Not Ready for my Close-Up

A bit of glamour came to the Takoma Garden this week.  From the new cable channel Retirement Living TV came a producer and his cameraman and soundwoman, filming me for a show about seniors who blog.  Okay, it’s not exactly HBO, but exciting by my standards.  I was one of four bloggers interviewed for an 8-minute segment, so my share of fame will be maybe 2 minutes, if I’m lucky, not the proverbial 15.  But hey, I’ll take it!  Unless and until I see a close-up of myself in living color and freak out.  See, I may be younger than their target audience of 60 and up but I’m still old enough to want long shots with me off in the distance like one of the shrubs, or at least no closer than these stills.  But TV producers rarely go for that approach.

Well, enough of my whining.  Here’s the blow by blow of the event, indoors and in the garden.

The interview itself was in my living room under a frightening battery of lights and with a microphone wire threaded seductively under my blouse.  The soundwoman heard the most amazing things – my cat scratching, the hum of the refrigerator, distant trucks.  Lord, what a noisy house I have – to trained ears.

The segment filming me at the computer was just weird.  Watch her type!  Watch her surf!  I scrolled through plenty of garden blogs, though, so it’ll be fun to see which ones (if any) are shown.

Now for the segments in the garden, I was told they wanted shots of me gardening – you know those totally fake shots we see on HGTV all the time of interviewees nicely dressed, accessorized and in full make-up doing their gardening chores.  Just like we do them all the time.  So I thought I’d set these folks straight – gardeners will laugh, I warned – and suggested they film me showing them around the garden, just like the much-missed Erica Glasner used to do on "A Gardener’s Diary."

But guess what.  They know more about producing a TV show than I do!  I know, that surprised me, too.  After it was explained that there would be nobody for me to show around the garden – no Erica asking me questions – I gave in and grabbed my Felcos, ready to do a little pruning.  (Their suggestion in an early phone call that I change into my normal gardening clothes was greeted with such derision on my part that mercifully, it wasn’t mentioned again.  Though it might have been fun to emerge in my typical paint-and-mud-smeared sweat pants, filthy T-shirt, beat-up clogs and unmatched socks, just to see if they still liked the idea.)

So, folks, one more pretend gardening scene.  They’ll be sending me a DVD but that’s so 20th Century – gimme a link!  It’s what a blogger’s readers expect, after all. 

Photos by Jimmy Daukas, an innocent passing neighbor.  The lower shot may look like I’m bossing these folks around but don’t you believe it.  For two and a half hours I did exactly as I was told.

Thanks to Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By for asking me to participate in the show.  She tells me the folks at RLTV are treating their viewers with a lot of respect and if they somehow got past her famous condescension-detecting device, they’re okay by me.