A Tale of Two Stories
Two stories. One is true, one is made up. Which is which?
Here's story number one.
Burton Wendelmeyer shakes his head as he points to the digital photo frame. It shows a group of kids, all smiles and giggles in white tops and bright blue shorts and skirts against a yellow wall. Burt picks out one tiny grinning face. “That's Amaya.” He shifts his finger. “And that's her brother Joshua. He's ten. He's going to be a doctor.”
The photo changes to neat rows of small bushes, their dark green startling against the red dirt; now a different view of the same field, and newly-dug holes awaiting more plants, water barrels to one side. “Mangoes,” Burt says. The photo changes. “And peanuts.” He chuckles.
More photos: a small herd of flop-eared cattle. A woman crouched beside one, milking.
“That's Amaya and Joshua's grandmother. When their parents died - AIDS - they moved in with her.”
A roadside market, ripe fruit arranged on an coarse-woven mat. A pump. Clear water pouring into a pot.
“Here it is,this is the one.” He presses a button and pauses the show. In the background are the clay-walled buildings of the village; in the foreground, a crowd surrounds a wooden sign, the paint still wet. It reads Jericho.
“The village's real name is Katamwenye,” Burt says, “but they decided to change it. Isn't that something?”
Later, we sit around the coffee table in the Wendelmeyers' suburban home. “To be honest,” Burt says, and his cheeks turn a little pink, “we didn't think of this at first. We just wanted to do… something. CBS had this great show, out of the blue they decided to cancel it, and, well, we wanted them to know they'd done the wrong thing. People on the fan forums were saying, mail in a gazillion cards and letters and emails, or someone said they saved Roswell by sending in Tabasco sauce, thousands of bottles of it. Someone else said march seven times around CBS's headquarters, bring it tumbling down.” He chuckles. “It seemed like a good idea for, oh, thirty seconds. But when you think it through, it wouldn't have brought the show back.“
Burt points to another photo in a frame on the wall, of a smiling girl of middle school age. “It was Lottie, my youngest, who had the idea. There's another story in the bible about Jericho, she said, where Jesus heals two blind people. She said, wouldn't that be a nice thing to do.”
He clasps his hands and rests his chin on them for a moment. His eye twinkles. “Smart kid. I don't know where she gets it from.”
“So I put the idea on the forum - Open Their Eyes! - and people started to get on board, started pledging money, five bucks, ten, twenty… You know twenty bucks pays for a cataract operation? My optician won't pick up the phone for that. And every operation we could pay for, we sent a postcard to CBS. The word started to spread, the press got interested, and it kind of started to snowball, and then we looked at the amount that was pledged…”
How much?
“It was a few thousand at that point, enough for hundreds of people to see again. And we started to think, maybe there's more we can do. Someone said, well really the show is about rebuilding after the world almost ends, and that got more ideas going. I had some holiday to take, so I booked a couple weeks off and started calling people, charities.“
And that's what led to the village.
Burt nods. “Actually, it's not just one village. Katamwenye - Jericho - a lot got done there, but we made a big difference in ten, a dozen others: clean water, seeds, animals, books and medicines, even teachers and doctors and nurses.”
The final total? “After four days, we had about two thousand dollars. Then, it kind of took off. A week later, it was pushing twenty… By the time CBS announced the cancellation was final, it was around fifty. But there's still a little money coming in, even after a year.“
Fifty thousand dollars? And they cancelled the show anyway. Wasn't that disappointing?
Burt scratches his chin. “Maybe it's worked out better. If they'd brought the show back? I don't know. But all those people who can see now, and this,” he points to the photo of the village named Jericho, “that's a pretty good memorial, don't you think?”
And here's story number two:
Jeffrey Braverman poses for the camera, dwarfed by the piles of unshelled peanuts that surround and tower over him. There's about a ton here, less than a quarter of what they'll ship today.
Where would you send over four tons of peanuts? To the headquarters of the CBS television network.
It started just under two weeks ago. CBS announced they were not commissioning a second series of Jericho, an hour-long drama set in a small Kansas town that survived a nuclear apocalypse. Fans of the show reacted, at first with emails, phone calls and letters, then some of them recalled a scene in the final episode, where one of the characters responds to an ultimatum with the single word, “Nuts!” They decided to do the same, searched the Internet for a retailer, and started placing orders at Nuts Online, where Braverman is CEO.
Braverman noticed the sudden increase in orders and twigged to what was happening. And even though he'd never heard of, let alone watched Jericho, he decided that if people were going to start throwing nuts at CBS, they may as well be Nuts Online's. He bought the search phrase Save Jericho from Internet search giant Google, and added some special offers for Jericho's customers to the company web site. “Maybe I get excited too easily,” he wrote there in an open letter to the show's fans, “but I was impressed with your devotion and passion and decided to fully embrace your campaign.”
Meanwhile, at the receiving end, CBS has been struggling to cope with the deluge. “We've made arrangements for the bulk of the boxes to be picked up by Staten Island Project Home Front, an organization that focuses on fundraising and supporting military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said spokesman Chris Ender. “We've also made contact with the Bronx Zoo to see if they'd like some of these, as well as local homeless shelters and food banks.”
How many nuts is that? Ten days into the campaign, and fans have placed over $28,000 in orders, and Nuts Online shipped over nine tons of roasted peanuts to CBS, with more in the pipeline. It's a huge undertaking for what's little more than a family business, and it's not even making money. ”Although this isn't a profitable venture for us now, I do realize the publicity has the potential to do wonders for our business," Braverman writes, in between roasting and packing tons of nuts.
All this, and he's never even heard of the show?
“I think this campaign also transcends Jericho and touches the essence of humanity. Such good people from all walks of life, from around the world, coming together and fighting for something they believe in. I think I can speak for many, if not all of us, when I say that we have been touched by this unity.”
When will it end? CBS isn't saying anything yet about a change of plans for Jericho. And with the story of the nutty campaign spreading across the Internet and broadcast media, it seems set to continue for a while yet.
I'm sure you know the answer already, but in case you want to double-check…