Story Frame 5 – When One Door Closes

The station’s on-air auction came and went. The dozens of donations I’d gathered over the preceding weeks brought in a gratifying amount of money, especially the deserted tropical island.

Not long after, the station posted a job opening for a VP of Development. Gallagher encouraged me to go for it, which I did. In my previous career, I’d been vice president for an international importer, so it wasn’t really a reach. And having raised over $65,000 for the station in just a few months, I already had a track record with them. Based upon this, I was hoping to land the security of a steady job.

Weeks passed during which dozens of applications came in. In the end, there were nearly one hundred people from all over the country interested in the position.

I made the short list, and then the even shorter list. The station’s general manager invited me out for an interview lunch, which was initially to be at a sweet little European restaurant nearby. But as we left the station in his car, he changed his mind. He confessed he was scared to make left turns out of the station across the lanes of traffic. He apologized, turned right, and took me to a nearby Wendy’s instead.

That turn turned out to be foreshadowing. Of the one hundred applicants, I was told the following week I had come in second. A woman from Rochester, New York – a stranger to the Washington DC area, someone with no local connections – was hired instead, despite the local contacts I had and the money I’d already proven I could raise.

I was bitterly disappointed and vented with my husband about the irrationality and injustice of it all over a bottle of wine that night after the kids were in bed.

The following day, my phone rang. It was the stranger with the nice shoes.

At my invitation, he’d shown up at the station for the Very Important Persons cocktail party the night before the auction started. At the end of the evening, we’d exchanged contact information. I assumed it was just a polite way to end our conversation, never thinking I’d actually hear back from him. But here he was, on the other end of the line.

“I’ve spoken with my colleagues about you,” he said politely. “We’re wondering if you’d like to come have lunch with us next week. We think we might be able to hire you on a freelance basis.”

And that is how I came to find myself discussing the craft of making documentary films over bowls of steaming hot chili at Hard Times Cafe with a nun from New Orleans, a Franciscan friar, and the stranger with nice shoes whose name turned out to be Michael.

My life was about to take a very different turn indeed.

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