I was plenty excited that I was going to be talking with world-class fisherman, veteran ski-patrolman, river guide, inventor, and direct-metal sculptor John Simms on WYOMING CHRONICLE.

Before dawn one morning, John and I climbed into my truck and drove together on slick roads to the Wyoming PBS studios in Riverton. John had cracked a couple of ribs recently – the eighth or ninth time he has done that – so he was a bit sore. “They heal up by themselves,” he said, shrugging it off. Clearly, a cracked rib or two wasn’t going to slow Simms down now any more than it had when he was leading people into the back country, roaring down fall lines, or safely through some of the fastest water in our state.

As we sipped our coffees and talked as the Wyoming landscape changed, I realized that there was no way that we could cram all the inspiring and interesting stuff that John has done into a half-hour interview. But as the cameras rolled, he touched on a lot of it.. It was amazing, inspiring stuff. Wait ‘till you see it.

What an honor to talk with John Simms on WYOMING CHRONICLE. As my fellow hosts and I fan out across Wyoming, we look forward to meeting and talking with others of you, too. People who will inspire you. Just as John Simms inspired me.

Our interview airs next Friday, November 20 at 7:30 pm.

Chronicle broke some new ground this week – an interactive interview with Sen. Mike Enzi with a satellite linking our studio in Riverton to the Senate press gallery in Washington, D.C. It adds just a little more tension – and tension, I’ve found, is generally GOOD in interviews, especially with experienced politicians – and gives us a great opportunity to bring viewers up-to-the-moment news from the Nation’s Capitol.

The subject of the interview, health care, brings some tensions of its own. Enzi was famously one of the Gang of Six, a bipartisan group trying to forge a compromise on health care reform in the Senate Finance Committee. Though Enzi has a very conservative rating as a Senator, he is known for working across the aisle, and he kept his attacks on Democrats to a minimum in our interview. But he has taken some heat at Wyoming town hall meetings for his cross-the-aisle work, particularly from voters who oppose the “public option” health plan, which opponents fear signals a federal government takeover of health care. In the end, he voiced opposition to the bill that finally emerged from the Finance Committee bill, which he said was rushed out under artificial deadlines.

There are some surprises in the interview – check out what Enzi now says about the “public option” – and a minimal amount of political rhetoric.

Spent much of yesterday afternoon taping the first of what will be numerous Wyoming Chronicle “donuts” – one of those terms that makes me realize that despite years of working for Wyoming PBS, I’m still befuddled at times by the world and lingo of TV.

A donut in this case is the hosting segment that surrounds the interview at the heart of each Chronicle, opening and closing. We tape interviews in bunches – down in Cheyenne, we did four interviews in two days – and then air them once a week, but we add an introduction (by me) that gives a more immediate spin to the subject.

Our first show, for example, is about the swine flu epidemic, a topic that gets a new spin every day. Laurie Farkas interviewed Wyoming’s Chief Health Office, Brent Sharrard, and now we have to keep the subject current. We do that by commenting in the “donut” on the latest count of infections in the state, and by adding a new website “flu.gov” to the information here on the website that accompanies the show.

So the work doesn’t end with Laurie’s interview – in a way, the work of Jennifer Amend and Tom Fischer, who runs the website, has just begun.

We taped several more hosting segments yesterday, because director Thompson Coles had the studio ready, and we figured if the situation changes, we can re-do that segment. But some of these shows don’t have to air instantly – they’re “everygreen”.
Or so we thought. I decided yesterday to go ahead and tape the “donut” for a show that won’t air until the end of October – Dina Mishev’s interview about the BLM’s wild horse roundup and auction – because it was a ‘soft’ piece not tied to a news event.
Then, moments before I turned off my computer, in comes a press release from the U.S. Department of Interior: Secretary Ken Salazar is proposing a new program for wild horses that would set up horse preserves in the Midwest, because the public isn’t adopting enough horses to keep the western range healthy. Rewrite, rewrite…and tape!

Now we’ll have to hope Salazar doesn’t change his plans before the end of the October, or we’ll be dragging back into the studio to re-do the donut. At that point, I suppose, it would be glazed.