The other day in Ft. Lauderdale, I drove by the house I lived in for 10 years prior to fleeing SoFla. I had a big flashback of my "big event" in 1996, when the Broward Sheriff's Office and Ft. Lauderdale Police converged on my yard in pursuit of an armed bandito and shot the hell out of everything, especially the bandito - a guy named Eduardo Diaz, who had robbed four gas stations in the area before he met his bloody end at the curb in front of my house. I happened to be standing in front of my totally groovy 1975 Datsun 280Z, which I was sanding in preparation for a paint job in a fit of do-it-yourself butchness. As I stood by Z-car, I watched the bizarre drama unfold about 70 feet away from me - then realized that I was standing in a shower of bullets - literally. I was like the lady in the circus that gets knives thrown at her, all missing by fractions of an inch. In my case, it was bullets - two of which missed my hips by about an inch or so each. Seriously.

I put together a little video montage of clips from the news coverage of this event. The media swarmed me the day after the shooting - a day in which I had had NO sleep the night before from the sheer adrenaline. So, the interview footage of me is kind of funny now, as I remember being fairly out of it that day, tho I appear to be somewhat together... go figure. Of course there is the big black smudge on my face in one interview and my oh-so-fetching car-sanding outfit... whateva. Check it out if you want to see some classic yellow journalism at work, SoFla style.