I was hosting the Miss USA pageant when the director told me that we were running short, meaning we had time to kill. What he didn’t tell me was that they’d added material to the teleprompter, including an introduction of Miss Universe, Ximena Navarrete. The degree to which I botched her name on live national television was fairly extreme: I read her first name as Eczema, like the skin condition. Months after insulting the Venezuelan population, I further revealed my moronic teleprompter skills on Watch What Happens Live, when I read that someone from “La Calif” had a question, not realizing that I was meant to say LA, California. I made myself Jackhole of the Week for that one.
I wish I could explain this outfit to you. This photo qualifies as an embarrassing moment, right?
The first time I was ever overserved—I believe it was Tanqueray, and I know I was in high school—I awoke in the middle of the night and became immediately aware that I wouldn’t make the ten steps to the bathroom without throwing up. Thinking fast, I took off my boxer shorts and threw up in them. I then tossed them out the window onto my front lawn, I suppose in an attempt to get rid of the evidence. As if Evelyn Cohen would miss that one.
At my job selling Deadhead gear out of a pushcart at Faneuil Hall, some guy came up and started talking to me about pot. He was getting a huge shipment later that day and told me he would sell me an ounce for the unimaginably low price of $450. I literally walked to the bank machine, emptied my account, handed him the money, and waited for two hours for him to deliver my pot at a bar across the street after work. I realized when he was five minutes late that he wasn’t coming, and I have never felt like a bigger sucker. At least he wasn’t a cop.
FEEL THE PAIN
Here’s what … I’m sort of a wimp. I was the kid in glasses who couldn’t even mow the lawn because of grass allergies. Being risk-averse doesn’t lend itself well to the news business, and I got the same pit in my stomach every time I headed in what most sane people would consider the wrong direction—into, instead of away from, disaster. When I arrived in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, I rented a car and headed straight for the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. I quickly found myself in the midst of fiery rubble, with devastated families helplessly looking on as first responders performed triage. A truck bomb had exploded at 9:02 a.m., demolishing the building and making a huge chunk of downtown Oklahoma City look like a battlefield. A light rain was falling, which underscored the somber mood of the shaken city that from that day forward would be synonymous with America’s worst act of homegrown terrorism.
I was far too hardened to mass tragedy for a twenty-seven-year-old, but like a lot of journalists, I needed that emotional armor just to do my job. By that point in my life I’d gotten pretty good at showing up on the scene—plane crash, wildfire, flood, hurricane—quickly establishing relationships with people in the midst of devastating trauma, and getting them to talk about it on-camera. It was like some sick kind of speed dating where my job was connecting to people in their most vulnerable moments, getting what I needed, and going. It’s not that I didn’t have empathy; there was just always another plane to catch. These were years where my life was divided into two-week increments that totally revolved around what stories I was covering or who I was producing live in the studio. The only variation that ever occurred was when news broke and I was pulled into the fray.
There’s incredible adrenaline involved when you become a competitor in what amounts to the broadcast news edition of The Amazing Race. Teams are dispatched, planes are chartered, and the pressure is on to get to the story first, plant a stake, and own it before your rivals. The way you win is by getting the people with the most compelling stories to stand in front of your cameras and spill their guts.
Because I flew there from Chicago—on a flight packed with journalists and so turbulent that the reporter next to me crossed himself several times—I thought I’d gotten to OKC quicker than any of my New York counterparts, but I soon discovered that any self-congratulations were premature.
While there were plenty of people still en route from New York, the private charter flights had already landed, and a familiar but yet still surreal scene was taking shape on the perimeter of the disaster zone: Every major and minor media organization was camped out with tents, trucks, and lights, forming some kind of gruesome circus that, if not for its proximity to catastrophe, might otherwise seem kind of glamorous. I could tell just by the intensity of the frenzy that this was the biggest story I’d ever seen. While searching for my camera crew I saw every broadcast journalism star you could name, and I finally walked right into Connie Chung smoking a cigarette. I greeted her probably too enthusiastically, given the morose scene around me, but I was caught up in the camaraderie and drama of the race.
I stayed awake for two days shooting with correspondent Jane Robelot, writing and producing stories about rescue efforts and volunteers to air during the morning newsblocks, those news segments on morning shows
