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What was the genesis of this piece?
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I was watching a movie called "Y Tu Mama, Tambien." At certain points the action would freeze and a narrator would provide some background or side story, some of which seemed pretty unrelated, as I recall. For example, at one point the car is traveling down the highway and the scene freezes. The narrator says something like, "If they'd traveled here earlier, they would have driven through a cloud of white feathers." And he tells a story about a poultry truck wreck that killed somebody. Then the scene moves again and you see a cross with flowers on the side of the road, out the window. It's been a while since I saw the movie so I don't remember the details, just that I had the idea that it would be cool to do a story like that.
Then photographer Doug Clifford and I were walking around a mobile home park trying to find some human angle for something that was on the city commission agenda, and we met the ice cream truck lady. I believe we stopped her truck to ask if she knew any hookers. She gave us a good quote, but before she drove off I realized that she was the right subject for my idea. I pitched it to my editors as best I could, that I would try to write a story about these barely connected lives, and if it flopped, they would have a summer feature about a kooky ice cream lady. Fortunately, my editors are very brave.
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Please describe your reporting process. How much is reconstruction and how much were you present for? What sort of research did you do?
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A photographer and I spent one day with the ice cream lady, riding in the truck. We were there for all of the narrative of that day—when she met the kids after school, when she went to the mobile home park and had the conversation about whether she sold drugs, etc. I got all her background and life story that day. She described the day she found out Sean was killed and reading the poem at his funeral, but I wasn't there those days. I confirmed the details with Sean's mother and with our police reporter, who was there.
The day we rode in the truck, we collected phone numbers from customers who looked interesting. Sometime later, we went back to several of her customers and got their stories. That was the tough part because we didn't know anything about them or about what they might say or about what we were looking for. We said "hey, we're writing about the ice cream lady, but we want some chunk of it to be about you." They were good sports.
I was with Andrew Nerney and his grandfather at the bus stop at 5 a.m. but did not travel with them from the house to the bus stop because Andrew's mom wouldn't let me. I spent time with Jaromir Dub in his shop, but obviously was not with him when he escaped communism. He and his oldest son described that. I spent a lot of time with Jaime Utterback and her kids, but didn't use the scenes I witnessed. I opted instead for the conversation about Santa, which Jaime and three other adults in the house described.
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What challenges did you encounter during reporting?
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The ice cream lady was too interesting, to the point of being a distraction. As I conceived the idea, she would have been primarily a vehicle for taking the reader from house to house, like a tour guide or a narrator, and the vignettes about the customers would be the heart of the story. Then she started talking about pina coladas and straight razors.
Also, we didn't know when we started that one of the ice cream lady's customers was a boy who had been killed recently, and who was all over the news. The kid who shot him was a customer too. We had to figure out how to handle that.
We had a real fear that the ice cream lady, because of her colorful past, might turn out to be a drug dealer or something. So far she hasn't.
We reported more of the customer vignettes than we used. Some just didn't work out. The hairdresser had a great story but he didn't want it in the paper. The mobile home park owners backed out at the last minute. A woman who ran a daycare was too close chronologically to another vignette we used.
Interviewing little kids and asking for phone numbers was tricky, but we did get phone numbers from every kid we thought we would use in the story or in the pictures, because we didn't want their parents to be surprised when they saw the paper. We got permission for every kid named in the story, including Sean.
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Please describe structuring and writing the piece.
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I had to rethink it several times, how to choose customers who were spaced evenly throughout her day, or manipulate time so that the vignettes fall in the right places in the story. Then I had to figure out how to work Miss Nikki's story in between, and how many of her adventures to put in or leave out.
I rewrote the top of the story a number of times before it was even close to right. It actually took a day or two of writing before it dawned on me that her song "It's a small world" was the point of the story. I wrote the vignettes separately, then built around them. I made a timeline of her day and of her life. I tried varying degrees of transition between the main story and the vignettes. I annoyed a number of people with bad drafts.
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What sort of reaction did you get to the story? Emails? Phone calls? Response from other media? Etc.
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I got a lot of reader calls and emails, but what struck me about them was not their number but their intensity. I got the impression that not everyone read the story—after all we were asking a lot. It's a long story, and you kind of have to think about what it all means and why it is put together the way it is. But the readers who did like it liked it intensely. I got lots of calls from other writers and from English teachers, people who read and think. They had a lot to say. One guy sent the ice cream lady a $100 tip, which was lucky for her because her husband was laid off the day after the story ran. One editor at the paper sent me a note that said, "That story is no more about the ice cream lady than Moby Dick is about a whale." That meant a lot. I also heard from people who said it was "too busy" or just "kinda long." It probably didn't help that it ran on a day when we had an even longer story somewhere else in the paper. My editor and I decided that it was not in the end a perfect story, but that wasn't the point. We both learned from it and we both are proud of it. It makes us want to keep stretching.
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Please include any other comments you think would be interesting to fellow reporters, editors and students of narrative.
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I just remember that none of us were sure this story would work when I proposed it. But my editor, Mike Wilson, was very encouraging and patient, even when I did a lousy job of explaining what I was trying to do. He let me figure it out. I always had the sense that if the story was a total disaster they would not hold it against me. I'm not always a very confident writer, so that kind of support is the reason this is not just a summer feature about an ice cream lady.
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