My Dating Show Audition Tape

ON DRUGS

This is a story about the casting video I filmed for a dating reality show.

I hadn't wanted to be on a dating show, not since the realization of that ambition at my 10th birthday party when I re-created in my living room the staging of MTV's Singled Out, with my fourth-grade friends as contestants and my mom playing Jenny McCarthy. Nineteen years later, the stage was set for another pseudo-romantic showtime.

I had been scouted unceremoniously when a casting director for a new reality show cold-called the marketing department at the company where I worked, desperate to enlist someone who fit this description:

• Female

• 27-39 years old

• Works in the fashion industry

• Attends gallery openings and fashion shows

• Has an abysmal sex life

I'm paraphrasing but it was that exactly. That's who they still needed for the show.

Our marketing manager answered the call, and excitedly conspired to recommend me for the show based on a casting representative's promise that in exchange for conscripting one of its employees, our company would get high-profile recognition on the show, which would air on the same network already responsible for the largest reality-show-style-watch traffic spikes on our fashion ecommerce site. From my office, I overheard my coworkers advocating for my participation, which they believed would translate into publicity and revenue. "Let's pimp her out," said the chief operations officer to the marketing manager.

I wasn't down. I was a techwhore anti-establishment punk with little interest in social activities prohibitive of recreational drugs. I countered that I was busy, too busy to quit my life and join the cast of a reality show, come on. More importantly, I was an icy misanthrope when it came to sexual selection, so much so that I never went on any dates IRL, so why would I want to go on televised dates? Like a slutty primetime sellout! And appearing on the show would be worse than selling out. I would not receive monetary compensation. Not a single primetime penny. I dug in my heels. I refused to send back the short stack of waivers, NDAs and other paperwork when it eventually arrived on my desk, sent by a parental network conglomerate to my work address. Fuck their primetime legal needs! But the show's assistant director needed only dispense a few small doses of pandering encouragement directly into my ear before I believed in her tastemaking powers and heeded her flattering forecast. I was the perfect candidate. I was going to be on TV and it was going to be a big deal.

Elusively assured it was a mere formality, I was instructed to film a casting video (a.k.a. audition tape) and submit it immediately to the casting directors in order to be considered for the show. The purpose of a dating reality show casing video is to position oneself within the meat market from both the supply side and the demand side. That is, to describe the self and the ideal mate. I was furthermore required to testify to the fabulousness of my New York City Social Life and unfabulousness of my New York City Sex Life, the primary lifestyle qualifications for being cast on this particular show, the characteristics that led to my recommendation as a candidate in the first place. Also, casting preference would be given to Twitterati whose many online followers would form a built-in audience for the show. Unluckily for the celebrity yearnings buried under my misanthropy, my gold-star abstention from all social media scored me zero points in the online presence column. So, I had to wow the directors with my personality. I had the chance to cram some wow into the casting video, now that I'd survived the definitely superfluous preliminary phone interview, during which I stuttered and groaned while someone from the casting team slaughtered me at a question-and-answer session mimicking a '90's-style game of Girl Talk™, telling me made-up stories about her romantic falters to get me to be honest about my own. Just like when I was ten.

TV-people know: Even the most energetic and dramatic personalities come across sedate and listless on screen. It was important that I pump excessive energy into my webcam when I recorded my audition tape. I was instructed in an email by the producers to "do whatever you have to do to get cranked up". But I didn't have any crank (which by linguistic coincidence is slang for methamphetamine) so I did the best I could with what was readily available.

I bought an energy drink from the corner store on my way home from work. I poured the energy drink into a glass filled halfway with warm vodka. It was warm because the ice cube tray was empty. I pulled a gram of MDMA out of one of my underwear drawers and sprinkled it's granular entirety into my vodka-and-energy-drink cocktail. My shit is tippy top of the line and a whole gram is ten doses in street math. I used a fancy wooden chopstick to stir it all together. Then I opened my laptop and began filming a casting video for a dating reality show.

I thought alcohol + ecstasy + caffeine = methamphetamine but I must have been sleeping during that day in AP Chemistry because instead of emerging from my realistic personality energetically carefree and larger-than-life, I nestled into a bedroom corner and for hours shirked and quivered, telling secrets to myself in emphatic whispers through an LCD-screen mirror, scratching my nails through the uneven texture of the clear acrylic sealant layered over the red paint stains on my plywood-and-sawhorse desk.

After several hours that felt like minutes, when I was done speaking my romantic truths and reverberating my self-consciousness, I had dozens of thirty-second recordings, which I then mashed into a single six-minute offering, editing the video clips with a quickness reminiscent of classic ecstasy-fueled conversation: passionate yet disinterested, neurotic yet sloppy. I strung together all the best sentences. I cut out all the minutes of chewing my beleaguered tongue or staring silently into space. I wasn't digitally nimble enough to catch and extract all the inter-clip visual bits of reaching forward toward the touchpad mouse to start and stop recording. The choppy cuts seethe amateurish fear and desperation, echoing the egocentric video’s hidden sentiments. It's fucking raw.

When I finally finished editing it was not only the next day but the next afternoon, whoops. I showed up at work and submitted my masterpiece to the casting agency from my corner office, behind a door with my name on it, where I recovered with my blinds down over SoHo, and sleepily stayed to complete normal work especially late that night. Fashion ecommerce. A day in the life.

After enough time passed that I didn’t remember whether or not I submitted the casting video to the producers, they chose me to be on the show. I never sent back the signed releases but they cast my high ass anyway. Someone from the production team- I never knew who I was talking to, they never used the same number twice- called to say that they "matched" me with a Russian model who was also in the pool of dating-show contestants. They showed me his photo. He was hot. He was sending money back home to mom. My marketing manager taught me hi how are you in Russian. There was a flurry of meetings with production people who arranged a "date" for the two of us.

PRO TIP: Don't wear all black or bold prints if you don't want to broadcast misshapen.

Given these aesthetic restrictions passed down last-minute by my favorite production assistant, I had no idea what to wear for my television date. But then I remembered the universal truth about women on cis hetero reality TV: they all look like men in drag. I showed up on set cold sober and "camera ready" in a homemade hot-pink micro-snakeskin hooded spandex minidress. I designed and sewed the dress with a soft, rave-friendly hood to increase my body heat while fluttering between dance parties on chilly nights unencumbered by a coat. On camera, its bulky turkey feather lining hovered over my shoulders and silhouetted my head in a fluffy semi-circle of Renaissance-era corona.

Turns out, you're either fun and interesting on TV or a worthwhile human being. The bevy of directors and handlers were all supercool to me and deferential to my preferences and accommodating of my anxieties. Every second I spent on set was a waste of everyone's energy. I was glad I had two more parties to go to after the taping, parties where everyone thought I was funny and cool and wanted to date me, or it would have been a really lame Thursday night. The lameness : makeup ratio would have been downright unacceptable.

After my awkward little non-romantic encounter was captured by a professional film crew on many expensive cameras, I felt a scared shyness that boiled over into spirituality. I prayed the rosary that the directors would edit me out of the show completely. The Blessed Virgin Mary, that shady old queen, answered my prayers the house down. The directors didn’t use the footage of me and didn't invite me back. Discerning viewers, though, can spot my feathery neon visage skittering through the background of an art gallery scene in the first episode. At least, that's what my marketing manager told me. I haven't seen it.

Excerpts from My Dating Show Audition Tape on Drugs

#unlove