I think the single distinguishing characteristic about my professional life… aside from how very professional it often is not… is how many unusual habits I’ve picked up along the way. The fact I don’t seem to know how to point, for example, or count, for yet another example in any way even approaching normal comes to mind.
I spent roughly five months of my twenties working at Walt Disney World. Just five months. I still use the two finger sweeping gesture I learned there when I want to indicate where something is, rather than the eminently normal one finger jab. They drill the jab right out of you. The idea is that when you’re showing somebody how to get somewhere, you don’t want guests (always guests at the WDW, never customers) to think you’re pointing at them. A sweep of the fingers is less offensive. An entire generation of new Disney cast members has been born, learned to walk, talk and drive, and has started drinking to excess for a shorter amount of time than I’ve been using the two finger sweep instead of pointing.
Counting down from three to one. I haven’t set foot in a newsroom in almost a dozen years, and the reasons for doing a silent last third of the countdown don’t even apply in that industry anymore once everything went digital, but after standing in front of a camera to do a standup and invoking the magic incantation, “standup in three… two…” and leaving off the “one” so that the editor can set his in point for the edit on the fly by listening for when you stop counting, I seem to have lost the ability to count down to one like a normal human when trying to take pictures at family gatherings, log flume rides or children’s birthday parties. “Why didn’t you say the number one?” I have been asked this more times than I can count, and the reason I can’t count is because… well, I can’t count.
At least I don’t answer my home phone by saying “newsroom” anymore. It took about a year to drop that habit after I left the business, but I’m finally back to “hello.” However, there are still times when I hear the “breed breed” of a Nokia two way phone and I almost say out loud “This is Michael, go ahead.” Insidious business, news.
I only bring this up because I was reminded once again just how difficult it is to plunk down a divider line between the different chapters of a person’s life. Old habits die hard. If, as Dickens might have said during one of his more Copperfield-esque passages, this is the chapter in which I try to create a third act and learn new mental muscle memories, it seems I have a certain obligation to figure out how to incorporate those firs two acts and well worn habits into the mix.
The crowdsourcing campaign is about to begin. For anyone familiar with journalistic no-no’s, this is also known as Burying the Lead. Next week, we’ll cover the Potter Box. Anyhoo, In addition to budgeting, training and the whole shmear of organizing this project, there’s the little matter of the trailer video I’m creating to promote it all.
Working with a photog again, particularly one who establishes his chops at one of the local stations,. It was, for the afternoon, a return to The Life. I almost found myself reaching into my jacket pocket for my pack of Camel Reds. The news van was the only place where smoking was acceptable. Not permissible, but acceptable. It also didn’t seem to matter I wasn’t an actual reporter in this particular photog’s newsroom… or in any newsroom. We have, however, covered the same stories, had the same grievances, shared the same gallows humor, and if there were a ten year long temporal archipelago between his stories and mine, it didn’t seem to come up or make any kind of a difference.
The really disturbing part, though, was how easy it can be to slip into assuming, or at least noticing the worst about people, and how this creeps into your attitude about the world in general. News does that to you. When you don’t just cover one story about a police officer trying to catch sexual predators by posing as a teenage girl in internet chat rooms and that officer later gets arrested for taking the same bait himself, and you don’t cover this story once, but several times over the course of your career, you get a bit jaded when it comes to the thin blue line. When every newsroom has at least one person who wishes aloud for a good plane crash so he or she can have something to do, your standard of acceptable behavior tends to become a little fuzzy. There are only so many city council members caught smoking and selling crack you can cover before you just get tired of assuming the best of people.
That’s why the second act of my life has been so cathartic. You say you want me to interview children about what it would like to be adopted? Absolutely. Your no-kill animal shelter needs a PSA to help feral cats find a loving home? I’m in. Your mentoring program resulted in more than one hundred high school graduates? Where do I put the camera? I spent my twenties wading through snow, behind hurricanes and and around the periphery of every gruesome crime scene you care to imagine. That I spent my thirties with the same tools but around different stories was a form of therapy I don’t think they teach you in Psych 101.
So…. this third act. What is it exactly.
I’m so glad that the second bit of big news this week does in fact find a way to thread the needle. I’m happy to report the Australia leg of the Palette Project will most likely be in support of a fantastic new nonprofit called Employment Link. Now, I don’t want to speak too soon because the proverbial dotted line still needs more than dots on it, but my goal over the next few weeks is to make sure that the Palette Project as a film and that I as an individual can be an advocacy partner to support their mission. What I wrote abovve about trying to find the good guys after years of reporting on the bad ones? These people at Employment Link – they’re the good guys. This is an organization that creates employment resources and training for people with disabilities. I’ve been interested in this organization ever since I got hooked up with their for-profit arm, a company called Adaptive Technology Services. This is the company that first assured me if there was any way for me to hold onto any of the skills I’ve developed over the last twenty five years, they were going to work with me to find a way to make it happen. Portable CCT’s that help me use field mixers? There’s a way. Electronic pens that record your voice and link the file with dime sized pads you can put on everything from different wattage Arri bulbs to P2 media cards – tabs that, when touched by the pen, let that pen speak to you and tell you what you’re touching? Make it so. Optical character recognition apps that read everything from the menu at a diner to log notes in the field? Well dang, beam me up.
As I’ve written previously, this is the key. The key, of course, is not to be the story, but the storyteller. Inasmuch as this film exists because of the perspective I bring to it, it finishes because of the stories we’re finding along the way. Today, I can say that the first stories are actually, truly, not about me, and the reporter in me likes that. Unequivocally, the first leg of the trip is on behalf of a cause. that cause is the goal that everyone deserves the chance to do meaningful work. Employment Link believes there is a way. So do I. What Silvana, the executive director of Employment Link, reminded me of is that although mine is an unusual job… it’s a job, and it’s a business. A business with a crew and a schedule and obligations. Self employment, in other words. I’ve been reminded that this is an experience that, at its core, I should share with others who are trying to do the same thing.
So in this effort to fuse urgency and action with outreach and awareness, the results of the Australia leg are easy to set. We want to create jobs. I’ll be working between now and March 8, our tentative departure date, to raise awareness for this issue. Support for this film is now also about support for this cause… and spoiler alert, there will be other causes. This is leg one and step one, and there’s a vision here.
Pun absolutely intended.
