Starting with a simple ad on “Live with Kelly and Ryan,”  Susan Vernon sent her family to live television.

This ad asked for people to send a picture of something they were doing that was out of the ordinary. For the Vernon family, this was their son Jason at the Central Iowa Bee Association Honey Ambassador Ceremony.

Vernon reflects on the moment she decided to enter the picture of her son, “it was just one of those things you do on a whim like you might buy a lottery ticket…I thought you know what, why not.”

Although it was a spontaneous decision with little hope for any outcome, they promptly got a call. Vernon and her son had to have an initial interview to see if the content was “show-worthy.”

She explained, “they interviewed me for a really long time, then they interviewed my son for a really long time, and then they asked us if we would be on the show.”

With the amount of love she has for the show, Vernon has been watching hosts Kelly and Ryan since the days of the original hosts Regis and Kathie Lee. More recently, she had been watching during quarantine as a break from virtual learning. 

“I was probably working 12 or 14 hours a day just with my computer on my lap. It’s so dorky but the one thing that allowed me to maintain a routine was, I would turn on that show and like I would do these things before the show and then I would get to these things after the show. It was my one bit of routine,” commented Vernon. 

With Vernon’s love of “Live with Kelly and Ryan,” she thought she would be more nervous for the interview if it would have been later in the day. 

Vernon responded to this saying, “it was so early in the morning, we had to get up so early. Even though it’s [filmed] live, it’s actually live on the East Coast…It is actually a show that airs at 8 a.m…I was too tired to be nervous.”

Vernon says the most interesting part of the whole experience was the behind-the-scenes content. “We had to do a tech check on Sunday, and then we had to do a tech check and sound check in the morning before the show. All of the pre-interview we had to do. It was really cool to see everything that goes into that one three-minute segment.” 

Most important of all her son was able to talk about something that he is really passionate about: his Honey Bee Ambassadorship.