Taping for FOX 35 News

At the crack of day this morning the Icebar team opened early to meet FOX news 35 Entertainment maven Christine Van Blockland for a live taping of our ICEBAR. This had been scheduled three times, but today there was no news more worthy and we were LIVE.

Omar, the camera guru, set up shop at 6:00 AM. His truck, looking like a van from space, cranked up a tower about 30' tall and snaked wires out to hook us all up to the towers LIVE. Interestingly we OOPS "lost the feed" on one segment, and seems like we were being beamed to a tower in Sanford, which was a little too far, but the Hunters' Creek tower was down, and so we were transferred to the Bithlo tower. I did not know there were so many from which to choose. Omar was truly a one man crew with an amazing array of wires, batteries, microphones, cameras, tripods and other magic gear than seemed to appear and reappear while he effortlessly filmed with a camera that had to weigh 35 pounds. Great job, Omar, and THANK you for making us look good.

Christine Van Blockland, star of Fox 35 Entertainment, and "ASK Christine", is a tiny dynamo. She and our Ice Princess Tristen are the same size, I think they claim to be 5' tall, but from my clogs it looked a little like a "tall tale".

Christine talks, energetically and FAST. She is an upbeat whirlwind at 6 am. First fixing her hair and makeup, she cheerfully let us throw capes over her head and then even asked for an Ice Princess fur headband. (Note to self: Christine would make a great Ice Princess should she ever decide to leave the world of TV). She walked us through the process of being on live TV, and told us she would give us about a 10 second warning... that seemed long enough, and we spent the next two hours mostly waiting for the next shot.

It was fun, we had a good time, and when we were taping inside Christine told our guys at the side bar that since it was morning TV they could toast with the ice glasses, but not drink, because we wanted to be careful not to show alcohol consumption. She didn't tell the Ice Queen, so when it was my turn, Hey! I DRANK! It was water with blue curacao just to show some color, but Sean our Ice Bartender, put real vodka down the luge, so I got my first drink of the day quite early! The one thing that seemed to be a problem was our drink names. We serve Seal Bite, which is red, Thin Ice, which is green, Yellow Snow (you figure it out), and our signature cocktail, Penguin Pizz.

The Pizz part gave them a lot of angst. Christine just could not bring herself to say the word, so she said, hey, the drink comes out like a Penguin PEZ !!! The anchor said HUH!

This was fun, we look forward to seeing ourselves on the news, and you can see it at:
http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/mornings/072109icebar