(100th post! woo!)
OK, so, I caught the last 10 minutes of that
Legally Blonde reality TV show tonight.
It's sort of weird. There's Bernie Telsey, saying "I'm sorry, we just don't see you as Elle Woods" to some angular-faced girl who looks exactly like the 10 other angular-faced girls on screen. I suppose this is just a weirdness that's part of the biz...have you ever walked down a hallway at Chelsea Studios and suddenly felt like you're walking through a crowd of clones? It's really creepy.
But I digress. BT names all the finalists, they leave the rehearsal studio or wherever they are and get into a limo. It appears they're driving to Times Square.
"Ohmigod,
this is Broadway!" one girl squeals as they drive down
said squealed street.
Then they get out at the Palace Theatre.
"Ohmigod,
this is the theater where they do
Legally Blonde!" someone squeals.
And then they're surprised by...Laura Bell Bundy.
So many squeals.
There is lots of squealing on the show, because, I think, the contestants are so young. There's not so much squealing on
Top Chef or
Project Runway, but the median age of those contestants is probably greater than 19.
The
Legally Blonde reality shows weirds me out. A lot. I don't have anything against it; I don't think it's excessively bad or exploitative. It just makes me squirm! I'm trying to figure out why.
I think a great deal of it is that it hits very close to home. I hate auditions because I want to cast everyone! It breaks my heart to say "Thank you" to one person in a room; I can't imagine saying it knowing it'd be seen by millions of people.
The other thing that's weird is that at the end of the show, the girl wins a
real job. I know it's real because I have friends who do it. It seems weird to get a
real job through a reality TV show. I can dig getting a fake Donald-Trump-just-invented-this job, or a here's-some-money-to-start-your-own job, but a
real job? Weird.
Weird because it seems very much like a candy-coated route to a real job, and it doesn't seem like the contestants get that the real job is not so candy-coated. (At least not in the 10 probably excrutiatingly produced minutes that I saw.) I know performing on Broadway is a dream job, but it is a job. All my friends on Broadway acknowledge they are living the dream, but that doesn't erase the day-to-day
jobiness of it. The contracts and the protocol. The finding time to do stuff that's
not your job. The stress of figuring out what happens when this job is done, or how this job plays into a career.
A job in the arts is a job, and, like any job, if it's yours, it's hopefully one you love and need to do despite all the little things that make it, well, a job. I think maybe I just want the girls on this TV show, or any young aspiring artist, to know that. Because I'm imagining one of those squealing 19-year-old girls landing her dream job and then crumbling under the reality of the job that it is.
Boy, I must sound jaded, but I'm not! I think maybe it's stemming from the fact that I'm working on literally 5 different shows at the moment, each one I am 100% in love with, but each one feeling like a job simply because
they have to get done (and there are actual bosses saying so!).
Or maybe it's just 'cause my fierce-ass friends in
Legally Blonde would eat these squealing girls alive backstage at the Palace Theatre. Literally dice them up and enjoy them in leisurely bites, saving the leftovers in tidy Tupperware containers, and bringing their earlobes across the street to dip in their post-show martinis.
Watch out, girls!
