As I inexplicably like to chronicle here on an ongoing basis, it's pretty much second nature for me to find new and ever more elaborate ways to embarrass myself.
Last week was chock full of such opportunities, and I'm not simply referring to the Manilow Incident. I also had a chance to plead with and humiliate myself for HGTV in an attempt to be selected for one of their room makeover shows. Since we live in L.A., where a lot of HGTV's programs are filmed, I submitted my first and thus far only application to a certain show that revolves around one designer I happen to truly dig.
Not to say I'm a special-needs, design-impaired half-wit or anything. I do consider myself to be a person with a fairly keen and unique sense of style. And several friends and family members, upon hearing of my desire to parlay my HGTV geek love into a firsthand experience, have commented to me, "But decking the place out in your own style is the fun part of home ownership!" Yeah, well....we've spent the past few months warding off interior-dwelling ants and spiders, and patching up the leaking roof, and scrubbing this place from floor to ceiling, and sprucing up the home office, and laundry nook, and Z's room, and....the backyard is still kicking our asses. After all that, and freelancing, and raising a toddler, and trying not to let the dirty laundry pile up to the ceiling, I've shot my wad already. I'm tired. And I.G., beyond being tired too, is...well....a dude. Picking out a decorative accent color that "pops" isn't high on his list of priorities. We could use a little help.
A few months passed since I submitted an application to the HGTV show in question. I'd given up on our living/family room ever landing its fifteen minutes of fame, and decided to just slap a throw rug down on the floor and call it a day. So when we finally got a call from one of the show's segment producers, we were psyched out of our minds. She said she'd like to come visit us, get a look at the potential makeover space in question, and maybe shoot some casual footage of us and our family/living room. Just a casual, low-key, no-big-deal kind of thing.
Yeah, maybe not for her.
Fortunately my mom was in town, and could tend to Z. while we cleaned, and scrubbed, and de-cluttered, and de-weeded, and planted rose bushes and flowers in the front yard, and tried to bring the rest of our house up to snuff. If you've ever watched the show, well.......it's not like the houses featured are in dire straits to begin with. Not that a mere bottle of bleach could deliver us that far upmarket, but we wanted to at least make an effort.
I just assumed the interview would mostly revolve around any makeover potential inherent in our bland-but-promising family/living room, and that we - the homeowners - would be an afterthought. I.G. and I are presentable folk. We're not drooling, unkempt backwoods first cousins whose offspring are three-headed, six-limbed Deliverance babies. We even speak in complete sentences most of the time. So we figured that this producer would have to take us into consideration, but mostly as a sort of perfunctory measure.
We were surprised to find that the producer wanted to focus on us - for what felt like an interminable amount of time - with her video camera rolling all the while. That's bad news for me. I tend to not excel in spontaneity-based mediums. I prefer writing to speaking because it provides an opportunity to deliberate, to swap out a bad word for a good word, and a good word for a better one, and to self-edit, at least as much as is subjectively possible.
She asked us a lot of questions - innocuous questions about ourselves, and then about our family/living room: what we liked about it, what we didn't like, about the current furnishings and what our "style" was. Defining our style proved tricky. When we were living in our 700 square foot apartment, our style was generally determined by the answer to the question, "Well, what's on sale at IKEA?" ("What can withstand cat scratches and baby sick?" would also occasionally influence our aesthetic, along with a sporadic infusion of, "Look what I just bought for $10 at the garage sale being held by the creepy guy down the street! It smells like Spam and moth balls, but hey - ten bucks!") Anyway.....I've since determined that "Noresund" and "Mongstad" are names that some cube-dwelling clerical monkey at IKEA must have made up in exchange for his weekly allotment of Swedish krona. But no...."Mongstad" meets "ceramic Elvis ashtray" is not a formal "style" onto itself.........at least not as recognized in official interior design circles.
Anyway, with the on-camera interview underway, our initial responses to the producer's questions about our lifestyle and aesthetic preferences were often met with polite silence - so stupidly, my little hamster brain quickly jumped to the conclusion, "OK, we haven't provided a satisfactory response. Maybe if we keep talking, we might accidentally stumble across one."
If only. If only clueless and desperate rambling reliably resulted in saying the right thing. Or, if it ever has, 'twas not without burying the right thing beneath a verbal sludge of wrong, wrong, wrong things.
Like, when asked what sort of style we'd really like to see in our living room, we were quick to say, "Rock n' ROLLLLLLLL!" (Never mind my drunken alter ego, who is prone to wailing along to the
lyrics of "Can't Smile Without You" or "Fernando"....I might dabble in
soft rock in weaker moments, but that doesn't mean I want my living
room awash in tasteful beige curtains and subtle floral arrangements.) I even wielded the universal hardcore sign of the horns to emphasize precisely how rock n' roll we are. I forget that in some circles, the sign of the horns is considered a Satanic gesture, or that in certain Mediterranean countries, it's at least considered a vaguely distasteful reference to marital discord. I'm not sure it has ever been successfully employed to woo a renowned interior designer before.
Or, when asked by the producer how we felt whenever we walked into the living room in its present state, I.G. blurted out, "Happy! Really happy!" I know what he meant. In a time of economic crisis, when people are losing their homes left and right, and after we scrimped and saved and sacrificed in order to buy our own home, we're just freakin' glad to have a living room, period. It's a luxury to be devoting any time to complaining about its lack of aesthetic cohesion. Only, for purposes of landing a coveted spot on a home makeover show, we should have probably leaned toward a slightly more despair-based reaction. You know, maybe wringing our hands and sighing wretchedly while insisting that the only dramatic splash of color or accessory used thus far to infuse a jolt of "je ne sais quoi" into this otherwise morbidly bland living space is the blood splatter that we leave in our wake after repeatedly slashing our wrists, so agonized are we over its lifeless and uninspired design scheme......
Upon conclusion of the interview, the producer informed us that she would show our footage to her producer, and if he or she liked it, they would show it to the designer, and if she liked it, they would run it by the network, and if they liked it, we would be selected to appear on the show. Well, what are the chances that a Satanic hand gesture, and saying all the wrong things, and shrieking those wrong things into the camera in an attempt to comply with the producer's recommendation to be "animated," will successfully clear so many hurdles? I was like Jerry Lewis, circa his Nutty Professor days, attempting to channel Ozzy Osbourne, circa his heavily medicated MTV reality show days. It wasn't pretty.
Ah, well. At least we tried.
