Gaffe Master
Another glorious, sunny Monday yesterday. What is it with Mondays around here these days?
And, yeah, another Big Talk taping day at the WFHB studios. My guest was Betsy Stirratt, director of Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery in the Fine Arts Building. The Grunwald will be the site of a cool new exhibit, (Re)Imagining Science, opening Friday.
Betsy Stirratt
●
Betsy and I jumped right into to gabbing about the exhibit — it features collaborations between research scientists and artists — and her own successful art career. Betsy knows her stuff. She’s articulate and excited about the making and showing of art.
So, we were about 25 minutes into the conversation and I’d been rapt the whole time. I wasn’t paying any attention to sound levels and such but at that late minute I decided to check the readouts on the Tascam recorder.
And…, um…, I hadn’t turned it on.
The Tascam — With Its Readout Reading… Nothing
●
Betsy was in the middle of a discourse on the distinction between realist and hyper-realist representations in visual art and her preferred more subjective approach to the making of the stuff. I could feel an embarrassed little smile coming on my face. I jumped in when she took a breath. “Uh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you’re gonna clunk me in the head.”
I explained what I’d done — or, more accurately, not done. “That,” I said, “is the dumbest-assed goofy kid mistake you can make in a recording studio. Just call me a dumb-assed kid.”
Betsy was a great sport about it. We simply started over again and came up with a still-lively, still-compelling interview. Funny thing is, I spent the remainder of the interview nervously glancing at the Tascam to make sure it was on — even though it wasn’t about to turn itself off spontaneously.
Tune in to WFHB‘s Daily Local News Thursday at 5:30pm. My Big Talk chat with Betsy Stirratt will air around 5:45. And then you can catch the entire interview on the Big Talk page on this communications colossus the next day (or whenever I get around to post-producing and posting it.)
Keep in mind you can catch my parley with the creative minds behind the play “Resilience: Indiana’s Untold Story” — Dr. Gladys DeVane, Liz Watford-Mitchell, and Danielle Bruce — who appeared on last week’s Big Talk, here.
And next week I expect to have as guests the folks behind the documentary Men in the Arena. It’s about a couple of Somali soccer stars who strive to ply their trade while civil war and its attendant human rights abuses swirl around them. The film will be shown here in Bloomington later this month.
▲