Kathleen Taylor
Kathleen Taylor's Dakota Dreams
Author of the Tory Bauer Mysteries: Funeral Food, Sex and
Salmonella, The Hotel South Dakota, Mourning Shift, Cold Front, and Foreign
Body; and the knitting books: Knit One, Felt Too, Yarns to Dye For, I Heart
Felt, The Big Book of Socks, and Fearless Fair Isle Knitting; and the novel The
Nut Hut
My Big Exciting Hollywood Adventure
by Kathleen Taylor
I had done local TV appearances for all six of my Tory Bauer
mysteries, so I wasn't nervous when the publisher of my book first knitting
book, Knit One Felt Too, arranged for me to appear on the HGTV show, Smart
Solutions, in January 2004.
I was to do two main segments of about six minutes apiece,
and two one-minute final segments. To prepare, I had to have examples of each
item in every step- for one project, I needed to bring an unfelted sweater, a
half felted sweater, a totally felted sweater, and a finished felted and
decorated sweater. For the soap making segment, I had to have examples of each
item, in each step of preparation. For my two one-minute segments, I had to prepare
about twelve different mini-projects in the same way. I was also given a list
of personal requirements: two sets of clothing for each segment, I had to
provide and apply my own makeup, I was cautioned against wearing pure white,
pure black, wide stripes, wild prints, anything sparkly, anything with logos of
any kind, and long red fingernails (though a manicure was recommended). I was
also told that only closed-toe shoes were allowed.
Even with that list, I still wasn't nervous about the
taping. I was, however, anxious about flying by myself. I hadn't flown alone
since the fall of 1970, when I moved to South Dakota. I worried about making
connections and navigating strange airports by myself (this was back before I
started flying all around the country on my own). I especially worried about
handling the two large suitcases, and about going to California for the first
time.
So I made sure to have my knitting with me on the flight. In fact, I used my
knitting bag as my carry-on, and checked everything else- makeup, underwear,
toothbrushes, comb, show supplies, and the rest of my clothes. I boarded in
Sioux Falls, where it was snowing and blowing. The flight was smooth and I
knitted almost an entire sock. We landed in Burbank, where it was about 60
degrees, dry, sunny, and absolutely beautiful, with me still very worried about
wrangling two suitcases by myself.
Turns out that I didn't have to worry about that. The big-bag with my show
stuff was probably the fourth one off the carousel. The bag with my clothes was
nowhere to be seen.
I waited at the carousel. I waited and waited and waited. The airport folks
assured me that they would find the suitcase within a week, which wasn't
exactly encouraging since I was due at the studio by noon on the next day.
I spent the evening watching TV, calling the hotel desk to see if my suitcase
had arrived, and knitting. I managed to finish the second sock. I worried about
what I was going to wear to bed. I worried about what I was going to wear to
the studio. But what I didn't do was worry about the TV gig, after all, I'd
done lots of interviews. It would be a piece of cake.
At 8:00 the next morning, I checked in at the hotel desk.
Still no bag. I outlined my dilemma at the desk- I was in immediate need of 4,
nice but inexpensive outfits, plus makeup, plus a toothbrush. And I had to be
at the TV studio by noon. They directed me to the closest Target store (which
was no different from my local Target, except for the palm trees in the parking
lot).
Back at the hotel, I checked back at the desk, just in case,
but no bag yet. I grabbed the project
supplies and my new clothes, and caught a cab to the studio.
The Smart Solutions studio was in a big complex that looked very much like an
oversized, shabby, garage. It had an open overhead door and there were many
people (mostly young) inside, all concentrating intently on their tasks. There
was junk piled floor to ceiling along the walls- boxes, tables, stoves, sinks,
dishes, flowers, papers, shelving. The middle area held a half dozen trestle
tables, each with someone (or several people) fussing and arranging things. One
guy wearing a chef apron was doing stuff with bottles of oil and spices, at
another, a lady arranged fabric covered boxes. Yet another lady was packing a
bunch of flowers and vases in a big box. Some of the young staffers wore
headsets with earphones and little transmitters clipped to their waistbands.
They talked constantly into their headsets as they worked. It was a big bustle,
lots of movement, everyone purposeful and focused on the task at hand. It
looked and sounded like organized chaos.
I tried to stand out of everyone's way. A kid stopped and asked if I knew where
I was supposed to be. I said I was doing segments with Scott and Lorelei (my
producers). He led me down a short corridor next to the sound stage whose big,
closed doors had red lights over them. As we walked by, the lights came on and
revolved like police car lights, the *on air* signs all flashed.
