Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [17]
Gunn is, as always, gracious and kind, but somehow his visits are exceedingly awkward as he stands, cheery and dapper and slightly hesitant, at the doorstep. The moment when he is invited in is so sweetly poignant, because it is then that we see the designer’s roots peeking out from beneath the wacky headgear. The place where most of these sophisticated hipsters grew up is often markedly different from their carefully cultivated, glamorous personas: there is the ordinary-looking family, uncomfortable in front of the camera and unsure of what to say; there is the drab sofa where Gunn sits briefly before heading off.
I had assumed that season four’s Jillian Lewis, so urbane on the show, was an Upper East Side private-school girl, but instead she was a Parsons grad who hailed from a modest house in the small town of Selden, Long Island. First season winner Jay McCarroll, he of the pointed wit and flamboyant dress, grew up in the tiny mountain town of Lehman, Pennsylvania, the youngest of six kids. His dad was a bricklayer, and the family shopped at Sears. And whippet-thin, black-clad season four winner Christian Siriano may have looked like the bastard child of Ron Wood and French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, but in the end, he had the same comfortingly pedestrian relatives that most of us do.
In an instant it’s clear how thoroughly these designers have reinvented themselves, how they carefully honed a new persona until one day, they were the person they always wanted to be. I did it, too. When I took the New Jersey Transit bus into the city in 1989 to interview for a job at Rolling Stone, I had a Jersey girl perm, long red nails, heavy Color Me Beautiful makeup, and an Ann Taylor power suit I had borrowed from my mom. As I waited in the lobby, I realized with dismay that I looked utterly different from the stylish employees breezing into the office. After I landed the job—to my astonishment—I took careful note of the city girls around me. I lost the perm. I bought good shoes. Slowly, slowly, I blotted out that scraggly Jersey girl and transformed her into someone else. If you looked at me now, you’d see a confident urbanite. Some days, I almost believe it myself.
5
SHOW BOAT
Toby Young
“DON’T DO IT,” SAID MY WIFE. “They’ll make you look like a complete prat.”
I’d asked her advice about whether to participate in a British reality show at the beginning of 2004 called The Other Boat Race. According to the e-mail I’d received from the BBC, I would be one of half a dozen fat, middle-aged Oxford graduates competing against an equally out-of-shape Cambridge team to mark the 175th anniversary of the Boat Race, an annual institution in the United Kingdom in which two teams from Oxford and Cambridge compete against each other. To train us for the big day, in which we’d race along the Thames, the BBC would enlist the help of various Olympic rowers, including the five-time gold medal winner Sir Steve Redgrave. The highlight would be a one-week, residential boot camp—or “boat camp” as the Beeb wittily described it—in which we’d be filmed huffing and puffing as the Olympians put us through our paces.
I knew Caroline was right—of course I’d end up looking like a prat—but there were various arguments in its favor. For one thing, there was the $20,000 payment—nothing to sniff at now that I had a family to support. Then there was the fitness factor. I was weighing in at 185 pounds, which, for a man of my age and height, was “clinically obese.” It also appealed to the schoolboy in me. How often do you get the chance to be trained by Olympic athletes? It was as if a group of gods had come down from Mount Olympus and offered to teach a bunch of mortals how to fly.
But above all it was an opportunity to appear in a reality show.
This wasn’t the first time the possibility had come up. For instance,