• A transcendental television moment with the Eagles’ Don Henley
• The difficulty of making a green new deal with a determined developer.
• Sour grapes about no Concord stand-up
I can’t possibly complain about a career that took me around the world, let me meet and talk to fascinating people and rewarded me handsomely.
But here I go.
The many fringe benefits of my jobs in journalism included being able to visit friends and family before or after an assignment: an aunt and uncle in Seattle. . . college friends in LA. . . my nephews’ former au pair and her mum in their home in Bristol, UK . . . a certain someone I had the hots for in Brussels (a short hop over to Belgium after a London job), etc.
But, this one time, for the life of me, I couldn’t finagle a simple seat on the Eastern Shuttle to Massachusetts to put the finishing touch on this 1990 CNN story about preserving land around Walden Pond! I have family and friends in the Boston area; a best friend from high school lives in Concord, for Pete’s sake!
Watch the piece by clicking below and tell me it wouldn’t have been infinitely better if it included a shot of me walking pensively along the shore of Walden Pond pontificating about this issue!
I just can’t fathom how anybody was supposed to take this story seriously without a walking stand-up by the reporter, the most important part of every story. (Without a reporter, there is no story, for goodness sake!)
Anyway, Henley and his crew successfully purchased and protected 85 acres of land. And I didn’t get a free trip to visit friends and family. The executive producer of Showbiz Today, normally a delight to work with, had a Scrooge-like grip on the purse strings this time. (Just kidding, Scott).
I guess maybe I did get a Thoreauvian lesson in the virtues of leading a simpler life.
(I found this at vocabulary.com: “If you head to a cabin without your mobile devices, you might call that a Thoreauvian vacation.”)
-30-
P.S. In the video, can you identify the male celebrity seen just before Kathleen Turner? I have a hunch.
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