French Reporters & Class Reunions

Okay, here are a few updates:


LEG

Regrettably, I am still suffering from Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). I spent the entire month of September in bed with my leg propped up on a pillow. The pain diminished, and the swelling went down. At the beginning of October, thinking that my leg must be better, I ventured out to work at another fair in Willcox, Arizona. The drive alone caused my leg to balloon up again with edema.

That is how the month of October has been. I am feeling much better, but every time I try to get around normally, my leg winds up putting me back to bed. The doctor says that it could take up to six months before I am totally over this. I am spending a lot of time reading. But there is no TV watching, because the generator decided to spit out a valve. There is also no writing, because my laptop was sitting in a corner, collecting dust after taking a dump in Montana.

Thank God for my BlackBerry, otherwise I might have gone insane.

BUT… I did recently repair my computer, which is why I am able to blog on this fine Sunday morning.


CLASS REUNION

Last year, I missed my 20 year class reunion. Ten years previous, I had gone to my reunion where I almost won the “Most Changed” award. (I wasn’t always this fat.) When the 20 year reunion rolled around, I seriously considered going, but there was a fair going on that weekend. I was faced with the choice of: 1. Going to my reunion and spending money, or 2. Working the fair and earning money. Obligation to my family won out over nostalgia.

Several months ago, the Class of 89 announced that, in lieu of a 20 year reunion, they would have a reunion with FIVE classes, encompassing 1985 through 1990. Such an event is unheard of, and only a once in a lifetime event. I promised myself I would go.

I have spent the last several weeks listening to 80s music, looking at old pictures, etc. I have really been looking forward to the reunion. I have really been thinking of those days when I grew up in Casa Grande. It seems as if the young people in that community were very close knit. I have been thinking about the people I knew and associated with. This has been enhanced by my participation on social networks like Facebook. I have recently connected with many old friends there and have pleased that they have not been lost to me in the haze of the decades.

But also, I think I liked myself a bit better back then. Certainly in some ways, I was more of a dumb ass. But I was edgier, more laissez-faire, more devil-may-care. I wasn’t hampered by the mistakes of life. I wasn’t dulled by health issues or tamed by domestic responsibilities. Don’t get me wrong. I am still the same person. But there are a few moments when I look at myself and ask, “What the hell happened?”

So as I prepared for my class reunion, I looked at the few clothes in my closet and wondered what I would wear. My wives speculated which one of them would go. Long had I entertained a fantasy of walking into a reunion with a wife on each arm. But I made it clear to my wives – none of them would go. After having been on TV, I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself. I would be going alone.

So last night was my reunion. I didn’t go. And here is why…


66 MINUTES

At the end of September, as I lay in bed with my illness, I frequently wondered how in the hell I was going to provide for my family. I couldn’t work. My wife Temple was pounding the pavement, looking for a job. I prayed for an opportunity to come my way.

Then one afternoon, I got a phone call. I looked at the Caller ID to see way more numbers than the standard ten digits. Definitely an international call. I stared at the strange number and wondered whether I should answer it. I decided not to. A minute later, the phone rang again, and I decided to take a chance and answer it.

It was a reporter.

In the days after our show with Dawn Porter, it seemed as if I was being contacted left and right for similar opportunities. A company that produced reality programs wanted to come into our home, another British production company wanted to send a woman to live with us for one month, and someone even pitched me for Survivor. But it has been five months since anyone had contacted me.

I had thought that the proverbial fifteen minutes promised to me by Andy Warhol were over (although Dawn Porter had only given us ten minutes.) It seems I was wrong.

It was a journalist named Morgane from France. She represented a program called “66 Minutes”, and she wanted to come into our home to film us. Already it sounded better than our previous venture. Dawn Porter was a brightly-colored flower set in the middle of the simple peasants. Morgane would not be on camera. It would just be her and her cameraman, and she would ask us questions. But it would not be so much an interview as it would be filming us interacting with each other – such as filming Martha and Temple cooking in the kitchen together.

I told Morgane how the girls would not be keen to do another show, because their interviews had been cut from the previous program. They were still a bit miffed about that.

“Actually, we are more interested in filming them,” she responded. “We want to see this from a woman’s point of view.”

Mmmm. Not bad…

“If you are looking for polygamists where the women wear pioneer dresses and the men wear button-up shirts, then you would be better off going to Centennial Park,” I told them. “There is nothing stereotypical about me or my family. We don’t fit the idea of what people think polygamists look like.”

“Actually, it is our goal to show that there is no stereotype that fits polygamists,” she said. “They are just normal people.”

I am liking this more and more. Now for the coup de grace…

I explain to her how I kind of made my daughter Sophie participate in the last shoot, and that she had had a hard time with it. I understood the desire of a journalist to get the opinion of a teenage girl on the topic of polygamy. As valuable as I think Sophie’s opinion is, I was not going to force her to go through this again.

“I won’t make her do another shoot,” I said. “I am going to let her make the decision.”

“That’s fine,” said Morgane. “She does not have to participate. We can even digitally alter the footage so that it will blur out her face.”

Sounds good.

