A Hallmark Day, Not A Kodak Moment

They arrived last night to meet the family and make us more comfortable. (I think they may need as much time getting used to us!) One TV journalist who drove in from Ohio and will head home to Vermont tomorrow, and one associate producer up from Brooklyn, are both staying at a Chipman B&B. I bet Marion Acres is having a great time with this! She is a sweet lady who will love having such special guests.

At any rate, they will return this morning at 8:00am and spend 10 hours with us, filming whatever interests them. There should be plenty from which to choose. They will set her up at the table with school books, catch her practicing in the front room, take a walk by the river for some quiet question time, follow her to SUNY Potsdam to film her lesson with Dr. Rubio, head to Canton for her studio session with NPR's Todd Moe, home again, home again - jiggety, jig - for an acoustic jam session at 3:30pm with friends (actually, I'm guessing this is at church since I don't have a drum set in my music room), back to the house to teach a favorite guitar student (Cameron Dennis), and last but not least, the grand finale: Sinclair Family Dinner night with the whole crew. Whew!!

All this will be whittled down to a mere 3-4 minutes of air time footage to be viewed on New Morning, a Hallmark TV morning show hosted by Timberly Whitfield. You will see that it is Hallmark's version of early morning TV, presented in a less newsy and highspeed fashion. The stories are aimed at getting us to quietly consider some of the more important life issues, although they do not espouse any one faith in particular. Interesting.

And how did they get Julia's name? When we asked, the associate producer, an artsy creative type who is quiet and always observing, hesitated, saying, "Let's see, how can I make this long story simpler. My boss, John, is friends with the PR man for Christopher Parkening. They are all into guitar, classical, where I work - they love it - so my boss told me to do a story on the participants of this competition. It was narrowed down to Julia and one other guy, Travis, from Oregon. In the end, we went with Julia."

We don't know if it was the homeschool aspect of her bio, or her family relationship stuff (she wrote about how Dad first taught her guitar and how the whole family is musical.) But whatever it was, God has brought her to this -- a Hallmark Day. It should be a whole bunch of fun, and I'm just happy to be tagging along!