a quick glimpse

It's like this: I just taught from 7:45 a.m. until 9:45 p.m. two days in a row, high school, then adult class, with about an hour break each day, and I'm a rumpled, stumbling disaster too tired to even stagger into bed, so I'm here at the big screen, indulging myself in a bit of reflection at the end of the marathon. But it's not over.

Thursday, two meager days hence, I'm scheduled to take eighteen teenagers, two girls and SIXTEEN BOYS to the local TV station to try to teach them to operate a TV studio and all the equipment in it.

My plan is to bumble through it and come out with a 30-minute segment ready for broadcast on our local cable channel. I have several short, hysterically funny videos they have made thus far in my class, so I'm hoping we can get a primitive set assembled and lit, manage to turn on the equipment in the control room, type some credits into the character generator and get a novice crew pointing some cameras and mics at a host who will introduce the videos. Then roll tape. Then back to the host for another intro, maybe a clownish interview with a fellow student director, roll another tape, and so on.

Might just pull it off. Despite my shortcomings as a first-year teacher of video, which are numerous, this batch of shorts is creative and funny enough to stand alone without apology. In fact, four are quite brilliant even to this urban sophisticate weaned on Fellini and Polanski and Kurosawa, and I wish I had done them.