Natural Disaster

by Ginger Zee

  I loved watching the students get on the green screen for the first time, which started the very first day of class. What I found was that some people are just inherently talented, but there are aspects of being on air that can be taught and practiced. Here are a few examples of TV oddities that folks in news commit.

  Vagina Hands

  Vagina hands is that odd way of holding your hands when you are on television. I don’t know where it started or why it hasn’t been abolished, but in my class, it was. I would always tell them, Stand like you do at a party, like you do naturally. If you wouldn’t talk to your mom holding your hands in a diamond shape like a vagina, then don’t do it on TV.

  Crutches

  The crutch is a reference to something a person does or says when they get nervous on television. It’s the “Uh…um…” or “As you can see…”

  I was ruthless with my students when it came to ridding them of these habits before they got too ingrained. It was inspiring to me to see them build their confidence without their crutches. Everybody responds to confidence. It’s exciting, it makes us trust you, and it’s a huge component of being successful on television.

  Overused Words

  There are many of these, but a few of my pet peeves are residents, motorists, and massive. Motorists? Residents? Aren’t they just people? The word massive has been so overused, it has lost all meaning to me. Massive sinkhole, massive manhunt, massive storm…so what really is massive?

  To this day, I get calls, texts, and e-mails from former students asking for advice on contracts; or they want to share the great news that they got their dream job. My former student Sean Bailey just got his third job, the one he has been gunning for his whole career, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I love hearing from my former students like Sean because it always reminds me that I have a purpose to pass on what I have learned, and that I can make a difference in people’s lives. Everybody loves that feeling.

  On his way to his first day at that dream job, Sean texted me:

  WHEN YOU STEPPED INTO GMA FOR THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR DREAM JOB, ANY ADVICE FOR ME AS I STEP FOOT INTO MY DREAM JOB?

  I responded:

  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO REMEMBER THAT IN A MONTH IT WILL BE LIKE EVERY OTHER PLACE YOU’VE EVER BEEN. NOT TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE MAGIC, BUT TO MAKE YOU LESS NERVOUS. YOU BELONG THERE. YOU ARE GOING TO BE AWESOME.

  He sent me this note at the end of the day:

  THANK YOU. TODAY WAS OVERWHELMING, BUT IN A GOOD WAY. ALSO, I WORK A SPLIT SHIFT TOMORROW AND GET TO GO TO THE BEACH IN BETWEEN….HOW COOL IS THAT?!

  That is cool, Sean. And that is what I miss about teaching. Sean still thinks working fourteen hours with a four-hour break in between is “cool.”

  Teaching allowed me to remember the purity of this business, my passion for meteorology. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to teach again soon. There are a ton of young men who could use my makeup tutorial.

  Allow me to give you all a litmus test for your health and well-being. If at any point you find a way to avoid pants with buttons and zippers for more than an entire season, that should be the call for help your body is giving you to say something is drastically wrong.

  The winter of 2010–2011 was that time for me. My fill-in opportunities at MSNBC in New York City were not as consistent (I had been filling in pretty regularly for a while; I even did the Weekend Today show once). Chicago was starting to feel stale. I had gone through a slew of unsuccessful relationships, moved to what felt like every neighborhood there was in Chicago, yet I couldn’t find peace. I now lived in a cave-like studio apartment with just Otis about a block and a half from the NBC tower.

  Every day I would work my morning shift, and then go home and drink half a bottle of wine between ten and eleven A.M. to “help me nap.” Then I would wake up, groggy and irritable and leave for work again. During my dinner break, after the 5 P.M. show and before the ten P.M. show, I would polish off that bottle of wine and sometimes open another. This became not only normal but necessary for me to get through my day. I was seeing a therapist, but she was what I call a “yes-therapist”—someone who may as well be your mom, who agrees to everything you say without really challenging you. And that was the season that I stopped wearing real pants entirely. I would go from sweatpants at home, to tights and a skirt at work, back to sweatpants, and once in a blue moon, workout pants (not that I worked out; they just sort of got me thinking about working out). I don’t know what it is about pants that keeps me in line, but without them, I live in a fantasy land where wine is calorie-free and a valid member of the fruit food group. I don’t eat much when I’m depressed, so the weight gain wasn’t terrible, but I was bloated and my eyes were bloodshot all the time. Not a great camera-ready look. Our weekend makeup artist, Diane, knew me well enough that she finally asked if I had been drinking when I got to work. At two P.M. I am sure I reeked of wine. I would make up an excuse, like Oh yeah, I was just catching brunch with friends. Brunch with friends was, of course, my solo bottle of wine in my dark studio apartment watching reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 on SOAPnet and staring at Otis. But sure, brunch.

