I posted this over at The Payphone Project but thought it belonged here, too
…
I finally watched this.
A few months ago I was on “CBS Sunday Morning” for about a minute or two. It was a piece focused on (what else?) phone booths and payphones. It might be the last such appearance I agree to. I had that in mind from the first contact to the last.
Years ago, when I had a DVR, I watched “CBS Sunday Morning” pretty regularly. Back then I remember thinking “They’re going to come for me some day.” The subject matter is a perfect hit for the older demographic the show targets, and it perfectly fits the “soft news” tone of the show.
The segment had been in the works for 5 or 6 months before the actual interview occurred. The initial contact from the show’s producer came in the form of an email with no subject line. I almost ignored it. I responded but heard nothing back for months. When correspondence resumed it moved at a more concerted pace. Phone booths are obviously not timely subject matter so it’s not surprising that this was something of a backburner project.
At one point the producer called to confirm the date and time of the interview. It was funny because when he called I had just gotten off the phone with CVS, the pharmacy. When he said he was from CBS I thought for some reason the pharmacy was calling me back. I got a laugh out of that but the producer did not. He was very businesslike but not at all unpleasant. He assured me time and again that “this piece is going to be excellent” and that the interviewer (Mo Rocca) was a top-tier humorist.
I had never heard of Mo Rocca and, to be honest, when I looked him up what I found was almost enough to make me not do the interview. All I found were annoying videos of him chasing after people on the streets asking them inane questions. I was afraid he would be the sort of “gotcha” comedian who generates his material by ridiculing the people he interviews. But then I thought no, this is “CBS Sunday Morning”. That just doesn’t sound like their gambit. Still, I kept it in mind as the interview date approached. I decided I could handle it if he tried to embarrass me.
In fact there was no trace of sarcasm or disparagement. These folks had clearly done their research, asking me questions about stuff I’d written over 20 years ago, and not even on the Payphone Project site but on the old “Place of General Happiness” where the payphone site actually first started in 1995. There were also allusions to the 2004 New York Times story, which I later surmised was at the root of CBS’s motivation to contact me about this subject. It seems I am still feeling the vapors of the reach that one story had.
It reminds of the comment made by a writer from Reader’s Digest. She stated that once you’re on A1 of the Times you are, whether you like it or not, “taken seriously,” and that is forever. I don’t know how true that is, especially in this case given the subject matter, but she stressed her point repeatedly. It was a memorable comment.
I spent hours interviewing with that woman, and hours more doing a photo shoot under the Brooklyn Bridge with two Reader’s Digest photographers. For reasons never communicated to me the story was never published. I don’t think she ever even finished writing it.
The CBS interview lasted about 90 minutes, from which only a minute or two was used. I said a lot of things about a lot of stuff. Afterward the camera crew said I was awesome, and that I was “non-stop” in talking about the subject at hand. They were so positively impressed by this that I had to assume their other subjects often clam up when the cameras turn on them. For a change of pace their next assignment was to interview Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Washington.
CBS had done its research, no doubt, not just into my background but on the subject of what roles phone booths have played in popular culture over the years. That depth of research should come as no surprise considering it is a network news organization. But if they got anything wrong about me I blame it on the fact that my thinking about this stuff has changed over the years, and I may not have coherently articulated that change. In the past I’ve made comments that could be interpreted as nostalgic or sentimental about how the role of public telephones in our society has changed. I do not maintain such sentiments today, particularly regarding the style of fully enclosed telephone booths that were the subject of the CBS piece. I remember phone booths as uncomfortable, claustrophobic spaces that most people were more anxious to get out of than they were to get into. Much of the nostalgia regarding phone booths is, I think, false.
Along those lines I made one comment that I thought sure would be used in the CBS piece. I said that entering one of these phone booths felt like I was stepping into a coffin. I added “Maybe they should bury me in one of these things.” I was referring specifically to the wood phone booths at the New York Public Library, where the interview took place. As soon as I said this Mo Rocca’s face lit up, as if we had just struck comedy gold. He responded that he hoped I lived a long and wonderful life but that when I die he hopes they bury me in a phone booth. It was funny as hell but maybe too needlessly moribund for the soft news format of the show.
It was communicated to me 3 or 4 days ahead of time that the segment was finally going to air. I can honestly say I had never been so goddam nervous about anything. I was burning up inside in ways I never experienced ahead of any other public appearance or publicity. Much of this emotion came from the fact that the piece had been in the works for so long that I could barely remember what I said at the interview. My fears of being made to look like a buffoon at the hands of the interviewer also resurfaced. I also remembered misspeaking about a couple of facts and figures. In follow-up emails I communicated to the producer that I might have misspoken about a certain detail but that I also might have nailed it. I just couldn’t remember what I said.
