The Think-Tank Stirs...

Right about now, the brain trusts at various television stations across the land will begin to ruminate, to get restless, to sow the seeds of what might bloom as greatness in the coming months ahead.

More often than not, these bursts of inventiveness will involve the weather department. Why?

Simple enough. Weather and Summertime Fun go together, right? I mean you gotta have weather in abundant perfection or you face serious depression, anxiety, navel swelling, apoplexy, and nervous neuralgia. Oh, almost forgot cheap, hauling your weather act around was cheap, as in it costs not a penny. Cheap is good. Free is better.

Heaven forbid it rain a bit before, during, or shortly after that Summertime Fun.

Talk is cheap. Sometimes, talk is torture:

"Don't tell me a shower will ruin my plans this weekend, Vince."

"That's right, we are screwed, hosed, flattened, crap out of luck, looks like we might get a passing shower late Sunday. It's all over, keep the kids in, that umbrella handy...and make a novena. Maybe we can turn this thing around."

If you suspect that's a stretch, let me suggest you weren't paying close enough attention to that nifty crosstalk. By the time my TV career ended - hard to keep it going when they throw you out - dealing with inane and innocuous, not to mention vacuous crosstalk was like slamming a Hummer's door on your thumb.

In The Beginning...

Way, way back, my former employer (no, I won't mention them by name, I took blood oath with myself, which is not easy to do.) and I together came up with the idea of The Weather From Your Place.

The thinking pretty much goes like this. Since your weather guy is the designated station goof, whether he really is or not, send him and let him do a buck and wing from that great American institution, the backyard cookout.

Hey, if the grille man hockey pucks a hot briquette down the weather guy's shorts, no problem, he can dance, scream, and head for the pool, the audience will love it. If he slips on spilled cole slaw and does a face first header into into the tomato patch, all the better, he loves to garden. Hell, you can't send out a serious news anchor and have that happen.

What we did, at the very, very least, was introduce the concept here.

While it may have been done earlier in other markets across the land, we did it first here. By here I mean all of the twenty-some counties of this television market.

Sure, could be some weather monkey like me, complete with hot dog suit, was doing the backyard cookout/weather live-shot out in Davenport, Iowa, but until this writer (and that station) undertook the practice in this area, it did not exist here. We were the first. I was the first. Others came to the idea after me. One in particular claims to have invented the practice. He's wrong. He knows it.

So, there we were, it was the first summer of going to viewers' homes on Friday evenings to bring you that all important weekend forecast.

While the following edition of The Weather From Your Place was just one among several dozen at least, it's easily the most memorable. Here's how we ended up where we ended up, which is somewhere right on the Luzerne/Lackawanna County line.

There was this guy at the station, an off-air person, seemingly a decent sort. He'd begged me to do the weather live from his girlfriend's house. Could be he was trying to score points. He was relentless. I caved, I said OK. "You got it, this Friday we'll be there, tell them to set it up on their end for us."

I have to tell you that the main reason I caved is that this guy had promised us nothing short of a Vegas review from his girlfriend's backyard.

Some of what he'd promised was an entire neighborhood turnout, catered and homemade food, and a really nice backyard. There were all sorts of specifics he kept gabbing about, but I'm guessing you get the idea. I recall him going on and on and on about homemade Italian sausage. We never saw a link. Figuring that it was at least a guarantee to look good, off we went.

"We" would be me and a well-known videographer of longstanding. No name, please.

He took off ahead of me to set up the shot. This was standard practice, since I had to get all my weather junk together back at the station, then just make it in time to hit the air live. Oftentimes, I'd literally step from the car, have a microphone shoved in my hand, jump in front of the camera, and hit air with no wiggle room at all.

On my way to the location, he comes on the two-way radio and informs me with some regret that there is no one there.

Come again?

He did.

There was no one there.

No one. Lights are off, driveway's empty, nobody home. The place is empty. No partying neighbors, as promised. No sizzling grill with tons of food for the entire block, as promised. No sign of life. I was so angry that I could chewed and spit nickels, or nails, or the head off of the dip who invited us. We needed a plan fast.

(Cell phones, while they existed, were scarce at the time. We still used two-way radio communication.)

I'm back on the two-way...

"Listen, here's what we do...knock on some doors, get neighbors out of their houses and into that backyard. Then we'll get the grille fired up. Beg the neighbors for something, anything, we can toss on the fire...drinks, we'll need drinks in their hands, it doesn't matter what, I don't care if it's pool water. I'll be there inside of twenty minutes and we'll pull this off, over."

He's back at me...

"First I gotta get this live shot established. I'm not so sure we can get out of here."

Meaning, of course, that we might be off the hook anyway. If we cannot make the shot work technically, we can fold the tent and go home. I like that idea. It'll really PO the bossman, the news director, but it takes the pressure off us. We can blame engineering, whose fault it would most likely be anyway.

Squeezing the live van into place, Captain Video takes out the main television cable line to the entire neighborhood, he rips it right off of the utility pole. But, by God, he gets the van where it needed to be to get the mast where it needed to be, allowing him to fire up the shot and get us on the air live. An auspicious start we've already had, this is just perfect.

My arrival was likely no more than four or five minutes, if that, before we went on the air. Short of a No Trespassing sign, absent armed security blocking our way, we weren't exactly getting that warm welcome here.

There was no time to waste. It was about as close as I'll ever come to military precision.

I told the now assembled neighbors, maybe a half dozen or so, to get that drink in their hand now, get lawn chairs now, get their butts into them now, and get happy fast now. Look like you're at a cookout, look like it's the best Friday ever, look like you're having the time of your life. I didn't ask, I demanded. I didn't see any options.

We splashed way too much fluid on the charcoal. It roared skyward. We threw a half dozen frozen pork chops on the grille. Someone tossed me an apron. Given the circumstances, I may have torn it off them.
Showtime!

I stood between grille and camera, spatula in hand, poked at the rock-hard pork chops, smiled my biggest TV smile through the wavy smoke from the grille's largely petroleum-distillate fueled new fire, and welcomed our audience to this week's Weather from Your Place!

And it worked.

It looked one good time in progress, like we'd just popped in on a backyard cookout and joined the fun while doing the weather. We talked to neighbors, loosened them up on the air, had a few laughs, and made it all look casual, natural, nonchalant, un-staged. It never came off as being last minute, it never came off as what it really was; a calamity prevented right before it happened.

Remember the girlfriend? She'd be the one on whose behest we'd come here. Somewhere in the middle of that half hour, she pulls in the driveway. Stepping from her car, she looked stunned. I don't remember speaking to her, which was surely intentional. I had several words for her, many of them not in the dictionary.

At 6:30, we thanked the assembled cast, then drove away. We never knew what happened. More accurately, we never knew what didn't happen or why it didn't happen.

We never found an answer to why all of what we were promised failed to materialize, or why no one was home at the place where we'd come to do weather from their place. We did hear, through back channels, that the family had no idea we were coming. Was it a practical joke?

Most parties involved know who they are. Not to worry, it was a long time ago and I'm not talking anyway.

Those watching at home probably thought nothing of it, at least nothing out of the ordinary. Through the wispy clouds of nearly twenty intervening years, it was fun.

In the there and then, it was The Live Shot from Hell.