  This went on until around March, when I realized my contract was up in less than six months. I began to feel the pressure. Where would I go? What would I do next? I had no answers; I only knew that I felt completely worthless on both a professional and personal level. Even if WMAQ wanted to keep me, I couldn’t keep doing the job I was hired to do. The five years of double shifts on the weekend and long stretches of being the low man on the totem pole needed to end. The fear of being out of work, or stuck there, forced me to face the fact that I needed to find a way out of this Cabernet-soaked depression. I had now been in television for almost a decade, and I felt like the next move had to be a big one. So I made a call to Rick Ramage.

  Rick was a guy who found me way back when I was in my first job in Flint. At that time, he had told me, “You don’t need me at this level, but stay in touch and let me know when you could use my help.” Every time I got a new job he would call to congratulate me. When I negotiated my own contract in Chicago without hiring him I think he probably thought that was a mistake. This time I knew I needed his help. I told him I wanted to make a big move, and he agreed to represent me. I updated my highlight reel, cut back on my red wine, and put on a pair of pants. None of it was comfortable (especially the pants), but it felt like a win.

  I was pushing the hardest to get a meeting at NBC for the Weekend Today show, because I had just always had that Today show goal. Remember my password todayshow10? Well, it was 2010. I worked solely at NBC affiliates throughout my ten-year career and grown up watching Matt Lauer and Katie Couric on Today on WOOD TV, and I just felt like NBC was home.

  Unfortunately, NBC didn’t feel the same. Rick said that while they did love me, they already had Janice Huff (whom I adore, the smoothest delivery out there) and Bill Karins filling in on the weekends, and they weren’t looking to make it an official job (Janice and Bill do weekdays at WNBC in New York City and MSNBC, respectively). But Rick also had good news. ABC News and CBS News were both impressed with my résumé reel and wanted to meet me.

  As with that “meeting” at NBC in Chicago five years prior, television stations, even big networks, will often say they are interested in meeting you “if you are in the area.” Translation: We are not going to pay for you to come for a formal interview. If you are that into it, you make it happen on your dime, and we will be happy to open an hour in our schedules.

  So I made it happen. I made plans to stay with my high school friend Kelley, who had moved to Hopewell Junction, New York, after college, and I booked my flight to NYC.

  I took a taxi from LaGuardia and remember coming over the bridge and seeing the skyline of Manhattan. Not since seeing Chicago for the first time had I felt more ready for a new city to be mine. Career-wise I was more than ready, and personally, I needed a shake-up. I went straight to Grand Central and took the train north about a
n hour to visit Kelley for the weekend. I remember being nervous waiting for Monday to come. These interviews were going to change my life; I could feel it.

  On Monday morning, I took the train back to the city super early and went to a salon to get my hair blown out. Hair has always been the thing that I don’t feel confident doing myself. I can do my makeup any day of the week, but hair, ugh! I can never make it look right. I stepped out of that salon ready to take on the world and perhaps a Pantene Pro-V commercial.

  My first stop was CBS News. Like every other television station I have ever been to, the building itself was dumpy. CBS News sits on Fifty-Seventh Street near Eleventh Avenue. I was disappointed in how drab and unassuming this building was. I think when you are in television, you always expect that next step to be so glamorous. But this looked almost identical to the sad lobby we had at my first job in Clio, Michigan. In fact, I wondered, did they get their carpet from the same factory? Oh, well; the job itself would be exciting, and I decided to focus on how much I wanted my new life to start in Manhattan.

