for certain if she did that one.)
Jackie’s comment to the school board member is an exception to her providing the commentary later. I heard and recorded that at the time.
I filmed more than an hour of video on my phone in the Publix parking lot alone, and filmed much that evening and the next day in the capitol, as well as teaming up with the Vanity Fair video crew once we got to Tallahassee. I found it somewhat amusing that in all that time, the only person who asked me not to use what I had shot was a journalist. While the CNN producer was having the slightly heated disagreement with Jackie, she noticed me filming it. She then found me later and begged me not to use it. It was understandable. I could have made her look awful, by appearing to give a seventeen-year-old survivor a hard time. I assured her it was clearly a legit problem, which Jackie agreed with as well once she understood. I chuckled that the kids were fine, but a professional had gotten worried. But she had reason to—and it was a painful reminder that it’s very easy to make an innocent person look horrible if you come with an agenda, or if you’re just sloppy and don’t bother to sort out what actually happened.
I interviewed Jackie’s dad, Paul, in the parking lot. Her mom did not want to do interviews, but I spoke to her informally near the end of the trip, and a bit by phone and text days and weeks later.
I did not witness the dispute with the bus driver. We were already lined up in our cars with motors running, waiting for the buses to leave at any moment. (The bus engines had been running the entire time, and everyone had boarded the buses.) We were wondering what the holdup was. Jackie filled me in on those events later.
3
David, Cameron, and Alfonso all told me about their roles and the logistics getting there.
Information on the march’s projections comes from the group’s permit application. I discussed various aspects of it with the kids over the next month.
I did not interview Emma Collum. Her descriptions come from “Parkland Students Have a Cause and $3.5 Million . . .” (Miami Herald).
The information on the celebrity donations and their statements was widely reported, but I got them all from Deadline. I pulled Oprah’s statement from her Twitter feed.
I was flipping around the dial as we drove, and I heard the promotion on Sean Hannity’s radio show and the opening report on All Things Considered.
The comments from Jeff Kasky and the MFOL spokesman are from “Parkland Students Have a Cause and $3.5 Million . . .” (Miami Herald).
4
My approach to sizing up expectations was to pose the question to dozens of students twice: before they arrived at the capitol, and then late in the day to see how they matched up. Daniel Duff’s reaction was the most common, so I used him to stand in for the whole. In his case, I followed up with him with two phone interviews over the next few weeks to elaborate and reflect more in depth.
This seems like a good time to talk about how I chose the kids I would focus on in the book. There were about two dozen kids in the original MFOL group, and I knew I could not feature all of them, or the reader would get a strong sense of none. I knew I wanted to focus on a small number, with a mixture of perspectives: all the obvious things like male, female, and different ethnicities, but also the roles they played. I wanted leaders in a central role and foot soldiers a bit further out. The first time I interviewed Daniel in Tallahassee, I knew he was a strong possibility. I asked him to spell his name and give his age and year in school, and I was astounded he was a freshman.
I also frequently get asked how I made contact with all the kids. Woody Allen famously said that “showing up is eighty percent of life.” I quote that often, because I find it surprisingly true, particularly in journalism. Getting David’s number took some doing, but the rest was mostly showing up. Nearly a hundred kids went to Tallahassee (a few dropped out at the last minute), and I must have spoken to at least two-thirds along the way, plus lots of parents. I used to be reticent about asking minors