Better than Botox

Just when I decided to put away the skateboard and stop playing video games and embrace the whole aging thing, everything changed.

Blame Steve Jobs.

I used to be an early adopter - until it got ridiculously expensive and Apple became the world's fastest-growing cult. I've never been a conformist.

And then I held it: the. tablet.  I was minding my own business on the Santa Monica Promenade when I saw one of the glistening jewels sitting alone on a store display table.  Very odd, since the other iPads were surrounded three-deep by cult members.

The serpent seduced with the Apple.  In my hands was the fountain of youth. Videogames. Comics. Disney on demand.  The 9.7" capsule held an elixir far more potent than Botox. I was transformed like Queen Gimhilde  in Snow White, the magic mirror at my command.

Then I felt eyes drilling into the back of my head. A boy glared at me as if to say, "Lady, you look ridiculous playing video games with curlers in your hair."  

The spell was broken. 

I gingerly put down the tablet.  I was saved. My bank account not depleted by $499. Plus tax. Plus data plan. Plus accessories. Plus apps.

You almost had me, Mr. Jobs. And just for the record, I wasn't wearing curlers.

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Defying Limits

I've been feeling so trapped by monotony that I tried riding backwards in elevators just for kicks. Really bothers people when someone defies convention. Or is there some law that says elevator passengers must stand facing forward?

I've always resisted boundaries that limit creativity and adventure. As a kid, if an adult told me, "Girls don't climb trees," I'd climb the highest one.  When teachers said, "Draw inside the lines," I colored perfectly outside the lines. 

Yes, challenge boundaries in the wrong way and you land in jail. or worse.  But defy limits in the right way? You can change the world.

I was thinking of two Haitian boys who told us their parents died when their houses collapsed in the earthquake.  They said they ran for their lives but got lost and had been running ever since. We brought them to our camp to take care of them.

Natasha with our adventurers Kevin and Manu. Haiti 2010

That night our hosts brought back a stranded traveler. As fate would have it, she recognized the boys from a school in the city. 

Turns out they weren't exactly orphans running for their lives.  They'd made up the story.  We couldn't be mad; they'd just wanted an adventure. We arranged to take them home in the morning.

I hope to see the boys again - maybe write a children's book about their adventure.  I'm not condoning their actions - they could have gotten hurt or worse.  But imagine the men they can become if given the chance to run with an extraordinary vision for their country.

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Justice of the Heart


A friend sent me a casting notice for a movie about a serial killer based on true events. I never imagined the possibility of auditioning for the role of a TV newscaster would reveal the ending to a real life case.

Friends have suggested I write books about the murder cases I've covered but the idea never appealed to me; maybe because there aren't any happy endings.  "You go on but you can't forget the things you saw," said my mother.  Can't forget the victims - or the killers.

No Movie Script
I wish it had just been a movie when my TV station sent me to cover the murder of a nurse named Martha Bryant who'd been attacked driving home from work.  The horrific killing rocked a quiet Oregon town. 

I can't forget police describing how the killer tried to rape her: "When he realized she was of no use to him sexually due to her injuries, he executed her."  Shot her point blank in the head in the back seat of his car.

Police began to suspect a soft-spoken family man who lived nearby. My cameraman and I went to his house to interview him but workers were tearing it down.  Someone had torched it. 

"Found this," a worker handed me a charred slip of paper, "don't know if it means anything."

Chills ran through me after one glance. It was a search warrant showing cops were looking for possessions of a dozen women in the man's house. 

If my hunch was right, police thought he may have killed before. Many times.

Phone calls confirmed the women listed in the search warrant were either missing or dead. The trail of possible victims ran from Florida to Oregon. 

I went on the air with the exclusive report that a serial killer might be at work. Police asked a judge to have me arrested for illegal possession of the warrant because I refused to reveal how I got it.  

Until now.

Cesar Barone eventually went on trial for Martha's murder and more. I sat behind him at the defense table every day in court.  During a break, he spoke to me for the first time. "Can you do me a favor?" he asked. "Can you check on my dogs?"

I never aired his comment; seemed too cruel to the victims' families.  Never aired his wife's story either; she'd met Barone a decade earlier through a personal ad.  She had no idea she'd fallen in love with a serial killer.

No Hollywood Ending
Today I learned Barone is dead.  Died on death row at 49 still insisting he was innocent (crime writer Anne Rule wrote a book about him but he never gained the notoriety of his former Florida cellmate, Ted Bundy).

I wish it had been a movie and the director would say, "Cut!" but there's no tidy Hollywood ending for Barone's wife and kids or his victims. 

But maybe life scored justice in the end:  Barone died of a cancerous tumor wrapped around his heart.

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Uncovered Treasures

Walking along the cool, sapphire waters of the Pacific. Sunshine glistening on the waves. Sea treasures - oysters, starfish, mussels, sponges, anemones - uncovered by the low tide.

I'm with a friend I met the day we flew to Haiti. Sarah had stayed in Port-au-Prince to run a clinic set up at an orphanage after the earthquake. This is the first time we've seen each other since hugging goodbye under a mango tree.

"Part of it is closure," she says of coming to see our team in California.  Like a book you can't put down, we struggle to close this chapter.

