“You’re an intern,” she said point-blank. “I don’t see the common ground. You’re twenty!”
I was twenty-one. And we had Whitney Houston in common! What more did we need? I’d dated a guy in Paris who didn’t even speak my freakin’ language, so how could this woman tell me we didn’t have enough in common? And you know what? Despite how annoying I must have been as I repeated to her all summer long “We ARE going to be friends,” she eventually relented in a major way and remains one of my best friends today.
Imploring Lynn to be my friend
Newsrooms are a crazy mixed cocktail of contradictions—fervor and indifference, devotion and irreverence, curiosity and cockiness—but I knocked it back in a single giddy shot and bellied up for more. I had found somewhere that I belonged. Instantly and irrevocably.
Unlike Five O’Clock Julie, I couldn’t get enough of the place. I would have happily lived out of a sleeping bag in the mailroom. Sometimes I’d ditch my job and just walk around; there was no door that I wasn’t bold enough to enter. I could have come upon a door with a sign reading MORLEY SAFER PEDICURE SUITE, PROCEDURE IN SESSION, and I still would have barged right in. I would waltz into the As the World Turns studio and just stand there, or slip into the control room and watch how the soap sausage was made. (As discussed, I hated CBS soap operas, but it was still extremely cool. All the actors were much thinner and better-looking in person, and whenever any of them passed in the hallways, I always said hi, because even though I wasn’t a fan of their show, I was a fan of saying hello to celebrities and having them say hello back!)
One day, I sauntered down to the (closed) CBS Evening News set at airtime. I knew they’d pan the newsroom during the bumps to commercial breaks, and I wanted to be on TV. The show was in progress and the room was eerily quiet with the exception of Dan Rather’s comforting voice. I plopped my narrow ass down right behind him at a desk that didn’t belong to me and started reading someone else’s newspaper. Then I picked up that person’s desk phone and dialed my mom to tell her to watch the show closely. Everything seemed to be going fine until a tall redheaded bully came up to me and asked me who I was. I sheepishly told him I was an intern at the Morning News.
“You don’t belong here,” he snarled. “Get off the set.”
He kicked me off the set! At least he did it during a commercial break. I wanted my mom to see me on TV, but not being forcibly ejected.
It was utterly humiliating. What was I thinking, walking around the place like I owned it? Maybe Madonna had steered me wrong? What if they told Lynn? Needless to say, I never returned to the Evening News, and being bounced only added to the inferiority complex I had already with the Evening News interns, of whom I had not been chosen to be a member, and who all wore suits and looked like they were better at standardized tests than me. I was scared those Ivy League interns would find out what I did. Scared of what, I’m not exactly sure, since intern beat-downs weren’t exactly prevalent in the halls at CBS. (Incidentally, the big ginger-haired bully who kicked me off that set was Bill Owens, who later, probably despite his better judgment, became a great friend and the executive producer of 60 Minutes.)
I should’ve let that little set-crash be lesson enough, but I soon got another mini-can of Whoopass shaken up and opened in my face. It happened a few days later, when a Morning News producer pulled me into the conference room for a “little talk.” At first, I was excited. Little talks are my favorite! And this one started out like gangbusters with him saying I was bright, and aggressive, in a good way, and well liked. He said I had a lot of potential, and that I reminded him a lot of himself, which on one hand was really cool, because he was only twenty-four and already a producer, but on the other hand was puzzling, since he was Asian and a little chubby. Did he mean that he thought I acted like him or looked like him? Did he see himself looking like me? By this point my ponytail was in full effect and I was working a coordinated suspender/tie combo almost every day. I did not see a physical connection between us.
When my wandering mind stumbled back on track, he was telling me that I could really go far this summer and make a big impression, but … And are compliments followed by “buts” ever good? No. He said that I was a bit “rough around the edges” and needed to work on some things. He said there were important people in the newsroom and that I needed to “tone it down.”
“Do I need to talk softer?” This was not the first time in my life that I’d been told to tone it down, thanks to a volume modulation problem I’d inherited from my mother.
“No,” he said. “Remember, Andrew, this is CBS News.”
I’m sure that what my older Asian twin regarded as being gentle, I mistook for vague. I asked him for a specific description of what to do. He said I needed to be more “introspective.” Introspective, adj.: the act or process of a reflective looking inward to one’s own thoughts and feelings. Oh, kind of like the complete opposite of expressing yourself? Dammit, Madonna! He concluded by saying the
