The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [58]
Days later, I steeled my nerves and stepped out in front of the slow surge of cars. I was on a steep hill in San Francisco; I’d had to wait for a trolley to clatter by. Across the street, an attractive blond producer named Zoë beckoned to me. A blight upon sexy British accents, I thought as I clomped along at a deliberate pace, trying to ignore the blare of horns and the menace of nearby bumpers. After about five lonely weeks on the road, I would have walked into traffic for just about any winsome smile. Jane was nearly a hemisphere away, and I missed her terribly.
The BBC’s coverage of the League had hardly turned out more sophisticated than that of its American counterparts. They opted for a Wild West theme, thanks to the Santa Fe hat that I still wore as a spur to the mission. At this moment I found myself participating in a staging of the lone cowboy forging ahead through a herd of steel cattle, or at least that’s what they seemed to be reaching for. I’d recently completed a slew of takes of me walking up the hill, and then back down to come back up again. The theatre of the piece had required many other shots—even more, it seemed, than either of the TV crews had wanted in Los Angeles. These folks needed me walking and tapping the “holstered” Typo Correction Kit at my side and walking some more. They needed the hat, and the shadow of the hat. The correspondent had performed little magic tricks between takes, to stave off monotony.
At a Beat Museum dedicated to Jack Kerouac and his cohorts, the BBC correspondent had seen something Kerouackian—Kero-wacky, if you will—in my mission and thus deemed the locale appropriate for a walk-and-talk that would end the piece. This piece of stagecraft would involve us waltzing by a bin of books, picking one of them up, and then me explaining to the correspondent why TEAL stood for all those who did not have the faculty to express themselves as well as Kerouac, or some bollocks like that. They wanted a smooth sound bite from me that would encapsulate the mission’s purpose. What they got was several takes, with us continually walking back over to the bin while I mumbled something different each time. Sometimes when I picked up a book, I’d drop it on the floor. At take five or six, the correspondent looked like he’d rather be doing a magic trick, or anything else.
Probably the most awkward stop had been at a sex shop in the North Beach neighborhood. As with the tattoo parlor and the army-surplus place back on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A., I became filled with the compulsion and courage to go into a more unconventional venue to correct typos, in large part due to the camera crew at my back. I found a pair of typos right away in an ad for a lube that apparently possessed the following traits: MIMICS THE BODIES OWN LUBRICATING FLUIDS, and COMPATIBLE WITH CONDOMS & DIAPHRAMS. The subsequent awkwardness was caused not by the owner of the shop—who turned out to be a nice guy who was happy to let me correct the mistakes—but by the mere, leering presence of me and a British news outfit in such a place. We had barged into the establishment essentially for an expected comedic payoff. I felt more like a feckless mountebank than ever. Sheepishly I made my correction with the camera rolling.
Now, if I made it to the curb without dying, my ordeal would be over. I pressed on, steadily avoiding a peek at the annoyed San Franciscans in their hybrid