  I met with Mary Noonan, who was the director of talent development at CBS. We had a very nice talk, but I was in and out of there in twenty minutes. CBS didn’t really do weather, and they definitely were not in the market for a meteorologist. So why had I met them? I can tell you that no meeting is ever a waste, because the same people in this small group move around, and your paths will eventually cross at another station. Mary now works at ABC in our talent department.

  Slightly disappointed at the time, I walked slowly (since I was way too early) a few avenues east to ABC’s headquarters at Central Park West and Sixty-Sixth Street. At this time, I had no idea how to navigate NYC and was so pleased with myself that I hadn’t gotten lost. I checked in early and thought this lobby was at least a little glossier than the one at CBS.

  I have come to learn that the look of the office doesn’t matter. It is the people inside who really count. And the people inside ABC were about to change my life for the best. I didn’t know it yet, but ABC was going to be the place where I was finally able and encouraged to fly.

  I took the escalator up to the elevator and things started to look a lot more like CBS. Either way, this was a new space and I was bringing my A game. I can’t remember exactly what I wore, although I do remember I had gone against the classic black/navy motif that is always suggested. It wasn’t the Pepto-Bismol pink I had worn to my first interview in Flint, but it was still something that said, Hey, I’m Ginger Zee, and I am different from anyone you’ve ever met.

  Barbara Fedida is the talent coordinator at ABC and the person I was supposed to meet, but she had an emergency and had to delay our conversation. So her assistant introduced me to Sheila Sitomer from the News Practices department. Poor Sheila. She had no idea who I was or why I was there. But we had a nice conversation. Sheila then passed me off to Tom Cibrowski, who was the executive producer of Good Morning America at the time. We also had a nice talk. He dropped me off back upstairs at the waiting area for Barbara. Barbara’s assistant apologized, saying Barbara needed more time, and said they had other people they wanted me to meet. I must have met three other executives, and each time I was corralled back into that waiting area. And each time I sat there, the same tall man in a suit walked past.

  By the third time—the time I was really waiting for Barbara—he passed by again and asked, “Are you being helped?” I told him yes, and that I was waiting for Barbara Fedida. With the friendliest smile he said, “Oh, you must be Ginger!” I nodded, and he invited me to walk with him. As we twisted and turned through the confusing hallways, we started going in a direction I had not passed through yet in this building. The windows started getting bigger; the offices were no longer cubicles. My mind was racing. Who was this guy? We reached his corner office and I was surrounded by glass and a fantastic view of the city. I turned around and looked at the name on the door. Holy cow, this was Ben Sherwood’s office. This was Ben Sherwood standing next to me, inviting me to take a seat. Ben Sherwood, by the way, was the president of ABC News.

  Ben and I had a brilliant conversation. He was so inquisitive, normal, and inviting. I never would have thought that the president of a gigantic news organization could be so accessible. We talked about what I wanted to do, and he asked what my end goal was. I told him I wanted to make great TV and get a tornado on live television someday. I told him about my storm chasing, and my ability to anchor and report. I told him I thought networks did too much damage chasing and needed to do more forecasting. He made me feel so comfortable, and I was just letting go. After what must have been twenty minutes, Barbara walked in. She looked frazzled; she had obviously had a long day of something else going very wrong. Her perfect complexion and incredibly thick and beautiful dark hair looked very New York City to me. She had gorgeous shoes and was dressed like she had her own personal stylist who only shopped from the front seat of runway shows. This woman was taking that Tamron Hall glamour back in Chicago to a whole other level. I looked at her shoes and did not recognize them as Jessica Simpson (which was totally top of the line for me, and I still totally love, by the way). They were something else. This place was something else.

  I was jolted from my shoe envy, when Ben’s voice boomed, “Hire Ginger. We need her on our team.”

