A month into my new role, a milk-truck driver entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with wire, plastic ties, sexual lubricant, and a small arsenal. He dismissed the 15 male students, bound the remaining 11 girls’ ankles, and barricaded the door. Then he opened fire, killing four of the girls, ages 7 to 13 （another died at the hospital the next day）。
It was depraved. And the third fatal shooting at an American school that week. I wanted to go to the scene—I knew that dispatching the anchor would help convey the horrific magnitude of the story. And it was precisely the kind of raw human tragedy that I’d become adept at covering.
“I should grab a crew and go down there right now,” I said to Rome and the other producers sitting in the bowl, following the developments. “We can be in Lancaster in two and a half hours—we’ll broadcast live from there.”
Their vague nonresponse said it all. I could tell they were nervous about doing anything out of the ordinary, anything that might open us up to more criticism. “I think we should just cover it from here,” Rome said in a better-safe-than-sorry kind of way.
Under normal circumstances, I would have pushed back; I was managing editor of the broadcast, after all. And yet I was starting to doubt my own judgment.
So I let it go. Later that night, when I glanced at the monitors, you can only imagine how it felt to see a somber Charlie Gibson anchoring ABC’s World News Tonight from Lancaster.
The story reverberated across the country and was still very much in the headlines the next day. I decided it would be valuable to hear from someone who had experienced a similar tragedy.
Brian Rohrbough had lost his son Daniel in the Columbine massacre seven years earlier; I’d met him while covering the story for NBC. So I reached out and asked if he’d be willing to do a “Free Speech” segment about trauma and getting through tragedies like this.
We arranged with the Denver affiliate to tape Rohrbough; they’d feed us the video at 4:45. So there we were at 4:46—me, Rome, everyone, standing around watching the commentary as it came in—our jaws dropping as Rohrbough’s attempt to grapple with yet another school shooting turned into a creationist, pro-life diatribe: “For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum…replacing Him with evolution…Abortion has diminished the value of children…”
Surprise turned to panic. The segment was guaranteed to bring more bad press, but what choice did we have? It was called “Free Speech,” for God’s sake. Were we seriously going to muzzle people in a segment called “Free Speech”？ That sounded like a recipe for really bad press. So we went with it.
Incensed viewers took to the CBS website:
Your free speech segment today was the biggest load of hogwash I have ever witnessed. How could you use an unspeakable tragedy to give a rightwing flat earth nut job a podium?
Then I got hammered from the other side for a blog post I wrote saying we knew that some might find Rohrbough’s views “repugnant.”
Gee, it had seemed like such a good idea. In retrospect, I wish I had called Brian Rohrbough and said that while I appreciated his commentary, it wasn’t really about school shootings.
After that fiasco, we decided to only let people speak their minds once a week, before deciding that we the people of CBS didn’t have the constitution for “Free Speech.”
“Free Speech” was dead.
63
So Hawt
WHEN I FIRST came to New York, I was a DIY / Loving Care kind of girl, until I realized I needed professional help. I started going to the lively Louis Licari salon on 5th Avenue. Louis is a doll, so in late October when he hosted a cancer fundraiser at the salon, I wanted to be there for him.
When I walked in, I immediately noticed someone standing at the makeshift bar: six foot one, dirty-blond hair, wearing one of those shirts with a band at the neck in place of a collar. “Who’s that?” I whispered to Leigh, a freckle-faced brunette who did publicity for Louis.
“Right?” Leigh said in her Brooklyn accent. “He’s so hawt!”
She gave me the lowdown: His name was Brooks Perlin. Super-WASPy, ran a hedge fund （which it turned out he didn’t, although at the time, I admit it made him even more attractive）。 Loaded. （Even better, but again, not true.） Apparently, he and Louis did triathlons together.
I made my way to his general vicinity. When I got to the table, Brooks grabbed a cup of white wine, handed it to me, and smiled.
We made the smallest of small talk before I drifted away and started to circulate. When a good song came on, one of the male hairdressers and I started dancing a little. I was wearing a navy knit dress with a leather belt, and, as the kids would say, I was feeling myself. I sensed Brooks was checking me out.