Monday, May 23, 2005

my near brush with fame*

*subtitle: why I was too embarassed to watch Mtv for nearly three years

I grew up in Southern California (the O.C.) and every so often, my friends and I would road trip it up to Hollywood to go to a club to park in a scary neighborhood, pay an exorbinate cover charge, and flirt with wanna-be musicians and actors.

One evening, my non-skanky friend, Jenn(2), and I decided to go dancing at the Palace, and halfway through our evening, when we were approached by a non-threateningly attractive boy with a clipboard(3). He asked us if we watched Mtv and asked if we'd like to be on a new dating show that they had.

We weren't particularly interested in that, but he was super cute, so we listened to his pitch - blah blah blah, fun dating show, blah blah blah, need cute girls(4), blah blah blah fifteen minutes of fame... after listening to the pitch, it became painfully evident that he had about as much personality as his clipboard, but he had worn us down so we wrote our numbers on the clipboard and agreed to be on his show.

The next week some squeaky voiced producer called us to make arrangements for us to go up somewhere North of Hollywood to some studio to be on some show called "Singled Out" that neither of us had ever heard of. They told us that they wanted us to be peppy and pretty and to bring two different outfits (because we would be taping two different shows) and not to wear black, white or horizontal stripes(5).

In the meantime, we both made it a point to watch copious amounts of Mtv to see what we were in for(6), and, though the girls on the show were way peppier than we planned on being, it didn't look like a total trainwreck, and it was an opportunity to take a day off of work and have an adventure and maybe even win prizes.

So, on the appointed day, we got all gussied up in our non-black, non-white, non-strip-ed outfits and drove the two hours to the studio. We, and 98 of our "peers" were herded into a giant conference room fully stocked with ice cold Coca Colas and punchbowls filled with M&Ms(7), we were shown a video of the show and instructed that every time the camera was on us, we had to "go wild" (8)

So we got all sugared up and headed into the studio - the 50 boys were first and some vapid girl picked the one that she liked best and I'm sure that they lived happily ever after (like all other reality dating show contestants do) and then it was our turn - fortunately, because we were both tall, we got stuck in the back so no one noticed that we weren't "going wild"

Even though we tried to sneak off of the stage, they wouldn't let us and made us stay into the second round (9) but by this point we. were. done. and we were ready to go to any length necessary to get the hell out of there. It was all just too much to deal with, the lights, the loud music, the peppiness, the girls in short tops going "woooooooo" - we were mortified that we had wasted an entire day on that.

"But we agreed to stay to tape two shows," one of us pointed out.

"I don't fucking care," the other one said.

"Okay, as soon as we get done taping this part, you need to double over in pain and I need to take you home."

"Deal."

And that worked until we were out the door when somone from Mtv noticed us heading towards the car.

"Hey! Where are you going?" she yelled at us.

"We, um, left something in the car," I yelled lamely.

"And I'm sick," she added.

"You can't leave - you'll ruin it, we need fifty girls and fifty guys." This is about the time that they broke out the pitchforks and torches and we started sprinting to the car. We escaped with our lives, but not so much our dignity, in tact.

But I have no idea whether or not our show was actually ever shown, but I live in the hope that because I never saw it, no one else did.

I will say, though, that Jenny McCarthy is about the size of a smurf in person, and really, really cute and nice and as much as we didn't want to like her, we totally did.


(2) There was a point in time when, I swear, every friend I had was named Jennifer
(3) a clipboard means that someone is official, right? Because they don't give those to just anyone
(4) hello, I'll do damn near anything for flattery
(5) which meant that my go-to outfit, the pirate wench costume, was out (kidding, I swear... I was going to wear it anyway)
(6) In case you're unfamiliar, it's where some guy or girl picks a date sight unseen from a pool of 50 of the opposite sex based solely upon shallow criteria like whether the girl has big or small boobs, or whether she'd rather BE a doctor or marry one
(7) This was before Red Bull so they had to get us all hopped up on caffeine and sugar
(8) I almost sprained my eyes from rolling them so hard
(9) even though the boy had already chosen who he wanted to go on the date with

Labels: boobs