I Was a Teenage Game Show Contestant

My freshman year of high school, I was a contestant on “Nick Arcade.”  The game show, filmed at Universal Studios Orlando, which was located conveniently and directly across the street from my school, was no “Double Dare,” but it had its own particular attraction, given that kids, they love playing them some video games.  And not only did the competing teams get to square off by answering trivia questions and performing video challenges, the winners, for the final round, did  battle for the grand prize..inside a video game.

This was around the time that Central Florida was angling to become the Hollywood of the South, presenting itself as a cheaper alternative to filming in Los Angeles or New York.  A lofty ambition, and obviously, one which didn’t work out as planned.  Though, a few lackluster cable shows and movies did shoot there:  “SeaQuest DSV“  and “Swamp Thing” to name two. (I was at one point supposed to be an extra in the movie Matinee, but I came down with pink eye and stayed home.)  What no one bothered to realize, or chose to ignore, is that Orlando has no distinct skyline, and could not in any realistic way sub for a major metropolis, unlike Toronto, say.  Miami fared better, but still it’s hard to make Miami look like anything other than the Deco, sandy, flashy city that it is.  Shooting on a sound stage was fine, but on location, there was no disguising the setting.  It was not in Florida’s destiny to become the new film capitol, but it did as we know turn out to be quite the boy band factory.

Looking Back At The ‘House Book’

A staple while in college was  the “house book.”   The book was your basic journal, the kind that can be purchased for a nominal price at any chain bookstore, and wherein we residents and guests could jot various observations.  Not every house or apartment possessed one, this was college not some hippie commune,  but the most populous locale, i.e. the one with the most party space and okay probably available drugs, was the locale of the tome.  I came into possession of one, a purple velvet-covered journal, when my roommates and I moved into the pink house with maroon shag carpet, off of a dirt road, down the street from the cow pasture,  where the local teens would forage shrooms and once sold us a batch of tea for a reasonable price.  Before the purple book, fun to pet when on Ecstasy someone I think noted, our groupthink was collected in “the Mushroom Book” — which, naturally, was a bound journal with various fungi on the front.

The house book was the understood repository of random quotes, ideas or mind tangents, funny sayings or odd cartoon scribblings, the existential worries and “deep” thoughts and sincere bursts of emotion that burble up in the fecund minds of matriculating liberal arts majors with a penchant for pop culture and a taste for recreational drugs.  We were not some sort of collegiate Algonquin Round Table, trading highly rehearsed barbs and bits of witticism. Usually we were too high or drunk or indifferent. But the book was useful as a catch-all for random thoughts or feeeeelings, or if someone dropped a needle-scratch/head-tilt/say-wha? quote in the middle of conversation.  For example, K.T.:  “I only take as much weed with me as I can eat.”  Moments like that, then, the book was fished from the couch cushions or from the counter top for someone to write the line down.  Or at parties, someone would scribble an observation or vent a grudge, the pen-and-ink of version of one of those reality show video confessional booths. Otherwise, the moment would be forgotten, tossed out like so many over-full ashtrays and empty beer bottles the next day, as stagnant as bongwater. (The velvet book, for a time, also became the repository for chicken recipes and wine ratings.  It was versatile in its function.) (Speaking of tossing things out, there was a week when it had been so long that anyone had done dishes, we contemplated chucking the food-encrusted lot piling up in the sink and going to Wal-Mart to replace them, but sanity prevailed.)

Keep in mind, this is before the age of Facebook, when else we would be status-updating or twittering or the like on our laptops, but this was a veritable dark age.  And though we took pictures, they were not digital ones, instantly uploaded online to validate the fact that we were at the party we knew we were at.  Is it real or is it Memorex?  Still!  The impulse, really, is the same:  to remember a moment in time that was “fun” or “cool” or angst-inducing or whatnot, and then to place it in a forum for public consumption.  In this moment in time, it just happened to be in a book.

And flipping through the book again recently, I’m not necessarily struck by one item over another, no lost “million dollar idea” or philosophical “game-changer,”  the quotes and doodles sometimes as cringe-worthy as an old high school journal.  But they make me smile.  What value, then?  I suppose the value that one adds to a previously blank page, what was once empty is not?  Something instead of nothing, however inane or innocent-seeming or wrong-headed or touching through the lens of time.  Or just that I was there, we were there, like carving initials in a heart on an oak tree in the park.  Either way.