The kid vaguely motioned at a table with some bagels and donuts and said to
help myself, and then he left. I hadn't expected so many people to be working
on what I thought was a small show. The red *on air* lights went off, and a
nicely dressed gal with a headset came from the sound stage and spotted me. She
asked if I was being helped. I told her I someone was getting Lorelei, and she
told me to come with her, that she'd find my people.
I followed her and she found Lorelei, who was about the same
age as my sons. Lorelei grabbed a stained green, trestle table on wheels, and
said that we were doing the felting segment first. She suggested a rehearsal.
Uh oh. Rehearsal? What rehearsal? Wasn't I just going to talk with Matty, the
host, about felting, and show the projects off, and maybe mention my book once
or twice? Why no, I was going to have to talk and move and put things in a prop
washer, and then take them out in the right order, and respond intelligently to
questions, and remember not to turn my back to the camera and remember not to
put my hands up to my chest and remember not to talk too fast, and remember to
stand just apart from Matty and not crowd her, and remember to talk about
felting in a general way without referring to my book specifically, and to make
it light and funny and comfortable. And to smile, dammit.
And to remember that above all, during the opening walk through where Matty
greeted each guest individually, to look busy, turn to Matty after she
approached and said my name, smile and say, "Hi Matty", and then go
back to what I was pretending to do.
While Lorelei and I were sorting through what we would and wouldn't use of the
felting stuff, Scott (my segment's other producer) showed up. He wanted us to
do a run through of the segment. Lorelei turned to me and said brightly,
"Kathleen, what are we doing here today?" I froze- I couldn't remember what we were
doing, why I was there, what was going on, or anything else.
We started again and I got through it, but I was hesitant, blushing, rambling,
and certainly not smiling dammit. We did it again and it got a bit easier but I
could feel myself sinking fast.
A senior producer came over and said that Upstairs wanted to move shooting up.
Scott found a stage hand and asked him to bring the green table with the
felting projects over to the garage. We headed into the sound stage
The sound stage was a long rectangular room with a high ceiling entirely
covered in tuck and roll padding. It was divided in half lengthwise. To my left
was a dark area, with cables and wires and 8 or 10 people working in the
shadows. There were chairs and monitors, and electronic equipment. People sat
at stations and typed on keyboards. It wasn't just dark because of low
lighting- the wall padding was painted dark to minimize reflected light. It
also deflected sound. People were talking in normal voices, but their voices
didn't carry and they all seemed to be whispering.
Halfway between the light and the dark areas, were 3 or 4
big cameras. One had a long boom-arm with a small camera positioned at the end.
It moved and rotated, swooping up and down gracefully. On a nearby monitor, I
saw that the boom camera was taking shots of oil bubbling in a pan on a stove
top. There were captions on the bottom of the screen, which I assumed the
people at the keyboards were providing. Stage hands and women with clipboards stood
about in little clutches.
The other half of the long room held the Smart Solutions set, which had three
separate but connected areas. At the far end was the *garage*. It had cement
walls, shelves with artfully arranged paint cans, tools, gardening gloves, and
a flat of fake wilting marigolds.
A dividing wall separated the garage from the next set,
which looked like a living room with brick walls, a cast iron staircase,
bookshelves, a curtain over a fake window, and a chair or two. A woman I'd seen
before was standing behind a wheeled table, arranging finished and partially
assembled fabric boxes. She talked seriously with a young woman wearing a
flowered skirt and army boots who was holding a script
On the other side of the living room was the kitchen set. There was a guy
wearing an apron, tending the pots of bubbling oil. The kitchen had a tile
counter top, a fake fridge, a microwave, and a sink with dishes artfully
stacked in a drainer.
The sets were lit with many huge lights hanging from the ceiling,
Lorelei and I went to the garage and began to set up. She and Scott discussed
which pieces we wanted to show, how to display them, what order to lay them
out, what order to present them, what to talk about, what to say, how to manage
props and actions, how to deal with the wet sweaters, what I should emphasize,
what I should not say. It was more information than I could process. I was starting
to think that I would fail miserably in front of this large, efficient crew.
Scott had me do a run-through of the action while a stage hand wheeled a prop
washing machine into place next to our table. I muffed nearly everything-
forgetting which item to pick up first, losing track of what I was supposed to say,
and in general, made a mess of it. I apologized. Lorelei cuffed me on the
shoulder gently and lied that I was doing fine.
A lady came over and clipped a transmitter unit to the back waistband of my
pants and had me fish a microphone up through my shirt which she clipped to the
placket. She cautioned me to tell her if I had to go to the bathroom so she
could take the unit off so that I wouldn't drop the very expensive piece of
equipment into the toilet. Luckily, fear had frozen my bladder. She said if I
needed anything to let her know.
The prop guy then took out a string with rolls of colored tape threaded on it,
and started cutting strips to cover all of the brand names and logos on the
washer and other props.
