My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover if Not Being a Dumb Ass Is the New Black, or a Culture-Up Manifesto (24 page)

“Dance! You dance! Dance, girl!”

In the darkened theater, I reach for Joanna’s wrist and squeeze it. She pokes me in the side in return while a ballet dancer
grand jetés
across the stage.

“Dance! Uh-huh! Dancin’! You’re dancin’! Woo!”

Joanna and I are attending a fund-raising dance performance, and we’re seated not only in the nosebleed section, but also apparently right next to a woman who has so much joy in her heart for dance that she can’t help but let it out in quick Tourette’s-like bursts. On my neighbor’s last “Woo!” she shakes her head so enthusiastically that she pelts me in the face with a couple of her hip-length dreadlocks. Fortunately, it’s not one of the beaded strands.

However, I’m fairly mellow about the whole thing, as Joanna and I had dinner at a Russian place beforehand, where we discovered the joy of flavored flights of vodka.

Traffic was obscene getting downtown, so I was almost half an hour late to meet her. While Fletch did his best to weave in and out of lanes to get me there quicker, Joanna sent me updates on her iPhone, telling me there’s a damn good reason that Russia never became a superpower in regard to wine. “Imagine cherry cough syrup,” she wrote, “only thicker.” Given that description, how would we then
not
opt for vodka?

Some details of our dinner escape me
²¹¹
but I remember being first served a sampler platter heaped with colorful scoops of salads made of simple ingredients, like carrots and beets and mushrooms. This was followed later by another platter filled with hearty fare, such as stuffed cabbage and meatballs and Stroganoff. Our entrées were much heavier than German food, but also much more flavorful.

By the time we finished, we’d eaten ourselves sober again and were so stuffed that we could barely walk the few blocks to the theater. Okay, no offense, Russia, but if this is how you fueled up prior to battle, no wonder you couldn’t beat Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, back in the nosebleed balcony, my neighbor is banging her armrest and screaming, “Spin, spin, spin!” while a ballet dancer performs a
fouetté en tournant
.

Yes. Shouting will absolutely help him spin.

Joanna’s husband is with their kids, so we’re not under any kind of time constraints. And, as this is the first time just the two of us have been on the town together in something like fourteen years, we’re going to take advantage of the situation. We could stay out all night if we want. We won’t, but I love having this as an option.

When the show’s over, Joanna and I make a beeline for the nearest cab, heading directly to the most magical place in the city. On Friday and Saturday nights, the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel turns into something more akin to Willy Wonka’s factory. Tiered tables fill the center of the room, and each of them is heaped with dozens of chocolate treats, like chocolate crème brûlées, chocolate truffles, chocolate cookies, chocolate cakes, chocolate tarts, chocolate-covered strawberries, chocolate donuts, and chocolate mousses, all served alongside melted chocolate for fondue and various flavors of hot chocolate. The spread is nothing short of obscene.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Joanna says, eyes wide. “My girls would lose their minds.”

Once seated, and after we select our treats and sparkling champagne- vodka cocktails, we begin our postmortem on the performance.

“Did the Happiest Woman in the Entire World wreck everything for you?” I ask.

“She didn’t bother me. Judging from how muscular her arms were and her carriage, she had to be a dancer, too. She was probably just excited to see her friends onstage,” Joanna replies. It’s rare to get Joanna to ever say anything bad about people, despite having lived under my terrible influence on two separate occasions.
²¹²
“How’d you like the performances?”

“Honestly?” I admit. “I didn’t really understand most of them.” The element of storytelling was seriously lacking in some of the pieces. Although I loved watching the movement, I couldn’t always figure out the motivation behind it.

“Oh, thank God, me neither! I figured since you’d been studying about dance, you knew something I didn’t.”

I shrug. “I’ve been spoiled by
So You Think You Can Dance
. I mean, they have some of the best choreographers in the country working on that show, plus they explain what the dance is about before every performance. And maybe they’re dumbing it down for the masses, but as a member of the masses, I appreciate the summary. As for tonight, I didn’t expect a full breakdown, but a few hints as to plot might have been nice.”

“Yeah, those couples in all the loose clothing in the fourth number with all the sticks? What was that about?” Joanna asks, taking a bite of her chocolate-cherry compote.

“
Pfft
, I couldn’t begin to tell you. But if I had to guess, I’d say they were crows.” I dig into my white-and-milk-chocolate mousse. “Oh, and P.S.? I could have done without the charity’s president rallying against the evils of the Republican party in his speech, too. I mean, I’m here, paying seventy-five bucks a ticket specifically to support
your
organization; can you not call me the devil, please?”
²¹³

“I noticed you were squirming at that point.”

“That’s also because Dreadlocks McShoutypants was having a conversation out loud with herself. Apparently she needs to remember to pick up some spirulina at Whole Foods on the way home. As for the dancing, you know what else bothered me? This is petty, but I didn’t like the
sound
of people dancing. On my stupid show, they edit out the noise of the dancers leaping and landing back on the ground. At this thing, everyone sounded like a herd of cattle because we could hear every foot slapping the stage. I found it distracting.”

She looks thoughtful as she picks at the pecans on her tartlet. “I guess I didn’t notice.”

