My Fifteen Seconds of "Fame"

I don't know why it's taken me so long to post this. After all, it's not every day that I get interviewed by a television news station. In fact, I've never been interviewed before. But it happened last Tuesday afternoon.

I had posted comments on two local news stations' Facebook pages that morning about my close encounter with a wrong-way driver bound for tragedy the previous night. And just a couple of hours later, I received a voicemail from a female reporter at one of the stations asking if she could interview me about my experience. However, she seemed to believe that I had actually witnessed the fatal crash that occurred right after my near miss, so I thought I didn't have anything worthwhile to say to her and didn't call her back as she requested.

But that afternoon, a male reporter called from the same station, and this time I picked up the phone and talked to him. He too wanted to interview me. I told him I didn't see the accident, but he still wanted to interview me to "get the perspective" of someone who closely encountered the errant driver just moments before he died in a fiery crash that also killed two other people. So, I agreed to let him come to my house for an interview.

He and his cameraman arrived about fifteen minutes later, and I stepped out on the front porch for the interview. I felt nervous, but not as nervous as I was afraid I might be except for the fact that I was still nervous enough that my right leg involuntarily and disconcertingly jerked forward from below the knee numerous times as I stood there answering the reporter's routine questions about what I saw and felt the previous night and what I thought about it all in retrospect. The interview concluded very quickly and the reporter and cameraman thanked me for consenting to it.

That night, my wife and I tuned in to that station's ten o'clock newscast right after the penultimate telecast of the penultimate season of American Idol, and a short way into it they aired a story on the crash, and a snippet from my interview appeared. Since I no longer subscribe to cable, I didn't have a DVR to record it with, but my wife recorded it off the TV with her cellphone video camera. I haven't checked out the result. I wasn't sufficiently enamored with what I saw on TV to want to see it again.

Still, I'm glad I did the interview. It was an experience, short-lived as it was, that I'll be unlikely to forget, although more likely than the other guy they interviewed who saw the accident, tried in vain to help CHP officers pull the wrong-way driver from his pickup before it caught fire, and then stood by helplessly as the driver burned to death in front of him. That poor interviewee and the other witnesses to this tragedy will probably have nightmares for a long time about what they saw and heard that awful night.

I have only relief that I wasn't driving in the fast lane when I encountered the pickup; sadness for the people killed, for their families and friends, and for those who saw the victims die; and an iota of shallow gratification that I got to do something I've never done before and enjoy my fleeting moment of quasi-fame.