In the course of that year, however, I’d lost a bit of my resolve to continue teaching. I loved my classes, and yet teaching in inner-city Baltimore was difficult. We’d gone through several principals in one year. I worked fifteen-, sixteen-hour days. I wondered if I’d be able to do the job for decades without burning out.
That summer I was in Maine with my grandparents, on my own with them for the first time ever. We have a huge family of cousins, aunts, and uncles. For once, it was just them and me. How fortunate I felt to glow alone in their spotlight.
One night as we finished our dinner of swordfish and corn, I told them about the job offer from the Today show. I told them that I was conflicted about exploring the opportunity. In Baltimore, I was fulfilling my dream of making a difference as an educator. But maybe there was a way I could make a difference on TV? I asked what they thought.
“Why don’t you at least take the interview?” Ganny said. “It is always a good idea to take the meeting.”
It might surprise people to hear that, because my Ganny had a reputation for being a traditionalist. Henry and I were newlyweds. She never was shy about her enthusiasm for more great-grandchildren.
The truth is, she was more progressive than people gave her credit for. On the one hand, she dropped out of Smith College to get married and had been known to encourage women with small children to stay home (though she never put that pressure on me). On the other hand, she had accomplished a great deal on her own, particularly when it came to her work in literacy. She once ended a talk at a women’s college with this: “And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well!”
As had happened with a lot of my Ganny’s rules, I think over time her thoughts on women working had shifted. She never told me not to work and in fact sent me letters of encouragement while I was teaching. In one, she wrote, “Dear Jenna—Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder [a book I had given her] reminds me so of you. . . . Do you have a Clarence or a Robert in your class? What a challenge for you! . . . We miss you and are so proud of you.”
By the time we were eating our dessert of blueberry pie, I’d resolved to take my grandmother’s advice. I would take the meeting.
THE NEXT DAY, as the early-morning Maine sun streamed through the windows, I sipped my coffee on the couch. My grandfather, sitting beside me, the morning papers in his lap, said, “Do you ever watch the Today show? Why don’t we turn it on?”
That was my Gampy. He had a smart, practical, and obvious strategy for deciding on whether I wanted the job: learning more about what it would entail. That simple act hadn’t even occurred to me (not that it was an option during the school year, because I was off to work before the show even began).
The three of us sat on their little blue sofa and turned on NBC. We watched and talked, drinking coffee. Then we saw Matt Lauer and Sacha Baron Cohen seated opposite each other on the morning-show set. Cohen was promoting Brüno, the movie in which he pretends to be “an international man of fashion.”
While Cohen, in character as Brüno, perched dramatically on his chair in a silver jumpsuit and silly little hat, Lauer asked him whose idea it had been to wear a Velcro suit backstage at a fashion show. (A clip showed the slapstick chaos that followed, as a large black backdrop and an entire rack of clothes stuck to him.) His reply: “Why did ich do it? Why do artists do anything? Why did Louis Armstrong walk on ze moon? Why did Caesar build Rome in a day? Why did Leonardo DiCaprio paint the Mona Lisa? Ich don’t know.”
We heard the morning-show crew laughing in the background. In Maine, we guffawed.
The interview had us captivated. My grandparents and I hadn’t heard much about the film, but the hilarity of the TV interview drew us to the theater. Gampy and I decided to see a screening that very afternoon.
It was a perfect day, not a cloud in the sky. We usually went to the movies only when the Maine sky turned dark gray and the wind whipped up, but on that glorious summer day we drove, accompanied as ever by Gampy’s Secret Service, to the movie theater in Portland, Maine.
My grandpa was in his eighties. He believed in a high level of decorum. If you’ve seen the film, or even parts of it, you can imagine how awkward this experience was for the former leader of the free world. And now imagine that at your side is your twenty-six-year-old granddaughter, who had greatly encouraged this outing. I sunk down in my seat, laughing more at the absurdity of our predicament than at the movie.
On the screen, Brüno stripped to his underwear and made a pass at Congressman Ron Paul in a hotel room. He took a karate class to learn how to fend off an attack by sex toys. He adopted a baby, hoping to emulate Angelina Jolie, and picked it up from a box at baggage claim.
Within minutes, Gampy was visibly uncomfortable. Listening to risqué jokes while sitting next to my elderly grandfather—jokes that in another context I might have found funny—made me blush scarlet.
“What should we do?” my grandfather whispered to me. “Should we get up?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
“How are we going to walk out of here without attracting attention?” he said.
We stayed through the whole thing and then sheepishly snuck out.
Of course, I did not hold our misbegotten trip to see Brüno against the Today show. Thanks to my grandparents’ encouragement, I did take the meeting, and then I took the job. This year, I celebrated my ten-year anniversary at NBC. And every time I recommend a book or film on the air, I make sure to tell viewers whether it’s something they should share with their children or their elders.
Out There on the Water
When Barbara and I were little, our parents bought a small cabin on Rainbo Lake in East Texas. The area was known as a paradise for outdoor sportsmen. The lake was teeming with bass, and the piney woods were full of deer. Barbara and I were thrilled—at first. Then we learned that we were not allowed to swim in the lake because it was filled with giant alligators. At best, our parents let us jump in for a fast dip if the heat was particularly oppressive. Then we had to pop back out again before the alligators noticed their next meal.
The main activity at the lake was to fish from our fishing boat, which was big enough to accommodate several people. My father and my grandfather loved the sport of it. Both of them were gentlemen and gentle fishermen. They were always catch-and-release guys. The meticulous act of calmly disengaging the fish from the perilous hook seemed as important to them as the casting.
Fishing was never my sport. The pace was too slow. When I put my line in the water, I scared the fish away. Barbara and I were always looking for adventure, trying to make those fishing trips more than they were. We brought many distractions with us onto the boat to keep ourselves entertained: books, Barbies, board games. When I was ten, my father let me try my hand at steering the boat. I immediately crashed it into someone else’s dock.
Every so often, we accepted Dad’s plea to try our hand at fishing. He knew we’d catch something if we made even a little bit of effort. When we caught something, he took a Polaroid of us holding up our catch with the camera kept on the boat for just these moments. “Smile, Jenna, and show us the fish!” he’d say proudly.