Fifteen Seconds - More Or Less.

 

In early 2001, I was killing some time on the Zoetrope.com boards, when I noticed that c|net television producer Shirin Etessam had posted a message, requesting a volunteer to be interviewed for a (now-defunct) show called News.com.

So I figured, "What the heck, send her an eMail."

Much to my surprise, she flew me up to Oakland (from L.A.), after a series of phone chats. She even sent a driver across the bridge, to bring me into San Francisco.

Cool. I felt like a V.I.P.

I arrived in the morning, but their taping wasn't scheduled until late afternoon, so I cruised around the city, visiting some old friends from my Haight-Ashbury-urban-commune daze. They were very patient with my blatant attempts to show off.

Later, we shot at least 30 minutes of video down near the Pier 40 Marina. I was a babbling idiot for most of that time, but luckily Shirin only needed about 10 or 15 seconds from me, to plug into a much longer piece about Francis Ford Coppola and his Zoetrope Virtual Studio. So during the mid-February CNBC cable/satellite network broadcast, I actually sounded like a normal human being.

Yup, thanks to Shirin's editing skills, my 29 minutes and 45 seconds of babbling had been left on the cutting-room floor.