Natural Disaster Read online

  Where is Andy Avalos [popular WMAQ weatherman]? And who sprays on Ginger Zee’s clothes?

  For a recovering anorexic, this was a tough one to read. Because my sick brain immediately saw this as Ginger Zee looks fat. I had to fight my inclination to write back, I had to buy these clothes myself, lady. With my own money. And TV adds ten pounds. And I can’t imagine what you are wearing and look like. Instead, I wrote:

  Happy Wednesday! Thanks so much for taking the time to write in and share your opinion. I am guessing you mean my clothing appears too tight? If so, I am sorry it came off that way and by no means do I intend to offend. I am just a young woman who studied meteorology only, no TV, trying to figure out fashion and flattering cuts like the rest of the world. If you happen to have any specific help or suggestions on where I might find affordable clothing that you think would look better, I am all ears. I am relatively new to the city and hope to hear back from you soon. Above all, thanks for watching and I hope you have an outstanding week.

  Postscript: She wrote back with several very specific sartorial suggestions, including that Lord & Taylor has their semiannual sale every March and September, and that Talbots makes elegant, loose-fitting pantsuits—and that they have a 40 percent coupon. She also became one of my most loyal fans and supporters.

  I try to think of these MVs as sad or angry folks at the other end of a computer who think I have a closet full of amazing shoes and the easiest job in the world. And I get it. My job comes with the perception of glamour, fame, and fortune. It’s not exactly true, but I do understand the attitude. I’m lucky. But does that mean I have to become a target of anybody with a laptop? I’ve never strongly empathized with the Gwyneth Paltrow it’s-so-hard-to-be-a-mom-and-a-movie-star rant, and I guess I accept that MVs are just part of the job one must endure. So I do the best I can to handle each comment with as much empathy and this-isn’t-about-me kind of attitude as I can.

  Very rarely do I get an e-mail or post about something I actually do for a living—like forecast the weather. This one got close:

  I watch NBC 5 all the time,,, love the younger generation,,, but it is very annoying to me when Ginger Zee, falls into that—gravely voice thing,,, I find it very unprofessional, at times it seems very forced. The audience is more then the 20 year olds.

  Here is my response:

  Please help me understand what you mean by “gravely voice thing.” I take all comments very seriously and always want to come off as professional. Did I sound like I was in a grave, and if so, any suggestions on how to remedy that would be most appreciated, as I am very much alive.

  I appreciate you taking the time to write and for watching, Ginger Zee

  Here is her response:

  Hi Ginger,,, the only way i can explain it is,,,, a deep throat thing,, and it sound very gravely,,, To me it is an early 20ies girl thing,,, they force their voice to go low and it comes out “like” gravely. Thank you for getting back to me,,, you are such a talented and attractive young woman,, I wish you well in your career. I love channel 5 and if you have any pull,,,, I wish they wouldn’t show so many programs in the wide screen,,, I love to see the top of the heads of people (or should I say, the entire head)

  See how she turned there? Started complimenting me? Always fascinating.

  Then there’s the straight crazy:

  Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 5:30 PM

  To: Zee, Ginger R (NBC Universal)

  Subject: Honey are we retaining water tonight at the auto show or did you eat some bad Blow Fish to make that Punkin head of your look fat on TV tonight ?

  My response:

  Pumpkin head? That is a new one. Thanks for the chuckle.

  Thanks so much for watching!

  GZ

  No matter what you do, you always end with “thanks for watching,” because that is the point. They were watching. They have a choice. They chose to write after disliking what they were seeing, and then chose to keep watching; and I will always be grateful for that.

  While I was pregnant, I got this doozy of an e-mail:

  Subject: Dress with respect

  You dress like a sausage. How embarrassing. I’m sure you get paid plenty and can afford to buy clothes. Disgrsce

  And yes, she spelled disgrace wrong. Misspelled words and poor grammar are almost a guarantee when an MV writes. Very rarely, I would say 0.01 percent of the time, do they have proper grammar and spelling.

  Here is my response to the pregnant-woman basher:

  Oh no! I am so sorry you think I look like a sausage. That is definitely not my intent. As a very pregnant woman, I am doing everything in my power to not look huge. I guess I need to work a little harder.

  Thanks so much for watching and have a spectacular day, Ginger Zee

  This may seem strange, but I get excited these days when I hear from an MV. It’s weird and maybe slightly masochistic, but it reminds me just how far this natural disaster has come. I’m not saying the attacks never hurt, but mostly they are amusing. I still respond to every one that is appropriate (meaning, I can’t picture them in a dark room lit only by the screen of their laptop, framed by clippings of me taped to the wall in the background). A therapist once taught me a terrific tool to use in handling the attackers, which is to separate others’ feelings and opinions from my own. Everyone is entitled to their feelings, and my only job is to acknowledge (not change) their feelings using the template, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I love…matching my shoes to my dress (for example).

  I suggest this tool for anybody facing any kind of harassment, undue criticism, or bullying. For some reason, honoring the feelings of your attacker disarms them, and they either go away or come back with such a lame response that it’s game over.

