When Buffalo Grove mom and corporate sales executive Liz Goldberg isn’t tending to family and work, she accepts wedding and other singing gigs and is a soprano with the Buffalo Grove Singers.
Goldberg recently learned her talent is hereditary, a revelation that began about a year ago with an “and-what-do-you-do” conversation with former Buffalo Grove singer Bonnie Pisik.
“Bonnie said, `I’m a videographer. I said . . . my sister and I have been wanting to have a video done of our mom,” said Goldberg. She and her sister Barbara Barnett of Wheeling were inspired by a video done through Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation featuring Goldberg’s husband’s parents, who are Holocaust survivors.
“It told the history of my husband’s family. It was so interesting. I thought that would be so cool to do for my mom. She’s had an interesting life. She came over here from Lithuania, alone, when she was 5. And I don’t know if my mother will be around when my kids [10-year-old Sydney and 6-year-old twins Illissa and Matthew] get married,” said Goldberg, whose father, Seymour Shyette, died 20 years ago.
The final product was an hour-and-a-half video of pleased-to-be-asked Buffalo Grove grandmother Ellen Shyette Steiner, reminiscing about people and events that shaped much of her 77 years.
“My mother told stories I had forgotten. She talked about coming over to this country, becoming legally blind [from a degenerative disease] when she was in her 20s, how she got involved in the schools and community and how after my dad died she worked with senior citizen centers and received the Claude Pepper award for working with seniors,” Goldberg said. “And it’s not just my mother’s life, but also when she met dad, what the [World War II] years were like, my parents’ life together, when they had us.” The taping also told Goldberg that singing was even more in the genes than she suspected.
“I knew my mother liked to sing opera and I sing opera, but I learned that my mother’s grandmother also sang opera. We come from a musical family. My brother [Lowell] is a musician and my kids are all musically talented,” she said.
Goldberg is glad the family has the tape to pass along.
“It’s not something we look at every day, but it’s there,” she said. “It’s interesting and it is very important to me and my sister to have documentation from our part of the family. And Bonnie interwove pictures based on what my mother was talking about. It’s such a treasure.”
To cover topics of particular interest to a family and encourage the subject to talk, Pisik conducts the session as an interview. Staying unobtrusively in the background, she is an interviewer who is heard, not seen.
“It has a real documentary feel to it,” Pisik said. “What’s nice about it is that to get into the story, I illustrate what the person is saying through pictures the family has. If the person is reminiscing about a parent, I cut to a picture of the parent.”
To make the subject comfortable, she usually starts out asking when and where the person was born as well as questions about grandparents and parents.
“I have an outline of 75 questions if I need them. They’re coupled with questions about something a client wanted talked about,” she said.
Pisik tries to gear her questions so that the end result is not an impersonal chronology.
“When I do a video, I try to project in my own mind what it would be like to be a total stranger 50 years from now viewing the tape. I think it should be something that says to the person who is looking at it years down the line in the future [that] this is part of what I am,” she said. “The tape should not just be about what the person did, but who the person was. I try to capture the personality, the person’s smile and show where the person is coming from.”
The role of interviewer and maker of video “heirlooms,” as she calls them, are a natural evolution for Pisik, a 40-year-old mom who chose the career as a way to balance work and family.
A graduate of Southern Illinois University’s theater department, Pisik worked with her father, Al Richman, at his Midwestern Broadcasting School and Studio in Chicago and at other recording studios before moving on to multimedia productions .
The Special Olympics struck the right chord for Pisik.
“This was the first one with a human element to it,” she said.
She planned her next career move to include more documentaries with a human angle. She decided to work out of her home so she could maximize family time with husband Mitch and their sons, Ben, 9, and Nathan, 6.
“I told someone I was thinking of doing a video heirloom and she was interested because her mother-in-law was a Holocaust survivor, and this woman thought it would be good for her children to know what that was like,” Pisik said.
For a demo, she taped her parents and her husband’s parents. “I heard about the day my husband was born. It was endearing,” she said.
That was about a year ago. Pisik is now regularly producing video memories, taped at a site the families prefer and edited in her home office.
“Doing video heirlooms combined two things I love,” she said. “I love doing interviews and I love doing videos. I cry with them. I get emotional with them.” She gets calls from clients whose parents range from impoverished immigrants to Iowa farmers to big city executives.
“They all have incredible stories. And they are all different. But in all of them there is a strength that holds the family together,” Pisik said.
She doubts, however, that the video subjects would ever think their stories belonged on tape.
“None of my subjects asked me to do the video. They don’t think their lives are that interesting. It’s their children and relatives who see value in the stories. They want it to pass down to their children and grandchildren,” she said. “But I think everybody has an interesting story to tell.”
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Video Heirlooms range from $300 to $500. For more information, call Bonnie Pisik Video Production at 847-573-8016.
