And Laura Leaves Me

Any time you get people together, there will be conflict. As in any organization, there was bickering and complaining and interdepartmental power struggles. CBN was run by a man named Pat Robertson, of whom I had only heard about from his negative publicity (of which he had plenty). I had pigeonholed him as an ostentatious “televangelist”.

A lot of controversy swirled about him, especially from the media. Some of the criticism may have been true but I believe a lot of it had to do with the media not liking someone who claims to be a Christian who has power. His comments were often taken out of context

I began hearing snippets about some of Mr. Robertson’s flaws and I later saw some of it for myself. But as I continued to work there, I also began to see positive things about this man. He seemed to have a genuine motivation for his activities. I also saw that, with all the power he wielded and the seeming lack of accountability, he had accomplished a lot of positive things and appeared to have a lot of integrity.

I didn’t have much personal interaction with Mr. Robertson. I would sometimes run into him in the halls and we would usually say hello. He also hosted a Christmas special that I produced. He looked bigger in person and I couldn’t tell on television that he has strikingly blue eyes. He had security, so he usually wasn’t alone. But every once in a while, we had some awkward silences when it was just the two of us on the elevator together.

The internship was three days a week so I worked with some more temp agencies on the other days, mostly in construction. It was fairly monotonous work. On one job, they were building a two-story office building that I would start sweeping at one end of one of the floors until I had swept the whole building, then start all over again. It turned out to be an office building for the home shopping network, QVC.

On another job, I would clean up all the junk and debris that got scattered about on lots when they built houses. It was in the middle of winter. It doesn’t snow too much in Chesapeake but one day it was coming down. After about an hour and a half, the supervisors felt sorry for me and said I could go home. But with a temp agency, there is a minimum pay time of four hours. So even if I had only worked 1 ½ hours, they still had to pay me for four. For some reason, I felt like I needed to remind him of that, so he sent me back out until I had done the four.

When we got married in North Carolina, we had no idea that, one day, we would be living on the East Coast. Chesapeake is about a four-hour drive from Morehead City. We decided to go down there for our anniversary and stay in the same beach hotel four years later. It was a bit of a disaster.

The hotel that had been new during our honeymoon was now worn and rusty from the salt air. They put us in a bottom floor room so our view was the back of the sand dune. There was also a walkway over the dune so we had to keep our curtains closed if we wanted privacy. There was also a spring-break, college crowd atmosphere going on with yelling and bottles breaking all night. Not the best anniversary we ever had.

I had come here to go to film school at Regent so as the internship came to an end, I now had to figure out how to accomplish that. Even though the former Dean of Communications had offered those of us in Andrew Quicke’s script-writing course 25% scholarships, there was no money to back that up. I needed to get a job to pay for classes because I didn’t believe in taking out loans.

In another great bit of timing, as the internship wound down, an associate producer position was made available at CBN. Kathryn Carlton produced the International 700 Club, a shorter version of the domestic show that went out around the world and she needed an assistant. It was what was called a temporary position with no benefits. However, I could get insurance through Regent if I started there. As all this was in the works, Laura left me.

Spring and summer in Virginia bring major thunderstorms. Laura had had a bad experience with thunderstorms when she was young so the Virginia storms kept her continually petrified. Her best friend, Robyn, who was on the ship in London was about to have a birthday. So Laura decided to get away from the Virginia storms and surprise her friend in London for a couple of weeks. Funnily enough, while London very rarely gets thunderstorms, they followed Laura there too. Then the two-week trip turned into two months! 

Laura back in London