Free Producer by Wendy Walker Page B

every day. The list of decisions I have to make daily would seriously surprise you, it is so demanding. And organizing
     is the only way to pull it off.
    I even organize my purse by cleaning it out every singleday, which some of my friends find inconceivable and obsessive. How do I find the time to do it? they want to know. My friend
     Suzy admits that her form of organization is stacking her stuff into piles. She knows where everything is, but no one else
     does, and I told her I’d be afraid to look in her closet. You see, just like women think that dumping out my purse every night,
     throwing out what I don’t need and refilling it with what I
do
need, is ridiculous, I find it inconceivable that any woman would
not
clean out her purse every day. How do you know what you have with you? I need different kinds of things with me on different
     days, depending on my schedule. I simply can’t fathom arriving somewhere and not having what I need readily available. Of
     course, I leave out something now and then, but for the most part, my organization skills help me feel prepared for the inevitable
     and I get some peace and ease from that knowledge.
    In 1993, for example, I got a page early one afternoon when a newly elected Bill Clinton was about to give one of his first
     televised presidential addresses to the nation. The networks take turns producing such an event. It so happened that CNN was
     pool (one network taking the responsibility for providing coverage for all the networks) for this national address, so I headed
     to the White House along with the CNN technical staff to prepare for the live presidential address.
    I already knew how these things unfolded and what preparation was necessary, but the president’s aides were still feeling
     their way around as best they could since everything was new to them. When President Clinton arrived in the Oval Office before
     his speech, flanked by Vice President Gore and his aide David Gergen, he was ready for us to put on his makeup. But there
     was no makeup artist. This administration did not know yet that for presidential addresses, the president’s aides wereresponsible. When I broke the news that the networks hadn’t provided a makeup artist, Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s press secretary,
     and I looked blankly at each other. Then I said, “Okay, Dee Dee, let’s open our purses.”
    Since I had emptied out my purse the day before and refilled it that morning with what I needed today, I knew I had some foundation
     and a clean sponge with me. Dee Dee found some old tubes of makeup in the bottom of her purse, so I cut the sponge in half
     and she and I went to work. While I did my best to cover a presidential blemish on Clinton’s nose, he seemed unconcerned that
     two nonmakeup artists were applying his makeup before he addressed the nation on television. And one of us was a press person
     to boot! When he finally went on the air, Dee Dee and I decided we had done a pretty good job. Of course, it helped that he
     wasn’t so bad looking to start with!
    It has always given me a sense of balance to keep my life in order, and that bleeds over into my work world. Without deep
     organization of all the moving parts of my life, I would never be able to pull it all off and maintain a sense of decorum.
     Or even get my job done, for that matter. In essence, my life is about making decisions, tons of them all day long, and the
     only way I keep track is by keeping everything in some kind of order.
    Luckily, being organized has always come naturally to me. I was a self-motivated kid, and I loved keeping my room clean and
     organizing my drawers. When Katie Couric’s husband, Jay, died of colon cancer, her closest friends rallied around her to do
     what we could. Besides being there emotionally for her, we also jumped in to help organize the funeral arrangements. As much
     as I had driven Katie crazy with what she called my “almost OCD” ways when we lived together (more on