The year was 1976. Back before cell phones or the internet, in the days of typewriters and carbon paper, I had landed my first job in television, as a script typist for the MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
I was three months in the Big Apple, but had yet to see any of its sights, not even its fabled lunch spots. Every day since being hired, I had stayed at my desk all through lunch, subsisting on delivery coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, answering phones.
No one made me do that. I was simply still so new – to the job, and to New York – that I think I was afraid it might all evaporate if I left my desk for as long as an hour.
My friend Carla was determined to rectify this situation. “You’ve been eating the same darned sandwich every day for three months now! There are so many famous places that are just a few steps from here: The Russian Tea Room; Rumpelmayer’s; the Carnegie Deli…. Tell you what: Lunch will be my treat, if you’ll come with me today. What do you say to that?”
“But who will answer the phones?”
“The same person who would answer them every day if you just took the lunch hour you’re entitled to: the receptionist!”
“I’d love to, you know that. But…”
“But what?”
“Well, they might need me..”
“Tell me something. You’re the script typist, right?”
“Right.”
“So they need you whenever they broadcast, right?”
“Right.”
“But the studio is dark tonight, isn’t it? MacNeil isn’t even in the country, and Jim Lehrer is doing the show entirely out of Washington all week …so all you have to do is catch up on some filing and go home early – isn’t that right? So surely you can spare one measly hour for lunch?”
“Well, when you put it that way…. Still, what if something happened?”
Carla lost all patience with me. “What could happen?” she barked.
I rose to the challenge. “Well, there could be one of those freak summer thunderstorms in Washington, and lightning could hit the WETA studio building, and it could burn to the ground, and they’d have to send Jim Lehrer up to do the show out of New York. That’s what.”
My friend stared at me for almost a minute. Then she cracked up. “You’re nuts, you know that?! You’d have a better chance of winning the lottery! You don’t really believe all that, do you?”
“I guess not,” I said, sheepishly.
“All right. Let’s go then!”
So I set off to discover the phenomenon of triple-decker sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli, whose motto may as well have been, “Bet you can’t eat both halves!”
An hour later, I was indeed only halfway through my mountain of pastrami when I suddenly came up for air. “I’ve gotta go!”
“Judy, you’re getting paranoid again. Anyway, you can’t leave till you’re finished.”
And so it was that two hours later, I waddled back to my office, fat but happy.
The smile quickly faded from my face when I spotted the line of co-workers stretching from the elevator all the way back to my desk. Every one of them looked worried.
“Here she comes!” yelled the first one.
“At last!” said the second.
“Where have you been?” scolded three, four and five, as they hustled me to my chair.
“What’s wrong?” I managed to yelp. I was starting to panic, and it was all I could do to keep all that pastrami where I had put it.
“You won’t believe it,” said the senior-most producer in the office. “There was a freak summer storm in Washington, and lightning hit the WETA studio, and Jim Lehrer is already on his way up to do tonight’s show out of New York. Everyone else is busy re-booking guests and calling in camera men, but there’s a lot of script to type – where have you been?”
I barely had time to shoot an “I told you so!” look at my friend before she took off. “Hey, where are you going?” I yelled after her.
“To buy a lottery ticket!” she yelled back, over her shoulder.
Ever since that day, I can’t hear the phrase “What could happen?” without also knowing the answer:
“What could happen? Anything could happen! This is New York!”
Judy Epstein swears if this isn’t true, may she be hit by a bolt of lightning…or a winning lottery ticket… whichever comes first! E-mail her your own incredible story at jepstein@mail.com .
