So Much Smaller In Person

Carrie and I had quite a laugh on the phone between her newscasts.   She met TV Chef Bobby Flay at the New York State Fair this morning and told me he is as friendly as friendly can be, and tiny.

“Really”? I asked.  “He has such a full face, you’d think he’s kind of big”.

“Not at all” Carrie responded.   “He’s really thin.  He probably has a 32 inch waist.  He looks so much smaller in person”.  We paused and then cracked up.  “It’s what people have been telling us for 30 years”.

So true.  If there’s one thing I heard over and over again in my nearly three decades long career on Syracuse television news,  it’s that I’m so much smaller in person than I was on TV.  Carrie hears it still, as her impressive run on WSYR-TV endures.  Hard to understand because we look just like ourselves to ourselves and to each other, but to people who saw us only on TV, we were small face to face.

I think our belly laugh was fueled by a similar conversation we had just one week ago.  I was at the Notah Begay Foundation Golf Tournament at Turningstone and stood within eight feet of Tiger Woods.  Carrie was working and could not attend so I described Tiger as magnificent and smaller than he appears on TV.  Again, more silence, and then more laughter.

After all these years, with my career on TV now closed out and Carrie still going strong, we think of ourselves as “small” on TV as we are in person.  So it’s a shock to meet someone on TV who isn’t as seven feet tall as they are on the screen. It’s kind of like looking in the mirror and seeing someone who feels 29 looking like she’s 52.

It’s so incongruous and there’s absolutely no desire to reconcile one image with another.

Tagged as: Bobby Flay, Carrie Lazarus, new York State Fair, Tiger Woods