Apparently The Cameras Turned on Them

The first thing I heard this morning when I woke up was the sound of a familiar voice. It was Michelle Valles, on the radio with the morning crew at KLAQ.

When I was at KTSM NewsChannel 9, Michelle "Vata" Valles walked in the door one afternoon as a deer-in-the-headlights graduate of UT Austin, looking for a TV gig. She found it, made her way to the main anchor desk and eventually spread her wings back towards Austin, where she is the primetime news anchor for their NBC affiliate, KXAN. This morning she was talking about the South By Southwest tour, an annual event in Austin that is as much to music lovers as a Baptist revival is to Billy Graham. But somewhere the conversation turned, and the topic focused on the "poor judgment" of two local television news stations. Covering the story of a traffic death (in TV we called this a "fatal") that had happened the night before near a legal drag strip, the two news crews - one from the CBS affiliate KDBC Channel 4, the other KVIA Channel 7 - caved to the urging of the crowd to race down the strip themselves. To see it for yourself, click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioHh4a5C-9g

Now really...this is some funny shit. Having spent some time in TV myself, I can tell you that stuff like this goes on ALL THE TIME in news rooms, and those involved certainly don't have any intention - or wish - of seeing it in the headlines. This, unfortunately, is on the lips of Anderson Cooper, CNN, and - as the above link can attest - You Tube. Did they make a bad decision? Hell yeah, they did. Those live trucks cost a fortune - probably in the neighborhood of half a million bucks. News Directors in El Paso reluctantly hand over the keys to operators that are often not even of legal drinking age, but they are trusted. Now there's a word you haven't read or heard in any news story related to this sad but funny incident.

So that's the story: This situation is really not about a poor judgment call by two news crews to haul ass down a short strip of pavement; this is about a violation of trust that can never be replaced. According to the newspaper this morning, the guy driving the KDBC truck has been fired, so he REALLY won't ever have the chance to redeem himself. Rick Cabrera, the guy in the Channel 7 live truck, was the heir-apparent for outgoing local news legend Gary Warner. Now both KDBC and KVIA managment are on full-time damage control, and each station will now have the unfortunate task of earning back their reputation among viewers (and their fellow media colleagues) as being the leader in covering the news, instead of being the story that's covered.

Gee, I wonder where KTSM was that night? To me, the video posted all over the web looked too good to have come from a cell phone. No, it looked professional. Hmmmm....

How I Missed the Boat

Oh hell, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are having twins. Does she have to do everything I do?

I decided today that I missed my calling. I should be sitting outside my larger-than-life Malibu home with my larger-than-life bank account sipping a larger-than-life margarita. Yum...I can see it now.

So where did I go wrong?

It was more than likely that first day of college. As I forced my crusted eyes to open, still in bed nursing a righteous hangover, my mother nagged. "It's the first day of classes...are you even registered?!" Truth be told, I was not registered. I really didn't want to go to college, but I had put up a really good act for the last year. It all seemed so hard. When was I going to get the call that an unknown, incredibly rich uncle had died and left me his fortune?

Since the phone was not, in fact, going to ring with that call, I picked it up instead. I called my best friend. Yep, she was going. Said she had a philosophy class that afternoon. Yuck - that didn't even sound good. A chile cheeseburger from Sonic...now that sounded good.

I made three more phone calls and got three more confirmations that everyone had accepted the invitation to higher education. Everyone except me.

I'll spare you all the gory details of my college career (Oh! that would be so fun to read, wouldn't it?) and just tell you that seven years later, a few Fs, two husbands and a wonderful baby girl later, I graduated with a degree in journalism. Should you be surprised? No. It was the quickest way through what I thought was going to be a painful process. And I didn't have to have a shitload of math classes. The only math I need to know is the ratio of gin to tonic. Now that's my kind of philosophy.

What $750 Will Buy You

My daughter swallowed a marble tonight. You would think a mother of three would have the wits about her to make sure things like marbles don't make it into their child's mouth, but I do, and it did. I was in the middle of dinner (more mac and cheese) when I heard the gag. I reluctantly called my mother, who rushed over to sit with my other two daughters, and in a matter of minutes I was speeding away towards the emergency room.

Why do they call it an "emergency" room anyway?

There seemed to be no real emergencies in this room. At the risk of sounding snobby, it just seemed full of lathargic, pathetic souls looking for either sympathy, attention or a reason to not report to their minimum-wage jobs the next day. Two seats over sat a teen mom with an inconsolable baby. Accompanied by her mother, her mother's mother and a pack of likely illegitimate nieces and nephews, the doe-eyed mother looked around and absent-mindedly patted her baby's bottom. Maybe the nieces and nephews were the young mother's own siblings - who knew? Where I live, anything is possible. In the corner, a group of twenty-something thugs with freshly shaved heads yammered in Spanish about their tia who hadn't been seen because well-insured white people had come in. "Ya basta," they sneered. This was pointed at me; they had had enough. Since noon, they had been waiting with their aunt who was having chest pains. Have they ever heard of an ambulance?

