thestoryofjory.com

I went to a community watermelon feed yesterday at Tower Park. That’s where I ran into Carmen.

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in Stillwater, or you’ve lived in the College Gardens neighborhood, you’ve no doubt met Carmen Dormer.  She’s the type of person who has never met a stranger, and is eager to talk to you about anything imaginable, particularly jokes.  Carmen loves jokes.

“Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash?” Carmen asks. “To the dump, to the dump to the du-du-dump!”

“Did you hear about the eight-year-old boy and his little brother? They went to the pharmacy and the eight-year-old went up to buy a big box of tampons. The druggist said, ‘Whatever do you need these for?’ The boy replied, ‘Well, I heard that if you use these, you can swim and ride a bike, and my little brother can’t do either!’”

She’s got some racier jokes, too, but you’ll have to get her to tell them in person.  They’re much better that way.

Carmen does not like watermelon.  So she brought cantaloupe to the watermelon feed, which you can see she still has in her hand in the above photo.  She asked me to cut those slices for her.  She then asked me to take a picture of her, and she wanted to be leaning against the tree, looking upward.  I pretty much go with whatever Carmen says, because she’s the kind of person who makes life interesting.

Next time I see Carmen, I’ll probably have to re-introduce myself (we’ve met four times already).  But I won’t mind, especially if she’s got another joke for me.

Mike Hosty is one of my favorite live performers of all time.  I try to see his show whenever he’s in Stillwater.  He puts on a fun (and funny) show that’s perfect for a night of beer-drinking at the bar.  He played Eskimo Joe’s for the first time on Wednesday night of anniversary week, and it was awesome!  Here’s some photos of the show & some friends I ran into at the bar. Enjoy!

This is Amy Zerba.

She is an associate producer for CNN.com, journalism professor at University of Florida, and all-around nice person.  She came to OSU SJB earlier this week to lead a workshop on multimedia journalism for SJB faculty. As a new faculty member, I was invited to participate in the workshops, and I am very grateful that I did.  I gained so much just hearing about her experience in the field as a working journalist.  She also gave me a lot of insight into the workings of a major news outlet that I can share with my students in the Fall.  Knowing what skills Amy has had to develop to create her stories, I’ll be able to better prepare my students for diverse careers in strategic communication.

I also gained a lot from hearing my professors-turned-coworkers argue about… pretty much everything.  Amy had to put up with her instructions getting derailed by debate on more than one occasion, but she was such a champ about it.  On the last day, we spent as much time debating production value and newsworthiness as we did working on the assignment.  The assignment was to edit something in FCP, and since I’m already adept at that, I just sat on the couch and soaked in the discussions. The most interesting part of these debates were the vastly different, but equally correct, perspectives each individual held given their specialty.  Public relations instructor Bill Handy had a different outlook on the presentation of some of the news stories than did Marc Krein, the broadcast production instructor, or Barbara Allen, print journalist and adviser to the student newspaper.  Miraculously, they all seem to really like each other despite these differences of opinion.

Barbara Allen & Amy Zerba

Marc Krein

Bill Handy

One of the other benefits of attending the workshop was that I started getting better, more defined ideas about lessons and teaching opportunities for my classroom in the fall.  Amy shared a lot of great resources, especially links to online learning and teaching tools like lynda.com.  My fellow instructors also gave me a lot of great advice and many different perspectives from which to view strategic communication.  I hope to take the experience of the workshop and use it to build excitement for new journalism in my students and myself.  I can’t wait for school to start.