We did another run-through of the action, getting a little smoother. The
director of the show came over. She decided that we had too much on the table
and should reduce and rearrange the clutter. She also decided that we needed to
change the order of the action. Then the Head Producer came over and asked for
a run-through. He didn't smile or react, which made me even more nervous. He
suggested more adjustments. After he left, Lorelei said it was always like
that- the underlings get things organized and the Higher Ups change them.
By our final run-through, I was fighting real terror, afraid
that I would freeze, or worse yet, start crying. Scott told me to remember to
smile. I tried a wobbly one for him. He asked if I was scared, and I said yes.
He grinned and said not to worry, that I was doing fine.
The director announced that they would first tape Matty on her show-opening
walk through each set. The director showed us our marks (tapes on the floor)
and said to stay put but to look busy. Then she listened to something in her
headphone and announced that Matty was coming down.
There was a sort of
*silent waiting* among the crew when they heard that Matty Monfort was on her
way. It was clear that she was The Star, the reason all of us were there. She
entered wearing a robin's egg blue sweater and dark blue skirt. She had
shoulder length blonde hair, bangs and a soft flip, and she was about my
height.
Matty stopped and talked to the director for a few minutes. She then walked
over to the chef and talked to him for a moment (trailed by cameras, and crew
checking sound levels and lighting, and framing shots). She spent a few minutes
with each guest as the director and producers walked her through. I was the
last in line, when she got to me, she shook my hand. She told me to talk
directly to her during the segment, not to look at the cameras. We were to
forget that anyone else was there and to remember that we were just having a
conversation about ...she paused, looked at the table and then up at the crew
and waited... someone said "felting"... she said "felting"
and gave me a big smile. Out of the corner of my eye, Scott mimed a Big Smile
at me and I remembered to smile back at her.
It's good that Matty didn't ask ME what we were doing on the segment because
I'm pretty sure that I would not have remembered. I was absolutely terrified.
Matty walked back to the chef. Lorelei said quietly to me, "Stand on your
mark but look busy, it doesn't matter what you're doing, just look like you're
doing something. When Matty gets to you, she'll say something about you, you
look up and say "Hi Matty", and then go back to what you're
pretending to do."
I nodded and pretended to fold the sweater that was closest to me. I could hear
Matty's voice as she greeted each guest. The director and cameras followed her
down the line. As she got to me, my heart was pounding, I looked up at her and
remembered to smile. She said, "Hi Kathleen", and I said, "Hi there."
Everything stopped. And it wasn't a good stop, like we were done with that
segment. It was a *someone screwed up* sort of stop. And I knew who had screwed
up. Matty and the cameras all went back to the beginning of the line.
Lorelei leaned in and said, "Don't look at Matty until she gets to you and
says your name. And no matter what she says, you just say, "Hi
Matty."
I nodded, but what I really wanted to do was run screaming from the room. They
started over, I double checked my mark, made sure I was futzing with the
sweater, I forced myself to look down, and when Matty said my name, I looked up
with a big smile and said, "Hi Matty," and then bent back down to
fumbling.
That take was good enough, thank goodness. I don't think I could have done it
again without fainting.
After that, everything went smoothly. Matty and I talked. I
smiled, I didn't drop anything, I didn't mess up the action order. I didn't say
any bad words. I didn't faint. And I didn't burst into tears.
The drill for the next long segment was the same: rehearsal, changes,
rehearsal, changes, smile, changes, Hi Matty. I stayed on my mark and did the
things we had to do. And amazingly enough, I found that I was having fun. In
between segments, I mentioned that luggage had been lost, and having to buy new
clothes. Scott literally paled when he realized that my suitcase with the props
could have gone missing as well.
At the end of the day, when all of the other guests had left, we taped my two
one-minute final segments. By then, I was feeling pretty good about my ability
to remain conscious while the cameras were rolling. When we finally finished,
the crew actually applauded, though now that I think on it, they were probably
just glad to be done for the day.
When I got back to my hotel room, there was the suitcase with all of my
clothes. It had gone on to San Francisco all by itself. I hope it had a good
time.
That night, I watched a bit of TV, knitted, and conked out very early. Before
checking out in the morning, I put makeup on because I was shooting a local
news segment about the Hollywood trip immediately after landing in Sioux Falls.
When we landed, my husband was waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator,
and behind him was the local news crew. That
interview was a piece of cake.
The shows finally aired in August and September of that
year. I watched them with closed eyes and covered ears. I am now filled with admiration
for all TV people- the amount of behind the scenes work is staggering. And I
have a new respect for all actors, even the bad ones. Most of them can remember a two-word line...
If I ever get the chance, I'll do it again in a flash. Next
time though, I'll put a toothbrush and makeup in my carry on.
