I think Flavor of Love was Tasty and Rock of Love Rocked

(Well to be accurate it was Flavor of Love 3 and Rock of Love 2, but the numbers totally ruin the flow of the title)
 
THE STORY OF MY SECRET LOVE AFFAIR WITH REALITY TV: PART 1 OF 2

The original plan was just to add this to my bio – a little blurb about how I’ve become totally addicted to something that I was only barely aware of (and disdainful of what little I knew) a few weeks ago. But while trying to word it in my head last night, I realized it was going to be a really LONG blurb and decided that maybe it would make a fun blog topic. And since I haven’t written a fun blog in a while, I decided to go for it, even if it meant exposing the true reality TV skeletons in my closet.
After I got done writing I realized not only was it WAY too long for a blurb, it was actually kind of long even for a blog entry.  Six pages is a LOT to expect anyone to read, especially when it is just me nattering on, albeit (hopefully) wittily, about things like Bret Michaels’s weaves. So I decided to break it into TWO blog entries. One about my sometimes shameful relationship with reality TV shows and one about my newly discovered lurve for SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE about which I have had an almost evangelical reaction. This, obviously, is the first entry. If you’re not interested in my history with reality TV shows but are curious about why a show you probably, in passing, think of as “more crap on Fox” is so darn exciting to me please feel free to skip this post and move onto the next one although: SPOILER ALERT: I do see one of the people mentioned in this post IN THE FLESH.

Okay!

I want to say I dislike reality TV... and most of it I do. I’d LOVE to be able to say in a lofty and superior way, “Oh I loathe television; we don’t even OWN one.” But that would be a big fat lie. While reading is still probably my favorite pastime, I have come to terms with the fact that I rather like some television shows. For example: crime dramas. Other than the original CSI (which just, enough already) I watch ALL of them. Except Cold Case which is just too freaking depressing. Give me guns and explosions and twisted crimes and demented criminals and the conflicted therapy-needing people who try to solve them and I am a very happy girl. When they all dwindled to a stop in May (way too soon after the drought caused by the writer’s strike) I was an unhappy girl, which is how this got started. But before I get all evangelical I think some background is in order.

These are the reality shows I have never watched and merely seen commercials for but that seem like proof our civilization is nearing collapse:

• Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader – Surely one of the signs of the apocalypse
• America’s Got Talent – The only thing that will be on TV after the apocalypse
• My Super Sweet Sixteen – This is what happens when parents don’t spank!
• The Moment of Truth – I don’t understand anyone willing to ruin their life ON TV for money

There are several shows that seem to be based on random guesses and suitcases full of money but I’m going to file those under game shows and declare them not relevant to this discussion.

There are the reality shows that I have watched at one time or another:

• Survivor – I watched the first season when it was a novel idea and it seemed like they really were going to let those people starve and they weren’t casting purely for personality conflicts and assholability.
• The Real World – Again a novel idea at the time. Haven’t they actually run out of cities at this point?
• American Idol – I actually enjoyed the first season of this. I loved Kelly Clarkson from the start, rooted for her to win and was really excited when she did. I even voted for her in the finale. And it turns out she really was the reason I was watching because none of the other seasons or singers have ever reeled me in. Other than Clay Aiken slowly morphing into a scary soccer mom nothing of interest to me has come out of American Idol since then.
• The Bachelor/Bachelorette – Again the novelty was interesting and, like way too many other people, I watched Trista fall in love with Ryan instead of edible perfect Charlie, not realizing that she was Never. Going. To. Go. Away.

