Local sticks to her guns for ‘30 Days’
The next time you decide to respond to an intriguing Craigslist post, read carefully, because you might end up on an Emmy-winning television show. Just ask Brookline native, Pia Lalli.
Lalli, who is a certified fitness instructor, responded to a listing for people passionate about gun control.
She applied without reading the fine print and forgot about it until she got a call from Morgan Spurlock’s trading perspectives show, “30 Days.”
“I thought it was like two BU students doing a documentary,” Lalli laughs.
After a lengthy audition process, Lalli found herself in Leesburg, Ohio, with Ken Eckermeyer, a former marine who owns around 14 firearms.
“Being a former marine his house was clean, so I was happy about that,” she says, “but pretty much everything else after that was not to my liking.”
Lalli says Eckermeyer was a gentleman despite their differences, but she was a bit overwhelmed by the isolation of her rural surroundings, the oppressive heat and the fridge stocked with Hot Pockets. She is a fitness instructor after all.
“I think by the second day I was just losing it,” she says. “I was just crying every day and a couple of times I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ I thought about backing out.”
But the show gave Lalli a car and she stuck through 30 days of living with a gun enthusiast, working at a gun store and gun show, skeet shooting, taking target practice, hunting and even spending a day with the Michigan militia.
“They were the biggest surprise because they were just a nice group of weekend warriors, really,” she says.
Eventually Lalli found common ground with Eckermeyer about keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable, which is the concern that prompted her involvement in gun control — a good friend was shot and killed in 1996.
“I was always kind of a pacifist,” she says, “But that just kicked it into overdrive for me when I read the guy’s background. ... I was appalled not so much that guns exist, I knew they existed, but I was like, ‘How did someone like this get a gun?’”
Eckermeyer says he had never met anyone from Boston, and didn’t know what exactly to expect, but was impressed with Lalli’s openness and willingness to cooperate with any activity planned.
“That’s one of the reasons why I have a lot of respect for Pia,” he says. “Because she took herself out of her element of comfort there in Boston and brought herself all the way out here to Ohio to see the other side of the issue.”
‘30 Days: Gun Nation’ airs tonight at 10 on FX.