Nine Minutes

People can do a lot in nine minutes. And people, especially television talk-show hosts, can do a lot in just one or two minutes, such as second-guess the actions of masseuse Diane Lee Wolozin, who called Mary-Kate Olsen three times before calling 911 when Wolozin discovered the dead body of Hollywood star Heath Ledger at his SoHo apartment on Tuesday.

This is one of the many things that is so unappealing about working in television. The second-guessing of some woman who at some point the media is going to paint as a failure in this tragedy. One morning show Friday had two hosts asking two guest analysts if Olsen and Wolozin could somehow be held liable. That's how we do it in America. We're always looking for a scapegoat, quick to dismiss that maybe Ledger was simply a pill-addicted loser, or maybe that that wasn't the case at all, that perhaps he was just the victim of a horrific accident for which there is no one to blame. Fewer newspapers sell when those to blame are not alive. We need to find out if there's anyone we can humiliate or just plain ruin.

I can ask you what you would do if you won the lottery, and you'd probably say pay all your bills, buy a big house, travel around the world, etc.

You can ask me what I would do if I only had one day to live, and I'd say I'd track down Charlize Theron. These are fun, hypothetical conversations to have to pass the time.

But you cannot begin to imagine what you would do if you showed up for work and were confronted with what looked to be a dead body. What goes through your mind? That it's a dead body? That it's a dead celebrity's body?

You hear from time to time about adrenaline flowing to the point where somebody saved a loved one's life by lifting a car off the ground or something. People do unusual things in unusual circumstances. So just as easily as it might be for one occasion to lend itself to heroism, it can just as readily produce the opposite effect, where the only person available does not come through under pressure. I don't think you can be charged for that, and I definitely don't think you should be raked on television like that.