My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [110]
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.
For me, The Real World filled a void and made me believe that I was hanging out with friends for half an hour each week. Even if we were in different places, I