Dan's Papers - May 22, 2009 - MY THREE MINUTES OF FAME ON FOX NATIONAL NEWS

At five minutes to nine last Thursday morning, I was stepping out of the shower at our Manhattan apartment when my wife opened the bathroom door and held out a portable phone.

"It's Fox News," she said.

"I'm supposed to have an on air telephone interview with them in an hour," I told my wife. "Nine forty five. Could it be 8:45?"

"They want to talk to you now."

I spent 20 seconds toweling myself, and then, stark naked but with a towel over my shoulder, took the phone right there in the bathroom. It was not the contact I was familiar with at Fox, Megan Brown. It was a man on the phone.

"Did you get Megan's email she sent you 15 minutes ago?" he asked.

"The segment is still on for 9:45. But are you in the city? Could you get to the studio? If you can, we'll send a car."

The Fox Studio, on Sixth and 48th Street, is half an hour away from the apartment on the Upper East Side. It usually takes one hour for me to even get dressed in the morning and I hadn't even started. They wanted me dressed and in front of a camera 40 blocks away in 45 minutes.

The tale they wanted me to tell was about the latest peculiar looking creature that had washed up on the eastern end of Long Island a day earlier. There had been one last August, something about the size of a sheep but with the fangs of a raptor. Now there was another one, this time on a beach at Southold.

I have been on live TV before in the city, but never on this kind of notice. Twenty minutes later, at 9:15, I was down in the lobby watching a private car pull up in front of our building. I didn't know it at the time, but I had not grabbed a blue blazer from our closet for the occasion, I had mistakenly grabbed my tuxedo jacket. That's what I was wearing. I climbed in. "Ludicrous Speed," I said to the driver. This is a famous line from Spaceballs. I wanted a half an hour trip through midtown traffic to take 15 minutes.

As the car weaved down Park Avenue, I was on the phone with Fox about my progress. I had picked up a banana from the kitchen on my way out the door. I had brushed my hair, shaved, brushed my teeth, that was it. Between calls, I gobbled the banana. What to do with the peel?

"Just leave it on the seat," the driver said. "I'll take care of it." He got us to Fox on Sixth Avenue at 48th Street in a ludicrous speed of 15 minutes.

I ran in to the desk in the lobby. This is a 60-story building.

"I'm on the air in 14 minutes," I told the guard. "I have no idea where."

"Can I see your identification?" the guard said.

Eight minutes later, at 9:38, I got out of an elevator somewhere and was led through a vast city room to a small studio all set up for a talking head. There was a desk, a camera, a digital clock, a monitor where I could watch the anchor interviewing someone who had come before and a glass window behind me that showed up on TV, accurately, as the skyscrapers outside. They would interview me here remotely from the main newsroom.

A woman came over with an earpiece.

"Which one?" she asked.

A woman with a soft brush came over and mushed some powder on my face for five seconds. Then it was just me with the voice in my ear and the monitor in front of me. Actually there were two monitors. I was on one in my straw hat. The live feed from "America's Newsroom" was on the other and also in my ear.

I looked at myself. There I am. Pretty snappy. I hope I don't blow it.

I looked at the other monitor.

"The thing is," an expert was saying to anchor Bill Hemmer, "there will be longer waits in the waiting rooms, longer waits for MRIs or dialysis. I am not predicting disaster, but if this goes into effect before the medical profession has time to get ahead of the game, it could be really bad."

"We are headed for a break now," Hemmer said. "But we'll be back, with a tremendous story about still another creature from somewhere that has washed up on the eastern shores of Long Island."

Cut to commercial for Cialis. It was 9:39. One minute to go.

I turned to the woman who had given me the earpiece. "How long is the segment?"

"Three to four minutes."

Surely this was a dream. Forty-eight minutes ago I was stark naked getting out of a shower on 80th Street.

"And we have with us," Hemmer was saying, "Dan Rattiner, from Dan's Papers out in the Hamptons."

There was a woman anchor, Megyn Kelly, who first spoke. "Dan you look very much as if you just came from the beach in that straw hat and all."

"I did," I said, grinning.

Hemmer showed pictures of the two creatures, then a map where each washed up.

"What do you make of this second creature coming ashore?" Hemmer asked after explaining everything.

"Do you want the real version or the made up version?" I asked.

"Let's take the real version first."

The thrust of what I said was that, about three miles off the tip of the North Fork, there is the Plum Island Animal Research Lab where they get animals sick and then try to make them well. No animals are allowed off, but 20 years ago, three deer swam from the island to the mainland and that is a fact.

"You're saying you are sure these creatures came from that island?"

"No. But it's a good guess. Want the other version?"

"Aliens have landed and taken over Plum Island. They've been killing animals and letting them wash up on the mainland to let us humans know what they are capable of."

"Well, thank you very much, Mr. Rattiner," Hemmer said. And moments later, I was off. And in my ear, I heard the following. "There's a car waiting out front for you on 48th Street," it said.

The woman came over and took off my earpiece. God forgive me, but this is what I said. "You know, when it's over, that is that. You're out. Like a woman in the morning. I don't even get a donut."

"You are so yesterday," she said. "And yes, the donuts are gone already. Cutbacks."

At five past 10, just 63 minutes after I got the call in the shower, I was back in the apartment uptown.

"How did it go?" my wife asked. Then she let out a hoot. "You are wearing your tuxedo jacket."

She thought about this for a while. "I should have had a look at you."

"They did say I looked like I just came from the beach."

"Yeah. From an all-night party."

I sat down with my breakfast cereal. Had this really happened? Yes. The Montauk Monster has gone national.