It’s not every day that Good Morning America and People Magazine call the office, looking for me. (Which is to say, they never do.)
But the Delgadillo girls and their situation are a near-perfect story subject, so it’s no surprise that other outfits have been calling here trying to get in touch with them. (I take their numbers and pass them onto the Delgadillos; I can’t imagine they want the whole world calling them at home.)
The People writer seemed especially eager to interview them now (I’m guessing they’re worried about their direct competitors getting to them first), so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the magazine in a week or two.
The Newseum has an online trivia game called NewsMania up as a feature on its new Web site. (The online store is currently offline, though.)
No matter which level I play at, I get a 90 score. Grr.
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Back in December, there was a tremendous outpouring of support for the Delgadillo girls after I profiled them in a story I called Home Alone.
The story of a girl raising her four younger sisters while both parents are in Iraq seems to speak to a lot of people, and it shows up on the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times: Soldiers’ daughter is on duty at home. They expanded the interview to include the parents, which is the logical next step and definitely improves the story.
No, that’s too mild: They did a fantastic job on the story, talking to the army, the mother via Instant Messenger and spent the day shadowing Audrey and, as a result, got fantastic quotes from the girls that I couldn’t get in my hour-long interview. I would have killed for that final kicker quote the LA Times got. Good stuff.
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Just got off a phone conference about the new upcoming Web sites for all the Daily Press papers — memo to self: the Handfree Mute button on the phone isn’t really muted — and it looks like the end result is going to be pretty nice for readers and make HesperiaStar.com a site area residents will want to use as a home page, with all the new features.
The plan, I gather, is to roll out the new Desert Dispatch and El Mojave sites first before getting to us. The end results will look similar, so keep an eye on those two to catch a glimpse at what the Star and Daily Press sites will look like.
The Internet is a strange place, full of everything and nothing, like an image of the tombstone of my first friend to die:
Aislinn was a friend of mine from high school. She was brilliant but never applied herself, not seeing the value of high school. She was insanely smart, articulate, funny, but would sabotage herself by coming to school high and so on. She never even took the SATs, as I recall.
When I was in college, she sort of snapped herself out of it — everyone else going off to college has that effect on a lot of folks — and proudly told me in the fall of 1989 that she was attending community college classes at Northern Virginia Community College and was planning on transfering to James Madison University for the next school year.
A week or two before Virginia Tech’s 1990 spring break, she collapsed in her parents’ kitchen, spilling milk all over the floor. It turned out she had a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. She kept up a good attitude, and rediscovered her Catholicism in a big way.
She died that fall. Because I was always moving to a new place each year (sometimes each semester), and it was in the days before cell phones and e-mail addresses, our mutual friends couldn’t find me and tell me, I didn’t hear she had died until the spring of 1991. I remember breaking down in a movie theater when Macaulay Culkin got stung to death by bees; I hadn’t had any real release prior to then, and became a basket case in the theater. (The film was no great loss, as I recall. Slim pickings in Blacksburg back then.)
When Aislinn turned 18 following our high school graduation, I brought her multiple grocery store flower bouquets merged into one as my gift. The normally tough Aislinn sort of freaked out at this: Somehow, she had managed to go 18 years without flowers.
I like to think that, if she was alive today, Aislinn would be Queen of the World by now.
And in a completely different mode, here’s a picture of a friend of mine from high school/college, Wendy Wickham, holding up a fish:
Everything and nothing, see?
