What goes into an overnight turn-around . . .

Former President and Mrs. Carter have come, spoken, and gone. And it was my job to do a short distillation of what Mr. Carter said for Morning Edition. So, about 5:30 p.m. on Monday afternoon, draped in press credentials, loaded down with equipment, I headed over to JMU's Convocation Center to set up.

This was a pretty straight-forward reporting situation. We had a mult-box (short for what? multi-function box? multi-purpose box? anyone else know?). This meant I could simply run a cord from my recorder directly into the sound system and be assured of having good sound quality. (Except that this hook-up developed a slight hum, which, sadly, no one could get rid of.)

So, anyway, by 6 o'clock, I had run my cord, plugged in, tested the connection, and sat myself down to spend a pleasant hour chatting with my fellow reporters (Channel 29 on my right, Staunton News-Leader on my left).

The ceremony began promptly at 7 with a procession, followed by introductory speeches, and several lovely songs. About 7:45, the Carter's were presented with the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award. Then it was time for Mr. Carter's speech, and so time for me to go to work logging tape. This involves keeping my headset firmly on my head and staring at the counter on my recorder so that I can take accurate notes about when Mr. Carter said what. Doing this meant that once I got back to the station, I could pull the sections of his speech I wished to use without having to go back and listen to the whole speech again.

Once the speech was over, I sat in traffic like everyone else, glad that I'd remembered to stick a water bottle in the car. Logging tape is thirsty work.

Back at the station, I pulled my actualities (the parts of the speech I want to include in the story), wrote my script, voiced my script in the studio, and then transferred both the actualities and the pieces of script (call trax) into Adobe Audition (sound-editing software) multi-track file on my computer. Then it was just a matter of fiddling around with placement, fading in and out, and adjusting levels. Around midnight, I pressed the magic mixing icon on my computer and voila! a story emerged.

I love these overnights. I have to focus, push myself, battle fatigue, and just keep going until I'm done. Of course, I probably wouldn't love them as much if I had to do them all the time.

By the way, if you couldn't hear President Carter in person last night, I posted his entire speech at WMRA.org.

There! It's 12:53 Tuesday morning and I'm going home.

Someone else's cultural comfort zone . . .

When my daughter, Lizzie, was around eight, she saved up her tiny allowance to present me with a subscription to Cosmopolitan. Absolutely touched and pleased, I was also a bit baffled.

"Why Cosmopolitan," I asked, having always thought of myself as a Harpers/New Yorker type.

"Because," Lizzie said, "You're always reading it in the grocery store."

Mordre, as Chaucer said, wol out. Especially if an 8-year old daughter's got her eye on you.

Anyway, that is the reason why I read (and enjoyed) every issue of Cosmopolitan magazine for one year. Including an article that changed the way I understand such feelings as love, stability and security.

It was an article, I'm sure, about relationships. And it made the point that whatever emotional construct you grow up around is what feels comfortable when you grow up. So, if you grow up around stability and peace, the adult you feels culturally comfortable with that. But, if you grow up in chaos, the adult you gets nervous when things are too quiet, too peaceful, too stable.

On the morning of Nobel Peace Laureate Jimmy Carter's visit to speak to us about peace in the Middle East, I've been thinking again about that article in Cosmopolitan. I think we Americans (and I'm certainly talking about myself when I say this) assume way too often that other cultures are as comfortable with stability and peace as we are. And we forget that it takes at least a generation of people living with the absence of war and chaos to turn peace and stability into that culture's comfort zone.

Mr. Carter, being Mr. Carter, I'm certain never loses sight of this. He's never struck me as arrogant, or macho, or self-righteous in his approach to cultural differences. But he also seems pretty clear that to be at peace is a better way for anyone and everyone to be than what the Arabs and Israelis have going on at the moment.

I'm looking forward very much to hearing him speak. Even though it means I shall be up most of the night, reporting on it for WMRA's Morning Edition.

Presidents and blog housekeeping

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter will be in Harrisonburg on Monday to accept the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award. The former president will speak to us in the Convocation Center, the same room in which now-President Barack Obama addressed us last fall. Before that, you have to go back donkey's years in Harrisonburg's history to find a presidential visit. And now we're having two presidents come and speak to us within a year.

Former President Carter's topic will be Middle East peace, something with which this brave, quiet-spoken man has involved himself for a long, long time. An uptick of tension in the situation there was caused just a few days ago by a new United Nations report, which makes his visit astoundingly timely. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16gaza.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=UN Study Israel&st=cse).

It is perhaps the most complex, volatile situation our world has to deal with, and one of the major players in the quest for peace there is coming to Harrisonburg to talk about it. I am agog, amazed, in awe at James Madison University's Gandhi Center for allowing us an opportunity to hear Jimmy Carter speak on this subject at this critical time.

Amazingly (to me) I think there are still tickets. You'll find a link to getting some for yourself at WMRA.org.

Housekeeping note: I think this blog will now take anyone's comments. If you try to post and still have trouble please drop me a note at mwoodroof@gmail.com/