My Uncle Jim recognized me in the background of a small picture in Time magazine, and made the effort to cut the clipping and mail it to me.

When anyone in my parents’ generation would see someone’s child in the paper, that’s what they’d do: cut it out and mail it off, so they’d have extra copies. And even in these days of email forwards and blogging, there’s nothing quite like getting a clipping in the mail, especially when you didn’t know about the article in the first place.

Thanks, Uncle Jim. That was a wild day. I had just turned in what I thought was my final draft of Bad Lieutenant, my feature profile about Lt. Dan Choi. But the news around Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was changing fast. U.S. federal judge Virginia Walker had just issued an injunction that DADT immediately end. I saw on Dan’s twitter that he was going to Times Square to try to re-enlist, and met him there. This would not be the first nor the last time he’d force me to re-write my story, and I was terrified word of my long simmering profile would leak out or be ruined by the unfolding events.

The Voice, not wanting to draw attention to the subject of what would be the following week’s cover story, didn’t run my tweets. Both Joe My God and Pam’s House Blend did, running this picture I was probably taking as the Time photographer took mine, which puts into perspective how much media was following Dan at that time: