It was a normal Mark Burnett day. Well not really…but I can’t fully explain that here…top secret 🙂
Anyways. Our days begin with everyone grabbing their coffee or tea of choice. We check email, facebook and then the news. We all get online at various times in the office and announce news events when we read them. That’s when we discovered Farrah Fawcett’s death.We all discussed that for about 10 minutes and everyone gave their memories and their opinions. I have to say that I did not know much about her. I watched a Barbara Walters special on her Thursday night and cried over her love story with Ryan O’Neal!
Back to the story — We continued the day with the utter chaos that is the job. Then came our moment of news updating. I was on Facebook and saw a friend had posted “First Farrah, Now Michael?” I freaked out and went to CNN.com. Once there I saw that he had been sent to the hospital of cardiac arrest. I screamed it out and everyone in the office stopped. I read out the article and everyone freaked. G-Mac, one of the guys I work with, read out another website that said Michael had died.
G-Mac is actually dating the personal chef to Michael Jackson, so we got a lot of information first hand. She told G-Mac she was sent home the second Michael’s health was failing. She said Blanket was running around scared. Still a weird thing to envision.
When we heard he died, everyone went running to the “living room” at Mark Burnett Productions to watch the television. Thanks to the oh so understandable Direct TV, it took us about 7 minutes to find a news channel. Once there, every other news station and website announced he died before our channel. There were about 20 employees hanging out in that area. I finally met the people I had been smiling at while walking in the hallways every day!
Once they announced it, we all just sat there in silence. We thought about his music. His dance moves. And thanks to G-Mac, we thought about his children and his daily life.
Everyone dispersed back to their office except for about 5 of us. From the kitchen we could smell chocolate chip cookies. So of course we floated into the kitchen all at once. Come to find out it was a guy heating up chocolate chip waffles. We were saddened that our image of chocolate chip cookies was a sham.
The rest of the day, I could hear the helicopters circling UCLA Hospital, because MBP is literally right down the road. Needless to say I decided not to leave at 6:30pm like I was planning because the traffic on the highway was beyond ridiculous. Everyone was driving to the hospital to be in the presence of his body. I cancelled my plans and ended up working until about 9pm. No traffic at that time!
We listened to MJ music the rest of the day and danced in the office. We all knew we would be asked years from now, “Where were you when Michael Jackson died?” I was working at Mark Burnett Productions with some of the coolest cats in the biz.
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