Learn "Video Biography Basics" in January 2010

Get ready to dust off your headsets and double check your Internet connection - Family Legacy Video's next Webinar series is on the calendar!

Family Legacy Video is proud to present "Video Biography Basics," a six-session Webinar series led by award-winning video biographer and Family Legacy Video president Steve Pender. If you've been wondering what it takes to create a legacy video, this series will answer your questions and give you practical and professional tips and techniques you can apply to your own do-it-yourself video biography project. The sessions are designed for beginners and advanced beginners.

Choose from morning or evening sessions. The dates: January 19, 26; February 2, 9, 16, 23. Individual sessions cost $40; sign up for the series and save 10%.

For more information and to register visit Family Legacy Video's Workshops & Webinars page.

Introducing a new twist on gift certificates

Remember the last time you gave someone a really great gift - and how much fun you had anticipating the reaction your present would generate - and how great it was sharing in the recipient's surprise and joy?

The gift of a video biography from Family Legacy Video certainly falls into the category of unique and special gifts, but it poses a challenge: Since the legacy video is most often created after you announce the gift, what can you give your storyteller that will surprise and delight him or her and generate excitement about your special present?

Family Legacy Video's answer is a new twist on gift certificates. We call it the DVDficate™. It's a personalized video on DVD that's a really fun way to announce your legacy video gift.

To see a sample and learn more, visit Family Legacy Video's Gift Certificate page.

Video Biography: A Dream Career

Dreams are funny things. Most disappear from my memory in an instant, like flash paper kissed by a burning match, as soon as I open my eyes to the light of day. Others, for no particular reasons I can fathom, remain inked indelibly onto my long-term memory. I like to re-examine these dreams occasionally to see if time and life experience bring additional insights into their meanings. Once in a while I get lucky:

This is one of those dreams where I'm both a participant and an observer. It's spring or summer. I see myself playing in the backyard of my boyhood New Jersey home with one of my brothers. I'm about eight years old; Bob is around two. Suddenly, it's time for me to leave. I stand, and in an instant I'm walking by myself, way in the distance. Bob immediately notices that he's alone and he begins to cry. Even though I'm miles away, I hear his distress. I turn, and in a moment I'm back with my brother. I take his hand in mine. Then, in another instant, we're walking together, far, far away.

This is the oldest of my "inked-in" dreams, staying with me since I was eight years old. It's always resonated with me in a very strong and visceral way. I could never put my finger on just what gives this dream its staying power. But looking back on it nearly forty-five years later, I think its imagery sheds some light on why I became a personal historian.

On a basic level, the narrative is about me leaving my brother behind, then realizing my mistake and taking him with me on my journey. But when I approach it a little more creatively, I see that the two figures can also represent generations of a family, one older and one younger. We often get separated - sometimes by distance, sometimes by time, many times by both. How can we bridge these gulfs and stay connected? In the dream my brother and I link hands. From my current perspective as a video biographer and personal historian I help generations create links by sharing stories.

Preserving, sharing and celebrating personal and family stories is the greatest way of fostering and maintaining connections between generations that I know. When you commit your story to video or audio or print, you're reaching out to your family's younger generations and generations yet to come. You're saying, "Hi. We're family and we're connected. I'd like to introduce myself and pass my experiences, observations and insights along to you. This is my gift to you and I hope you enjoy and profit by what I have to say. And please, pass my life story and yours along to the next generations of our family."

Speaking from my own experience, hearing stories about my grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles made me appreciate them and feel connected to them as flesh-and-blood people, instead of flat and faded images in a photo album. And thanks to today's video technology, I can help folks capture their stories as never before, creating legacy videos that will allow future generations to see and hear ancestors speaking directly to them.

Generations "holding hands" and staying connected through the power of story - that's what this dream now means to me. And if dreams are signposts, I'd say this one had me pointed towards a career as a personal historian long ago.

Beautifully Imperfect

At the end of the day, what it is you'll remember about your loved ones? Great accomplishments? Public acclaim? Perhaps. More than likely, though, it'll be their endearing and "imperfect" qualities - like in this commercial commissioned by the government of Singapore. Enjoy!

A pilgrimage to a very special eatery

Pizza, spaghetti with marinara sauce, lasagna, eggplant parmigiana - all standard items you'd expect to find on most Italian restaurant menus. But at Spirito's, a neighborhood eatery in Elizabeth, New Jersey, these dishes are part of an on-going, inter-generational feast.

Spirito's opened in 1932. Seventy-seven years later, the business is still run by the Spirito family, and descendants of the original customers continue to patronize the place. The restaurant occupies a nondescript stone building on the corner of 3rd Avenue and High Street, a neighborhood of busy, narrow streets and not nearly enough parking. The bar's in front; dining room is in back. It's a no-frills kind of place, clean enough and featuring wood paneling and green-painted booths. Hanging on the walls, framed photos and newspaper reviews and articles celebrate the histories of the Spirito family and the restaurant.

My maternal grandparents introduced me to Spirito's when I was a youngster. We always started with a cold antipasto, featuring celery, peppers, olives, cheeses and meats. Next came the "pizza pie" (as Grandpa always called it), a cheese pie with lots of tomato sauce and a very thin, crispy crust (what Garden Staters call a "bar pie"). The main courses followed. I can still remember the ravioli - large plump pasta pillows with a feather-light and creamy cheese filling. And the eggplant - wow, my mouth is watering as I write this.

