The interview:
I honestly think it went pretty well, all things considered. We were very nervous going into it; part of that was just the OMG of having someone stick their camera into your face, and part was the sensitivity of the discussion. There were some last minute back and forth stuff with the ABC people in New York that nearly made us drop out of the thing over concerns over the general angle of the piece.
We had to make it really clear about a number of things…we very pointedly did not discuss Mere’s sister’s family by name and didn’t discuss them much at all.
We very pointedly did not endorse the idea of going out and looking for a lost sibling. Quite the contrary. We stressed that SisterFar was more an effort to give people leads on how to handle a meteorite dropping in their back yard, and that such an occurrance is miraculous, but requires a huge amount of work to handle, and a lot of goodwill.
We stressed that we had been lucky to encounter another family that was reasonably analogous to us, and that other people would find that the whole ‘twin-law’ setup would provide a gulf that mught be beyond them to bridge.
The kids, if they have a bond, drive the process, but the parents can wreck it. And the idea of telling some kid that their recently rediscovered and rebonded twin is no longer available to see because That Other Family are Just No Good is too painful to imagine.
This is not to say that the benefits to the kids can’t be spectacular. They can, and we’ve seen that happen with Meredith and her sister. But you have to think things through and be very aware of the pitfalls.
Susan thought that the only thing that I might get called out on was in describing why we went to China, I obliquely mentioned that the process was much simpler there than in other countries, and described without names VERY briefly the less certain setup of places like the former Soviet Union (two trips, depends on the judge, etc). I thought Susan (who was not going to say a thing originally) should do most of the talking. I probably broke in too much for the cameraman to follow my interruptions. We’ll see.
The worst part for me was when they brought Meredith on camera, and she Got Scared, hemmed and hawed and spoke in a whisper to any of the questions. I felt terribly for Mere, who was suddenly and uncharacteristically awkward and untalkative, and she was having some reaction problems from another bug bite, so she really wasn’t on her game at all.
Also when they were doing closeups of the still uncompleted redo of the sisterfar.com website; there is little there right now to see, and we can’t show them the online message area; waaaay too private and sensitive.
It all took a lot longer than I’d expected; they got here at 11, and they left around 4. Part of the delay was because they totally rearranged our living room, had to do an elaborate setup of lights, filters and screens (even powdered my face), and set the scene just so.
Over the last several days, they also changed things back and forth a lot over who was actually coming out to the hose - first it would be the correspondent, then one producer, then another, who was a trouper - his dad had suddenly had a stroke out of state, and he did hs job, but it was obvious after the cameras went off and they were packing up that he was seriously worried. He tried really hard to get us all to be comfortable, and we and the ABC crew got into a couple of rolling discussions about photo and video tech stuff, the merits of Tivos and so on.
The story should be on World News Tonight sometime this next week while I’m Atlanta. Needless to say, the Tivos will be ready. Connie and Bruce took off during the interview, and we had to toss the dogs into the back yard and seal off both the dog doors (inner and outer) - they were just too curious and into stuff and ready to make noise.