If you can't see, what does beauty look like?

All that time filming, and we already know who will be the star of the video: Whitney.

Last Tuesday afternoon four creative and energetic young guys showed up at our door armed with audio equipment and cameras.

Ho hum, just another day for Beth Finke.

One of the four guys was my friend Mike Grant’s son, Sam. Sam and his buddies Craig Benzine, Matt Weber and David Wolff got some good news earlier this year: they received a grant from Google! The money is helping them fund a new channel on YouTube called The Good Stuff, and now they’re busy producing videos. Every few weeks The Good Stuff puts together a playlist of five or six videos centered around a theme (they’ve already covered subjects like Geeks, Origins, Airplanes, Miniature) and if I were you I’d subscribe to The Good Stuff channel right now so you won’t miss the episode coming up. The next theme is “Senses,” and these guys have already arranged interviews with:

• experts from the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation,
• a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago named Jerry Coyne who studies the concept of free will and how that helps determine ones sense of self,
• Alpana Singh, the renowned Chicago sommelier who hosted the PBS program Check, Please and wrote the book Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine, and Having Great Relationships, and
• Me!

After giving Whitney some affectionate pats and belly rubs, Matt, David, Sam and Craig got to work right away, finding just the right spot for me to sit at in our apartment for the interview and making extra sure all audio and light levels were perfect before they started filming. Craig Benzine conducted my interview and made me feel comfortable in front of the cameras. He’s very familiar with YouTube: he already has an uber-popular vlog on YouTube called wheezywaiter that has half a million followers. That was not a typo. Half a million people subscribe to wheezywaiter, and Craig, Sam, Matt and David are hoping that someday a million people will be tuning in to The Good Stuff.

Craig was armed with all sorts of questions for me, many of them centering on my concept of beauty. Some examples:

• Did your concept of beauty change after you couldn’t see anymore?
• You hear stories on the news about the obesity epidemic, so when you’re going down the street with Whitney, doo you imagine everyone walking in front of you looking like balloon characters?
• The people you were able to see, when you imagine them now, do you picture them aging?
• Everyone describes Brad Pitt as so good looking, when you hear his name, do you come up with an image of what he looks like?
• Do you have an image of what the four of us look like?

When the interview was over, they took some short takes of me playing piano and working at my computer, and then we headed outside so they could follow Whitney and me to her favorite tree. The guys had been with us for hours by then, and Whitney needed to go!

So is beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Find out the answer to that and other intriguing questions by tuning in to The Good Stuff now. All the previous episodes are there for you to watch, free of charge, and the producers hope to have “Senses” up by the end of the month.

To whet your appetite , how about I tease you with the answer to Craig’s last softball question. The response to whether or not I had conjured up an image of what these four guys looked like in the short time I’d come to know them was obvious. “You all look like Brad Pitt,” I shrugged, and funny thing, not a single one of them denied it.