Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Rochester, VT

More than two decades ago, in another life, I was a journalist covering Vermont politics when the phone rang in the Montpelier bureau. The call changed my life and put me in motion pictures. The conversation went something like this:

“Hi, Bryan? My name is John O’Brien. I live in Tunbridge. And I’m making a film about my neighbor, Fred Tuttle. He’s a retired dairy farmer. The plot is that Fred’s running for Congress. And I need someone to play a journalist. Jim Falzarano over at The Times Argus suggested I call you. I was wondering if you might want to be in the film?”

The first thought that runs through my mind is that Falzarano is a dead man. Next, I search for a polite way out.

“Um, uh, are you sure you’ve got the right guy. I’m no actor. I’ve never even been in a school play.”

“Well, OK, but how about if I come up for a visit?”

That visit sealed my fate.

Once you meet John O’Brien you will do nearly anything he asks. John is a Vermont Renaissance man. Sheep farmer. Political strategist. Nice guy. Writer. Filmmaker. You know those Dos Equis beer commercials? With the rugged older guy who’s supposedly the most interesting man in the world. That dude has nothing on John O’Brien.

So John puts me in his movie Man with a Plan. I play the straight man to the inimitable Fred Tuttle (who, unlike me, has a Wikipedia page). In the final stages of editing, John calls me back to Tunbridge and makes me the film’s narrator. We record my dialogue in his “soundproof” coat closet.

John O’Brien’s art takes other forms, however. Post cards, for example, and big envelopes. It is priceless art for the cost of a stamp. John’s cards and letters reflect his insights on friends. They’re a way of saying he knows you, he understands you, he cares about what you care about. Against the rise of the Internet, this new mass medium, John’s post cards recall and preserve a gentle tradition, writing ink on paper. In this democratic medium, like his films, John is idyllic, poignant, funny and downright neighborly.

So what has all this got to do with birds or other flying things? A collection of John’s post cards and envelopes, on loan from their recipients, is now showing at the BigTown Gallery in Rochester, Vermont. It includes an envelope John sent me with his drawing of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. (At the time John had asked me to give a talk at the Tunbridge Library about my exploits for the woodpecker, most likely still extinct, in the swamps of Arkansas.) Among other birds appearing in John’s mailings on display include Bald Eagle, Red-headed Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Northern Cardinal and Common Yellowthroat.

Get to the show before it ends on August 22. Not because of its birds. You’ll also get a vivid lesson on nudity and Nixon, ice hockey and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, life in Vermont and beyond. Here’s a more insightful discourse on John and his art than I alone can provide.

Oh, and if you don’t believe any of this, here’s my 15 minutes of fame: Bryan Pfeiffer’s official filmography page at the New York Times. (No relation to Michelle. And, sorry, no autographs.)