The restaurant does have it quirks. Plenty of bread, but no butter. Soda is served by the pitcher, but you can only buy beer by the bottle. No coffee. And if you want desert you can stroll on down to the Italian ice stand at the other end of the street. But hey, these are the things that give Spirito's its charm - like the wait staff.

The waitresses were, and still are, fantastic. I've heard them described as gruff - but to me they're pure "Jersey" - friendly, no-nonsense ladies who also happen to have great memories. They never write down an order and they never make a mistake. In fact, years after my grandfather and grandmother moved from Elizabeth and my grandfather had died, I remember going to Spirito's with my grandmother and finding a waitress who remembered them both.

Memories, I think, even more than the food, are what make this place so special. On a recent trip to New Jersey, I returned to Spirito's for the first time in two decades and enjoyed a meal with my mom, two of my brothers, my sister-in-law, two nieces and a nephew. Nothing about the place had changed - and that was a good thing. I was happy to see a new generation of our family enjoying the same dishes I savored as a kid. And as I worked my way through the antipasto, the "pizza pie" and my eggplant, the tastes brought with them memories of happy times with my mom, grandparents and brothers around these very same tables. We were all part of a wonderful continuity - a very tasty legacy, if you will.

As we got up to leave, I told my mom that, while we had three generations gathered around our table, I'd felt as if my Grandma and Grandpa had joined us as well. Mom nodded and smiled. She'd felt their presence, too.

A legacy of tulips

Did you ever play Wiffle Ball? Growing up, it was the summer pastime of choice in my suburban New Jersey neighborhood. Every day, kids would congregate on the side street by my house, choose sides and have at it. Games were noisy affairs, punctuated by lots of arguments over close calls, and could last for hours. It wasn't unusual for us to suspend a game for dinner and then reconvene afterwards. In fact, I remember finishing one game under the glare of a neighbor's headlights.

It was a pretty safe game, too, thanks to the hollow plastic Wiffle Ball. It would glance harmlessly off just about anything it hit.

The exception was Mr. Daly's tulips.

Mr. and Mrs. Daly lived on the other side of the street. They were a very pleasant, elderly couple and they tolerated us kids pretty well. Unfortunately, Mr. Daly insisted on planting tulips outside the chain link fence bordering his backyard. He was quite proud of those tulips and the bright red and yellow blooms they provided each spring - and he became quite upset whenever a sharply hit foul ball lopped the top off one of them. Or two. Or three. Not that we wanted to damage the flowers; they were just innocent bystanders that occasionally got caught in our Wiffle Ball crossfire.

The 1960s, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Daly, are long gone. But a recent experience brought all those memories back to me. In early July, my wife Halina and I traveled back to New Jersey to visit family. One day, we drove through my old neighborhood. I couldn't resist stopping to look at my old house, now vastly enlarged from the little bungalow in which I grew up. I walked around the house and took a few pictures - and it wasn't long before I caught the attention of one of the neighbors, who probably figured I was casing the place for a robbery.

He strolled over, a glass of beer in hand, and asked if I needed some help. I introduced myself and told him I grew up in the neighborhood. We started chatting, and soon I found myself in the middle of a small crowd of neighbors, answering questions about what things were like in the old days, and who used to live where. During the course of our chat, I mentioned our Wiffle Ball games and the many tulips we beheaded.

Finally, the time came to say goodbye. As I was about to leave, the neighbor currently living in the Daly's old house said, "You know, I'm glad you mentioned about the tulips. They keep sprouting up and I had no idea where they came from."

As Halina and I drove away, the thought of those tulips - Mr. Daly's legacy to the neighborhood - filled me with a warm glow. The experience reminded me that legacies can take many forms, be they video biographies or tulips - and that they enrich and inform the lives of the generations that follow.

Nice job, Mr. Daly.

Start planning your video biography interview - before you take another breath

I belong to the Catalina Rotary Club here in Tucson. One of the features of our weekly lunch meetings is a segment called the "Member Moment." During this time, one of our members takes three or four minutes to talk a little bit about his/her life. Well, last week one of our more senior members had some time in the spotlight - and he made his moment quite memorable. In a matter-of-fact way he sketched for us a life filled with adventures, both in peace and wartime; a life filled with business success and family joys and sorrows. As he returned to his seat at the table he and I happened to be sharing, the president of our club said, "Wow, what an incredible life. Have you had Steve do one of his videos about you?" "No," the member replied. "It's too late for that." I immediately piped up and said, loud enough for the others to hear, "Too late? You're still breathing aren't you?"

Let's face it: Capturing our stories and the stories of our loved ones on video has to be done while we're breathing. There's just no other time that'll work. And yet, time and again, countless numbers of folks run out the clock. Take a gander at the obituaries in your local paper today. How many of those souls do you think recorded their stories as a legacy for their families? Chances are not many. I can't tell you the number of times I've been approached after one of my presentations by people who've said, "What you're doing is wonderful. I wish we'd created a video biography about my (father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, etc.) while he/she was alive."

None of us knows what fate has in store for us. So if you have a parent, grandparent or other relative you want to interview, don't wait. And if you're old enough to have some stories to tell and some life lessons to share, there's no time like the present to commit them to video.

So take a deep breath and get started. Do it today.