In which I am "the winner", and get fifteen minutes of fame
... or more precisely, 8:20 minutes of interview on the local radio. :)
This is old news already, but I've been sooooo slow to return то LiveJournal. :P
So, there was this contest on the site of Sofia Pride 2012, and I kinda got challenged to write something. So I took advantage of that part of the time between two dental procedures when I was in a relatively good shape, and did write something loosely called "an essay" - I don't know what exactly to call it myself. And since the title was My Colours, I had a sudden inspiration to use the rainbow-coloured bracelets that I was making for Pride for me as a focus of what ended up as... the best description I can think of is "a carefully structured stream of consciousness". Sorry, it's in Bulgarian; I might try to translate it, but you have no idea how difficult it is for me to translate my own work. It's not easy to summarize - it is about festivity during a protest action, overcoming my own feeling of vulnerability, being there for my gay friends, the teen boy who wanted so badly to go to Pirde but couldn't for family reasons, so I promised to give him one of those bracelets and a rainbow flag (which I did on the next day after Pirde)...
Then my creation won the contest, and I suddenly got a ton of congratulations on being "the winner," which felt very odd. It even got published in the online edition of a Bulgarian newspaper a couples of day later (and surprisingly, didn't get any nasty comments - maybe because it's not on their news page where all the regular trolls comment).
But the real surprise was an invitation for an interview from my local radio about that essay - they obviously learned about me from the site of Sofia Pride, and contacted me through the Pride organizers (with my permission). The host was a very friendly young man. We agreed to record the interview in advance because I wouldn't manage to go back from Sofia on time for a live interview in his show, which is always on Sunday. He did email me some general guidelines on my request, and I was allowed to ask a couple of preliminary questions, but he wanted the effect of a spontaneous conversation, so they just started recording the interview without much preparation. I'm afraid we achieved the effect of spontaneous conversation a little too well (they even left unedited a place where I made a gaffe, quickly corrected myself, and then laughed at it), but on the whole I managed to talk coherently if not very smoothly. Alas, they cut off too much of the raw material for my liking (probably to make the short conversation we had even shorter to fit in what limited time they could allot it), but I think they left enough of the important parts, and I managed to outline in very general terms my teen friend's story (with his permission, and of course took special care not to leave any clues to his identity identity although we didn't expect any of his acquaintances in his city to listen to my local radio). But I have no idea how their regular audience took it.
Then, since this radio can only be heard in real time, my teen friend recorded the interview in the only way he could think of - with his phone, and ended up with two bad-quality files (they split the interview in two parts and played some music between them) in a format that nothing on his or my computer could open. Then another friend converted them to mp3 files of (he said) even worse quality. So I had the chance to hear myself on the radio after I returned home - and after he returned from his grandma's home so that he could send me the files from his home computer. LOL I just didn't manage to ask anybody else to record the interview in the chaos around Pride, so it was up to him.
And now my literary fame is already over, and so is my promising career as a media star. :)
