Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Post #1 -My Career As A Reality TV Star

Okay, what am I doing here? I dunno. I've created this blog to go along with my fledgling website, www.altoonatives.com which so far is a music site that touts itself as being a site for "alternative tunes for discerning listeners" (namingly music that probably won't be played on the radio.)

Unfortunately, I have the attention span of a gnat, so that topic is likely to be expanded as time goes by, to include all sorts of media. For example, the season of Big Brother is about to start, and I've had a little bit of experience in the field of reality tv. In fact, VERY little experience, but here's my story....

So about me...I was a child star on local television, and at the same time a pioneer in reality TV, appearing in the ever popular one time episode of "The St Regis Elementary School 1969 Christmas Program" which aired (appropriately enough) on Christmas Day 1969 on KCTV 5 in Kansas City. I was nine years old, and representing my third grade class in a show that as far as I can tell was an early example of reality television -though looking back on it now, not a very good one.

In an endurance competition, the likes of which the folks at Fear Factor, Big Brother and Survivor were never evil enough to concoct, eight students from the aforementioned school (one from each grade) had to stand in a circle, holding a lit candle, and recite FROM MEMORY a bible verse, while the director got it in one take. I guess they were too cheap to afford post production editing back then. Our principal, Sister Mary Mean (who would later go on to world renown as Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies -at least I THINK that was her) assured the director that her students were "a cut above" (did she mean we were circumsized?)

Circumsized or not, the pressures of a TV camera and Darth Vader present were too much for several of the kids (a sixth grader and a seventh grader) and they kept flubbing their lines.

Unlike today's endurance challenges, where those people would have been voted off the island, or out of the house, or subjected to ridicule from Joe Rogan, the director would simply say, "Start again" and the first grader would begin reciting his lines once more. This part of the show should have only taken eight minutes, tops, but ended up going on for three hours. Eviction would have been a blessing.

Hot wax melted down the candle sticks and burned our right hands. The heat from the studio lights were roughly having the same effect on the group as those heat lamps do on slow cooking chickens at Kroger's. As the pressure mounted to perform again and again, more and more kids began forgetting their lines. The Christmas program was falling apart. The director chided us with taunts of "We didn't have this kind of trouble when the kids from Moshe Kipperman Hebrew Academy did their Hannukah program, last week. Now those kids were a cut above!" (Obviously if they attended school at a Hebrew Academy, they were circumsized!)

What we needed was a Christmas miracle. God works in mysterious ways. Virtually simultaneously, the seventh grader passed out, the sixth grader vomited and the first grader pissed himself! Thank you Jay-sus! After that, they settled with individual shots of each kid reading his lines. I was out of there in fifteen minutes, and never had the desire to appear before TV cameras again.

SO if you've ever had an experience before TV cameras (or any kind of camera -especially if it included hot wax) or any thoughts to share, post them here! I'm the laziest man in North America and really prefer to have other people do all the writing for my site!

peace
Kc Bob