I DON'T REALLY WEAR GLASSES

By Dan Miller 

September 17, 2008 

Look at the small photo up near the top, right side of this web site, and you'll observe I'm not wearing eyeglasses. 

Yet, some of you might have noticed that I do wear them on TV. 

Recently, my co-anchor Demetria Kalodimos told me that someone had referred to me as "the guy on the news who wears glasses." 

Well, that surprised me because I don't think of myself as a "glasses person." 

It's true that I've been wearing mild prescription glasses on all our newscasts for the past two or three years, but that's just so the tele-prompter won't look so blurry when I read it. 

Perhaps we need to buy clearer tele-prompters! 

And -- I'll admit -- I've been using the little drug store "cheaters" to read small print for the past few..... uhhh, well, for the past 20 or 25 years.... 

But I still don't consider myself a person who actually "wears" glasses. 

That's something other people do. 

I mean, Woody Allen and Drew Carey and Sally Jessy Rafael wear glasses.... so did Buddy Holly and Barry Goldwater.... but me -- no -- I just make use of them now and then. 

When I first started buying those cheap drug store magnifiers, I liked the lowest power, #1.00.... now I'm up to around #2.50 or #3.00.... but, remember, that's just to help me with menus in dark restaurants, or to assist with the much smaller type that publishers -- for some unknown reason -- seem to prefer in recent years. 

Oh, my colleagues around the newsroom laugh because they see me occasionally wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time.... but that's just to give me two separate focal ranges.... one for my computer, and the other for the TV monitor in my office. 

And just for the fun of it I try to keep a pair of those "cheaters" next to every chair in my house.... and I like to have five or six pairs, with varying strengths, next to my bed.... but that's just in case I need to read something with small, or medium, or not really huge print. 

No, in spite of the fact that you'll often see me wearing glasses -- even two pairs at once -- I'm proud to say that I've made it this far in life without really wearing glasses.

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