“You must be really outdoorsy,” Becca says. “I tried to take the girls camping once. It rained, and we gave up in the middle of the night because everyone was crying, including me.”
I smile. “I camp with thirty-year-old men and even they get a little dramatic when they’re sleeping in the dirt.”
She grins. “Are there tears?”
“Not a lot. More whining and sniping at each other. I’ve never been camping with an actual child, but I’ve been on a lot of backpacking trips with full grown men who turned out to be big babies.”
Becca laughs, and god, it’s a beautiful sound.
One I absolutely cannot get attached to.This is probably my cue to wrap things up. I look over at Dustin, my camera guy. He’s been doing this show a lot longer than me, so I’m hoping he’ll tell me if I’ve missed something.
“I think that’s all we have for you today,” I say, and Dustin nods. I turn back to Becca. “Was there anything else you wanted me to ask for the camera?”
“Not for the camera, no.” She suddenly looks nervous again. I didn’t realize how much she’d relaxed until she wasn’t anymore. “Am I allowed to talk to you off the record?”
“Oh,” I say. “Something you’re too embarrassed to ask on camera?”
“No, not embarrassed,” Becca says quickly. “Never mind.”
There’s no rule that says every word we say has to be filmed. If we give the head producer what he wants, he’ll be happy with that. “Give us a minute?” I ask Dustin and Ken.
They nod and schlep their equipment out to the car.
When I turn back to Becca, she’s rubbing her face, like she suspects there’s still glitter there. Which there is. “What’s up?”
“I just wanted to get your perspective aboutThea,” she says.
This is about the last thing in the world I expected her to ask. I don’t know what perspective I could possibly have about her daughter.
“I mean,” Becca continues, “I know that part of the reason I got picked for the show is because of her. It’s a story that they can use for sympathy. I’m the poor single mother raising a daughter with a disability.”
I think she probably got picked for the show because she’s articulate and funny and drop-dead gorgeous, but I know what she means. “They’re definitely going to use that as part of your story, yeah. It makes you sympathetic, helps the audience be able to pick you out of the crowd.”
“Right. And I know I can’t control the way they portray me. But I’m worried about them exploitingThea. Having a deaf daughter is part of my story, definitely, but I don’t want them to make it look like it’s a negative part of my life. Like it’s so terrible that I have to deal with thistrialor something, when really,Thea is amazing, and I love our deaf community. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it makes sense. “Yeah, I could see it coming off like that.They’re going to focus on the tragedy in your past, but it would suck if it looked like your daughter was part of what made it tragic. Besides, you havetwoawesome daughters.”
“Exactly. But I know I don’t have any control over what story they decide to tell, and I know you don’t either.”
She’s right about that. My job is to do the interviews, develop relationships, get the footage they need. We’re going to take hundreds of hours of footage for every one-hour segment of show. I won’t even know what story they ultimately decided to tell until it airs.
“You do have a small amount of control,” I say. “You can control what you say to the cameras. So if you talk about your ‘daughters,’ they can’t cut that to focus onThea alone. But that will be difficult, because we’re going to get a lot of footage of you, and they’ll pick just a couple of sound bites for the show.”
Becca nods. “That’s helpful, though. I can try to remember to do that.”
“They’re going to focus on your personal loss and on the sign language, because awful as this sounds, it’s a tag that will help the audience remember you.There are going to be, like, twenty blond girls on this thing, and they need to set you apart. If you’re around long enough to get a more complex story, they could go with the pity thing. Personally it’s not the story I would tell about you—not that I get to choose, because I don’t.”
“What story would you tell?”
I lean forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “I’d go with, here’s this amazing mother and incredible person who has everything except a man.” I smile at her. “You can’t get away from that last bit.That’s everyone’s story on this show.”
She lights up, like it’s unexpected that people could see her this way.That surprises me, because it’s so obvious.
“So, on night one,” she says, “if I lead with ‘I have a deaf daughter,’ I’m encouraging them to treat that as my main characteristic, right? And then it’s likeI’mexploiting her to be interesting on a dating show, which is the last thing I want to do. But if I keep it back, will it look like I’m ashamed of her?”
I think about that. I’m clearly right—she is a fantastic mother, because if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be asking these questions. I like to think I’m a pretty good judge of when people are being fake, and while Becca obviously wants to look good on camera, I don’t think she’s faking that. She’s the same person now with the camera out of the room as she was before they left.
That’s a complicated question, though, and I’m not sure how to answer. I’m used to controlling the narrative—we had an editor for Jason’s show, but we had full control over what footage we used and what story we told.
