Tales of Li'l Foot

Back in the fall of 1997 I was an intern on the show Guiding Light. I happened to go to church with Robert Newman and his family in the prior years, so I kind of knew someone and was able to get an interview to apply for the job. I was so excited when I got it. I had been watching Guiding Light on television since the mid-80′s. It is no longer on the air as of this past September, which is sad and unfortunate. While I had that internship, I of course met the cast and crew and worked along side them twice a week, I think, maybe one day a week…I forget. It was a really good time. I worked in the production office. The copy machine they had in that office was like no other. It could spit out a manuscript in 2.2 seconds. It was amazing.

Anyhoo, I made some relationships with some of the actors. Ron Raines was such a wonderful guy. He’d take me and the other intern to lunch when we were working. We’d hang out and visit with him and have really nice conversations with him. I was once responsible for taking a bouquet of flowers to Beth Ehlers‘ dressing room. When I opened the door, I stumbled over something and wound up spilling the vase of water all over her dressing table and absolutely SOAKING her cell phone. I was mortified to say the least.

The internship only lasted from the fall to the winter break, but in that time I became close friends with Frank Dicopoulos and his wife Teja, as I babysat for their two children. I had the best time with them. They are such a great family. I still occasionally keep in touch via email and I send them Christmas cards. But after I graduated I did that working for an architect thing that didn’t work out and then I went to Hawaii for a month and then came back and full time nannied for them. In January I started buckling down and looking for a job. I was afraid of not having benefits, so I had to give up being their nanny. It was so sad to give that up. They are an amazing family.

While I nannied for them, I traveled with them twice. Once to the Cayman Islands and another time to the Bahamas. On our trip to the Bahamas I went out on a shark dive with Stuart Cove‘s diving shop. I was talking to some coworkers recently about that very trip and dug up the old pictures of that dive. I couldn’t wait to share them with you. I hope you’ve peed in the last 20 minutes, because if you haven’t these pictures will make you pee in your pants if you’re afraid of sharks!!! They were SO close. Two of them actually went for the same piece of bait right over my head, bumped into each other and thus bumped into ME! It was the most exhilarating experience of my life. I wasn’t scared though. The sharks knew the dive masters were going to feed them and that is the food these sharks wanted. They were Caribbean Reef sharks so they were more interested int he actual bait than us.

You can’t possibly know what it took for me to sqeeeeeeeeeze into this wet suit.


They put us in a circle on the ocean floor and then came down with a box of bait, which was two milk cartons open sides together and a rope tying it closed.

Just chillin’ on the ocean floor with swarms of sharks all around us.

Now, remember how I said, I wasn’t really afraid? Well, that wasn’t entirely true. AFTER we had the 5 -10 minute session of them feeding the sharks, they told us (back when we were up on the boat) that we could buddy up and check out the reef and the the fish and be back to the boat within like 20 minutes after that. Well I buddied up with this numbskull. We swam around and around and by the time we surfaced because we couldn’t find the boat it was like being in that movie…you know the one…where the dive boat takes scuba divers out…and then can’t find them..so they LEAVE them…IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN…yeah…THAT ONE!!! Only when we surfaced we did actually see the boat about a football fields length away from where we were bobbing up and down in the water. I don’t think I’ve ever swam so fast in my life. It was both the most wonderful and the most terrifying scuba trip I’d ever been on. And it wasn’t the sharks that terrified me…it was being with that numbskull that I was buddied up with whom I didn’t know.