My Six and a Half Minutes of Fame

In case you missed it, yesterday I made my grand debut as the next Oprah. (This is just one of my many parallel dream lives: Being an Oprah, being a NatGeo photographer, being a sheep herder in Ireland, being a musician in New York City . . . there are more.) Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that big, especially since I was the interviewee and not the interviewer, but still. Being on Studio 5 is a pretty big deal in my puny little world. I have since found out that several of my Utah friends and acquaintances tape this show daily. It's like the local Regis and Kathy. (I mean Kelly. I mean Kelly and . . . who is it now? That's how much I watch TV. Though I did tape and finally watch the opener for the third season of Downton Abbey last night as a reward after my day of drama. Was it just me or was the Mary/Matthew wedding kind of anti-climatic?)

Someone from Studio 5 contacted me back in December right before Christmas with an invitation to discuss one of my articles on their show, but both of us were up to our eyeballs in Christmas at the time so I didn't actually get all the details until a few days before. I say all the details, but it wasn't until about 10 minutes before they put the mic on me (which I must say felt a bit like a violation of my privacy since I had to thread it up my shirt and expose my muffin top right then and there to everyone who was milling around behind the scenes) that I was handed A SCRIPT with the questions that the hosts would be using. It kind of threw off my preparations since I was under the impression that their questions would contain the bullet points from my little article which would have made easy prompts for me, but it didn't turn out that way. I just had to remember the points in my head and say them at the right time to coincide with what they were putting up on the screen. This only proves challenging if you're freaking out because there is a camera on you and you know you are on live TV. It was a little crazy once I had the mic on and the hosts moved over to the set I was on during the commercial break. We started making small talk and then someone started counting down . . . can you feel the adrenaline behind that??

I actually felt pretty good about the whole thing other than my brain freeze right in the middle of the interview (what's my 3rd point again?), and my bad hair. (What can I say? I'm going bald and don't really know WHAT to do with my hair. Plus, during the time I had planned to beautify/bodify my hair, I actually ended up helping Will finish his Will O-Reilly, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato puppets ((an interview on Greek philosophy for THIS BLASTED GIFTED PROGRAM)), and Rachael wasn't interested in dressing herself, and everyone needed cold lunches, and of course Brandon was already off to work and in the middle of a surgery by that time even though his wife was about to become the next television sensation!)

Honestly, I surprised myself by feeling more excited than nervous. I keep saying I was just happy I didn't vomit or pass out on live TV, but the truth is I had a really good time. (They've asked me back for February, so it couldn't have been that bad!) Here's the link so you can see it for yourself, plus a picture of me by the NBC peacock. (KSL is the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake.)

What do you think? I could even settle for being the next Katie Couric. When I do the show again in February I'll have to try to figure out a way to hijack the conversation and become the one who starts asking the questions. Now that's a winning idea.