We went to the disaster zone expecting to feel the ache of death and despair.  Instead, for some of us Haiti became a place of rebirth.

"Haiti awakened something inside me," our friend, Kezia tries to explain. "My life hasn't really been the same since."

Sitting under the mango tree at base camp, I'd told Kezia she was meant to be a storyteller, a desire she'd buried long ago. In Haiti she'd let it stir in her heart again. "I felt like I'd been given permission to dream," she said. 

Closed doors. disappointments. failures...our dreams had become ghosts - until Haiti.

Sarah described Haiti as a place "where hugs were bandaids, hands became hope and a song bonded souls." It felt selfish to be with victims who lost so much only to find a song in our souls.

I, too, had abandoned myself to the song.  At times I was a writer, at times a nurse's aide, at times an orphan's playmate.  Limitations were removed. 

I struggle to find words. Kezia does it for me.

"Not being able to express yourself speaks of something new happening inside you. You are letting His purposes be worked out rather than making it fit a model you've seen before," she says. "That is trust."

Walking along the shore, I want to ask Sarah, "It's ok to keep the treasure we found in Haiti, right?"  But words are lost among the riches uncovered by the changing tide.

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Storytellers

It's an overused but true saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Every TV writer's heard a million times, "Write to video." 

I know when I truly got what that means.

I'd written a lead story about an illegal, multistate puppy mill ring. Our news director tore up my script. 

"See these images?" he said, cuing up shots of sad puppies whimpering behind chain link fencing. "Start here. Then go into this sound bite."

He showed me how to turn a good story into an extraordinary one; not being exploitive but using the full impact of the visual medium.  

He also gave me my first big breaks: the anchor desk, top story live shots (threatening to fire me if I screwed up), network stories.

He could be a tyrant, too. When a childhood friend's mom died, he told me not to come back if I left during a critical news time. I walked out, driving six hours in a blizzard to get to the funeral.

He called a few days later demanding to know why I wasn't at work. "You fired me," I said. "Show up," he said. It was his way of saying, "You're still on the team." 

That year we took the station to first in the ratings for the first time in 40 years.

He was fiercely competitive but taught me to use that drive to dig beyond surface facts. He denied me only one title: war correspondent. Despite the risk, I'd wanted to cover history from Iraq's frontlines.

Eventually I'd go to the frontlines of war zones of a different kind - inner cities, disaster zones, Haiti...

Storytellers.  We see the risk, but we also see the chance to tell history. See those images? Start there.

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Champions

Maria Peterson Photography

My childhood friend, Stello, came to visit and we got to talking about junior high. We can remember our first crushes but for the life of us we can't remember why we started calling eachother by our last names - and still do.

We played soccer a lot back then. We can still recall our team's starting lineup:  Stello, me, Missy, Ruthie, Pam...

An undefeated season took us to the district championships against our biggest rival. Coach kept us starters in the whole game but the score stayed tied at zero.  Exhausted, we faced a kickoff.

Each of us remembers that game a little differently. Stello, at center, was held scoreless at the front line. I missed a penalty kick, something that hadn't happened all season. Our goalie let a ball dribble by her. 

And our rival? Well, they made one lousy kickoff point.

We'd bawled unashamedly. We hadn't played just to win a title or to impress a boy on the sidelines. We had played for eachother. I had wanted my teammates to be champions more than I had wanted it for myself and they had wanted the same for me. 

But in the end we'd fallen short. Our season was over.

"Why do we still care about a soccer game so long ago?" I asked Stello before she left.  She thought awhile and then wrote in my notes, "What would the world be like if we cared more about the other's success than our own?"

So decades later defeat finally lost its sting as we imagined a world that looked like it did back on that soccer field.  First crushes included, of course.

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No Ordinary Life

Nurse Kerry jumped on a plan with only hours notice to return to Haiti

Received a distressing message today from a relief team nurse who just flew back to Haiti to help at the orphanage clinic we set up after the earthquake. Aftershocks had forced them to evacuate.

"All the children woke up, fear was within each of them," Kerry said. They'd been outside all night, most of the children too hurt to go anywhere else.

Each time the ground shakes in Haiti, it shakes in my heart.  Images run through my mind. A starving baby asleep in my arms. Sick orphans huddled on the wet ground.

I keep having a dream that I'm trying to drive my car to Haiti but a tidal wave blocks my way.

Some of my teammates returned to Haiti with only hours notice to help expand the clinic at New Life Children's Home thanks to the donation of a large UNICEF tent.  We call the clinic "Wimmer's Wing" after EMT Sarah Wimmer who stayed behind to help run it.

I expected those middle-of-the-night phone calls as a TV news crime reporter. The overnight producer would give me just enough details to throw on clothes and get out the door. Shooting. Northeast. Multiple fatalities.  

Even after leaving the crime beat, I still carry a backpack of clothes in my trunk...

As I look at how the story of my life has unfolded - from the viewer who sent a Kleenex with the snarky advice, "Honey, blot your lips," to Hollywood to Haiti - I've come to see that I'm not meant to live an ordinary life...even if that means crossing the ocean on a moment's notice simply to go hold a child's hand.

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