Blah Blah Blog

I’m thinking of using this blog to occasionally give you additional information on stories that appeared in the Topsail Advertiser. Sometimes we don’t have space for all the information we wanted to give you, and sometimes an interesting piece of information, while good, has to be edited out because it disrupts the flow of the rest of the article. Let’s try this now. It’s a little behind the scenes, cutting room floor blog:

Extra Info About The Sneads Ferry Community Theatre Story From This Week

I love covering plays from this group. They always have what seems like the perfect balance of seriousness and silliness. For example, the play they are performing for the next two weeks, “The Cemetery Club,” is a comedy about Northeastern Jews dealing with death. While the Sneads Ferry Community Theatre is a mix of Northerners and Southerners who plan to put on the best performance possible, many of them laughed when I asked them if they were going to try to perform in authentic accents for the characters. Some said they could pull it off, and some laughed and said they could never pull it off. But they all agreed that they were more concerned with just doing the play right, and letting the accents fall where they may. That’s them in a nutshell: they respect the theatre, but they don’t get delusional and pretend they are on Broadway - they keep Sneads Ferry true to Sneads Ferry.—————————–

Two radio interviews and newspaper interviews

 I work three jobs. (Don’t get the impression that I’m a workaholic. I’m not.) Some days I work one job, and some days I work all three. The problem I have is when I work for the Topsail Advertiser and then go to work at my radio job during the same day.

If I am interviewing someone on the radio, I have to converse with them and share the ”talking time,” otherwise, it sounds weird to hear one person doing all the talking and the interview can quickly lose direction. That’s not the problem. The problem occurs if I leave the radio station and then go somewhere and conduct a newspaper interview for the Advertiser on the same day. It’s a problem because, when tape recording a newspaper interview, it is proper for me to stay out of the story when I’m recording it. I really should only ask questions and ask follow-up questions into my tape recorder and let my interviewee just run with it. However, if I’m still in radio mode, when I get home to write down what I recorded for the story, I find that my dumb$*s has spent as much time talking into the tape recorder as my subject, even though no audience will ever hear the recording - just me! And then the article takes twice as long to write, because I have to fast forward through hearing my idiot self banter on with someone who is trying to tell me their story - not OUR story.

I’m not always that bright. Sometimes I’m not sure why anyone would hire me for a job, much less three people. Then again, I do have really nice legs for a dude. Maybe that’s why. Or it could be because I make other people feel smart by comparison. Seriously, if you want to feel brilliant, hang out with me for an afternoon. I can’t even chew and walk gum. But I try - and that’s the sad part. No matter how much I yell at it, that gum just won’t walk. This started out as a semi-professional piece - what happened here at the end? I don’t know, either. And I wrote it.