A live morning broadcast in England meant shooting at nearly midnight in Seattle. We heard the presenters in England through our earpieces and stared at the camera. It was a little nerve-wracking being on live. No second chances. The interview didn’t get too in-depth, but the crew and the hosts were very polite. Jess and Madi both had new Instagram followers by the time the broadcast was over.
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GMA!
Jessica’s BBC Article garnered a lot of attention and soon other media outlets came a-calling, including renewed interest from Good Morning America (strangely, the people we talked to seemed to have no knowledge of their previous interactions with us). Arrangements came together quickly and on Sunday night the GMA crew, including correspondent Matt Gutman came to interview us at the co-op in the 2nd floor lounge. Craig from the $40 a Pop documentary came to film behind-the-scenes footage as well.
We were interviewed for about 90 minutes total and had a fun, nuanced conversation about the whole story. Matt was smart, humorous, and asked some good questions. Of course, we knew all along that the resulting story was going to be only a few minutes long, so when they left we waited for Tuesday and hoped for the best.
The GMA story might be a little confusing to someone not in the know, but we were pretty happy with our first national tv appearance.
Addendum by Jessica: This was hilarious. Alice and Matt have strikingly similar personalities which is likely why she gets called “precocious” in the show (Matt called her this a couple times wheile filming). I think they might have been best friends in a previous life where they were both jr. high school students together.
About 70% of the way through Madi’s interview, the producer suggested they stop the whole thing and Madi could put on a jacket because her tank top was inappropriate. This would not only have meant doing most of the interview over again, but Matt also commented that plenty of starlets on the show look just like this.
Alice said, “this is just like public school where they tell you your bra strap can’t be showing because it’s distracting to the boys and you’re the one who has to change.” Matt nodded back at her. Power to you both. Fight the good fight out there.
Jessica’s BBC Article
After Aaron’s New York Times article, the BBC invited me (Jessica) to write my story from my point of view. The British are awesome, so I did.
This was a really fun process, and I learned a lot along the way about what is very different about my experience from Aaron’s.
A lot of my story happens back in the late 1990s when I didn’t know any lesbian parents. That’s the last time I spent so much time thinking about Aaron and what he was like and what I wanted for my family.
Protecting my kids is still 99% of my love story every single day.
Today Show Disappointment
Megan Kelly Firing Scuttles Our Scheduled Appearance
After my New York Times article was published, we began to receive a number of press inquiries, including from 20/20, Good Morning America, and the Today Show. Both GMA and the Today Show were only interested in doing a story if they would be the first to air it. We wound up choosing the Today Show because they offered to fly us to New York to appear live on the show, whereas GMA would have only been a pre-recorded segment.
A Today Show producer became our handler and did background interviews with Madi, Bryce, Jess and myself. They scheduled us to appear live on November 5th and booked flights and hotels for us. We excitedly made plans to see friends in New York and invited a bunch to come be members of the studio audience. We went shopping and bought fairly expensive outfits to wear on the show.
On October 23rd, Megyn Kelly made racially insensitive comments about black face being ok for Halloween costumes, and was fired shortly thereafter. As we were scheduled to appear on her hour of the show, we wondered whether this would effect us, but NBC’s preparations continued on so we assumed everything was ok. We were pleased that we would not have to meet Megyn and read rumors about who would be the replacement host with interest. We were hoping for Kelly Clarkson.
On October 29th, NBC sent a crew to film an interview with me that would be used as an introduction to our appearance. (Bryce went into NBC in NY for a similar taping) The interview went well and I looked forward to seeing it. During the day on November 1st, another Today Show producer called each of us to do yet more background interviews, but then later that afternoon we received an email telling us that our appearance had been cancelled.
We received very little in the way of an explanation of why we’d been cancelled other than that Kelly’s firing had caused their plans to change. It didn’t make much sense to us given the amount of work NBC had put into it. In a crisis, wouldn’t you want nearly ready material? Nor did we receive much in the way of an apology for the disruption to our lives: we’d all taken off work (Madi gave up a week of shifts at Yardhouse, costing her hundreds of dollars) and my brother Nathan had bought tickets to fly to Seattle to take care of Mom while I was away (NBC did pay his flight cancellation fee).
We disappointedly let our friends and family know that we wouldn’t be appearing and cancelled our NY plans. I put my hat in hand and contacted GMA to see if they would still be interested in our story. The producer that we’d been talking to said she would check to see if there was still interest. We’re still waiting to hear back.
Aaron’s Meet My Kids Party
In the original New York Times article, Aaron talks about his (strange?) first impulse after finding out he had sperm kids and that we were all going to meet — he was throwing a “Meet my kids!”-themed party at his building in Seattle.
We have a lot of family collection pictures of this party with a potentially one-of-a-kind theme.
Here are some we’d like to share.
