My Sundance moment: copping a feel.

Since it's Sundance season, the time when the Heber airport is overrun by private jet traffic and the streets of Park City are clogged with glitterati and their black-clad hangers-on, I thought it appropriate to share my little claim to Sundance fame:

Background: Sandra Bullock is even more beautiful in three dimensional real life than on emulsified celluloid. I mean "ohh-emm-gee" beautiful.

The year was about 1993-ish - not quite sure. When you're as old as I am, the years start to melt together. Yeah, that's it. She was in a film that year.

Anyway, at the time, I was a sound designer in a local theater here, and I was doing a lot of freelance work as well. On one of those occasions I was contracted by MTV to provide sound services to a local camera operator for three days of shooting at the Sundance Film Festival. Our assignment was to work for the MTV crew doing interviews of anybody they could wrangle, and then hit the party circuit in the evening. I think it was for a daily update show that was airing on MTV during the festival. I don't know if MTV still does that or not, seeing as I don't really WATCH MTV at all.

Anyway, one of our daytime interviews was Sandra Bullock. As all sound guys know, the ideal is to capture clean sound without being able to SEE the microphone in the camera shot. I had a boom with a big fuzzy "beaver" mic on it (don't ask), and a wireless mic set, which would send audio directly to one of the camera's two audio channels. I made the decision that since we were indoors, in a controlled environment, the wireless mic was the way to go, because there wasn't a lot of other ambient noise, and we'd capture her very well with a little lapel clip.

I approached Ms. Bullock, holding the mic clip and the belt pack in my hand, and told her we needed to "mic-up", she was in a makeup chair and her handlers were doing her hair and makeup, etc. She said "sure, go ahead".

I turned pale. Okay, paler.

Then I grabbed the second button of her shirt with my left hand and fed the mic up under her shirt from the shirt tail with my other hand, concealing the mic wire under her shirt, and clipped it to the second button area where my other hand was waiting.

By this time, all blood had now left my head, and the room was spinning. I got it all situated properly, clipped the pack to the back of her pants, and we were set.

We bonded. She's now my best buddy. We go out for coffee all the time. Okay, well, not exactly.

But there you have it: something odd that most people can't say - "I've had my hand up Sandra Bullock's shirt - and she approved."

And in case you're wondering, Billy Crystal is nowhere NEAR as much fun to mic up. I took one for the team on that one. Just sayin.