blakspring

So I’m back in NYC, about to be snowed on again, and missing the warm evenings on the beaches of Costa Rica.  I need a few more days to sort through my photos but in the meantime I figured I’d entertain you all with the story of my reality show audition.

As many of you guessed correctly, the reality show was The Amazing Race.  I have watched that show since season one and it was always my dream to be on it.  D and I always watched together; it was one of the few shows we both loved.  We had talked about applying but given how easily stressed I get under pressure, and that D’s usual reaction to my stress was some sort of anger/irritation, our participation in the show would have banged the last nail into the coffin of our marriage.

I actually have not watched TAR in the last year and a half because it had been “our” show and it was just very weird and kind of sad watching by myself.  But a few weeks ago as I was channel surfing, an announcement came on that there would be a casting call in Yonkers the following Thursday.

For anyone not familiar with TAR, it starts off with eleven teams of two people who basically travel to various countries, performing crazy stunts and tasks, and racing for the finish line.  Every team that has won in the past was either two guys or a guy and a girl, usually in their twenties or early thirties.  So having the right partner is essential to playing a good game.  I immediately grabbed the phone and called sometime-commenter Ron Russo, and yelled into the phone, “Oh my God, I am totally freaking out right now.  The Amazing Race is having a casting call next week.  Do you want to try out?”.  Ron Russo will make a really good teammate for me because:

1. his immediate response was, “yeah, let’s do it”.
2. very little fazes or upsets him, which is great because when I’m having a panic attack because we can’t find a seashell in a hay bale or my donkey is refusing to move along the road he will totally chill me out
3. he has an amazing sense of direction, can read a map like nobody’s business, and I’m convinced that there is a little GPS implanted in his brain
4. he can draw a map of the NYC subway system with every single station marked correctly
5. OK, maybe that’s not a skill that will help us in the game but it’s still pretty cool
6. he’s totally willing to take on any challenge that involves weird food that will gross me out

We each filled out a 12-page questionnaire and made a three-minute video showing why we should be on TAR.  I don’t know if the video quite explains why we should be on it considering it involves me playing a didgeridoo and Ron Russo spinning around while wearing a Cambodian peasant straw hat, but we’re trying to market ourselves as”highly competent weirdos”.  We made the video as a backup in case everybody and their mama showed up and all we had time for was dropping off our application.

The casting call itself was a letdown.  There were probably about 300 people who showed up and we were somewhere towards the first half of those people.  I was expecting it to be more like American Idol, thinking that we would get to talk to people from the show, answer questions and let our personalities shine, and then make the video.  Instead, we handed our applications to one of the staff, then stood in front of the camera and had two minutes to say and do whatever we wanted.  And let me tell you people, it is way harder to be interesting and charming and brilliant in front of a professional camera with blinding lights and no sense of time than to be at home with a timer running.

I’m not really happy with the video we made at the casting call.  We were both nervous and hadn’t really rehearsed what we were going to say so we ended up rushing through it, probably using only about a minute of the two minutes that we had.  We did include the home-video in our application, though the chance of anyone actually bothering to watch it is probably pretty slim.  Still, just the facts that I finally did something that I had thought about doing for so many years was thrilling.  Obviously it would be a dream come true to be picked but even if we don’t at least I’ll know that I tried.  And there’s always next season.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 11:08 pm and is filed under mi vida estupida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.