Weekend Sweetness for Eyes and Ears and Lester

ArtWalk

ArtWalk2015

June 19, 2015 ~ September 11, 2015

ArtWalk is an annual summer-time tradition where local businesses and galleries join with POAC to provide exciting art exhibits in Sandpoint’s downtown core. Each participating location will host the juried exhibits from late June through early September – the busiest months of our summer tourism season. 

Original work is accepted in the following media: painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, photography, glass, fiber, and sculpture. There is no jury fee to apply for ArtWalk. If you are selected to participate in ArtWalk, POAC will decide the retail venue that will exhibit your work.

All participating venues will provide artist receptions for the exhibit opening:
ArtWalk 2015 Reception: June 19, 5:30 – 8:30 pm
Art remains on exhibit Jun 19 – Sep 11, 2015

Business and gallery participation fees pay for the colorful ArtWalk brochures/walking maps and extensive publicity. Funds raised through ArtWalk also directly support POAC’s programs and events in the visual and performing arts for our community.


~~~~AND my son and my sister Barbara have their photography on display during this year's Artwalk.  Barbara's photos can be seen at Columbia Bank, while Willie's are hanging at the Pend Oreille Arts Council Gallery on First Avenue.

Check 'em out. 

Cindy is a Spokesman-Review columnist who often takes over the Huckleberries Online blog when Dave Oliveria is on vacation. You can learn more about Cindy by visiting her website at www.cindyhval.com 

On another note, I had some brief correspondence with Morgan Potts McLaughlin, my former English aide yesterday.  She has just received her RN degree at pretty much the same time that Lester Holt made the national news as the permanent anchor for the NBC Nightly News. 

As usual, when I mentioned Lester's appointment, Bill said, "There's always a Sandpoint connection."  

I agreed, remembering the column I wrote a few years ago for the Spokesman-Review about Morgan, then a college student in Utah who was working with Lester Holt as an NBC driver during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. 

Morgan agreed in her note to me yesterday that it was pretty exciting to learn about Lester's official naming by NBC as it Nightly News anchor.  

With all that in mind, I thought it would be fun and timely to share that column this morning.  So, here goes and Happy Friday. 

Morgan’s Excellent Olympic Adventure

By Marianne Love

for the Spokesman-Review

Shortly before Salt Lake’s Winter Olympics opened, Morgan Potts had to pack up her belongings, move from her Westminster College dorm room, and camp out with a family friend.  The first-year pre-vet major from Sandpoint didn’t mind.

She knew she’d pocket $300 for the inconvenience of being uprooted for Olympics security personnel.  She’d also enjoy a month off from classes. And she’d work 14-16-hour exhausting days in the midst of the Olympic flurry for the next three weeks.

 

This 18-year-old is still pinching herself after serving as personal driver for MSNBC Olympics anchor Lester Holt and hobnobbing with famous Olympic athletes on a daily basis.  Her selection from a field of 500 applicants came after a job fair interview last fall revealed her North Idaho winter driving experiences and her strong people skills.

“A constant thought ran through my head,” she says,  “Here I am, driving a brand-new Tahoe, carting around Lester Holt, meeting famous athletes left and right, getting free tickets to places I would never otherwise be . . . how lucky am I?”

The perks continued.  She earned good money. She kept the Tahoe 24-7 and wore official NBC duds, including coat, pants, turtleneck and hat, throughout the games.  

One day she even appeared on national television from Park City when Holt, doing a live feed in heavy, wet snow said, “Come over here, Mo; this is what happens during the break.”  

He summoned her to hold the umbrella over his head and wave.

“Ten minutes later, my mom called to tell me one of her clients saw,” Potts recalled. “So that was fun.”

 

Holt gave Potts high marks for her contribution to the NBC team.

“I think the thing that struck me most about Morgan is that she did not seem ‘awestruck’ by her experience,” Holt said. “We work at a fast (New York) pace, speak an odd lingo of our own, and (we) hosted a number of celebrity guests from Jimmy Shea to Dorothy Hamill to the Canadian Pairs skaters . . . . Morgan kept her cool and certainly has an extraordinary level of sophistication for someone her age.

“That said, she WAS a willing accomplice in the occasional Lester Holt-led ‘play breaks,’ which included a few runs down the ski and snow tubing slopes between newscasts,” he added.

 

Each day from dawn to dusk, Potts remained ready, at a moment’s notice, to transport NBC interview guests, through Olympic-proportion traffic jams to a variety of on-site venues. In one case, a 20-minute drive to pick up a guest for a 6:30 live interview took 68 minutes.  The guest arrived at the set with just two minutes to spare.

“The traffic was horrendous,” she said. “I guess a ton of people were in town to see concerts. To make it worse, this guest was booked by a guy named Greg in New Jersey.  He called three times throughout the day to make sure I remembered, four times on the way to get her and another three on the way back.  Talk about pressure!”

Potts shared her experiences with family, friends, and former teachers through daily email dispatches from Salt Lake City, Park City, or Deer Valley.  Adventures included an initial sighting of handsome American skater John Zimmerman and his partner, Kyoko Ina, followed by a two-hour visit with him at Starbuck’s and breakfast at McDonald’s.

“He’s really cool,” she wrote to friends, “We talked about majors and jobs . . . it turns out he worked at some vet’s offices too!”

Potts’ photo album features shots with Zimmerman and skier Picabo Street.  Her  passenger list included 1980 “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey goalie Jim Craig as well as  figure skaters Todd Eldridge and Michael Weiss.  

She won’t soon forget visits with skeleton gold medalist Tristan Gale, who’s “down-to-earth and sweet” or a three-hour news conference featuring the Russian gold medal pairs skaters. The NBC crew joined other media at a home surrounded by imposing KGB agents.

  

 “It’s scary to be yelled at in a language you don’t understand.  All I can say is that the Russians were very intimidating . . . all very big and not very happy to see so much media there,” she observed. “The Russian pair skaters showed up and were practically mobbed by reporters and cameras.”

With the Olympics closing, Potts faced reality and the letdown by turning in her Tahoe and saying good-byes to her East Coast NBC friends who constantly teased their “laid-back North Idaho girl with the pet squirrel” and lovingly named her  “Morgan Clampett”  (from the Beverly Hillbillies).

“I remember one of the first times Lester was in my car, he asked, ‘So, do you have any interest in journalism?’ 

My answer was ‘no.’” Potts said. “After working for MSNBC, though, my outlook has changed. I hear all these stories from Lester about how he’ll be meeting the President or broadcasting out of some foreign country.   I think now I would actually enjoy a job in broadcast journalism.”