The Wide Angle April/May 1996 Volume 1 No 6

Going National or "Look Ma, I'm on TV"

by Marty Lipton

Popular proverb: Never wrestle with a pig. You get horribly dirty and the pig enjoys it.

As mentioned in the activism calendar elsewhere in this issue, I recently appeared on the Jenny Jones Show in a segment about discrimination based on a person's looks. Apparently, the show got the Coalition's phone number from the article that ran in the Union-Tribune last November. They called us on Friday, February 16th; too late for us to return their call.

I called them Monday morning and spoke to a producer who asked us to direct them to victims of size discrimination. I gave the names and numbers of several individuals and then told them some of my own experiences while looking for media work in San Diego. Then the producer asked if I would be interested in coming to Chicago to appear on the show.

My gut reaction to this offer was a resounding "no." Although I don't watch many daytime talk shows, I've seen enough of them to know the pattern and the direction they usually go. My concern was that I would be up against some 'expert' selling a pop-psych book who would come on in the last 5 minutes of the show and try to convince everyone that all the bad things that happen to fat people would go away if every fat person worked really hard at becoming thin. I had no desire to wrestle that particular pig.

So, I asked who their experts would be and what sort of opposing views would be represented. Their answer: essentially, there would be no opposing views because the goal of the show was to show the variety and commonality of the experience of discrimination of all types. The experts on the show would be two lawyers who specialize in discrimination cases. I would simply tell my story and one of the lawyers would comment on possible actions to combat that type of discrimination.

That seemed fair enough, although as a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic I cannot say I was willing to take their claims at face value. But, I decided to go on the show and take the calculated chance.

I have substantial media experience, including appearances on a number of local radio and television talk shows but this was my first national production and, as with anything on a bigger and grander scale, the process involved was an education in itself.

For example, a local show generally screens guests once or not at all. For Jenny Jones, I talked to two different producers and two assistants before I actually left San Diego. At any point, they might have decided to leave my story out and go with someone else's. They FedEx'ed my airline tickets and reviewed all travel arrangements over the phone, including an 800 number that I was to call when I arrived at Lindbergh Field (to confirm on-time status) and a contact person to meet a O'Hare. Some of the information was guesswork, as I found out later. For example, they said taping would be at 11am Friday. The show was actually taped at 2:30pm.

My flight left San Diego at 2pm, Thursday, February 22nd; an hour late because of fog in Chicago. However, we landed nearly ontime because of what the flight attendants called "a record tailwind." Total flight time was less than four hours and the limo ride to the hotel in downtown Chicago took about 20 minutes.

By this time it was almost 9pm Central Time and, once checked in, I made plans to take advantage of some of the $50 per day allowance the show gives its guests in the hotel restaurant. However, the producer called at 9:15 to get me back in the lobby. She wanted to get some video of me and Marilyn Rogers, the other fat person scheduled for the show, doing basic stuff like walking around, getting on and off elevators and playing the piano (which neither one of us actually knew how to do, but it looked good without sound!). The only one of these pieces that I saw them use featured us going up a spiral staircase. We were, of course, filmed from the least attractive angle, but the whole thing appeared on screen for about a half-second and wasn't even particularly identifiable. If I hadn't been so tired, I probably would have objected to the entire staircase setup, but I really just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

By the time, we did get it over with, it was almost 10pm, the hotel restaurant was closed and I ended up having a really great bowl of navy bean soup at the diner across the street. Marilyn and I talked for quite a while and then were joined by another guest, Amanda Lee, a drag queen from Clarksville, Tennessee who was out of drag at the time. Amanda is another article by herself, but it's enough to say here that the three of us kind of bonded for the next 24 hours or so, which turned out to be a Good Thing.

Friday morning started early and foggy, and the fog had a hand in making me miss breakfast in the restaurant. You see, I'd had a hair appointment Wednesday during which my hairdresser and I decided to body perm my hair to make it more managable. I had Gillian Anderson hair when I left the salon, but moisture and the less-than-first-class design of the hotel room bath space made duplicating that nearly impossible. Checkout and pickup time was 11:30am, and I just managed to get everything together by then.

One of the assistant producers, Rob, met us in the lobby where we began to get an inkling of the number of people who had been scheduled for this show. In addition to Amanda (now in very sophisticated drag), Marilyn and myself there was also a group of African-American teens who had been assaulted by cops during a peaceful demonstration in Indianapolis and a couple of pierced and leather-clad kids, one of whom had been thrown out of University of Hawaii for looking different which caused people to beat him up and which the University considered a disturbance of his own making.

