Too humble to share news that she is a recipient of the North Shore Arc’s Distinguished Service Award for her contributions to people with developmental disabilities, Kim Carrigan, FOX25 Morning News co-host, does have fun sharing some humorous personal and professional tales.
For the third year in a row, Carrigan will be emcee and auctioneer for the North Shore Arc annual Wine Tasting and Auction, to be held Friday, March 28, 7-10 p.m. at the Lyceum Restaurant, 43 Church St., in Salem.
Read on to discover new insights on the local celebrity, and how she continues to give to the community where she happily raises her family.
For the past four years, she has had to rise at 2:15 a.m. and go to bed by 7:30 p.m. in order to be at the Dedham station by 3 a.m. for hair, makeup and news updates before going live on the FOX25 Morning News from 5-9 a.m.
“If I’m having a great day, I’m in bed at 6:30, which of course is before my kids,” she says. “The tough part about it is that it’s sort of like traveling through time zones, because come Friday, I’m back to a normal schedule. Fridays are bad for me. It’s my favorite day of the week because I can drink coffee all afternoon, which I can’t do any other day because I have to get to bed. At the same time, I’m so tired by the time my husband gets home from work, we can’t do a whole lot. It’s a tough schedule, but the great part of it is that I’m home before my kids get home every day. The children have two career parents, but they usually always have a parent someplace close by.”
Carrigan’s oldest is 11-year-old AJ, who is a fifth-grader at the middle school in Swampscott. Her little one, Grace, is 6 going on 35, she says, and a first-grader at Stanley School.
Carrigan married Randy, her high school sweetheart, and they moved to the Boston area in ‘94 for one year before moving to Swampscott. Randy is an attorney for State Street Global Advisors in Boston, and the couple was one of the original owners of the Preston Beach condominiums, but moved shortly after having their first child.
“The seawall there made me crazy,” she says of the wall that drops straight down. The Carrigans ended up moving and bought a piece of property on the other end of the beach, where they have lived happily ever since.
To learn the finer art of pole dancing, Carrigan, for a story, took a pole dance lesson out of a stripper’s home.
“The Carrigans do not have a pole in their home,” she wants everyone to know, even though the stripper kept saying, “You know, you could get a pole at your house.”
“I said, ‘You know, it would be best if one of the children’s little friends don’t go home and say Mr. and Mrs. Carrigan have a pole in their bedroom.’ Yes, I did pole dancing,” says Carrigan, “and it was quite interesting. I’ve done so many silly things, and the pole dancing will stay with me for a long time.”
“I’m a fitness freak,” she admits. “If you don’t stay fit on this schedule, you cannot survive. The great part about getting home when I do is that I beat the kids home, so I get to go to gym four to five days a week and work with a trainer in Marblehead three days a week. The other days I do my own thing, like ride bikes and walk Lynn Beach. Where I live is so great.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she answers. “I’m sort of a freak about that kind of stuff. TV does put weight on you. There’s no two ways about it. It accentuates things you don’t want to accentuate. And the viewing audience is tough on women. We all know that. I’m a member of the viewing audience and I’m tough on other women. You have to work a lot harder than the guys have to. That’s OK with me because fitness has always been a part of my life.”
“I’ve worked in television for such a long time, that’s [getting a clothing allowance] been part of my life always,” says the former WHDH-TV and WBZ-TV anchor, originally from Missouri. “There’s good and bad. The good is the obvious. The bad is that I wish someone would just go and do all the shopping for me, and I would never have to do it again.”
“We’re all the same way,” she says of trying to find clothes that are unique, but suit her style. At last year’s North Shore Arc event, she wore a metallic leather jacket, designed in Boston, with a champagne iridescent-sequined top she purchased at Suitable, in Marblehead. Lorraine Roy, a formal wear clothing store in Danvers, will plan to dress her for the March 28 event.
“That shop is located across the street from Cakes for Occasions, whose owner, Kelley is a regular on the show,” she says.
The suit she wears today was made for her, designed by Denise Hajjar, who has a boutique in the lobby at the Fairmont Copley Hotel.
“She makes me many things,” says Carrigan, who says she gets to pick the fabrics, and the designer will come to her house in Swampscott to fit her for a mold, so that later she can change things.
Carrigan has encountered some amazing experiences while interviewing presidents, but she wants to share a story from 1993, during a time when covered news in Des Moines, Iowa.
“The Midwest was under water in a terrible flood in July. President Clinton came to the station where I worked. There was a radio station upstairs, where the president came to address the farmers over the radio to tell them what kind of aid they would be receiving as a result of this flooding. I went upstairs to interview the president, and I asked a Secret Service person when he would be available.
Secret Service said, ‘Step inside here and I will talk to you about this in just a moment.’ Then he opened the door and said, ‘The camera cannot go in.’ I stepped inside the door, and when I turned around, the president was standing there. So for 20 minutes, without my camera and without another soul around, I stood in an airlock with the president.
It was quite an experience, to say the least. I was savvy enough to recognize the moment. Who spends 20 minutes with the leader of the free world? No one but me, at that point. So I took in everything there was to see about him. I noticed he had a Band-Aid on his finger, and he was wearing Wrangler jeans and work boots because he’d been out in the flooding.
