On Hiatus

No, there's nothing wrong. But I will be taking a hiatus from the blog until August, in order to get some pressing work finished.

See you then!

A Touch of Mime

I don't get nervous at interviews. I've spoken with Broadway stars and government officials, Grammy winners and Olympic medalists, millionaires and homeless children. I'm telling you (with the exception of Bernadette Peters), I don't get nervous.

But last week, I found myself a little butterflied. No flop sweat, but definitely buzzing with jittery energy. Why? Because I interviewed Kazoo.

Okay. The truth is I interviewed Jerry Hager, but for 26 years he was Kazoo at Seaport Village in San Diego. As the resident mime until 2006, Hager put on a show most every weekend, bringing light and magic to the world.

I grew up fast for reasons I'd rather not get into, but during those 1980s summers, watching Kazoo silently tell his stories, I got to be a kid. Just another child, marching along -- tromp, tromp, tromp -- humming a tune on a plastic kazoo, following a friendly mime.

I shouldn't have been so nervous. Hager is a wonderful man and a talented teacher at Grossmont College. His family loves him. He inspires people.

His daughter told me later that I made him cry with my confession of how much his shows meant to me. I didn't mean to bring on tears, honest!

The thing is, though, you never know how you're going to affect people in this lifetime. Kazoo helped me believe in magic when there was precious little to be found. He brought theater to life for me in a real way.

I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to tell him that.

Photo courtesy of jennerally.

A Red Letter Day

I was late on deadline with my latest feature. The editor said 2 p.m. and it was 4:45 by the time I was preparing to press send. The phone rang. Hurriedly, I typed the last few words and shot the story off. Then I answered the phone.

I expected to hear a male voice asking where my story was. Even when I got a female asking if this was Jennifer, I thought "well, maybe he's out of town and this is the editor who's covering."

Never in a million, jillion years did I expect to hear a lovely lady from the Kiss of Death chapter of the Romance Writers of America telling me I finaled in the paranormal division of the Daphne Du Maurier contest.

I'm still in shock.

Photo courtesy of gnovi.

Why It Mattered to Me

Last week, I wrote an article for the Union-Tribune about a restaurant in National City that reopened with new owners. It was meant to be an easy story about a place with a Hollywood-linked past that had been beautifully refurbished to reflect its history.

The editors didn't get the easy story I was assigned. Instead I turned in a piece about how history gets lost sometimes. In this case, the restaurant's owners had paid homage to a famous chef that was claimed as the original owner/founder in 1941. The real owner/founder was another man, not famous, whose name disappeared -- through no real fault of the current owners -- from the official history.

A friend asked why the official history mattered. It's only a restaurant. Why not just let the owners have their illusions about the origins of the place. After all, it didn't change whether their food was good or their drinks were strong. The place was still beautiful, the people who loved it still loved it. Why write this story?

Good questions. Ones I'm sure the restaurant's owners want to know the answers to.

So why did I do a week's worth of research, going from the court house to city hall to the library's history room, to discover who the original owner was? Because I believe the past matters. I believe the truth matters. And if I simply repeated their story, especially once I'd found evidence to the contrary, without really looking into it, I would be guilty of bad journalism.

That's right, bad journalism. The lazy kind that takes quotes out of context, doesn't provide background and uses hearsay instead of facts. Sure, it would have been easier. It would have been a pretty story. It even would have made business sense -- I would have made more money per hour if I had simply written a less-researched story.

But it would have been untrue. And the real story of the restaurant's original owner and its history was no less fascinating than the one that was wrong.

The thing is, truth matters. Facts matter. Even the little facts, the ones no one will know (or care) if we get wrong. It's like the saying goes, "the devil is in the details." And once you devil those small details, the large ones are even easier to mistake.

And then you end up in the Iraq War. Think that's a leap? Stop caring about the small things and see how much easier it becomes, over time, to stop caring about the larger things. Once you start taking the easy path, it gets more difficult to take the harder one.

That's why it mattered to me.

Photo by emdot.