THIS WEEK CELEBRATING GMA’s 40th ANNIVERSARY WE REVISITED A BEAUTIFUL STORY FROM 2004. THAT BROADCAST EVENT ON ABC WAS A PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL CATHARTIC MOMENT. HERE I GO BACK IN TIME TO THAT FRIDAY BEFORE MOTHERS DAY.

I was shaking like a leaf.  Because of the voice on the phone.  It was MY voice on the phone. “Ma’am..is this Judy Byrwa?”,  I asked hoping not to sound nervous or guilty for pretending. “Yes it is,” perked the woman back.  “I’m with Northwest Airlines and your flight is delayed this morning,”  sticking to my script.   “And we’ve put you on a later flight.”  I chirpily added.   “Why thank you…thats so nice of you,” said this saint of a woman who I knew so very well and quite intensely. Even though we had never met.

I had practiced a zillion times this fake charade silly ploy. Sitting in a car in a church parking lot across from her home.  It was to keep Judy Byrwa in her house. At home. So she could receive Breakfast in Bed. From Emeril Lagasse on live television: ABC’s Good Morning America’s annual Mothers Day celebration that I have produced for more than a decade.  So she would be at home at 8:05 am when a month or so of work and a week of editing wouldn’t be wasted on an answerless door knock.

Late in the game we realized she was on a 9 30 am flight that she was gonna have to miss! And she thankfully did.

I had read the nearly 7,000 entries in our contest to pick a winning mother and whittled them down to a top ten then a top three and then the winner. It usually was the one I thought would be the winner all along.  Because when I read the winner, I always knew.  The top ten was just window dressing for Emeril and my bosses.

Our yearly celebration was to herald and honor a mother (one year it was a father because he masterfully mothered five amazing kids because his wife died giving birth to the youngest. Thank God Twitter wasn’t around for THAT trolling blowback!)…Our winner was always a mother who had done something amazing, selfless, loving and worth showing several million people on the Friday before Mother’s Day.

Mothers Day Friday is my personal Christmas morning. Better than winning an Emmy. Kinda. Sorta. Not really.  But I love it so much.  A very special achievement to pull off a live surprise and put together an emotional and compelling tape piece.

Living in Los Angeles, I would fly to the city of Winner Mom the fortnight before and shoot testimonial interviews…then head to New York to put it together with a painter named Dan Recalde, a genius editor who for a long time developed filters, transitions, and other things that I have no idea what they are..but they were amazing.  So notable that it would cause all the other editors to be struck with awe and an obsession to steal the tricks from him.  Above all he made the pieces look so staggeringly beautiful.

In the edit room, script in hand, we developed a kind of unspoken superstition:  Danny and I planned how we would finish the piece FIRST….figuring out roughly what imagery and soundbite, even what music we would use for the ending, before commencing our edit. The ending was important.   “Its the ending that we leave the viewer with,” I believe Don Hewitt CBS legend once said. Maybe it was Andrew Heyward.  Or Andrew quoting Don.  Anyway,  I applied that law to our rather long, schmaltzy love tribute video to a mother, featuring a crying friend and at LEAST one sniffly son or daughter.  But my rule on crying is a little different than some others. I really don’t think the viewer wants to invade by watching full on crying…so I usually included emotional compelling things they say with maybe a sniffly bird seed of a soundbite…right before….or after as a button. Sobbing is uncomfortable for everyone involved. I sobbed myself, though.

So attached that me and my co-producer of the live and tape event for many years Margo Baumgart in the early days couldn’t watch it on tape for a few days. It was such an emotional and nerve wracking experience.  Hiding the secret…and a satellite truck is a lot of stressful work. While creating something.

I got through it.  But I did sob from time to time. Not simply sniffle or cry: but, yes, sob. These stories were my focus for a month….year after year.  I became attached to all the friends and mother’s children, sometimes keeping in touch.  On a few…not many of them, but a few… I cried EVERY SINGLE time I screened it.  There’s now remaining one that still makes me cry every time.  And that was Judy’s in 2004. (its on Youtube)

Judy in her 20’s had promised to take care of her best friend Sally’s twin daughters should anything ever happen to her.   In the early 90’s Judy was summoned from Washington D C to Sally’s San Francisco deathbed…after a several year long fight with breast cancer.  The family and friends waited for Judy.  When she did arrive it was announced to Sally that Judy was there.

Soon after, Sally let go and passed away.  Judy quit her distinguished Washington DC career in politics and government, went home to Michigan and raised the girls.

Emeril surprises Judy after a long answerless knock on the door…with butterflies exploding in my stomach.  The piece is strong with amazing soundbites, imagery and even humor with homevideo of Sally saying what she wanted on her tombstone: “I told you I was sick.”  With Charlie Gibson telling it and beautiful music by a guy named Rob Reale….it was strong television.

It was a very emotional experience. Judy, her daughters Karina and Karma and Emeril watched the piece in her living room as 5 million people were watching along with them. All of them, Emeril included, group hugged and cried tears of a very emotional celebration…made joyous by our hokey little Breakfast in Bed on her lawn which elicited the biggest scream ever it could almost be heard in Times Square without a microphone.

Off to the side, I was crying too.  It had only been five months since my mother Bernadette’s awfully tragic and devastating death at a young 58.  One thing that helped me heal was something my Aunt Geraldine (not really my aunt..you know …Irish cousins) at my mother’s wake told me and my sisters that when you find a lone single dime….anywhere it means your loved one is with you…or looking over you.  She didn’t believe it and thought it was silly. Until the day she found a dime by itself….. a sign that her dearly departed husband Paddy was with her.

Call it an Old Wives Tale…call it an Aunt Geraldine’s Tale ….call it what you will.  Now pay attention to a True as Fact Brian Tale:

My sisters and I returned to my mother’s house and to her bedroom to pick out what we would bury her my mother in….we sat all still drained exhausted and blasted by her death. Folding and sifting through the clothes, my sister puts her hand in my mothers sweater pocket.

And then the Earth stopped.

She pulled out of the pocket its only contents: one single, lone, but not lonely, beautiful, heavenly (ok, i’ll stop) …shiny dime that was sitting in that pocket waiting to be found.

Of course we cried and were somehow touched. And played that game of “who carries a single dime in a cardigan sweater…she always used her change purse”  “dimes never travel alone” …etcetere …all ready for a Geraldo Rivera investigation.

But there was nothing to find out.  We knew the answer: Mommy was with us.

So the sobbing or sniffling I did in the edit room, in the car across the street, on the plane and right there at the live shot was kind of my own kiss goodbye to my daily crying about Bernadette leaving us so soon.  When I interviewed them, I had told Karma and Karina the “dime” story to pass it on in hope for their own healing even years later.  They were inspired to hear it. But of course I hadn’t told Judy because I had just met her that morning and had never spoken to her —except as a Northwest Airlines agent.

There’s one more moment in our story.  Something amazing that I learned in an urgent phone call later in the day.

Its something that happened after Emeril, me, Margo and team were gone. No more cameras. Judy and the girls were returning to the house from lunch when discovered on the living room floor, in front of the TV, exactly where Emeril and they had that emotional group hug…yes.  There it was.

A dime. A lone shiny beautiful dime.