My National TV Debut*

If you’ve been reading, you may have gathered that I’ve been in New York City on and off over the past two weeks. I can finally reveal my big secret!

I was asked to film a few segments of The Nate Berkus Show! As you may know, Nate was Oprah’s decorator and for the past six years, he’s been the on-show, in-house decorator, solving viewers’ design problems and giving tips and hints on designing your own space.But one of the things that Nate loves to do is scour flea markets around the country finding unique things for his clients.  Wow! I like doing that, too. So, Nate’s show called and sent down a camera crew to film our Pigtown Pop-Up Flea a few weeks ago.The show gave me the challenge to buy some treasures for $100 and see how I could parlay that into more money. I managed to do pretty well, with a copper stock pot purchased for $15 and currently for sale at a “major kitchen store” for $400.  On-line, I found one fork for $23, identical to the four on the bottom left that I bought for $5.00.  These are the shots before I cleaned the items.

Late Monday, my terrific friend Tracey, who is one of the owners of Housewerks, where we had the Flea, and I took off to NYC looking a bit like the Beverly Hillbillies with a car filled with treasures. 

Tuesday was a day of shooting the show, with full hair, make-up and posh car service followed. It was nerve-wracking, but Nate’s incredible production staff and stage crew were more than kind to me and made sure I got through filming without a hitch.

What was originally intended to be one five-minute segment, morphed into about 13 minutes once Nate saw what we were bringing. They interspersed the video they’d shot with the on-set segments and wove it all together to tell the story of the “Junk Whisperer” (with apologies to my friend, Christian May at Maison 21 who came up with the term).  It was such a success that I’ve been back to shoot another segment already.

The first segment that I am in will air on Monday, October 11th. Check your local listings for time, or click here to see when it’s on. You can watch the promo video here.

*If you don’t count the time I was on Captain Kangaroo when I was four.