{"id":4697,"date":"2005-07-29T21:29:07","date_gmt":"2005-07-29T21:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-first-time-1.html"},"modified":"2005-07-29T21:29:07","modified_gmt":"2005-07-29T21:29:07","slug":"the-first-time-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-first-time-1.html","title":{"rendered":"The First Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve done a lot of public speaking (not counting the 1,345,043 hours in the classroom), done television, both live and taped. <\/p>\n

But today, I met the TelePrompter.<\/p>\n

Interesting. Headed over to this place<\/a> to do that thing today. Very nice people, simple set up. Script I wrote was on the teleprompter. I hadn’t even given any thought to what it would be like, but what startled me, immediately, was how difficult it was to keep my eyes on the camera. (You know, of course, that the words run right over the camera lense).  My instinct was to let my eyes rove, as they do when you’re speaking to an audience, or at the very least, lift them up to look above the lens. No can do. <\/p>\n

It was strange. It took a great deal of will to keep my eyes from darting off. It was almost as if I had to bury myself in the words scrolling down that little screen and shut absolutely everything else out, so my eyes wouldn’t flinch. <\/p>\n

But that was only responsible for one retake. Most of the others were due to traffic noise outside (no soundproofing) and once, someone typing on the computer on the other end of the room.<\/p>\n

So…if you’re Catholic and in the military, look for that DVD, with one little segment featuring The Palest Person in Indiana (which is pretty darn pale) talking about Mary, sometime next year, I guess!<\/p>\n

Michael and the children wandered around Notre Dame while I did my job. They prayed at the grotto, and Michael reported that Joseph’s prayer was, "Thank you God, for this food." <\/p>\n

We went through Shipshewana on the way back,<\/a>saw lots and lots of Amish. Also saw a young Mennonite woman working in a store, who had her little caplet, her long-sleeved shirt, and her ankle-length skirt, except the skirt was slit up to mid-thigh on both sides, so the whole Anabaptist effect was somewhat muted in that particular case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve done a lot of public speaking (not counting the 1,345,043 hours in the classroom), done television, both live and taped. But today, I met the TelePrompter. Interesting. Headed over to this place to do that thing today. Very nice people, simple set up. Script I wrote was on the teleprompter. I hadn’t even given…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe First Time - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-first-time-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The First Time - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve done a lot of public speaking (not counting the 1,345,043 hours in the classroom), done television, both live and taped. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}