  I have also started utilizing my “Good Guy Team” (also known as my fans; let’s not forget, they exist, and I love them all) to bully the bullies. For example, I got a simple Your the ugliest weather girl I’ve ever seen (yes, your was used improperly) post on Facebook a while back. I quoted it (without blocking the person’s name) and informed them, Please get it right; I’m the ugliest meteorologist you’ve ever seen. And then my fans took care of that guy. I believe he had to shut down his Facebook page that very same day. Not that I intended for that to happen, but it’s important to remember that every single one of us has our fans, our friends and family, and we need to let them step in and do the heavy lifting once in a while.

  In the case of the your-the-ugliest message, I’m fine with their opinion that I’m ugly. Call me a weather girl? Oh, hell, no. I have studied too much, worked too hard, given up too many days off, and made too many sacrifices (happily) throughout my adult life to be reduced to a stereotype that diminishes my talents and skills. I believe that each of us has a responsibility to take seriously the power of our words. Otherwise they become dangerous in the hands of those whose intent is to manipulate language for their own (evil) ends.

  While my responses haven’t changed too much, my reaction to these e-mails has. Thinking about the initial mean viewer in Chicago, my tears, and running to Zoraida, I realize now that all I was looking for was validation. That I was okay. But, thankfully, growing up has taught me that it’s my job to validate myself.

  Here’s the bottom line: you either believe them all, or don’t believe any of them. Because, to be fair, I get plenty of complimentary e-mails, tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram comments as well. People blow up my skirt all the time. But I have chosen to not take any of them too seriously. Not the good or the bad. You can’t. All you can believe in is yourself.

  One of the ways I dealt with the trauma of that first MV attacker back in Chicago was starting a folder labeled BOOK WORTHY in which I put every single MV comment I’ve ever received. Occasionally I find myself wandering through that folder and am amazed that time really does heal all wounds. Some of them are hilarious. And even the ones that aren’t, that are just plain nasty, don’t sting anymore. My shrink was right—everybody really is entitled t
o their opinion, and I don’t have to take it on; I don’t have to internalize it. Turns out being a grown-up does have some benefits.

  Now, I’m gonna get my fat pumpkin face some sprayed-on clothes and see you all on network television.

  Almost a year had passed at WMAQ, and Chicago was really starting to feel like home. It was the summer of 2007 when I got a message from my old friend and former classmate from Valparaiso University, Paul Oren. Paul and I had been resident assistants years earlier at Valpo, and he was now teaching at our alma mater.

  In his e-mail, Paul was telling me that Valpo had a class called Weathercasting that they had recently developed, and he thought I would be the perfect professor.

  “Ging, this is an adjunct position. One day a week. You would be brilliant.”

  “Stop. What is adjunct?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It means you don’t have to have a master’s.”

  “Okay, good. I don’t.”

  And by the end of a short and sweet conversation with the same guy I used to patrol the floors with at Alumni Hall, I was taking on another job: adjunct professor.

  I walked into that classroom in the fall of 2007 with such determination. I was wearing one of my red Ann Taylor power skirt suits with fresh-out-of-the-box matching kitten heels. I was so proud to be returning to Valpo just five years after graduating, especially because this time I was returning as a teacher. The doors of Schnabel Hall swung open and the smell of books and labs and maps washed over me like a warm breeze. Even though I had studied meteorology in a different building across campus, this one had a special memory for me.

  Less than a decade ago, I had been a campus radio cohost broadcasting from this building. It was initially my friend James’s show, and he had asked me to cohost. The timing was perfect. I had recently decided that I was interested in being a television meteorologist. I was working on my science degree, but I didn’t have any education in, much less practical experience with, being on air. The concept (and I use that word loosely) for the show was a mix of random music and talk-show-lite ramblings by me and James. Our audience probably never broke double digits, but we didn’t care.

  The small audience allowed us to grow more comfortable speaking into the microphones. But after a few months, we grew restless and began to wonder what we could do to increase our listeners. After a blue-sky pitch session (a term that means nothing is off the table and no ideas are dismissed out of hand), we landed on what was probably our craziest idea. We were going to rebrand our broadcast with the provocative title of Topless Radio. We hung newspaper over the glass booth that other students passing by could see through to give the illusion that we were both buck naked from the pants up inside the studio. We weren’t, of course, and I seriously still can’t believe anybody believed us, but they did. Very quickly our show became a huge scandal at our Lutheran university, and as a result, our audience grew. Somehow we managed to stay on the air as Topless Radio for the entire spring semester without the administration shutting us down. Now that we had at least a few dozen listeners, James and I felt like legitimate radio personalities. The campus paper wrote a story about us, and we were asked to participate in a local Jell-O wrestling event for charity. And it all began in Schnabel Hall, where I was about to deliver a lecture on “weathercasting” to a roomful of mini-mes.

  These kids were lucky. When I was in school, we had to find our on-air experience for ourselves out in the real world, which is pretty impossible. I was jealous of the opportunity they had to take this class, and I was looking forward to playing a role as teacher and maybe mentor.