Then there are the reality shows I attempted to watch but was unable to stomach:

• Joe Millionaire – I liked the idea of tricking a bunch of gold-diggers into falling in love with a construction worker but the actual execution of it was just too awkward and painful to watch. Until I watched that show I thought “Dumb as a block of wood” really WAS just an expression.
• Temptation Island – Once I got to the episode where it was brought to light that one of the couples attempting to strengthen their relationship by having oral sex with people they had just met had a KID I had to stop watching. You know that by now that poor kid’s friends found that shit on YouTube and showed it to him.
• Rockstar: Supernova: While some of the contestants were colorful to an almost deranged degree, Dave Navarro and his waxed chest gives me a headache. And seeing Jason Newstead sitting back there just made me sad. Fucking Metallica.
• The Surreal World – it may have been where Flavor Flav and Brigitte Neilson found love but 20 minutes into the first episode I was so depressed at what desperate people would do to get BACK on television I was ready to start doing vodka shots.

Then there is The Hills, which I have never seen even so much as a commercial for since I think it is on MTV or something but, since I accidentally signed up for a free subscription to US Weekly while purchasing something at Best Buy, I know that Heidi Montag is a bigger fame whore than Paris Hilton which is kind of impressive. I mean, she isn’t even wicked rich. She’s some girl from some reality show who turned a fight with the main boring girl on the show into her own media empire. And whenever there is a really slow gossip week (you know, like when they started locking Britney Spears in the house), she gets to be on the cover of US Weekly. Oh, and she got boobs. And her boyfriend is a douche who might be Satan.

Then there are the “TOP” shows where people compete to be the best chef, interior designer, house builder, house flipper, weight loser, clothes designer, photographer, hairdresser, etc. These don’t interest me with the exception of Shear Genius because those people are competing on ACTUAL PEOPLE’S HAIR and that’s kind of exciting and horrifying at the same time. Getting a horrible dress or ugly room is one thing, ending up with cherry red asymmetrical hair that makes you cry on television is quite another. So I watched the first season of that and am, in a hit or miss way, watching the second right now.

Okay, if I was less than honest I would totally leave out this next bit. But aside from the main reason for this post there is one other form of reality show I totally love: Trashy Finding Love Shows (as opposed to supposedly “classy” finding love shows like The Bachelor).

It started out so innocently. I was laying on the couch, sick as a DOG with a fever and I was flipping around because nothing is ON at 11 in the morning and came across a marathon of Flavor of Love 2 (at that time I wasn’t even aware there had BEEN a Flavor of Love 1) and in my altered, medicated and delirious state I was transfixed and fascinated. Where did they find all these trashy women? Why did they all have freaky nicknames that were spelled wrong? When Chuck D found out about this did he tell Flav, “You are DEAD to me!”  Wasn’t Flav dating Brigitte Nielson anyway? Don’t those clocks get heavy? Does he take them off when he has sex? I lay on the couch for hours, sipping Gatorade, watching probably ¾ of the entire season. It turned out the reason they were running the entire season back to back was because the finale was going to be that Sunday. So I admit it. I set the DVR and recorded it. I needed to KNOW if the truly heinous New York (who got her own show AND boobs) would “get her man” or not. And I really enjoyed the part where she did not (at that point blissfully ignorant of the plans underway for I Love New York). And mooning someone who just dumped you? Had NEVER occurred to me. Who says you can’t learn from TV?

So Flavor of Love totally turned out to be a gateway drug because during the marathon VH1 was running commercials for Rock of Love 2, with Poison front man Bret Michaels. And I was like “oh GOD I bet it has strippers in it!” So I happily, if shamedly, set a series recording for that. And there WERE strippers. And crazy girls. And, like you would expect from any good Venn diagram example, crazy strippers. The surprising part was the Bret Michaels was actually pretty funny and likeable. Really. Since during the height of his popularity I was off in a dark room listening to Depeche Mode, this was my first real exposure to him and I was surprised to find myself liking him. Not his music, of course, but he had pretty decent comedic timing and didn’t in any way try to pretend that he was NOT a huge horndog or that he wasn’t sleeping with these girls during the show. While trying to decide who to cut during elimination (“Your tour ends here…”) he literally would be like, “she’s crazy, and I think she might kill me, but she does have an awesome rack so I think I’ll keep her.” Add that to the impressive collection of bandanas with weaves attached to them he sported during the season and you’ve got some entertaining TV!