Off to the (Drag) Races

RuPaul is back!  Again!  With something called “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Though we all know old drag queens never really “go away,” they just take extended holidays to Mexico for unlicensed medical procedures or whatever.  Anyway!  It is a cable teevee reality show in which contestants compete to be the  next top drag queen or female impersonation or gender illusionist or whatever term is the pc thing to say these days.  And, true to form, there is a catchphrase at the elimination round:  “chantez, you stay,” to those who’ve made the cut and “sashay, away” for those dismissed.  There are the requisite “celebrity” judges, in this case former Destiny’s Child-er Michelle Williams and king of the sequin Bob Mackie.  Uck!  But!  Having not seen the show, I’m not out to critique.  I’m just rather struck by this weird,  I suppose cyclical, drag revival.  I was all prepping to live 2k9 like it was 1982, given our current economic clime, and now I’m sucked into some ’90s k-hole with all this drag race business.  It makes me thing of college, Orlando, Florida in the mid-nineties, and the Club at Firestone.

The Club was housed in an old tire factory, natch, and was the — given the alternatives — place to dance to electronic music, back when we were all high on ecstasy and maybe believed to our error that the stake had been put in the heart of rock ‘n’ roll for good, so it was all about pills and hugs and beats.  Hahahaha, folly.  So, the club.  It was around this time written up in Rolling Stone, and imported “superstar” DJs (I blame the ’90s for elevating every seemingly pedestrian occupation to superstar status– models, DJs, x-treme athletes, etc.) like Keoki and DJ Icey and whoever happened to be passing through.  And usually it was 18 and up, so I could go with my older college friends and not have to worry about being carded.  Though, for a time, I had a fake ID;  fake in so much as I did not seek it out and  pay for it to be made but found it by the side of the road after a fender bender likely caused by a girl known at the time by the sobriquet  “the Sequined Beasty” — who is now a happily-married  mother and a lawyer to boot,  proving people change!  Well, the fellow in this ID, he was over six feet tall with black hair and blue eyes, I was, at the time, about five-foot-ten with ash blond hair and a good thirty pounds lighter than the guy.  The license worked when buying beer at the corner gas station but the diligent bouncers at the door of the club rightly called foul and asked me to recite the vital stats, birth date, etc., from memory, of which I could not.  Good sports they, they took the ID away and said I could gain entrance when I came back with my actual driver’s license.

But to the point!  On one of the “official” gay nights, cause really at that time it was all a little fluid, the club had this thing called the Drag Race.  It went as such (if memory serves):  contestants would come onstage, and the first (timed) challenge would be to assemble an outfit from the tat in the costume trunks.  Then:  take a shot.  Next, there would be the applying of make-up.  Then: take a shot.  Finally:  each contestant would lip-sync thirty seconds to a minute of a song of the DJ’s choosing.  My roommate Jason was a frequent participant and a frequent winner.  Theater majors!  We know from make-up and costumes and showmanship!  There was a cash prize that was always applied towards rent.  Or maybe pot.  Or both.  Victory loot in hand, Jay would join the rest of us and we’d celebrate dancing with the rest of the shiny-shirted (nary an natural fiber to be found on those terrible rave tops) and JNCO-jeaned revelers.

To this day, when someone says “drag race,” I”m more inclined to think of a man hurriedly applying lipstick and wigs than two cars gunning their motors at a stoplight, ready to peal out.

I heard later that the club owner had started narc-ing on the the petty dealers who trafficked in the club, and the vibe took a nasty turn as it did with much of that scene across the country, the monster took over the party.  But by that time interest had dissipated for the most part, who could afford the cost of the ecstasy and the cost of the  recovery time the next day?

I’m sure Ru’s show is as entertaining as any formulaic reality show can be, but I’d rather watch a drag race in a sweaty, dark nightclub, with participants chugging jewel-colored shots, swerving in and out of their respective lanes in the race to the finish.  I like the danger and spontaneity, not the Klieg lights and camera marks, when it comes to the races.

Wrestling: Then and Now

The acclaim being heaped on Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and particularly Mickey Rourke’s  wounded animal “comeback” performance, has sparked a bit of nostalgia for the outsize, spandex-clad halcyon days of ’80s professional wrestling.  The Daily News has a “Then and Now” slideshow featuring some of the breakout stars of the circuit.  Remember, there was a time before Hulk Hogan starred in a reality show with his Britney manqué daughter and Jesse Ventura held elected office.

