I shot this video in Chicago recently. I had heard that there was a new exhibition about weddings in Chicago, and I called the Chicago History Museum to fish around for an angle that might be right for me to cover for Aol. I was stunned to hear there absolutely was.
The curator of the costume collection at the museum was on his way to the airport to fly somewhere, and I myself had just stepped off the plane and arrived in Chicago. We met with enough time in the middle to put out this interview.
There were some personally terrifying moments during the shoot. My camera kept blanking out on me and erasing whatever clip I had just shot, and in the middle of Long giving a dazzlingly articulate and compelling answer about Americans shopping history, my screen would throw up a warning alert that announced, essentially, that I’m a loser. When I got home, I realized with a sickening, sinking feeling that about 40 percent of my footage had failed to save thanks to this malfunction, which was related to an SD card that was too slow to capture all the HD wedding goodness I was feeding it. Most of my favorite sound bites dodged the techno-bullet.
Naturally, the entire story of how weddings became such a supercharged consumer event is much more complicated than I could present in a two-minute vignette, but it’s still rich with truth, and it says a lot about our society’s fascination with imitating the rich. Don’t let anyone tell you America is a classless society. We’re as bad as the English.
Don’t you love that guy’s voice and diction? We had a lovely time listening to him on the footage.
This story ended up doing very well on Digg despite the fact it was submitted by two different users. I think it racked up nearly 800 Diggs in total, and it made the front page of Aol.com.
Damn you Marshall Field!