That night I went to Uncle Charlie’s, which that summer became my favorite (gay) bar of all time. There was something comforting and familiar about Uncle Charlie’s brass and wood and TV screens. (Don’t look for it now; it’s been closed for years. Of course, like the dozens of Original Ray’s Pizza Parlors in NYC, there’s another Uncle Charlie’s that also happens to be a gay bar, but that’s not it. My Uncle Charlie’s, much like most real elderly uncles, is no longer with us.)
As I sat thinking over a few beers, I decided that it was possibly possible that I was acting a teeny bit too familiar with certain people. Like, the one day I was introduced to the newsblock producer and I said, facetiously, “I think I read about you in The Undoing of CBS News.”
And another day, when I was answering phones and someone called us from an affiliate in Spokane, Washington, I asked them if they were number one in ratings. When they said they were, I said—loudly—“We don’t know how that feels here!”
Then there was the time Erin Moriarty gave me some tapes to transcribe, and I, summer intern to this seasoned news reporter, replied, “I don’t transcribe.” And that seasoned news reporter looked like she wanted to shove the tapes down my throat and use my nose as the “play” button. She was pissed, and it was the first time I’d ever been yelled at by a superior.
“Are you kidding me? You do now.” And I did.
Oy. I’d easily thought of three examples right off the top of my head while drunk at Uncle Charlie’s! I vowed at that moment that I must remember that this was CBS News, and I was only an intern, there to learn, but not a true member of the team. Not yet, and maybe not ever if I continued to put the “punk” in “spunk.”
Since we’d kind of shared a moment, and we maybe looked alike, I’d hoped that that producer would notice my new self-reflective streak. Maybe I’d earn his respect. And then maybe he’d stop asking me to hold the elevator for him. Literally, he’d make me run down the hall two minutes before he went to the elevator. Was he that important? And, by the way, can I point out in the light of 2012 that there’s got to be some kind of teachable moment in that elevator story for him? I’ve never made any intern fetch an elevator for me, no matter how introspective he or she wasn’t.
Later that summer I pulled Green Room duty for a whole week. That meant a Town Car pickup at five-thirty in the morning, which was a privilege surpassing even free food. I didn’t care that I had to wake up in predawn darkness; the idea that I got to take a black car through empty Manhattan streets to a live network TV show where there was unlimited coffee and people getting ready to appear on-camera was so glamorous that I could barely handle it. When I got there, I headed to Studio 47—“the fish bowl”—and checked guest pickup times while Charles Osgood anchored the morning news. Then I greeted those guests in the Green Room and escorted them to the studio. In that week, I met the Karate Kid (Ralph Macchio); a hair expert; the writer of a book about only children; a Vietnamese author; Jack Scalia, who had been a regular on Dallas; some actor from Batman; Martin Luther King III; and Kerry Kennedy. Although I was only an intern, and it wasn’t televised, or probably very much fun for any of them, for me working the Green Room was like hosting a cocktail party. Actually, a weird cocktail party with a group of incongruous attendees that took place way too early in the morning. To this day, putting oddball combinations of people in one room is one of my favorite party devices, and a hallmark of Watch What Happens Live. When I was in that Green Room, I felt like I was in the center of something very, very good.
On the day that gay rights activist Vito Russo appeared to talk about AIDS, I felt as if I was in the center of something great. Russo was one of the storytellers in Common Threads, a documentary that had just been released about the first decade of the AIDS crisis, told through profiles of thousands of victims memorialized by the AIDS Quilt Project. Russo had contributed a quilt panel honoring his companion, Jeffrey Sevcik. As Russo spoke about contracting the disease himself, I was proud that he was on our show—that a gay activist and a gay issue were considered important enough to merit the thoughtful interview Harry Smith was conducting that morning. As I watched his appearance from the control room, though, a few staff members started laughing and cracking dirty homophobic jokes while Russo recounted the death of his lover. Despite my vow to be true to who I was, at that point in my life, there was no way I was going to speak up and say something to these people, who were my superiors. It was a crushing moment. But internships are a time to learn, and some lessons are way harder than how to collate scripts. Vito Russo died the following year.
* * *
Despite my initial doubts, I immersed myself in the consumer gig, and the more I got into the groove, the more responsibilities were entrusted to me. One afternoon, I was doing research on a tattoo-eyeliner scam and another story about contaminated orange juice, when at 5 p.m. someone yelled “Plane crash!” The whole room froze, and Charles Kuralt came on with a Special Report. A United Airlines DC-10 carrying 296 people from Denver to Chicago had crashed in Sioux City, Iowa. Miraculously, there were reports of survivors in the smoking debris.
The newsroom went
