In their many book promotion interviews from late 2010, Scott and Tessa dramatically describe how they never saw each other, spoke, phoned, texted, im'd, pm'd or communicated in any way during the two months she was recovering from compartment surgery on her legs. This unprecedented cut-off in any and all contact precipitated a painful year long estrangement.
Here, in the video above, they are one month after her surgery conducting an interview and declaring the hope for her return by the end of the month (November). She was, in fact, back in early December. Perhaps this tragic delay wiped from their minds that they were in each other's company at Skate America here, in 2008, during her recovery, discussing their withdrawal from Skate Canada and chatting with Kurt Browning.
Their discussion in this interview of their expectations for her post-recovery return turned out to be on the money; their season resumed just about exactly as forecast here. Yet today, Scott and Tessa both get actually teary when they stress how absolutely literally they were cut-off during those two months.
Scott and Tessa tell us now this interview was not possible. Did CBC fake it? Is it a moon landing situation?
Are Scott and Tessa (and Co.) entitled to lie, spin, sham and protect their privacy? Entitled to protect also what are implicitly such acute sensibilities that they, and particularly Tessa, are nearly paralyzed by what the public may think about them? IMO, yes.
ReplyDeleteThey are interested in exploring business opportunities that risk exposing their personal lives to public scrutiny, and so are also interested in pre-emptive gambits that head such scrutiny off at the pass.
This is all normal for people in their position, and there are terrific professionals (IMG for instance) that know exactly how to help people like Scott and Tesssa (& Co.) accomplish the goals of putting themselves out there while protecting essential aspects of their private lives, while simultaneously creating a consistent and productive relationship with the public.
However, that's not what we have here. Here, the public is supposed to not notice that they are treated as if their education never progressed past Romper Room. Nor notice that they're assumed to have the comprehension skills of wet cement and the reasoning process of a dead amoeba. We're intended to not notice that in order to swallow these stories we need to eliminate common sense. We must play along when stories don't match up, timelines don't match up, play along with the assumption that few of us possess grown up life experience or commonplace medical knowledge, most of us lack powers of observation, and we're expected to humor the apparent belief that we're all a bunch of rubes who never get out of the house house save to squeeze into a red T shirt with Canada on the front while clutching a maple leaf-splattered white Teddy bear that appears to have been slaughtered in a Canada Day massacre.
But I never agreed to pretend to buy into the most asinine public relations strategy in the history of ever. By the operating rules of this thing, all courtesy is supposed to exist on our end, the ones whose money they are seeking, while they freely and aggressivley treat the public like dim witted amnesiacs and talk to us like we're slow. And, there's more to come.