Living on Television
As Carmen San Diego, I don’t do television. I am a funny-looking creature with odd mannerisms and a fanciful dress sense. I have had to turn down television appearances because I was wearing a dress with a pattern that would moiré and I didn’t have time to go home and change. I spend a lot of time talking to print journalists, which I enjoy except for that one time that a magazine misquoted me and it looked like I was praising Facebook’s transparency policies. I am always happy to do radio-especially NPR. Appearing on public radio makes me feel competent and professional. Television does not.
In the interest of doing things that are hard (see also: learning Chinese, aerial circus arts), I take the occasional talking head request on news shows that I hope no one is watching. I have reached a certain level of comfort with Skyping into interviews. Having immediate visual feedback is very helpful in finding a camera angle that doesn’t cause my chin to completely disappear and stopping myself if I start to make a stupid face. I make a lot of stupid faces.
Television is outside of my comfort zone.
Last week, my adventures outside of my comfort zone put me on a red eye to Washington DC, so that I could co-host a half-hour news show about Chinese Internet censorship. Chinese Internet censorship is my comfort zone. It was the subject of my undergraduate thesis. This almost makes up for the pants.
Longtime readers of this space are well aware of my lifelong opposition to pants, succinctly described in this Euler diagram. There has never been any overlap between the times when I am truly happy and the times when I am wearing pants. Nonetheless, days before my television appearance I received a helpful primer from the show’s producer-here are your flight and accommodation details, here are some links to some of the things that we will be talking about, and by the way, wear pants. I can only imagine the unfortunate incident that led the producers to discover that the combination of the height of their couch and the angle of their cameras resulted in upskirt shots of their female guests. I scrapped my plan to wear a navy blue shirtwaist and brought out my pinstriped grey pants suit-the closest thing I have to corporate drag.
Washington DC is not a real place. It’s an airport and a shuttle between terminals and a professional chauffeur in a suit holding a sign with my name on it. Washington DC is a car with bottled water and a copy of The Washington Post. It’s a bright morning, driving past rows of bare trees. It’s a posh hotel with freshly-baked croissants and “Oh, I’m just here for the day to do a tv show.” It’s a hotel room with a view of the Washington Monument. Did you know that the saddest words in the English language are “empty hotel room?” This is a fact.
I spend the morning in my empty hotel room. I take a shower in a marble-tiled bathroom that is larger than the apartment I lived in in 1999. I use all of the fluffy towels. I pay for wifi so I can answer email and study up on Chinese Internet censorship. I try to sleep, because I did not sleep on the red eye. I get up and iron my jacket and pants.
The front desk calls me to tell me that my driver has arrived. I could not tell you where the studio is located, only that I seem to have driven past every big white monument in Washington DC. I track our progress by watching the little blue arrow move across the map on my phone, but this city is meaningless to me. There are joggers on the street and tourists with cameras. There are so many people in business suits and overcoats. I feel like the weirdest person for miles around. One of the producers escorts me upstairs. We talk about Burning Man and flamethrowers and quadcopters. He leaves me with a cup of coffee and the makeup artist, who complains that everyone from LA wants their makeup laid on with a trowel. He magically makes me look well-rested, for which I am profoundly grateful.
Live television is easier than I thought it would be. The studio is unusually cold. The producers and cameramen have piled on their coats and gloves and hats with flaps over the ears. We talk about travel. We speak in ridiculous Russian accents while we wait for filming to start. The hosts pace and throw balls and do yoga in an effort to keep warm. Newseum tourists stop to gape in the windows and see News Being Made. I sit up very straight and try to keep track of the cameras so I can catch myself if I start to make a stupid face. My hosts ask smart questions. The other guest, whose work I have been following for years, makes salient points. Once I relax a bit, I mostly do not make a fool of myself, though I think I may have fumbled a point about Facebook’s real name policies.
When it’s over, I’m relieved. I live up to the stereotype of Girl from San Francisco by constantly checking my phone, which provides me with a steady stream of messages from people who have seen the show. No one calls me an idiot. My work here is done.
In the interest of doing things that are hard (see also: learning Chinese, aerial circus arts), I take the occasional talking head request on news shows that I hope no one is watching. I have reached a certain level of comfort with Skyping into interviews. Having immediate visual feedback is very helpful in finding a camera angle that doesn’t cause my chin to completely disappear and stopping myself if I start to make a stupid face. I make a lot of stupid faces.
Television is outside of my comfort zone.
Last week, my adventures outside of my comfort zone put me on a red eye to Washington DC, so that I could co-host a half-hour news show about Chinese Internet censorship. Chinese Internet censorship is my comfort zone. It was the subject of my undergraduate thesis. This almost makes up for the pants.
Longtime readers of this space are well aware of my lifelong opposition to pants, succinctly described in this Euler diagram. There has never been any overlap between the times when I am truly happy and the times when I am wearing pants. Nonetheless, days before my television appearance I received a helpful primer from the show’s producer-here are your flight and accommodation details, here are some links to some of the things that we will be talking about, and by the way, wear pants. I can only imagine the unfortunate incident that led the producers to discover that the combination of the height of their couch and the angle of their cameras resulted in upskirt shots of their female guests. I scrapped my plan to wear a navy blue shirtwaist and brought out my pinstriped grey pants suit-the closest thing I have to corporate drag.
Washington DC is not a real place. It’s an airport and a shuttle between terminals and a professional chauffeur in a suit holding a sign with my name on it. Washington DC is a car with bottled water and a copy of The Washington Post. It’s a bright morning, driving past rows of bare trees. It’s a posh hotel with freshly-baked croissants and “Oh, I’m just here for the day to do a tv show.” It’s a hotel room with a view of the Washington Monument. Did you know that the saddest words in the English language are “empty hotel room?” This is a fact.
I spend the morning in my empty hotel room. I take a shower in a marble-tiled bathroom that is larger than the apartment I lived in in 1999. I use all of the fluffy towels. I pay for wifi so I can answer email and study up on Chinese Internet censorship. I try to sleep, because I did not sleep on the red eye. I get up and iron my jacket and pants.
The front desk calls me to tell me that my driver has arrived. I could not tell you where the studio is located, only that I seem to have driven past every big white monument in Washington DC. I track our progress by watching the little blue arrow move across the map on my phone, but this city is meaningless to me. There are joggers on the street and tourists with cameras. There are so many people in business suits and overcoats. I feel like the weirdest person for miles around. One of the producers escorts me upstairs. We talk about Burning Man and flamethrowers and quadcopters. He leaves me with a cup of coffee and the makeup artist, who complains that everyone from LA wants their makeup laid on with a trowel. He magically makes me look well-rested, for which I am profoundly grateful.
Live television is easier than I thought it would be. The studio is unusually cold. The producers and cameramen have piled on their coats and gloves and hats with flaps over the ears. We talk about travel. We speak in ridiculous Russian accents while we wait for filming to start. The hosts pace and throw balls and do yoga in an effort to keep warm. Newseum tourists stop to gape in the windows and see News Being Made. I sit up very straight and try to keep track of the cameras so I can catch myself if I start to make a stupid face. My hosts ask smart questions. The other guest, whose work I have been following for years, makes salient points. Once I relax a bit, I mostly do not make a fool of myself, though I think I may have fumbled a point about Facebook’s real name policies.
When it’s over, I’m relieved. I live up to the stereotype of Girl from San Francisco by constantly checking my phone, which provides me with a steady stream of messages from people who have seen the show. No one calls me an idiot. My work here is done.