I'm a TV Star!

Most of you know what I do for a living: I'm a TV news producer for a local station. I occasionally make it on air in some capacity. Sometimes it's just my name; the anchors will ad-lib about something. For example, when I write a goofy or funny story, one of my anchors will sometimes say something like "our producer, Max Power, really likes this story." Other times, I get to appear as an anonymous "guy" in video. Today I was running a story on new guidelines on how to clean your ears. Really hard-hitting medical news. As you might imagine, we didn't have any file video of ear wax. So I had one of our photographers shoot close-ups of my ears, along with a couple of unfortunate coworkers. By the way, it turns out, I need a haircut. This isn't the first time I've been on TV. Here are the highlights:

- Just a couple weeks ago, we did a story on how nobody reads printed newspapers anymore, so I got to flip through the paper. It didn't really make sense to me, though. Shouldn't the video have shown me putting the paper in the recycling bin and logging onto the internet?

- I was part of a dramatic Monopoly game, used in a sweeps piece on a real estate scammer. We dramatically threw down money and property cards, while moving our game pieces dramatically around the board. I think I won, in dramatic fashion.

- My work softball team highlights made the sports segment a month ago. Naturally, the only highlight they showed was our sports guy hitting a triple, but before that, they showed a shot of O. and I screwing around in front of the camera, saying "we're number one!" and so forth. Not my finest moment.

- Another sports highlight to mention here is the 3 on 3 media tournament the Rose Garden held last year. Our sports photographer got shots of our last game, in which I had a sweet reverse layup. But I also had been up all night because I was still working overnights, badly needed a haircut, and was wearing a nasty t-shirt. I should have thought about it ahead of time, I guess.

- Finally, I got to play a terrorist recently. We did a story about how the airport has a new security system in which guards are trained to spot suspicious behavior. To illustrate, I demonstrated how terrorists get nervous before blowing stuff up. I bit my fingernails (extreme closeup), darted my eyes around nervously (extremely extreme closeup), and tapped my foot anxiously (I did my best Larry Craig impression). Now that's not just being in the video, that's ACTING!

I give my news video experience about eight seconds of uncomfortably close camera shots.