Our appearance on "Fox and Friends"

Our appearance on "Fox and Friends" this morning was the culmination of arrangements set in motion by Fox early Memorial Day morning. Having never done this before, we found it an interesting learning experience.

We'd like to share some details about this experience in case any of you get a similar opportunity.

Having caught the attention of Fox from the numerous links to our blog, we received a call from a program coordinator to appear on their 6:45 segment. They needed to locate a video satellite station near our home. As we feared, the closest station available for this time slot was located near Boston - A 2 hour drive.

To meet the 6:45 taping deadline, Fox sent a car to pick us up at our home at 4am. With entire family in tow, we drove to the station.

Almost nothing happened until we approached the taping time. The technicians explained the basics but little else. I spent our waiting time in a TV room trying to associate names with the faces of show hosts. This turned out to be pointless as a live video feed of the hosts was unavailable during the actual taping.

The producers pressed us to have our three year-old daughter Anastasia appear on the set - an idea I had repeatedly expressed reservations about prior to taping. (My concerns turned out to be justified, as Anastasia was totally uncooperative.) Our 11-month old son Alexander sat in Cathy's lap, seemingly compliant until 10 seconds prior to the show.

The technician explained that we would appear briefly for a "teaser shot" prior to a commercial break and that the main segment would occupy a single shoot. During the shoot, they cut to commercial and returned to us. We suspect this was in hopes of calming Alexander down as the host commented about him "shutting up".

During the show, we had no idea what viewers were seeing. Our camera light was on the whole time, even though we weren't on screen. Later in the shoot we were unaware of being on screen and started looking around.

The children were much noisier on the set than it seemed on TV - noisy to the point of severe distraction. Before arriving, the program coordinator assured me that there would be a supervised off-set area for our children to wait until after the taping. This was not the case so we had little choice but to keep them in arm's reach.

Cathy and I have a slightly different take on the segment where the judge provided legal commentary. I felt that it falsely suggested that we advocated some sort of legal action against Subway, whereas Cathy considered it routine for the show.

To be clear, we never wanted nor believed in the possibility of legal action against Subway's contest rules. Furthermore, in reviewing over 12 pages of blogs on the subject, I have not seen a single poster call for legal action. I think we can all agree such a lawsuit would be frivolous.

Jim Peschke