  Leaning against a desk next to my lectern was a copy of my very first billboard as a professional meteorologist, wearing an electric-blue blazer with black buttons. Even in that terrible pantsuit, that billboard made me feel like a prodigal superstar. It didn’t matter at all that there were only six students in the class. I was going to pour myself into each and every one of them and make them all get jobs. (Postscript—I am proud to report that today four of the six students from my first class are currently working as television meteorologists, and many more from the six semesters I taught are in television.)

  Only one of the students was female, and I knew the moment I met her that she was going to be a rock star. I knew she was going to fight the same battles I’ve had to fight just because of my gender. Her name is Ellen Bacca, and she would later become my intern and prodigy. I used to joke that she had so much talent that I was going to teach her almost everything I knew so she wouldn’t take my job. Ironically, today she has my old job at WOOD TV in Grand Rapids and is teaching weathercasting at Valparaiso.

  When I was a student at Valpo, the emphasis was on going on to grad school to get your PhD. That’s it. The path was set for a lifetime of academia, or working in-house for the government or a big corporation. I don’t believe anyone from my graduating class at Valpo went into broadcasting but me. And that’s fine. I’ve always been in the minority as a woman interested in science, so I feel compelled to speak for and support that minority. And even though it’s been a few years—okay, a few minutes—since anybody’s called me a “weather girl,” I know it’s still a default title for any female meteorologist, so I fight the good fight. I used to wonder why nobody ever says “weather boy,” but lately I’ve started to think of it as a non-gender-specific pejorative. Nobody who loves science as much as I do, who spent four years studying differential equations and linear algebra, deserves to be reduced to a sexualized cliché.

  Unfortunately, I have had to fight the prejudices many harbor toward television meteorologists since long before I even was one, and it began right here at Valpo. One of my professors, whom I admired and respected, told me that a career in television would be nothing more than a “waste of my brain.” It was an awful feeling at such a young age to be told this dream I had that filled me with excitement and purpose was basically stupid. Because, for whatever personal reasons he had against television, he refused to write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship I was applying for.

  “I used to be on the board of this scholarship. I know what they are looking for. And it’s not you,” he told me.

  I asked what it was that they were looking for.

  “Someone more academic.”

  Seriously? So on the one hand, he thought I was too smart to be on television, but on the other, I was too dumb to be seriously considered for a science scholarship. Welcome to the paradox of being a smart woman.

  I wanted to tell him he was too stupid to be molding the minds of the next generation of scientists, but instead I simply took my application a few doors down to a female professor who was happy to write the letter of recommendation for me. It makes me sad to think that, at such a young age, I had already accepted that men would think it was okay to dismiss me so easily. But at least I was smart enough to figure out how to go to the right person to get what I wanted. As a punch line, a week later I brought him an application for a scholarship from Glamour magazine, just to see if he would write that. Of course he was happy to.

  Which is how that one young woman in my class, Ellen Bacca, fueled my passion to teach. To this day, she consults me before she makes any big career moves, and although the months of wisdom I imparted to her in Weathercasting and Weathercasting 2 were, I believe, helpful, I think it’s our relationship and my commitment to being her mentor that matters the most to both of us. Just last summer, she and her husband came to my parents’ pool while we were home visiting. I felt such pride talking to her about her career and how much she felt I was a part of her journey.

  I made sure every student I taught, especially the women, knew that we are no less scientists just because we choose to express science on television. Yes, I wear brightly colored dresses, high heels, and lipstick, but I’m also a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist by the American Meteorological Society, a distinction that is held actively by fewer than 350 television meteorologists in the country. (The certification process requires
having a BS in meteorology, passing a difficult test, and submitting a tape that must be approved by their committee.)

  People still think it is okay to call me a “weather girl.” It’s not. But I get it. When television news was just starting, weather girls were women who recited the information created by meteorologists at the National Weather Service. We’ve come a long way. Today, almost everyone you see doing weather has a science degree and is genuinely interested in the atmosphere. The job is just too hard and too challenging to pursue if you don’t love the weather.

  I am the first female chief meteorologist at a network. And I want to scream it from the mountaintop, or at least Times Square. The crusade to be taken seriously as a scientist despite my gender and to celebrate all women who love science as much as I do is one I am committed to. I have hope that one day the term “weather girl” will be as obsolete as “housewife.”

  I was determined that this was not going to be a class where I droned on about theory, reading, or problem sets that my students would never use in their careers. More than anything, I wanted to give them practical tools that would make their transition from college to career a little easier than mine had been. To that end, I made them come to class in on-air clothes, trading in their comfy college sweats for suits, ties, and pantsuits. I taught them how to apply for a job, how to negotiate a contract, and how to gracefully exit a job when the time was right. One of my fondest memories came in my third semester of teaching, when I had eleven guys and Ellen in Weathercasting 2. I made them all sit around the lecture table in front of Mary Kay makeup tutorials. I will never forget the image of eleven guys trying on makeup.