Fast-Forward in Faith
by Melanie Hemry
Adrienne Bankert wrapped up the end of the talk show she hosted and thanked her guests. It was a heady thing for a 23-year-old to have her own makeup artist and earn $1,000 every time she hosted a show. Climbing into her car, Adrienne snaked across Los Angeles in bumper-to-bumper traffic, pondering her career.
After an internship with NBC in Los Angeles, she’d landed the gig as host on a local PBS station. It was a great job and a wonderful experience, but Adrienne was driven. All her young life she wanted to make it big in television. Adrienne also knew if that was going to happen she would need to be on TV all day, every day.
Ultimately, the desire for career success would bring her to faith in the Lord.
Looking back, it seemed Adrienne was being prepared for the high-pressure world of television all along. She’d first considered being a journalist when she was 12 years old. She had been sitting on the living room floor, watching the evening news with her family on the local NBC station, KCRA out of Sacramento, when she blurted, “I’ll never do the news. But if I did, I’d work for them.”
The minute those words had popped out of her mouth, Adrienne laughed. She was tall and gangly, with big teeth and limbs sticking out at all angles like coat hangers. Someone like that in front of a TV camera? Not likely!
“You’re beautiful,” her mother had assured her. “You’re just in…a really long awkward stage.”
'Yeah, a really long stage,' Adrienne thought. 'More like a lifelong stage.'
By the time she reached high school that stage in Adrienne’s life seemed to be nearing an end. Aside from her good looks, which her mother had so graciously pointed out, at least one other unseen talent had begun to emerge.
BVOV : 13
