Lucy and Ethel make their debut on PBS

Remember back in spring when Ethel came to visit and we went up in a hot air balloon and a film crew from the PBS series The Aviators happened to be in our basket? Probably not. Here's a link to that post if you missed it.

Well lo and behold the episode aired Monday night, but my local PBS station doesn't carry the series so I sort of forgot about it until I saw on facebook yesterday that the episode was available on iTunes. I paid my $2.99 and downloaded it (it's episode 10 of season 3 if anybody wants to come along for the ride).

It's not every day that a professional film crew records a souvenir from one of my adventures,
so it was pretty cool to watch it and re-live the experience.

And get this ... I even have a speaking part! Granted, it was unscripted, but still...

It's the scene where the pilot is briefing us passengers just prior to liftoff. On screen, we see the pilot on the left, Ethel smiling in the middle, and shortstuff me down in the bottom right corner. My nose and the bill of my pink 7MSN baseball cap are barely visible. I'll transcribe what the pilot says leading up to my line:

Balloon Pilot: There's no first class or coach here. The balloon will rotate throughout the flight. Everybody, just turn and face outwards and watch the world go by, ok?

This is what happens next (apparently my voice wasn't loud enough, so the editor commemorated my words with a subtitle):

Mercifully, the rest of the segment focuses on the technical aspects of hot air ballooning and it really is quite interesting.