  Barbara looked a bit taken aback and smiled. I had a feeling at that moment that Ben’s impulsiveness was something Barbara had dealt with before. So as excited as I was to be essentially hired on the spot, Barbara’s face told me it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  I didn’t care. I walked out with Barbara and remember turning over my shoulder to thank Ben. He was already deep into his computer, probably making someone else’s dreams come true. He looked up and I said, “Thank you.” I meant it. This man believed in me. He was going to allow me to do what I do best and give me the opportunities I could never have dreamed of.

  I walked out of ABC and into Central Park doing cartwheels in my head. I believe I did a literal Toyota jump. (Remember that jump from the commercial where they freeze frame the guy who got a great deal on a Toyota?) I had gotten the job. On the spot. I was going to be a meteorologist at ABC news. I was eventually going to be the first woman and one of the only degreed meteorologists to ever make it as a chief meteorologist on a network. I was breaking glass and taking names.

  I was going to The Network, people. In TV news, a network is the golden ticket, the top of the mountain, the endgame. I was having an out-of-body experience it was so exciting. Even though Barbara had warned me that there was much more to figure out and I had to stay in Chicago until the fall, I knew this was home and that it would all work out. After I called my mom, I called Rick and we celebrated over the phone as I rushed to the airport.

  When NBC heard about the offer from ABC, they offered some fill-in work on Weekend Today. I politely declined. About nine months later, our team at GMA Weekend was beating NBC in the ratings; NBC hired a weekend meteorologist.

  When I returned to Chicago I wrote Ben Sherwood a thank-you note. But not just any note. First of all, this was a guy that I knew would appreciate more than an “It was such a pleasure meeting you; I really hope I get to be a part of the team,” kind of boilerplate thank-you note. No, Ben needed a special note. The kind of note only a real natural disaster could write.

  Ben,

  Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me last week. I haven’t had such a fated feeling since my epic adventure to The Price Is Right in 2003. I know this may seem odd, but stick with me.

  I had been working almost non-stop at my first full-time job as a meteorologist in Flint, Michigan[,] when one morning I woke up and had an overwhelming feeling that Bob Barker was going to die (I am obviously much better at forecasting weather than life expectancy as Mr. Barker is still alive and well). So, I took my first real vacation time and immediately booked a trip to Los Angeles so I could attend The Price Is Right. I was an independent woman, like Destiny’s Child had inspired, so this
was a solo, girl-power trip. I was told by a friend that you can just show up and people will have tickets to The Price Is Right. He was right. I showed up early and saw a handsome man across the street. He was waving me over. I crossed and he said, “Hey gorgeous, do you need a ticket?” Then, his friends came up on the sides of him wearing Central Michigan University shirts and asked, “Hey, aren’t you that weather chick from NBC?” I corrected them, “meteorologist,” and introduced myself to the beautiful man who had initially called me over. He introduced himself. Joe Frost. Joe Frost?

  In true Ginger fashion, my married name flashed before my eyes seconds after we met, and it was the best yet. Ginger Frost. A meteorologist named Ginger Frost. Can you imagine?

  Joe ended up getting on The Price Is Right, and I ended up spending the remainder of my solo trip with Joe and his friends, camping on the beach, swimming, partying…it was such a special, free time. Joe and I dated for about six months after that until an ill-fated end to our storybook romance in Ann Arbor at a U of M game.

  That aside, I learned to trust my gut. Something brought me to LA. Now I have that same pull to ABC News. Please help me make this happen. I assure you, and Bob Barker, that it will be a great move.

  My very best,

  Ginger

  A bold thank-you note, I realize, but I think Ben did appreciate it. And I would come to appreciate all his correspondence to this day. He has moved up and out, as we knew he would. His talents have no bound. And I will forever be grateful to him for taking this chance. He promised I would never work harder than I would for ABC News. He was right.

  I picked up The New Yorker magazine, then stared at the cartoonish cover, partly in disbelief that I was actually living in New York and partly in disbelief that one of the only skyscrapers I had walked into was that of a building that held my new therapist. This wasn’t exactly the Sex and the City version of New York City I had always envisioned. I hadn’t even had a chance to check out some hot new restaurant or store my heels in my oven like Carrie Bradshaw; nope, for me the first place I ventured into was the office of Dr. Scott Wilson.