The studio is colder than it looks

Call time for a morning show is exactly what it sounds like. Morning. The kind where the parking lot lights are still on. I checked in at KSAT12 to go live on Good Morning San Antonio and talk about The Uplift Project. I'm 16, and until that morning my experience with live television was watching it.

Two things nobody tells you about TV studios. They're cold, and they're small. On screen the set looks like a whole room. In person it's a corner with very good lighting, and the air conditioning sits somewhere between meat locker and walk-in fridge. I took a photo of the studio setup before I went on, partly because it looked cool and partly because I wanted proof that it was real.

Here's the thing about live TV that people do tell you, but you don't believe until the red light comes on: it's one take. No redo. If you trip over a sentence, that sentence has already gone out across the city, and your only option is to keep talking. I had a plan for what I wanted to say about the project. I said most of it, in a different order, much faster than I intended (nerves run on their own clock). I'm told this is normal.

The strange part is where this started. The Uplift Project began as a school project. Then a real newsroom decided it was worth airtime on a weekday morning. I don't fully know what tipped it from school project to news. I'm not going to argue with the result.

The part that actually mattered came the following Monday, when KSAT hosted a live phone bank at the station from 12 to 7 PM CT, with the money going to families fighting blood cancer. Seven hours of phones. It brought in around $3,000. That kind of number doesn't show up on its own, so if you were one of the people who called in that day, thank you.

I still have the photo of the empty studio on my phone. It doesn't look like much, which is sort of the point. Next time I'm on live television, I'm bringing a jacket.