He talked with me for 20 minutes about my experiences on television, where I’d grown up, my family, and he asked me as a member of the community what I thought was happening. He wanted to know how people were suffering and what I thought would be the answer to some of their problems.
His accent gets very thick when he’s one-on-one. He’s very soft-spoken and very handsome and charming, but no funny business from him. I just want to make that clear. He’s one of those people you can understand how some of the things that were alleged to have happened may have happened because he looks you right in the eyes. You are the most important person in the world. And he called me ma’am. And he’s the president! He kept saying, ma’am, ma’am, and I just thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. No one’s going to believe this is happening to me. I can’t believe this is happening to me.’”
The first thing you might notice about Carrigan is that her legs are so tanned.
“That is a fake tan, produced by lotion,” she announces. “Pantyhose were invented by man, there’s absolutely no question in my mind. A few years back, when suddenly, maybe it was Katie Couric, or whoever it was, made the declaration that women can have bare legs year round, I said, ‘Sign me up! I’m a part of that team.’ Even in winter months, unless I wear black tights, I go bare. Pantyhose are aging, and my legs can still hold their own.”
Carrigan’s co-host, Gene Lavanchy, asked her a few weeks ago, “Are you tanning?”
“No. It’s a fake deal,” answered Carrigan. “I mean, it’s the best!”
“I know, it’s so cool,” she said.
Last winter, again, for a story, she went to Nashua and experienced indoor skydiving.
“It’s wild,” she says. “I never did it before and will never do it again.”
Her husband, however, experienced indoor sky diving for his 40th birthday.
“Through a tunnel you fall into blowing air and literally go up in a huge tunnel, skydiving. Feet off the ground. Let me tell you something about skydiving that they don’t tell you: A) the second you go in, it catches your body and you go flying up. You cannot breath, and they’re telling you to close your mouth because that air is so hard, you can’t get a breath. The second thing they don’t tell you is that you’re so unattractive when you do this. I came back out and viewed it. I looked horrible. I’ve got to get something done about that. I don’t need to do that again. Some people think it’s great. I couldn’t breathe, I was petrified, and had to wear all that gear. ‘Flip over,’ they said. I said. I thought, ‘I don’t want to flip over.’ I did it for a story, much like the pole dance lesson. I believe it was a ‘things that you can do with your kids’ theme.”
#9 – You’ll never view her on TV wearing big florals or polka dots
“The station does purchase a lot of the on-air clothes, but they belong to me,” she says. “They come from all different places. I buy a lot of things from Suitable, and I buy a lot of things in the city, from Saks and different places like that.”
She has a clothing allowance with the station, but says, “They understand a big part of what we do is visual, so they’re pretty generous with the clothing allowance and that kind of thing. And the news director always takes a look at what is purchased to wear on TV, primarily because this studio is crazy. If you get into something that conflicts with everything that’s going on around you, you’ll need to change. You’ll find that most of the look is primary, unless it’s something pinstriped or something very small, something subdued. She [the news director] just double checks to make sure you didn’t get talked into something kind of crazy for the studio, and not look good.”
During her first Thanksgiving as a resident of New England, she says: “I made the mistake of going to Plimouth Plantation and letting them talk me into dressing like a pilgrim. There’s another thing I’ll never do again.”
Without request, Carrigan plans to offer more than her role as emcee and auctioneer for the North Shore Arc event, mainly because she believes in the cause.
“Those people are unbelievable,” she says of the volunteers who fundraise for North Shore Arc’s many program offerings. “What they do is absolutely amazing. And they don’t do it to become wealthy, and they don’t do it for fame. They do it because they see a need and they want to step in and take care of other people. It’s compassion for other people, whether administrators or those who work out of the field, or the volunteers associated with the organization.
“When you look at how many people are helped by them, it’s just amazing to me. And they do it for people who would fall through the cracks and would never get aid.”
Last year, when Carrigan watched a promotional video for the program, she decided she could offer something more. Over the course of several months, during her free time and with the help of two professionals, she was able to produce a video that better fit North Shore Arc’s promotional needs, simply because she knew she had the means to do so.
“I felt a need and knew I could do it with the help of two amazing guys. We’re very proud of how it turned out … and I hope that it turns out to be something positive.”
Look forward to viewing the video during the Friday evening event.
North Shore Arc’s 13th annual Wine Tasting and Auction will take place on Friday, March 28, 7-10 p.m. at the Lyceum Restaurant, 43 Church St., Salem. Kim Carrigan, FOX25 Morning News co-host, will add effervescence to the evening as the hostess and auctioneer. Don Fournier, president and chief executive officer of Beverly National Bank, will serve as the honorary chairman.
Attendees will have an opportunity to taste a number of selectwines from a wide variety of vineyards around the world. The live and silent auction provides an opportunity to bid on many unique items donated by corporations, small businesses and members of our community. Some of the items for this year include various restaurant gift certificates including The Landing, tickets to many popular local performances such as Blue Man Group, and even a private consultation with an award-winning interior designer.
Proceeds from the event enable the North Shore Arc to fulfill its mission of assisting individuals with disabilities, their families and caregivers. For information and to order tickets, contact Becky Landry at the North Shore Arc, 978-762-4878, Ext. 2401 or e-mail your inquiry to blandry@nsarc.org.
