COMMENTARY
Pergament: City of Good Neighbors lives up to its name
I don’t usually hang out with the television celebrities I write about unless it involves special circumstances, situations or feelings. Like panic.
Which brings me to my adventure coming home from California on Tuesday on the same airplane with Jarod Miller, the Town of Boston native who is the host of the CBS reality series, “Greatest American Dog.”
If cameras had been following the animal expert, it might have made for a pretty good reality show example of why Buffalo is called the City of Good Neighbors.
Of course, there is no greater adventure these days than flying. My flight back home from Burbank Airport after 12 days interviewing the stars was scheduled to land at JFK Airport in New York City about 45 minutes before the last connection to Buffalo.
It looked like it was going to be cut pretty close, even before the Burbank flight sat on the runway for about 30 minutes. When the pilot told us that he had to hang over Chicago for 45 minutes because of air traffic, visions of sleeping overnight in JFK danced in my head.
Oh, well, at least I was flying on Jet Blue, the airline that allows you to easily pass six hours by watching television. This enabled me to do my job and watch the evening news coverage of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East that has led to more Republican panic attacks accusing the media of being in his pocket.
Then it was on to hear MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann jump all over Republican presidential candidate John McCain for apparently misstating whether the surge in Iraq or the Sunni awakening began first during an interview with CBS’ Katie Couric. CNN’s Anderson Cooper was all over it, too.
All I could think was that “Saturday Night Live” writers probably were wishing their early start to next season was this week rather than Sept. 13.
I also had time to see a few minutes of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” which featured a 40-year-old church singer doing an incredible Aretha Franklin imitation. Shortly after she finished “Chain of Fools,” the Jet Blue captain informed passengers the flight was being diverted to Rochester, apparently because of weather issues in New York. That ended any chance of making it home to Buffalo that night.
Being no fool and having spent a night in a New York airport before, I decided getting off in Rochester and trying to get home was a better idea than sleeping at JFK.
I was not alone. Waiting to get off the plane, I spotted Miller behind me. He had been in Burbank to appear on Craig Ferguson’s late-night show and attend a CBS party to promote “Dog.”
I was at the same party, but since it was more crowded and noisy than the skies over New York, I never ran into Miller.
We had the same idea in Rochester — rent a car to get to Buffalo. One problem. The flight attendant said the rental car offices were closed. She was wrong, but there were no cars available to go one-way to Buffalo.
I had lost Miller briefly and made friends with another Jarod, a University at Buffalo geography professor who was traveling with his wife and incredibly well-behaved 2-year-old. Like me, Jarod 2 appeared ready to empty his wallet to get a ride home.
Then Jarod 1 showed up again, informing me that he had a ride coming from a friend in Buffalo, Jill, who would take us all home in her compact car. We’d all be home by 1:30 a. m. or so.
We had more than an hour to wait, during which time Jarod 1 and I discussed the ratings and audience for his show. Though the viewership slipped from a very strong 9.5 million for its premiere to a decent 7.5 million in Week Two, he said it had the same share and CBS was happy going into the third episode (which ran Thursday).
Then we ran into a TV personality from Orchard Park, 22- year-old Brittany Kroll, who hosts a talk show carried on cable. While she waited for her parents, who attended the Michael McDonald concert, to pick her up, she tried to book Jarod 1 for “The Brittany Equation Show.” We were all fast friends by then. Brittany even set up a picture of the six of us, when our ride came.
Jill, who works at Roswell, said a friendly hello to us all. She also brought a container of vanilla cupcakes she had made for Jarod 1’s birthday, which had been the day before.
She had me at hello — and at the sight of her car. But the cupcake tasted so good and the company put on such an entertaining show that I almost didn’t care that my luggage wasn’t going to arrive in Buffalo for several more hours.