We were all loaded into cabs with our luggage for the short trip to the NBC Studios. Here we were joined by a couple of "non-racist skinheads," and a guy with extremely spiked hair that had gotten him kicked out of high school. He was accompanied by his father and his lawyer.

From here on out, life became a cross between a cattle drive and waiting room. The whole mob of us was led through the building to the studio and were taken through the same entrance where the audience was waiting to be let in. We were told ahead of time to say nothing to audience members and to ignore them. Good advice, but hard for some of our number to abide by when someone said, "What is this? A freak show?" This has to have been one of the few times in my life that I was pretty sure nobody was looking at me, since most of my companions were far more colorful.

Still lugging our suitcases, we were ushered to a green room that was too small for all of us, so Marilyn and I were moved to another room occupied by guests from the previous show; teenage parents and their babies. In among this group was a man we assumed was an expert from that show, since he was helping the kids with their kids. Only after the teens left did we find out he was on our show. Seems he had been a volunteer with the Junior League for many years and wanted to be member, but League rules forbid male members.

We sat in this green room for more than an hour, during which the sound person attached our mikes, the makeup artist touched us up for the lights and Clark (the Junior League guy) helped me put a layer of Marilyn's nail polish on my fingernails. While waiting, we were joined by Steve Sacks, an honest to goodness New York lawyer.

Steve arrived in very casual dress carrying a suit bag and demanding the makeup artist's immediate attention. He then appropriated one of the two dressing rooms and spent the next 20 minutes changing clothes and talking on his cellular phone. When he emerged, he was scarcely recognizable as the same person. The baseball jacket and Reeboks had been exchanged for Armani and Gucci. Amanda's transformation was not half as startling!

We were kept in the green room until the audience was seated and, in fact, until the show had started and the first guest (the kid with spiked hair) was on stage. Then we were seated in the studio behind the set where assistants came to escort us onto the stage during commercial breaks. The best description of this is a game of musical chairs where seats are added instead of subtracted.

The show itself was fairly benign, primarily because of the sheer number of guests. There were about 15 of us all told; the show was 60 minutes long less commercials and Jenny Jones' comments and, well, you can do the math. Each of us ended up making a fairly short statement with no elaboration. The up-side of this was there was virtually no chance for anyone to get into anyone else's issues. The down-side was that some of these issues deserved far more attention than they received, particularly that of the teens from Indianapolis who I felt deserved a separate forum.

Once the show ended, we were taken back to the green room, collected our things and went back to the larger green room where Jenny Jones was available for pictures and we were broken up into groups to be transported to the airport. Seven of us were loaded into a stretch limo (sounds luxurious but wasn't) and headed out in rush-hour traffic to catch planes that we already knew were delayed by as much as two hours. The traffic made the drive to O'Hare three times as long as the one the night before.

Once in the airport, Marilyn, Amanda and I spent our ten dollar food allowances at a hot dog stand, spent a good long time talking and then headed for our separate gates...which turned out to be a waste of time when all our flights were rescheduled for the same gate. After repeated delays, I got back home at 3am Saturday. The show aired March 4th and again March 18th. I had hoped they would run the Coalition's phone number in the closing credits or between segments, but they didn't, so one of my main reasons for going was not realized.

However, this was a great opportunity to learn the basics of this system and the people-watching was amazingly good. I made a couple of contacts and a couple of new friends and the Coalition is now in the files at the Jenny Jones Show, for what it's worth.

I still think it's very important to pick and choose these opportunities carefully and to realize that they are publicity shots but are unlikely to effect much change in society's attitudes or even in the attitudes of the people who create these shows. This show's producers ended up exalting the trivial and trivializing the exalted by mixing too wide a range of issues and muddying the distinctions between them. Other shows actively exploit and reinforce social stereotypes in the name of "education."

In the past, other rights groups have decided to wrestle the pig in hopes that the fresh air of the cause would overcome the stench of the pigsty. They waded through a lot of slops and went face down in the mud a few times to demonstrate that the pig fights dirty. The wrestlers got bruised and dirty and the pig called it entertainment.

It may be an unreasonable expectation, but I would like our future matches with the pig to be at least as clean as this one was. And I wouldn't mind at all if next time we managed to come home with a package of pork chops.