News Flash!

After an amazing work-while-we-watch (woo - two sets of incidental alliteration there!) viewing of Troop Beverly Hills, Katy and I sat in front of the television as it automatically stopped the tape and cut to the local news. The announcer mentioned that there was "late breaking" news from our town, so we stopped to pay attention. Apparently, there has been a flasher in the area, revealing himself to women going for runs. I got excited when one of the interviewees turned out to be one of my grad school classmates, a fellow teacher, captioned as a "resident." As she revealed on camera, though she hasn't encountered the flasher on any of her runs, she finds it "alarming." At the end of the segment, the newscaster was "live at the scene," a location only a minute drive from us. Deciding he was too close to not go see him (the newscaster, not the flasher) in person, we immediately ran to the car to locate him. Our initial excuse is that we think it would be fun to jokingly flash him.

In no time, we arrived to see the news van. Once there, the idea of actually flashing the newscaster came to seem stupid (thank you, clarity), so we needed a new plan. The newscaster was watching us - no one else was around, and we had pulled up immediately beside him. Katy suggested that we just strike up a conversation with him, which I initially don't agree to. On second consideration, however, I remembered exactly how cordial Katy is, so I figured I could let her do the talking and be fine.

When we got out of the car, the newscaster cockily introduced himself as though he were a local celebrity. I silently judged him, which in retrospect might not be fair considering we did aid in that ego-boosting by instantly driving to see him. Though Katy was comfortable enough for the both of us, the conversation still went awkwardly as we really had nothing to say except for talking about the flasher incident in general. He basically repeated everything we had already heard from the initial story and we took turns nodding and commenting how "shocking" and "horrible it was. Not to treat the situation lightly, but in truth, I mostly found it humorous; this town needs some excitement, even if it is coming in the form of some creepy guy showing his genitals. In an attempt to cover up an awkward pause, I mentioned that I knew one of the people he interviewed, that she was a classmate of mine. He was surprised, saying that he asked whether she was a student, but that she said no. I can't wait to confront her for lying to a reporter, looks like the teacher prefers the term "resident" to "student."

Katy wanted to know whether the flasher could be a student. The reporter said, "No, he's either Hispanic or Middle Eastern." This statement threw me for a loop since this fact did not preclude the suspect from being a student. Thank goodness for Katy, who had the ability to speak up to his prejudiced notions, adding, "Yeah, so it could be a student." He didn't seem to get it.

Well, that was enough for us. It had been fun tracking him down, but clearly he was pretty lame. (And considering how lame we were for doing any of this stuff in the first place, that's saying something.) As we drove away, a while down the road we approached a guy walking late at night. "Is he the flasher?" I joked. Upon closer inspection, we realized this guy was peeing in someone's yard. So in effect, yes, he was exposing himself in public. To creep him out, we immediately turned around, driving by him slowly twice more. We contemplated going back to tell the reporter what we had seen so we could make the news ourselves, but didn't really feel like speaking with him again.

And that was our pointless adventure for the night. Ta-da!