What do I love about interviewing people?
My interest in people and their life stories started at a very early age.
I was born and raised in Manhattan. As a girl, I would walk around my neighborhood and look up at the windows of the apartment buildings and imagine the lives that were lived there. I was looking for something more exciting than my life, something more interesting and fun. As a teen, my favorite walking route was to the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Central Park South to see the large portrait of Eloise. From there I would window shop on Madison Avenue. Another treat was to walk down Lexington to admire the puppies in the pet store window.
I loved Central Park. For a city kid, the park was my backyard. It was where my father took my sister and me sleigh riding in the winter, where we posed for pictures on the bronze statue of Hans Christian Anderson in early spring, and then in summer watched our toy boats sail across the little pond.
Years later, I moved to the Berkshires which are located in western Massachusetts. The contrast to the city was striking. I learned to love the quiet as well as the sudden burst of activity in early summer when the town tripled in size with visitors. A few of the people I met when I first moved to Lenox are Tom, a retired stone mason, Neal, a carpenter, and Dave who plowed the snow in winter. They had all grown up in the town, and so had their parents. I learned that many local families came from Italy and Ireland. Neal looked like he walked right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I loved their stories and when I read that the town would be celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2017, I began interviewing people on video. The project grew in scope and by the time I was finished, I had interviewed over 60 people. I gained a partner who fell in love with the project in a meeting where I presented my idea and showed a clip of the very first interview.
What do I love about interviewing people? I love the details of their stories. When you put people at ease and are able to ask just the right questions, you’d be surprised at the memories that surface and the level of detail that emerges. One woman talked about sitting on the curb with her boys across the street from the El Dorado Hotel in Lenox Dale as it burned to the ground. Her brother told the stories he heard from his father about the burlap bags people would bring to the El Dorado Hotel from Pittsfield. There was a well under the porch, he told me, where the moonshine was hidden. They’d fill their bottles and put them into the burlap bags, then get back on the train and head home.
When I think about my parents and grandparents, I think about my grandmother’s spotless kitchen floor, the old-fashioned seltzer bottles at Sunday dinner, the white enamel kitchen table, the time my mother sprayed silver paint on the chandelier, the card trick my father loved to do. People are always fascinated when I tell them my mother joined the Marines during the Second World War and was stationed in the Mojave Desert. When she was about to be discharged from service, she had to be checked by the doctor. Her blood pressure was too low for him to sign her papers, so he had her sit in the room with the autoclave machine which always became very noisy when the steam reached a certain point. So my mother sat all morning and when the autoclave finally reached that point, the doctor yelled to the nurse to immediately take my mother’s blood pressure. And that’s how she was discharged from the Marines.
What stories do you want to tell? What details do you remember? Let’s have a conversation and get started on your video memoir.