How THIS Happened

Once Newt Gingrich agreed to CafeMom’s request for an interview in front of 100 moms in Iowa, we had about ten days to make it happen.

Ten. Days. And those ten days included Christmas Eve and Christmas. To say I was stressed is an understatement.

So while you were all (I hope) wassailing, I spent the week and a half leading up to Christmas sending and receiving a flurry of e-mails as producers and photographers and directors and production assistants and editors were secured, a venue was selected, a post production house was reserved, hotel and flight reservations were made, an outline of the program was created, and invitations were sent out to moms to attend the event.

I also spent the week watching cable news around the clock, listening to news radio in the car, and reading magazines and newspapers and political websites as I prepared to co-moderate the event. And writing posts for my political and style blogs over at The Stir.

And of course, I also spent the week baking Christmas treats and watching Christmas movies and singing Christmas carols and wrapping Christmas presents and attending Christmas events and moving that damned Christmas Elf on the Shelf every. Single. Night. Because frankly, my kids didn’t give a damn that I was about to interview a man dominating the nightly news. They wanted their Christmas Experience, and I was all too aware that it was my job to provide it.

With all that was going on, a few Christmas traditions went by the wayside (mercifully unnoticed by the kids)– along with updating this blog– but I’m very proud to say that we didn’t skip a single Jesse Tree story leading up to Christmas. We also managed, along with my small group from church, to provide Christmas for a family with five kids that until recently was homeless. Those two things made my own Christmas complete.

And honestly, despite the fact that I was way too busy to really kick back and enjoy the holidays, it was okay. Covering the presidential election is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity after all, and every time I felt overwhelmed, I reminded myself that by the next December, a president would be elected and I’d probably have a holiday season on my hands with absolutely nothing to do.

In short, it was all good… at least until Christmas Eve. That’s when I came down with a cold.

At first it wasn’t so bad — but by the Monday after Christmas, I was a lump of coughing, sniffling, shivering misery, wrapped in blankets on the sofa. The next morning, I went to the supermarket clinic down the street, told the nurse that I was moderating a forum with Newt Gingrich on Friday, and begged her to prescribe everything she could give me. She complied with two heavy duty prescriptions and a list of OTC medications I could take with them, and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday medicating myself, sleeping as much as possible, drinking lots of liquids, and praying for a quick recovery.

By Thursday, I was far from 100%, but well enough to make the trip to Iowa. I arrived in Des Moines, checked into my hotel, and headed over to the coffee shop where we were holding the event the next day.

You’re probably thinking “100 moms in a coffeeshop?! How’s that supposed to work?” Well, you have to understand that Des Moines is sort of built for the caucus and the media attention surrounding it. Smart business owners like the ones at Java Joe’s, where our event was being held, all have “meeting spaces” adjacent to their businesses, that just happen to be perfect for either media or presidential events. Our event was taking place in a sizable room with a stage with doors that opened into the coffee shop. It was the perfect size for our forum.

MSNBC was also broadcasting live from Java Joe’s around the clock (still is- you can see Java Joe’s if you tune into MSNBC today), and while our production team met to discuss logistics for the next day, Chris Matthews came in and got his makeup done right behind me.

Which, OF COURSE, led to this.

This is perhaps the creepiest photo ever taken of Chris Matthews. I was trying to be surreptitious, but you can tell he was TOTALLY WATCHING.

*shudder*

So. We started mapping everything out for the next day at that meeting — and then some guy from C-Span came up to us. He had a satellite truck out front and wanted to work out a few audio details before they BROADCAST OUR EVENT LIVE ON C-SPAN THE NEXT DAY.

I know I’m supposed to act cool and jaded about this sort of thing, but I’ll be honest. My stomach lurched a little bit when I got that news. Stay calm, I told myself sternly. I’ve totally been on C-Span before. This is nothing!

The fact that I was a sophomore in high school, asking a question during a televised event on one of those student government Washington trips, was totally irrelevant. I HAD BEEN ON C-SPAN BEFORE. No. Big. Deal. Besides, hardly any major media had RSVP’ed — this would still be an intimate conversation between a group of moms and a presidential candidate, and that I could surely handle, right?

RIGHT?!

Anyway, we finished up our meeting and headed back to the hotel, where I had a quick dinner and went to bed early in order to sleep off more of my cold symptoms and wake up with plenty of time for last-minute preparations. The next morning, I got up and logged into my e-mail. My inbox was filled with a flurry of messages that had gone back and forth between our production team while I was sleeping.

Sometime around midnight, it seemed, every major media outlet in existence had checked in to let us know they were coming to our event. NBC. ABC. CBS. Fox. MSNBC. CNN. The New York Times. Politico. Reuters. The AP. The London Telegraph. The TOKYO BROADCASTING NETWORK, for heaven’s sake. You name it, they would be there.

Oh, and another thing– Occupy the Caucus was making a concerted effort to disrupt all candidate events in Des Moines. And there would probably be hecklers in the audience, too– I would, I’d been told, just have to deal with it.

In front of the entire world.

AWESOME.

To be continued…