Turns out they just wanted an older dad. I fit the bill based solely on birth date.

Any thought I had of promoting my blog and getting that book or sitcom deal went out the window when they 1) didn’t let me say anything funny and 2) didn’t promote my blog.

Sigh.

The third thing I noticed was that I needed to lose a lot of weight. This was no revelation, and I jokingly said I had ten cameras on me at 10 pounds each, but being on national TV at anything more than your Freshman 15 weight is a little embarrassing.

The fourth thing I noticed was that the story they were doing was not really a good one and went beyond the increased risk of ADHD and other some genetic diseases that I had discussed with the producer. They said my children had a greater risk of becoming drug addicts or committing suicide. When this sunk in during the DVR playback, I literally muttered “Jesus Christ” under my breath. I didn’t realize how seriously depressing this was going to be where my kids were concerned. 

 

But the positives outweighed the negative. Being on national television is fun. I have received calls or messages from folks around the country, some I have not talked to in some time. In fact, my phone was going off WHILE the segment was playing. Some people couldn’t even wait to call and tell me how shocked they were that I was showing up on their TV screen next to Brian Williams.

Getting to show off my kids was even better. I’ve received so many “adorable kids” messages over the past two days, I’m floating on air. Two people have mentioned they think Sydney could do model work, even with the wicker-basket face.

It will be a cool thing to someday show the kids. They went national when they were still in diapers.

I asked Sydney if she liked being on TV and her reply was an excited “Yes! Let’s do it again.”

Sure. We’ll make it an every-day occurrence.


PS: Here's a link to the story:

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/study-some-disorders-more-likely-among-children-older-dads-n39341