Give That Girl An Award

It happened last week. A young, pretty television reporter on the West Coast named Rachel Menitoff was doing a live report about the California heat wave when a giant flying cockroach (as big as the palm of my hand) landed right on her body and went for a stroll as the camera rolled. That roach crawled across her stomach, up her chest, and clean across her neck— and Rachel never flinched. Not once. She kept right on talking about overnight temperatures as if she were reading a bedtime story to a child.

I’ve seen that video a dozen times, as people have shared and reshared it on social media. Every time I see it, it gives me the heeby jeebies, yet I can’t look away.

Look, that girl deserves some kind of national award or honor because, I promise you, 99 people out of 100 could not have stood there and carried on the way she did. She was nothing short of poised and professional. Give that girl a raise!

Here in Georgia, we all know cockroaches. We cohabit with them sometimes, no matter how clean we keep the house or how airtight and sealed our homes are. They get in every now and then anyway, and when we spot one, well, it’s nothing short of a crisis situation. We’re hunting a shoe or a fly swatter or whatever’s handy to kill it deader than dead as fast as we can. Nothing causes more of a reaction—well, I take that back. Seeing a rattlesnake, a water moccasin, or a copperhead is worse. But a cockroach is in the same vein. And that’s just plain irrational, because roaches can’t even hurt us. We just don’t like the way they look. So why does our blood pressure shoot through the roof? Why do most of us scream and holler and carry on until the situation is neutralized? These are the questions I have today.

Cockroaches are highly resilient insects of the order Blattodea. They’ve been around for over 300 million years and actually do honest work as decomposers in the ecosystem, though a few species are major household pests that spread bacteria and stir up allergies. Some say cockroaches will still be here long after humans are extinct. That makes me think they’re just waiting us out so they can take over the planet. Watching. Plotting. Waiting.

There are the small ones—little offspring of Satan himself. And then there are the dreaded Palmetto bugs—the big ’uns. There have been several instances in my 60 years when I’ve spied a Palmetto on a wall somewhere, tried to sneak up on it with a weapon, only for it to turn and fly straight at me, causing me to lose my mind.

Of course, we Southerners have a whole arsenal for this war aside from our shoes and swatters. There’s the roach motel—that little cardboard contraption where, as the advertising promises, “roaches check in, but they never check out.” I’ve always appreciated those commercials. And then there’s the roach spray, which most Georgians keep within arm’s reach. Some folks empty half a can on one bug, standing there spraying long after the ugly thing has gone to its heavenly reward. That’s just overkill, but I certainly understand the need to be sure he or she is dead.

So yes—that reporter, with that big cockroach climbing all over her as the camera rolled, is a trooper. A hero. She stood her ground while the rest of us would’ve been out of there. Rachel Menitoff deserves an award.