I took a couple of days to discuss it with the wives. Neither of them was pleased. They did not relish the thought of bringing the media into our home again. But things are tough. We did not get paid much for doing the last show. But we did get paid a little. This was ultimately the factor that made us decide to go ahead with it. It would be nice to get a little chunk of change at the end of October when we have very little in the spare change department.

As I have said before, I am such a whore. Would I drag my family in front of the cameras again for a few shekels? Hell, yes, I would.

I contacted Morgane and let her know that we would do the program. We set the date for Saturday, October 24. I was leaving Friday, October 23 open, because I at least wanted to attend my class reunion.

But we would do things a little bit different. We got such backlash from our friends and family that we decided to NOT tell anybody. It was really painful to experience the derision and disapproval of people close to me. So, in short, I would tell them squat about my plans. The day of the shoot, they would see a strange house parked at my house, but they would not know why until it was all over. It would be “none of their damn business”, as they say.


I’M NOT A WHORE

At the urging of my wives, I shot off an email to Morgane about how much they intended to pay us. It would be nice to have a dollar amount. The response I got was surprising:

“I do not know how it is in US but we never pay for interviews. It is against the principle of journalism, otherwise I pay you and you tell me what I want to hear. So I am sorry but it is not possible.”

At first, I thought she was surely pulling my leg. But I have a couple of friends in Belgium who are journalists. I emailed them, and one of them wrote back and told me this:

“I'm afraid your friend is wrong and that you won't get money for being part of a news story. When we're reporting on a story, we never pay the persons we interview, at least in Belgium and France. There are exception, like in the UK, where they pay to get exclusive interviews, but it's a totally different situation here.”

I went back and gave the girls this news. “I have NO DESIRE to do any show unless there is money involved,” I told them. “I’m not going through any of that unless there is some sort of compensation. We are not doing this show.”

But that night, I was bothered by my response. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about my love for their French language and my love of the French people. Ever since I was a small child, I wanted to learn French. For two dollars, I bought a small booklet on the French language from a grocery store. I took four years of high school French. I went to Belgium as an exchange program, and I volunteered for the same exchange program for six years, taking Belgian students all over Arizona. I taught French for five years for various continuing education programs. I worked for Holiday Inn as a French reservation agent.

What if the whole reason I felt driven to learn French was for this? Who better to represent Mormon polygamy to the French than me??

I emailed Morgane two days later and agreed to have her come into our phone for free.

The next step was to take Sophie aside and tell her our plans. A relative recently had told me that Sophie had mentioned in confidence how much my decision to make her do an interview had hurt her. I would not make her do it again. As predicted, she did not want to participate. So we arranged for her to be somewhere else that day.


THE QUEENS OF CLEAN & THE NO-SHOW

Three days before the shoot, we started cleaning the whole house. We bought supplies. We scrubbed the walls and doors. We organized the shelves. We got on each other’s nerves, because the cleaning was not happening as fast as we would have liked. It became obvious that we were not going to be done on time for the shoot.

So I made a tough decision. I decided not to go to my class reunion the day before the shoot. The plan had been – drive to my reunion and attend the mixer, drive home all night and be ready for the shoot. I did this, because the girls really needed my help with the cleaning. It was a hard decision. I had really been looking forward to the reunion and seeing all my friends. But this was more important.

As the date grew closer, I was concerned that I had not heard from Morgane. So I emailed her. She didn’t respond. I told my wives that the French crew was probably going to be a no show. We were all immensely relieved. But a couple of days before the shoot, I got an email. Everything was on schedule.

The cleaning continued. The day before the shoot, Morgane called me from San Diego. The crew was in the States already. She asked if we could move the interview to Sunday, instead of Saturday. I agreed. Although I was a little annoyed. I could have gone to my class reunion after all. I asked Morgane if we could go over the schedule. When should we expect them? What could we expect? She was actually quite anxious to get off the phone.

“I will email you the details,” she said.

I was starting to get a funny feeling from this response.

Saturday came, and we recruited all the children to finish cleaning. They cut weeds outside and piled them to be burned. They all scrubbed the kitchen down and got their rooms organized.

The whole time, I was motivating them by telling them that we would have some special visitors the next day. I bought some steaks to grill for our company. The cleaning was done by noon, and to reward them, I took them to a picnic at nearby Woodland Lake. As the sun set, I was getting concerned that I had not heard from Morgane. What time were they going to get there?

I finally called Morgane. I was getting really, really frustrated. I wanted my message to say something like this:

“Mais qu’est-ce que tu fous? Ça ne va pas, non! On vous attend en Arizona!”

But it was probably something a lot more polite, knowing me.

I got a call from Morgane an hour later. She cancelled the visit. They were also in the States to do a piece on health care. That story quickly became more important, and her producers wanted her to pay more attention to that one. So they would not be coming. She apologized profusely.

I shared this information with the girls, and we all collectively breathed a sigh of relief. We do care about being a good example. But this is a tough time of the year for us. We are not doing so hot financially. I am out of work with a serious illness. The schedule revolves around getting the kids to and from school. Things just feel a little too chaotic right now.

Still, there is a part of me that really wanted to share this with the French. I really feel like it was a missed opportunity.

And, as I looked at the photos from the class reunion on Facebook, I really feel like I missed out on it all for nothing…