Confession!  Coming of age in that decade, when wrestling seeped into the broader culture, when there were not only televised matches but a cartoon show, an album, a line of toys and cameos in Cyndi Lauper videos, I was a big fan.  The costumes!  The drama!  The clear delineation between good and evil!  (Okay, so sometimes the good guys defected.  But they usually saw the error of their ways.) WrestleMania!  Before the WWF became the WWE, when the stars of the wrestling firmament included Jake “The Snake” Roberts (pictured above), The Iron Sheik, Hillbilly Jim, George “The Animal” Steele, and Bret “Hitman” Hart, under the Svengali-like rule of mustachioed promoter Vince McMahon.  My father even took me to a match.  I was maybe eight or so?  I remember it was exciting, and loud, but honestly, I probably would have rather been watching it on the teevee.  In that big arena, the practiced snarls, the hyperbolic one-liners, the forced machismo, didn’t read.  It was just overly-pumped hunks of meat thwapping into each other from the turnbuckle.  Television captured the soap-operatic pageantry and spectacle and hackneyed story lines that being there live did not. And it was that myth-making that I’d bought into, I could have done without being squeezed next to jerky-eating, beer swilling, no-necked fans. (Clearly, I’ve changed.)  I embraced wrestling and embraced it hard, but like so many childhood fancies,  playing army and collecting arrowheads, wrestling got left behind.

I hadn’t thought of wrestling again until I first moved to the city and was working in a souvenir shop, selling XXL Phantom of the Opera sweatshirts to gabby Midwesterners, where one of my co-workers was a wrestling fanatic.   He would rush home to watch it on television, and set his VCR to tape the matches he was going to miss, later savoring them with a six pack of Coors Light next to his recliner.  Ben, we’ll call him, would get into arguments with our fellow wage slaves, jaded wanna-be actors and snippy show queens, about his adoration of the “sport.” There was speculation that Ben was in the closet, and the idea of these meaty men in outfits that would make Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters blush pounding into each other was how he dealt with his latent gay urges.  Then there was poor Leslie, the girl who had a crush on him, who would spend her evenings watching wrestling just to be close to him.  I don’t think he never responded to her advances.

No real point to the above anecdote, other than, say, I suppose wrestling will still have a hold over a certain segment of the populace.  Though probably never again like it did during that brief few years, when being a professional wrestler was on par with being a supermodel or the like, a niche interest that for a time captured the imagination and interest of the culture at large.

Dreams Deferred: The Lips and Assholes Across America Tour

Sometime shortly after I graduated college with a BFA in Theatre and no foreseeable job prospects I devised “the plan.”  Instead of attempting to start a “career” as a “working actor” I’d apply to drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. An interim measure that would surely give me “life experience.”  I’d be able to see the country.  I’d earn a decent wage.  Best of all, I’d be driving a physical embodiment of pop culture.  Americana.  My adoration for kitsch had no bounds so the idea seemed perfect.  It would be, at the very least, a memorable adventure.  I had given the scheme a title in my mind:  The Lips and Assholes Across America Tour™.

I requested an application and did some research.  The actual title of the position, should I get it, was “Hotdogger.”  I’d be paired up with another “Hotdogger” and given a specific region of the country to cover, doling out Wienerwhistles while the gratingly perky theme song — “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener…” — lured young and old to us like veritable Pied Pipers of pork by-products.  But before a Hotdogger is set loose on the highways and byways of America, they must attend “Hot Dog High” in Madison, Wisconsin.  Besides learning the mechanics of piloting the unwieldy vehicle, it would also be a sort of indoctrination program into all things Oscar Mayer.  Brand ambassadorship.  How to give good press and pose for photos with the masses. Which was the duty of a Hotdogger.  To represent at football games and grocery store openings.  Main street parades. It was a position of, not exactly status, but there was a cache of sorts.  Not that I envisioned Wienermobile groupies.  Still, it was a hot dog-shaped pedestal on which to place myself.

The irony is that, growing up, I never ate hot dogs.  I detested them as a kid.  And as they were a staple of most children’s birthday parties, I either feigned that I wasn’t hungry or would accept the proffered dog, then find an opportune time to chuck it in the trash, subsisting on the bun and condiments alone. (Well, till the cake was cut and served.)  But Oscar Mayer needn’t know that.