Reality is Bullshit
What a sham. I thought I would be on a “reality” show, but what I found was no more real than the script created by the producers. This was their idea of how we should have been interacting. They surprised me by telling me last minute that I was going to be the Fifth Wheel. They told me I would be as I auditioned. Then they told me I wouldn’t be when they called back with the date I would be filming. Then, an hour before I met the daters, they told me once again, “Of course you’re the Fifth Wheel. You’re the hottest one here and you have to drive everyone wild. What else would you be but the Fifth Wheel?”
I was thrown into a room full of people whom I wouldn’t normally give the time of day. Mind you, they were not ugly but they were really not my type. The men were actually little boys who couldn’t keep up with me and the girls were straight as boards. Being out until midnight was a big deal to these people. So what was I to do? I figured I’d try to make things interesting. The producers had decided to bill me as the WILDBICHICK, and once they showed the other daters my introductory video there seemed to be no going back. During the ten minute video, I was asked questions in such a way that my answers were forced. I mean, they were mostly my words, but I was asked to repeat myself quite a bit until I said things the way they wanted. Off camera, they asked about the wildest things I’ve done. Then they spit that back at me in question form while taping. “Did you dance in the bar and take your top off? Well, say it like you mean it, like no one will get in your way. Leslie, you’re a wild one. Come on, we want to see that fire. You want to drive people wild. How wild can you be? You have to show the viewers how wild you can be.”
This caricature is what the daters saw in my introductory video. And as I watched them watch me from the other room, I knew I was fucked. One of the boys said, “Ohmagawd, she has a big ass!” Yeah, they asked me to do a little extra on the video and I complied. No one forced me, and I would get $200 if they used it in the uncensored version. So I showed them a little T & A. I thought the daters would also get a censored version. But the introductory video was so contrived I should have known from the onset I was being set up. Silly me, I thought I might meet some interesting people and have fun with the rest of the daters since we all knew this is for laughs. I was already nervous realizing I was going to be on TV, and the attitude of the Mormons on the bus didn’t make it any better.
I actually had fun flirting with the crew and other people who weren’t even on the show. As I was filmed in some lame NJ bar, the patrons gazed at me and cheered me on, smiling when I occasionally waved back at some of them. The daters were frightened of me, I could tell. So, there was the 26 year old tallish Funny Guy who was getting along just peachy with the 30 year Born-Again-Virgin/Born-Again-Christian. Then there was a 23-year-old Guido from Staten Island who was pissing off the virgin but getting along with Ms. Perfect, the 21-year-old skinny-as-a-pole blonde. I think I might have broken her in half had I tried to push her. Apparently they were all looking for a love connection. When they saw my video, their eyes were popping out of their skulls and Ms. Perfect blurted out, “Oh no, she’s going to be flirting with all of us!”
In my first scene alone with the Funny Guy I had to jump right into this dart game where we had to make believe that we had already been talking for some time and were just getting around to the “good stuff”. I pretended to lose a make-believe wager and found myself agreeing to do a body shot. Okay, some fun, but I’m sure I was freaking this poor child out. Nothing seemed to flow naturally. Had I been asked, I would have requested they set me up with a couple of testicle-bearing men. But you can’t expect the TV people to know much about real-life chemistry, and so it seemed I was this wild woman totally out of my element. The producer constantly put words in my mouth and twisted everything I had to say. At one point I had to pretend to introduce this “sexy” game to the Guido as one I had “brought from home and want you to play with me.” Yeah, right. I wanted to say, “They want me to play this lame game with you, but I’d rather just punch you in the balls, you numbskull.”
The daters and the Fifth Wheel weren’t supposed to talk to each other off camera. The producers didn’t want to miss any “good stuff”. At the same time they never gave us the chance to have the kind of spontaneous interaction that might have produced some genuinely good stuff. At least they didn’t give me that chance. At times I would try to say things that might lead to what I really felt about the daters but I was asked to change what I said. Each time I tried to veer from the program they claimed it was not exciting enough. “You’re the Fifth Wheel; you’re supposed to be wild. Come on, have fun with this.” It seems to me the daters got a chance to get to know each other, and I even saw them talking off camera a few times.
I have never had to ask, “What can I do to make you choose me?” People either hate me or they love me, but usually I’m allowed to ease into getting to know a person. This, in the producers’ estimation, doesn’t make for good television. So in the second-to-last scene, just before taping began, I was prompted to begin with a lie. I had to ask, “What can I do to make you choose me?” In the last dreadful scene I was asked to separate the Born-Again-Virgin and the Guido, as they had been mismatched (Ms. Perfect was Guido’s favorite and the Virgin was Funny Guy’s challenge). I asked the Guido to leave and let us girls talk. Finally my chance to have a real conversation. Ah, but that wasn’t exciting enough. I had to ask her if she was interested in women, even though it had been apparent she was not. In a normal situation I would never have bothered. But, you know the song by now, I was the Fifth Wheel, after all. The wild one. Do these TV people even understand what a good time is really all about?
Here’s another lie: they promised I would get a chance to explain myself. They said that even though the video came off as a little pushy I would get a chance to talk about it. But in reality we were not allowed to talk about the video. So every time we goofed and tried to get to know each other by saying something about the video we saw (keep in mind they show the daters watching videos of each other during the actual episode), they stopped filming and said, “Look, we all want to get out of here as soon as possible so let’s do this right. You are not allowed to say anything about what you saw on the video, nothing about the show and nothing about the camera.” Getting to know the real person seemed to not only be pointless but an impossible task to accomplish anyway. So the dumb little boys and girls they picked for me pulled further and further away from me as we continued to film and I never got to be anything but the token WILDBICHICK.
Okay, so I thought Funny Guy could have been interesting, and for laughs I kissed both guys. But I was constantly pushed to come on too strong when I knew I would never even have approached any of these people in real life. In the end I tried to write NO ONE on the little placard you have to hold up or choose one of the girls for kicks, but even this wasn’t allowed. “That wouldn’t flow right from what we got on camera,” the producers bleated. You see, Ms. Perfect flirted with me off camera and it wouldn’t seem right to the viewers at home if I had chosen her. They might have thought differently if they had captured her sprawled across my lap laughing as I slapped her little flat ass. It almost goes without saying that none of the daters chose me. Choosing me wasn’t part of the master plan.
So was that reality? Well, if that was reality then reality is bullshit.
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