Watching scantily clad strippers try to play football in the rain in order to win a date with the 45-year-old lead singer of Poison -- that’s some fun right there. And watching really dumb girls try to scheme and connive against each other while hurling the ultimate insult, “You’re not here for BRET!” well, that goes really well with a pomegranate martini I have to tell you.

I think my favorite moment was probably when one of the girls was trying to memorize the preamble to the Constitution to perform at a USO show (while hula hooping in a bikini, you know, like you do) and she said something to the effect of, “I’m having a hard time learning the preamble because I had never heard of the words before, so I wasn’t just learning the preamble, I was learning new words.” How awesome is that? That was, by the way, the same girl that Bret thought might be a potential serial killer but kept because of her fabulous boobies!

John came home in the middle of an episode one night and ended up sitting and watching it with me. And he too was like, “He’s kinda funny.” And from that point on we watched it together. We rooted for comparatively-not-particularly-slutty Ambre, and we were bewildered by entirely-artificial Daisy’s supposed sex appeal. We even (oh the shame) are Netflixing season one now because we missed it.

I do have standards though. Even I draw the line at watching Shot at Love with Tila Tequila.

So that’s my history with reality TV. Most of it I think is boring and some of it is fairly entertaining in a junk food sort of way. NONE of it has ever been what I would consider “AMAZING.” So how did I end up an evangelist of SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE? Read the next post to find out!

Epilogue:

This is tangential but simply has to be included. A month or two after Flavor of Love 2 ended I was in the Bloomingdale’s Mall with Joel and there was well, a ruckus, and all of the sudden people were leaning over the balconies in droves and they ALL had their cell phones out taking pictures. So Joel and I were like, “oh crap, famous person, let’s try to get out of here” so we tried to make our way through the throng and all of the sudden about 25 feet away I see this TINY little black man in a do-rag wearing a huge clock being hugged by a grandmother while people wildly took what I’m sure were blurry pictures and I muttered, “oh fuck, it’s Flav” to which Joel who was like, “Who?”

So as I explained to Joel who Flavor Flav was (Joel not being a huge Public Enemy fan, I know, shocking) and why people were losing their minds (which was sadly, NOT because they were seeing the hype man from what I consider the seminal rap group but because they were seeing that guy from Flavor of Love) we slowly made our way upstream (I totally admit I elbowed some shrieking phone-waving tourists) to the elevator by which we hoped to escape to the food court. By then I had put it together that Flav, who was in San Francisco to do make an appearance at the Halloween Exotic/Erotic Ball (which is just nasty, by the way) had come to the mall just TO get mobbed. There’s no Giant Clock store in that mall. He, like Sally Field in Soapdish, had come to the mall to get recognized. Purely for the attention. Because if he hadn’t been wearing the clock, he would have just been some little guy at the mall. But what do you expect from someone who has been on FIVE different reality shows?

So we stood by the elevator waiting and waiting and then a bunch of big security guys came over and put screens up between the elevator area and the main mall. So we started to leave and one of them barked “you guys are fine” so we just stood there and a few minutes later Flav and his posse were escorted to the elevators and he was maybe eight feet from me. And I could not believe how TINY he was. Like, he was maybe 5’2” and 100 pounds soaking wet. My first thought was “I could snap him like a twig”. And I realized they must shoot that show in some sort of magical TomCruise-O-Vision because the skanks on that show are totally normal sized hos and he never looks like a midget on TV.

So the elevator FINALLY arrives and Flav and his posse get on and then motioned to us like “it’s cool, there’s room” and I start to move forward (I had so many questions, the first of which was “So, does Chuck D still speak to you?). When Joel CLAMPED down on my arm, pulled me back and waved them on. I shot him this bewildered look and he said, “I am NOT going have to explain to John that the last time I ever saw you you were getting on an elevator with Flavor Flav!” And I was like “Yeah, I do have a pretty big booty, he might have liked me.”

- Related Link: http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/rock_of_love/series.jhtml?extcmp=SEO_SSP_Y