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The three of us rendezvoused with NBC’s Today crew at the Larchmont Village shopping district. The tree-lined street was a lot quieter than Hollywood Boulevard, feeling almost like a neighborhood in a normal city. The correspondent was younger than the ABC guy had been, playing more the hip contemporary than the amused observer. He wanted to find something that he could correct himself, because it would make a great visual. Could we go ahead and locate a sexily obvious typo? he asked us. That part sounded familiar.

First, though, the driving shots. Like ABC, they wanted to capture us cruising around in my car, but NBC harvested far more shots in this pursuit. At first I didn’t get the fixation on Callie—she was a loyal old gal, but what did she have to do with the meat of our mission? I’d explained to them that we didn’t spot all that many typos from the car. Then I realized that they had placed much importance on describing the visual language of the road trip. I am driving from city to city, so the viewer must see me physically behind the wheel, peering out the car windows, not to mention actually turning the key and starting the engine. We must create a simulacrum of traveling. The viewer might not understand otherwise. They lent Josh a video camera and instructed him to lean out the window to film Callie’s wheels in motion.

The shortest part of the day was the typo hunting. Benjamin, Josh, and I had our voyeur-friendly routine down by now. We walked down the street and into promising establishments with deliberate steps, turning our bright faces to each other and attempting to make sound-bite-worthy comments. Upon entering Sam’s Bagels, I spotted the misspelled varietals JALEPENO and PUMPER-NICKLE, and the proprietor was happy to take the signs down and correct them himself. There wasn’t much else to unearth on the street, however. We found a few more typos in boutiques here and there, but the haul paled in comparison to yesterday’s. Nothing was big and beautiful enough for the correspondent himself to correct, and he seemed disappointed. Before we could try ranging farther for richer material, the crew declared that they had enough footage of our craft. They’d come up with a better idea for the correspondent’s stand-up.

A “stand-up” is the correspondent directly addressing the camera, usually at the end of a piece, and it doesn’t always involve standing up. For our piece, the correspondent sat at a table outside a café. Josh, Benjamin, and I were supposed to walk up behind him, sit down, and point out his name spelled wrong in the chyron below. Ho-ho, a virtual typo. We walked down that street about fifteen times, squeezed tightly against each other so that we all fit in the camera’s eye, while they tried to time his speech to a perfect shot of us sitting down behind his table. It was fun, like we were C-listers making our big-screen debut in Three Men Walk Purposefully Down the Sidewalk. Once they gave us the thumbs-up, we TEALers hurrahed. A job well done, now time for lemonade!

But then the producer called me over, gesturing toward the car, and we topped off the day’s filming with even more driving shots. Once again, the TV guys had decided that the imagery of the car—us driving around in the car, us getting into the car—was a necessary piece of the visual story. What could visually declare that this was a Road Trip better than guys in car? Where NBC put extra emphasis on the shots of Callie, ABC had put some extra emphasis on my Typo Correction Kit, an invention wholly my own, built and refined during the westward journey. They’d had me lay its contents on a table for a slow pan, and they made sure to include the Kit in shots of me. Both news teams had to assemble what was basically a two-minute movie, which had to include a proper setup and a catchy ending. I sympathized with the demands of storytelling. I only wondered what stories they were planning to tell.

The NBC folks departed, and then I had to say good-bye to my friend. If Benjamin