The history of the phone booth in America is, at times, unclear. I suggested that much of the conventional wisdom about the phone booth’s timeline might not be accurate, and that (for instance) nobody really knows when the very first outdoor, fully enclosed booth was installed. The oft-repeated lore is that the first outdoor phone booth appeared in Cincinnati in 1905. But some sources I’ve found describe that phone as being in a small metal box, similar in style to the emergency red callboxes seen around New York today. Further, that “phone booth” in Cincinnati was described as being unpopular at first because people did not like having their conversations overheard by passers-by. If that’s what people were complaining about then it does not sound like they were using a fully enclosed phone booth, which helps keep conversations private. I think the term “phone booth” might have been used generically, as it often is today, to describe any sort of public pay telephone.
I might have gone on way too long about this trifling detail but from conversations with the producer the historicity of the phone booth was made to seem like an important part of the segment. Getting some little fact wrong in front of 6,000,000 people can go a long way toward attracting the wrong kind of attention, no matter how trivial the subject at hand.
I am still exploring this matter. Recently I found a seemingly credible source which states unequivocally that the first outdoor phone booth in the United States appeared in 1928. That source gives no reference.
One matter I neglected to address was what people in the payphone business consider to be the real villain in the demise of the payphone. That would the so-called “Obamaphone”, more accurately known as the Lifeline program. This program, which has been mired in controversy in recent years, gives free cell phones to the poor. Lifeline was actually created during the Reagan administration, giving landline phones to those who could not afford it. The program was expanded to include cell phones in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration. The Obama administration actually had virtually nothing to do with the program.
To the payphone industry (what’s left of it, that is) the Lifeline program is nothing more than an attempt to take away their last and most reliable customer base, which is poor people. It had even been rumored when the program was created that the FCC specifically targeted the payphone business by encouraging this program.
I never injected this subject into the CBS spot but I tried to get it through to them in follow-up emails. I honestly thought the audience of that show would find it interesting, even newsy, but the producer just did not seem interested.
In the nerve-wracking days leading up to the airing of the segment I took to the sidewalk and the streets, walking all over creation into places I used to consider dangerous. I wandered through the Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses. Queensbridge is the biggest housing project in the country. In the past Queensbridge was considered pretty dangerous but my understanding is that the open-air drug dealing and stray bullets are a thing of the past. It actually felt comfortable there. I even made the journey somewhat productive by uncovering a couple of working payphones right in the heart of the projects.
The area in and around Queensbridge was new to me, which is not something I can say about pretty much any other part of Astoria or Long Island City. I started texting friends, expressing my high anxiety but also inviting them to tune in on Sunday. Among others I heard back from a documentary film maker who had interviewed me about a year earlier, in a piece which ended up not being about payphones. That was her intent. It turned into a series of probing questions, to one of which I responded that in the last few years I’ve learned that I am vulnerable to abusive relationships. I’ve always known that about myself but I don’t have the wisdom of foresight to avoid those situations. The filmmaker said she showed the video to colleagues, all of whom were positively impressed. They actually wanted more of me. She wants to resume the project but funding does not look promising.
After exiting Queensbridge I sat down on a sidewalk, attracting the attention of some nearby construction workers. They might have thought I was sick or homeless but after a minute or so their attentions went back the job at hand. I sat there for 20 minutes, abating my anxiety with positive thoughts but also feeling like a wino laid out on the sidewalk.
The segment aired. Within seconds my phone blew up with text messages and notifications from people all over the country who saw the piece. It was pretty cool. In that instant the anxiety evaporated, as did any notions I might have had that this was a game-changing moment. It was just good fun. I had not seen the piece but all the reviews were good, and that was all I needed to hear.
I ended up watching the piece a few nights ago, when someone posted a link to the video on Twitter. It’s interesting to think about “being seen” in perpetuity by people unknown to me. By no means do I consider the CBS spot to represent any kind of genuine celebrity. But it reminds me of a thoughtstream I’ve entertained before about how strange it is that there are so few people in the world who are constantly being seen. Paul Newman and Pavarotti come to mind as performers whose visage and work are being watched and discussed continuously throughout the world. That’s such a rare thing.
But then being seen also reminds me of a conversation I had with an underage kid from Ravenswood whose fake ID got him into a local pub I used to go to. Any time I said something even vaguely revealing about myself he would react with astonishment, saying “Man, I just saw you!” He seemed genuine in his excitement and amazement that someone would open up to him, even though I don’t think there is any way I would have said anything especially personal to this stranger. I never got his name.
