Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [34]
But now here she was again. The demon with the white hair and cat-eye glasses was back. And worse than ever. In a mockery of the mere concept of “business casual,” Shelly was decked out in a lime-green tank top and gaudy, hot-pink floral print capri pants, as if she were not an audience member but an old couch from Boca Raton.
Within moments of taking her place in line outside the soundstage, Shelly folded a piece of paper into an airplane and began throwing it around. And she was even awful at that. She didn’t attempt to get the damn thing airborne, just flicked her arm in a sloppy, downward motion that sent the stupid plane careening into the ground each time. The problem, however, wasn’t her lack of comprehension of basic physics or paper airplane throwing (gentle thrust upward!). It was that she was so obviously pining for attention. Why couldn’t she just sit down like the rest of us?
Thankfully, the CBS pages put us out of our misery—not, sadly, by strapping a muzzle onto Shelly’s face, but by ushering us into the studio. It was the same studio where all the Big Brother contestants had stood on the season premiere, ready to begin their quest for $500,000, now filled with bleachers for us to sit on. Unfortunately, we couldn’t choose our own seats, and I felt a twinge of apprehension as I feared I might be seated Shelly-adjacent again. Joyfully, though, this time I was placed on the opposite side of the audience. With a good thirty or forty feet between us, I figured, I would finally have the necessary Shelly buffer I so desperately needed.
Oh, how naïve I was.
Once we were in our seats, a producer stepped onto the stage to warm up the crowd. He invited various people down to the stage to play some Big Brother trivia for T-shirts—but of course I’d been there, done that. (At taping number two, I’d accurately identified Jerry as the houseguest who had thought a recent earthquake was just a truck backing into the Big Brother house. Booyah: free shirt.) Anyway, to my delight, Shelly was not chosen to participate in the trivia excitement. But that didn’t stop her from blurting out answers and guffaws from her seat in the audience.
As it turns out, however, Shelly was just warming up. Because about fifteen minutes before the live show, the trivia came to an end, and the affable stage manager, Eric, stepped out in front of us to lay down the ground rules for the audience. It was mostly commonsense stuff: Don’t slouch, don’t frown, don’t look for yourself on the monitors overhead. The whole point was that, as audience members, we weren’t supposed to detract from the host, Julie Chen, or any of the action happening onstage.
When you’re wearing a tank top the color of split pea soup and pants that look like a discarded tablecloth, however, blending into the background clearly isn’t a high priority. Sure enough, as the stage manager took questions from the audience, Shelly stepped into overdrive:
“You rock, Eric!”
“Can we give a standing ovation to you?”
“So I take it I shouldn’t scream? Hahahah.”
It was like she was trying to show all of us what close friends she and Eric were—despite the fact that they clearly didn’t know each other. Eric obliged Shelly with lighthearted responses, but it was evident that he had more pressing matters to attend to—like his job, for instance.
Yet Shelly couldn’t be contained. By the time Eric had finally broken free of her banter vortex, she was ready to move onto her next target: Julie Chen. Julie, you see, had arrived on the set ready to rehearse, and, after waving to the adoring crowd and unleashing that trademark smile of hers, immediately begun prepping for the show.
But Shelly didn’t let the fact that Julie was clearly occupied get in her way. With only a few minutes left before going live, Shelly turned to Eric. “Could I ask Julie a question?” Whaaa? She wanted to speak directly