“As part of my project, I’ve been watching a ton of old dance movies lately. They took out the stage noise, too, except in the tap-dancing scenes, which are supposed to be heard.”

Joanna gives me a wry grin. “My oldest takes Irish-dancing lessons. I guess I expect dance to make a lot of racket. By the way, have you seen
Singin’ in the Rain
yet?”

“Yes, and I loved it so much!” I exclaim. “What’s funny is after seeing some old musicals, I told Stacey I thought the
SYTYCD
dancers are way more athletic than Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Maybe these kids don’t have their charisma, but in a lot of ways, their technique is better. She countered by telling me after Michael Jackson moon-walked for the first time on the VMAs, Gene Kelly called to congratulate him. Then Michael told Gene if it weren’t for him, he’d never have become a dancer. Now a lot of the guys on
SYTYCD
attribute their love of dance to Michael.”

“Maybe it’s just as simple as that soda commercial—every generation inspires the next,” Joanna remarks while stifling a yawn.

“Are you exhausted?” I ask, glancing at my watch. “You realize if we were still in college, we’d just be getting ready to go out now.”

“A little bit, but I’m fine. Although tomorrow I’ve got to work our block party with a vodka-and-chocolate hangover; I may regret this then.”

I laugh. “Twenty-four years later and I’m still a bad influence on you.”

Joanna drains her glass and finishes her truffle. “What should we do now? You want another drink, you want more chocolate, or do you want to call it a night? I’m game for one more if you are.”

I consider all our options. “You know what? As long as you don’t hit me with your dreadlocks, I’m pretty happy with whatever’s next.”

Joanna just sent me a link to a review of the dance. Apparently the people in the loose clothes were supposed to be subsistence farmers.

And I still don’t get it.

“If we go tomorrow, they’ll have belly dancers,” I say.

“Yeah?” Stacey replies. “Then let’s definitely go
tonight
. Want me to see if the girls are free?”

Stacey and I are on the phone coordinating our outing to a Turkish restaurant, and I’m glad she’s suggested our friends join us because I’ve discovered that the Eat the World portion of my project works better in groups. More people not only means more dishes, but it also increases the likelihood that SOMEONE there will want to discuss
The Real World: Cancún
with me.

I know.

I know.

I know.

If at any point you’re compelled to mock me for still having the Bunim-Murray monkey on my back this deep into my cultural Jenaissance, feel free. No ridicule dished out could be equal to the embarrassment I feel for indulging in this urge.

My relationship with
The Real World
started at the show’s inception. When the New York season premiered in 1992, I was twenty-four and stuck living in my childhood bedroom. After my parents stopped paying for college, I had no choice but to move home and commute to a regional branch of my university. Between classes, I worked two jobs in order to scrape together the cash I needed to get the hell out of my parents’ house.

At the time, I was understimulated and in a funk, and I desperately craved the company of people my own age. In my hometown, anyone I’d have wanted to be around scattered the second we’d graduated seven years before. When I could arrange time off work, I’d scamper back down to the main campus, but those stolen days weren’t enough to keep my loneliness at bay. I felt like my twenties were escaping me.

Sure, I was involved with a sorority, but with my work schedule I rarely got to spend time with my sisters. Most of them had apartments together off campus, but I lived thirty miles away. On the one hand I didn’t have to share a bathroom with half a dozen girls, but on the other, no one was waking them up at six fifteen a.m. on Saturdays after their double shifts to “Use the stiff brush to scrub algae off the steps in the pool before you go to work, Jennifer.”

I yearned for conversations that didn’t revolve around the extent to which I’d fucked up my educational trajectory or why I’d mulched the lawn instead of bagged it.
²¹⁴
I don’t blame my parents for being hard on me; they were none too thrilled to have an adult chick back in the nest, either.

So when I saw the promos for
The Real World
, I was desperate for entertainment and, more so, fascinated by the premise that anything could happen on camera. I thrilled at the prospect of being around people my own age, vicarious as it might have been.

I had a rare night off when the show premiered, and I sat transfixed during the opening credits. As the cast members were introduced, I found that they lived in the kind of funky loft I’d always dreamed of living in myself.

Every participant had been hand-selected not because they were going to get naked in the Jacuzzi or punch random strangers in bar fights, but because they were pursuing their talents in New York.
²¹⁵
Bunim and Murray filled that house with aspiring writers and musicians and dancers and models. And these individuals didn’t spend their time trying to outdo one another with outrageous behavior; instead, they used the experience to try to understand their roommates, themselves, and their place in the world.

Of course complications arose, but nothing was manufactured back then. Apparently, Bunim and Murray originally kicked around the idea of scripting the program, but scrapped it. Occasionally you could see the hand of production encouraging the cast members to discuss certain topics, but they were important issues, like racism and sexuality and homelessness. In one episode, Julie’s mother came up from Alabama, and Julie poured her heart out to her roommates about how much trouble she had finding a connection with her mother. I knew exactly how it felt to have a mom whose idea of how a daughter should behave was diametrically opposed to her own. Julie’s personal growth felt like my personal growth.

Did they have issues with one another? Of course. But the problems came about organically because you simply can’t stick that diverse a group of people under one roof and not have them, you know, stop being polite and start getting real.