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Women's TV show takes viewers behind the music

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By Meg Dedolph
STAFF WRITER

It was a rainstorm at a rock concert that made Aurora University graduate Juliet Miranda understand how much she loved music.

When she was about 12 and growing up in La Grange, she won tickets to a Bon Jovi concert at Alpine Valley in a radio contest, and her father agreed to take her.

"They were going into the song 'Living on a Prayer,' and it started pouring rain," she said. "Everything exploded around me, and right before the final chorus, Jon Bon Jovi said, 'Wow, rock 'n' roll opens the skies.' Right then and there, I said, 'This is it.'"

She started to write a small fan magazine when she was 15, interviewing local bands, and within a few years, was selling subscriptions.

Now, she and assistant producer Laura Baartmans are the creators of "Over the Edge," a music documentary series showing on local cable stations.

Miranda, 26, works in the Aurora University publicity office, and Baartmans, 36, is working toward her master's degree in education at the school.

For Miranda, a Naperville resident, the show is a way for her to have a little bit of fun outside her regular job. She graduated from Aurora University in 1998 with a degree in communications and worked in Los Angeles as a publicist in the music and TV industries.

After being laid off, she free-lanced, but realized she wasn't going to pay her bills that way, so she returned home.

In January, she started work in the university's publicity office, but wanted something different to do.

"I thought, 'I love TV,' and I thought I'd take some of the bands I'm working with and go from there," she said. "Music has been my passion all my life."

What she and Baartmans mean by music is rock 'n' roll, much of it like the kind played during the '80s by guys with big hair and loud guitars.

Both of them list, among their favorite bands, acts such as Nickelback, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith.

"Music is an interest of mine, so getting to meet people that make it and talking to people who create it, even if it's not a nationally known band, it's neat to hear how it goes from an idea to a song on stage," Baartmans said.

The show premiered Sept. 13 on Aurora's public access cable channel with a half-hour episode about Enuff Z'Nuff.

"I've known them for a long time," Miranda said. "When I was going to shows, they've always been one of my favorite bands, so I wanted the first show to be them."

Acquiring enough tape to edit into one of the shows takes hours, she said. After listening to a band's compact disc and talking with members to see what kind of story she could tell, she and Baartmans start spending time with the musicians.

"We start going to rehearsals for a while, we go to some of their live shows and start filming them," she said. "Since I'm not exactly a musician myself, it gives me a chance to get my fingers in it. You become a part of their lives. It's amazing how long it takes to edit 30 minutes. It's hours and hours of footage, evenings and weekends going to shows and seeing bands."

Baartmans agreed.

"It amazed me how much work it took to get 25 minutes for a show," she said.

Miranda took her inspiration for "Over the Edge" from cable channel VH1's "Behind the Music," a half-hour program profiling different artists.

"The big difference is that I'm trying to make it a little more current," she said. "They never show what the band is doing now. This is more of a look ahead, what they're going to be doing. That's why I like to feature local bands in the show."

Her habit of worrying about lighting and sound quality has changed the way she looks at a night on the town.

"It's not quite as fun sometimes to look at it from a different perspective," she said. "The camera gives you a way to get in there, it gives you an excuse to get to know them, but sometimes I like to go to a concert and just sit there with friends and listen. You've got to keep coming back to what got you started, and it's the music. Otherwise, it turns into work, and that's no fun."