Point Richmond, CA
The price of fame…
Well, not exactly fame, but I’m working on it. A busy week for media activity here in sunny California. Over the last 7 days I’ve been on the front pages of at least 3 local newspapers (The Almanac, Palo Alto Daily News, and San Jose Mercury News), been filmed sweating it out at boot camp and on my boat by NBC 11 (due to screen tomorrow at 10.50am PST) and have been booked for two more radio shows and a TV chat show. I cancelled my exploratory meeting with a PR agent, as it seems I already have more publicity going on than I can handle. Funny how there was nothing for ages, and then it suddenly starts to snowball. As I’ve said before, progress is not linear…
The most fun media happening was Saturday night’s photo shoot for the New York Times Magazine (Play section, due to appear in June unless something much more important comes along).
On the face of it, doing a photo shoot in the pitch dark, on a boat in howling storm (pouring rain and winds of up to 20 knots) may not sound like the most fun way to spend a Saturday night, but the photographer and his 3 assistants were such great guys that the time passed quickly. Jason was a demanding boss – one poor assistant was crammed into my cabin with one flash head, another desperately trying to comply with Jason’s demands for “More light on the [effing] water!” while a third held an umbrella over Jason and his cameras, trying to protect them from the hostile elements – authentic, at least.
The results justified the means – when Jason showed me the pictures on his laptop, he had indeed delivered on his promise of a “rock star photo”. (And they say the camera never lies?)
It then required two whole hours in a nice warm pub to emerge from my hypothermic state… purely medicinal, of course.