A wise weathercaster, Connie McBurney, once told me THE trick about live television.  “Don’t swear, fart or black out,” she said.  I have lived by those rules ever since.

On Thursday, I did my first LIVE segment for KCTV5.  I had 3 minutes and thirty seconds to unveil five different ways you could wear a strand of pearls.  The entire time I was thinking something would go tragically wrong.  Perhaps one of the strands would break and pearls were go skittering across the studio.  Interns and stagehands would still be finding them weeks later and selling them on EBay.  Or my co-anchor Carolyn would somehow get tangled up in the pearls and pass out from a lack of oxygen.  Thus, forcing me to fly solo.  The entire segment was rife for a live television “incident”.

The TV gods were smiling on me on Thursday, however.  The piece went off without a hitch and was well received.  (And by “well received”, I mean I wasn’t fired.)  Now that’s not to say rehearsal wasn’t a complete nightmare.  There’s another rule in television I nearly forgot.  Always rehearse.  Good thing we did.  I forgot lines, forgot names, and forgot the company I worked for.  For just a brief moment, I thought I might be having another stroke.  Turns out stage fright and stroke symptoms are queerly similar.  (Link is below:)

http://www.kctv5.com/video/23940031/index.html

Whoever invented Murphy’s Law obviously worked in TV at some point.  I’ve seen total pros rendered complete blithering idiots when something goes wrong.  It’s like they can’t recover.  At my old station, one of my co-workers was fiddling with a Bic lighter in his pants pocket during a live shot once.  He managed to catch himself on fire while on the air.  Why he was “flicking his Bic”, we may never know.

After the show, the main anchor came up to me in the dressing room and told me he enjoyed my segment.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  He’s one of those wildly attractive “voice of God” anchors.  Tall, swarthy with a dimple in his chin.  He’s like Dudley Do-Right come to life.  And when he said, “You’re a natural”, I giggled like a giddy schoolgirl.

On the way out of the dressing room, I was swinging the pearl necklace around one finger and managed to smack myself squarely in the eye.  Thankfully no one saw it.

Remember, folks,TV i s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.