Laura is pleased to report that she just figured out how to insert the photos onto her brant. That’s an overstatement. She got the photo onto her post about the Book Swap Cafe but she has no idea what she did to get it to work. Now she’s going to try to retrace her steps and replicate her results. If she figures it out, she’s going to repost the “Laura Does Cable” post with photos.
After the huge disappointment of not being able to get the photos uploaded into the “Laura Does Cable” post, Laura sort of went into hiding. Not actual hiding, since she’s had several brant-worthy appearances. But hiding from branting about her brant-worthy appearances. For instance, she didn’t brant last Sunday about her drive to Concord, New Hampshire, to do a local cable show called “Book Swap Cafe” with two of the cutest women she’s ever met — Anita and Mickey — because she couldn’t bear the idea of 1) trying and failing to upload the photo that one of the six unpaid community cable television studio technicians took of Anita and Laura and Mickey at the “Book Swap Cafe” table right after the taping and 2) writing about her appearance on the “Book Swap Cafe” without being able to illustrate it with a photo. That said, she’s going to try to rally right now. First, she’s going to try to upload the photo. Then, she’s going to post this mini-brant, with or without the photo.
Technical difficulties are clearly not fixed yet. Laura just realized that the photos she thought she was inserting into last night’s post didn’t work and therefore her supposed-to-be-funny photo-documented report is not so funny. Laura would try to fix it now but she has to drive to Concord, New Hampshire (it’s 6:42 a.m. local time) to do a local cable tv show (more cable TV!!) called The Bookswap Cafe….
Even though this is out of sequence — that is, Laura should first be writing about her first event, a reading and signing at Newtonville Books — she’s going to start with her trip downtown to do a Comcast Cable TV entertainment-news show mainly because she has photographs and wants to try out all the cool brant-improving features now available to her.
Some might consider “Backstage with Barry Nolan” the poor man’s “Entertainment Tonight” but it’s produced by Comcast for Comcast (she thinks people “in the business” call that “original programming”) and it’s national and it gets real live celebrity guests — but Laura’s getting ahead of herself once again.
Anyway, on Thursday night Laura and her media escort, Benji, left the suburb of Newton, Mass., and drove their Volvo station wagon down Commonwealth Ave. past B.C. and toward B.U. where the Comcast Studio is located. (Laura assumed an actual driver was going to chauffeur her in a plush black sedan so she could sit in the back seat and read a magazine or talk on her cellphone with the little high-intensity lamp on the way she always sees businessmen doing on the highway when they’re being driven to and from the airport, but obviously her publicist screwed up.) It was dark, and since her escort couldn’t drive — much less read, since he’s only 6! — matching the streets up with the Mapquest directions she’d printed out earlier was pretty stressful for Laura since she’s one of those people who can get lost coming out of her own bedroom. Her lack of a decent sense of direction (especially in an area she grew up in) notwithstanding, Laura was able to find the Comcast building and get there on time. Which, for the former publicist that Laura is, means an hour and ten minutes early.
Once Laura and Benji entered the building (it was kind of annoying because Laura The Author About To Be Televised had to open the door for Benji The Child-Escort, but she remained professional and courteous and did not pitch a hissy-fit the way she could have under the horrendous and humiliating circumstances and which would have been entirely justifiable), they were brought to the Green Room to wait.
Having thought ahead, Laura had suggested to Benji that he bring something with him to do while they waited, so he brought a shopping bag filled with train tracks and trains which he then proceeded to spread out all over the floor of the tiny Green Room. Laura was afraid someone was going to complain, but the only other person in the Green Room was a woman who did Reiki (alternative healing) and she didn’t seem to mind one bit.
Waiting in the Green Room was super exciting for Benji! Good thing they’d gotten there so early and had so much extra time to kill! Clearly Benji couldn’t wait to tell everyone the next day how exciting waiting in the Green Room was and how cool he felt hanging out at the local cable tv studio even though he looked really really bored and tired. In fact, the only time Benji seemed to perk up was when they watched on the Green Room’s large flat-screen TV John Stamos being interviewed from the set of “ER” (actually, that was the only time Laura perked up, too.)
Anyway, after about 40 minutes Laura went to the make-up lady’s room, and the shortly after she returned a young man from the show came and gave her a mic to thread up her sweater and clip onto the neck of her sweater. (Laura always gets uncomfortable doing this since most of the time the young men who are helping to thread the mics up people’s shirts or sweaters are about half her age and she doesn’t want to scare them.)
As it turned out, Barry Nolan was not there (he allegedly “had the night off” and “was out on assignment” which made it obvious to Laura The Nobody’s Fool Author that someone was lying), so instead Laura was interviewed by veteran entertainment reporter Sara Edwards. Sara is blond, brassy, sassy, and a true professional. Sara was also just a little bit older than Laura which made Laura feel better about how old she felt around the young mic-person. Benji was even allowed into the studio and got to sit on a high swivel chair while Laura endured the grueling interview. Three or four minutes later, the interview was over, and Laura led Benji out of the Comcast studio.
Unfortunately, Benji was hungry, and so at almost 9:30 p.m., Laura took him next door to a small pizza parlor that was still open and got him a slice. While she watched Ben eat (and while she wiped cheese off his chin, and opened his bottle of water, and got him more napkins, and offered him the shaker jar of grated cheese, and ate his crusts, and threw away his greasy paper plate), Laura couldn’t help but feel proud of herself. Despite their roles being ridiculously reversed — Ben was supposed to wait on Laura hand and foot but Laura was the one who’d ended up waiting on Ben hand and foot! How unfair was that?! — she’d remained professional and polite even under extreme duress. Being a guest on cable tv wasn’t easy but Laura refused to be one of those impossibly difficult celebrity-divas who complained about everything – just like the hasbeen, Mary Ford, in the book she was promoting!