Story Frame 47 – Bill Moyers & the Mystical Leprechaun

Steve and I had been separated and divorced for a handful of years at this point, but the IRS was still hounding us. Talk about low-hanging fruit – between the two of us, we earned so little we barely had to pay taxes. Yet hound us they did.

One morning, I heard a knock on my front door. I got up from my desk and opened it, never suspecting that perhaps I shouldn’t have.

There, on my front doorstep, stood a large man in dark clothes, perhaps in his fifties, with a glowering expression on his beefy face. He looked every bit the bouncer outside the dodgy bar type. What he was doing on my front steps, I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps he had the wrong address?

“Are you Kristin Fellows?” he asked.

I confirmed I was.

He then pulled out a billfold and held it up for me to see his identification. I stared at it in disbelief. The fucking IRS had sent a thug to harass me in person at my home?! That realization ignited the pile of injustices and outrages lying dormant in my head like a carelessly tossed match on piles of dried kindling and I ascended into whirling dervish mode.

‘SERIOUSLY?!” I exclaimed, in all caps. “What kind of a bully are you to come and harass a single mom with kids at her home?! How DARE you! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

I was beyond outraged. Apparently, he felt the heat. Taken aback by my unanticipated ferocity and lack of intimidation, he stammered a few words I no longer remember and beat a quick retreat to his car. Shaking, and shocked I’d actually scared him off, I knew in my heart this wouldn’t be the end of it.

Strangely, it would be an obscure clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement, otherwise known as NAFTA, that would provide, after a few unexpected plot twists, the key to my release from the grips of the IRS.

Of course, I had no way of knowing at the time that another story frame was sliding into place.

Trading Democracy, a wonky, legislative television project, turned out to be one of the most important programs I worked on, not only for its geopolitical content, but for whom it introduced me to. Yes, it was intellectually pleasing to work on a Bill Moyers special, but it was heart expanding to meet a man described to me as ‘the mystical leprechaun of Capitol Hill.’

It had been two years since my departure from the documentary films workshop. And while the security of an actual job – that dream about regular paychecks, steady hours, and hopefully health care insurance and paid vacation days – had yet to materialize, a different path was unfolding before me. Like a roadmap, blurry and indecipherable at first, but as I leaned into it, making my way along it, various paths seemed to be gradually coming into focus. In my imagination, it looked like a whole network of roads and paths branching out from that Baryshnikov phone call I’d made ten years ago, like branches from the trunk of a tree that just keep budding, then dividing, then forking, each in its own beautiful and unique way, each one a pathway to the sky.

This latest freelance gig would have me working on behalf of veteran journalist and political commentator, Bill Moyers. Moyers had been the White House Press Secretary during the Johnson administration, followed by a long stint as the director of the Council on Foreign Relations. From there he segued into television; his programs on PBS had been a mainstay for years.

His latest PBS special was Trading Democracy – an examination of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA and the smoke and mirrors inherent in the agreement.

Although there had been a lot of hype about how it provided jobs for Americans, according to Moyers, there was one obscure section of NAFTA – Chapter 11 – that the public was not aware of. Trading Democracy revealed how foreign corporations were using it to challenge democracy, attacking public laws that protected our health, environment and even the American judicial system. Moyers revealed how NAFTA’s Chapter 11 provided what amounted to an “end run around the Constitution.”

Having heard about my work on The Face: Jesus in Art through WNET and the Fred Friendly Seminars team at Columbia University Graduate School for Journalism, I was hired by Kelly & Salerno – a two-woman, high energy publicity team – to figure out how to get a viewing audience for Trading Democracy.

How to get viewers to tune in to a program about NAFTA’s Chapter 11?!

This did not sound like a must-see, honey-let’s-stay-home-tonight-and-watch-this-instead-of-going-out kind of program to me.

Nevertheless, I of course took the project on because: 1) the opportunity to work with Bill Moyers and 2) the IRS was literally on my doorstep, hounding me for money.

Once again, I most likely got the gig because nobody else wanted to do it. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, nor how to actually pull it off.

Back in 2002, social media didn’t exist. The Internet was still in a very nascent stage. Entities had basic websites up but it wasn’t much of a communications tool. That left phone calls and emails.

Working with Kelly & Salerno, we designed an email tree. I researched and identified the kind of organizations that would most likely be impacted by this hidden clause in NAFTA. From environmental groups to labor interests, we came up with a list of more than 100 organizations. Then I got to work contacting their communications directors, one by one, introducing them to the Moyers special and asking if they would share our press release on Trading Democracy with their members and email lists.

At the suggestion of one of my contacts, we hosted a pre-broadcast screening and pizza party at his apartment in Washington DC for dozens of these communications specialists. It was a success. At the end of the screening, Colby Kelly and I did a Q&A. One person asked if he could get 535 copies, one for each member of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

I created a spreadsheet to track everyone’s efforts, trying to keep tabs on and document the reach of this word-of-mouth-via-email campaign as best I could.

I worked hard on this for weeks and weeks until one day when I got a phone call from the director of communications for Friends of the Earth. Based in Washington DC, it was part of a federation of grassroots groups in 76 countries.

“I think you can stop now, Kristin,” he said laughing.

“I just got a copy back of my own email this morning. When I look at the chain of forwards, I can see it went from me to a chain of 18 other organizations around the world, one by one, until someone forwarded it on to me, not realizing I had initiated the message in the first place!”

It’s weird to think back at how labor-intensive our get-the-word-out campaigns were back then. We didn’t know it at the time, but efforts like these were laying the groundwork for what would soon blossom into social media.

In the course of cold-calling numerous environmental agencies, telling them about the documentary and asking if they would spread the word with their mailing lists, I had called a woman affiliated with a labor organization headquartered in Gaithersburg. She listened carefully to what I had to say, then gave me some life-changing advice.

“If you don’t already know him,” she said, “you need to know Segundo Mercardo.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“He’s like a secret leprechaun of Washington DC and Capitol Hill,” she said with a laugh. “He knows everybody and therefore you need to know him. I’ll introduce you.”

The secret leprechaun of Capitol Hill? I couldn’t wait to meet him.

Coming up next, Story Frame 48 – Coffee & Confession

[photo above is not Segundo, but rather a leprechaun I happened to see in Asheville, back in 2016]