I'm glad it wasn't really an emergency...my kid is close to shitting that marble already.

"Baa, blaaah mwaaa" was all you could hear now over the snippy Spanish mixed with screaming, half-clothed kids. The noise came from a woman well into her 50s. She was with her mother, who patiently sat in the waiting room, rocking her daughter who clearly had the mental capacity of a newborn child. Though indicipherable, other mothers were tuning in to her; she was just as loving and caring over her "baby" as we were over our children. They communicated through a secret language I hadn't heard since The Elephant Man; unknown to everyone around them except each other. The woman's husband sat next to her, disconnected from his daughter whom he had likely never shared a simple conversation with.

McKenna is getting wiggly. I wonder: how long does it take someone to poop a marble, anyway?

New blood walks through the automated sliding doors. It's a construction worker who got a little excited over a circular saw and lost a finger. His limp hand, cradled by his filthy other arm, was wrapped in a bloody Van Halen t-shirt. The finger was in a Blake's Lotaburger bag. "Did you put the finger on ice, Mr. Trujillo?" asks the triage nurse, who is directing traffic, juggling telephones and answering questions from a cop...all the while processing each "emergency" that walks in the door. "Nah, man. I just put it in the bag 'cuz it's all I had." This is not good news. The nurse explains that she'll have to take the severed digit to the back, while the body it once belonged to would have to wait with the rest of us.

The Elephant Woman just peed.

It's 9:00. My daughter and I walked through the door at 7:00, and had already been seen by triage, an x-ray tech, and the admissions people. The Elephant Woman's mother tells me she's been there since 3. I don't ask what they're here for, and I don't have to. A young blonde in maroon scrubs calls my daughter's name through swinging doors. It's my turn.

"So how did she swallow a marble?" sneers Young Maroon Blonde. Poor thing. She has no idea who I am. "Well, I suppose she just opened her mouth, popped the son of a bitch in there and swallowed." Maybe that wasn't a good idea, I thought to myself. "I understand you're frustrated, Mrs. Jameson, we're all just trying to do our jobs."

While Young Blonde tried to do her job, I thought about Tia, who may very well have had chest pains and still had not been seen by a doctor. Elephant Woman, sitting in her own urine. The dirty Van Halen fan who will never again be able to flip anyone off with his right hand. My daughter swallowed a marble. Was it really an emergency?

After a record 20 minutes in a private triage room, a lovely East Indian pediatrician stops by to see my baby. "I checked her x-rays, and I don't see the marble. Are you sure she swallowed it?"

I thought about this for awhile. I had a terrible day at work. My husband and I last talked over a heated financial argument. I really thought she swallowed a marble, but I couldn't be certain. I surely wouldn't bet money on it - hell, I didn't have any money to bet. I asked my daughter if she swallowed the marble and she said yes. Would a 2 year-old lie to her mother?

I showed the doctor a bag full of specimens much like the one I assumed my child had swallowed. She examined them closely, extracted one from the bag and disappeared to x-ray the marble by itself. Then, comparing it to McKenna's chest and abdomen films, she concluded that if my daughter had in fact swallowed a marble, it would have shown up bright and beautiful on an x-ray. There was nothing bright or beautiful about McKenna's x-rays, other than the fact that they showed a perfectly heatlhy two year-old child who was all mine.

"I guess maybe she didn't swallow it after all," I said. I was all I could offer. The doctor left me alone with my writhing child, now so fed up with "emergency" rooms that she was just about to pop. I wonder if that would certify a true emergency in this place? An exploding toddler in her pajamas?

With my bag of marbles and my daughter who was now certified marble-free, I was sent to the window where you pay for services rendered. "Okay," said the woman, typing feverishly on her keyboard. "Your emergency co-pay is 750 dollars, Mrs. Jameson. How would you like to take care of that?"

Now wasn't that the question of the night? Really, I wondered, what the hell did I get for $750? Peace of mind knowing my child's intestines wouldn't get clogged by a non-existent marble in the middle of the night? A crash course in Emergency Room sociology? Cheap conversation among strangers with whom I had nothing in common with, who were secretly wishing bad things upon me and my daughter because we were white and insured?

I wrote a check. I said nothing. My thoughts spoke volumes. McKenna and I drove home and I walked through my house to the smell of hot dogs. "Here, Sugar, eat a hot dog and relax," my mother said. She meant well, but hot dogs? I really wanted the bottle of gin I walked through the door with four hours earlier. The whole 750-dollar bottle. I plopped my 750-dollar bag of marbles on the table, kissed my mother goodbye, thanked her and put my children to bed. My house was clean, thanks to my 750-dollar mother/maid, and I curled up on the couch with my 750-dollar hot dog. I guess it's true that some of the best things in life don't come free.