My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover If Not Being A Dumb Ass Is the New Black, or, a Culture-Up Manifesto

by Jen Lancaster

  By the time we finished, we’d eaten ourselves sober again and were so stuffed that we could barely walk the few blocks to the theater. Okay, no offense, Russia, but if this is how you fueled up prior to battle, no wonder you couldn’t beat Afghanistan.

  Meanwhile, back in the nosebleed balcony, my neighbor is banging her armrest and screaming, “Spin, spin, spin!” while a ballet dancer performs a fouetté en tournant.

  Yes. Shouting will absolutely help him spin.

  Joanna’s husband is with their kids, so we’re not under any kind of time constraints. And, as this is the first time just the two of us have been on the town together in something like fourteen years, we’re going to take advantage of the situation. We could stay out all night if we want. We won’t, but I love having this as an option.

  When the show’s over, Joanna and I make a beeline for the nearest cab, heading directly to the most magical place in the city. On Friday and Saturday nights, the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel turns into something more akin to Willy Wonka’s factory. Tiered tables fill the center of the room, and each of them is heaped with dozens of chocolate treats, like chocolate crème brûlées, chocolate truffles, chocolate cookies, chocolate cakes, chocolate tarts, chocolate-covered strawberries, chocolate donuts, and chocolate mousses, all served alongside melted chocolate for fondue and various flavors of hot chocolate. The spread is nothing short of obscene.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Joanna says, eyes wide. “My girls would lose their minds.”

  Once seated, and after we select our treats and sparkling champagne- vodka cocktails, we begin our postmortem on the performance.

  “Did the Happiest Woman in the Entire World wreck everything for you?” I ask.

  “She didn’t bother me. Judging from how muscular her arms were and her carriage, she had to be a dancer, too. She was probably just excited to see her friends onstage,” Joanna replies. It’s rare to get Joanna to ever say anything bad about people, despite having lived under my terrible influence on two separate occasions.212 “How’d you like the performances?”

  “Honestly?” I admit. “I didn’t really understand most of them.” The element of storytelling was seriously lacking in some of the pieces. Although I loved watching the movement, I couldn’t always figure out the motivation behind it.

  “Oh, thank God, me neither! I figured since you’d been studying about dance, you knew something I didn’t.”

  I shrug. “I’ve been spoiled by So You Think You Can Dance. I mean, they have some of the best choreographers in the country working on that show, plus they explain what the dance is about before every performance. And maybe they’re dumbing it down for the masses, but as a member of the masses, I appreciate the summary. As for tonight, I didn’t expect a full breakdown, but a few hints as to plot might have been nice.”

  “Yeah, those couples in all the loose clothing in the fourth number with all the sticks? What was that about?” Joanna asks, taking a bite of her chocolate-cherry compote.

  “Pfft, I couldn’t begin to tell you. But if I had to guess, I’d say they were crows.” I dig into my white-and-milk-chocolate mousse. “Oh, and P.S.? I could have done without the charity’s president rallying against the evils of the Republican party in his speech, too. I mean, I’m here, paying seventy-five bucks a ticket specifically to support your organization; can you not call me the devil, please?”213

  “I noticed you were squirming at that point.”

  “That’s also because Dreadlocks McShoutypants was having a conversation out loud with herself. Apparently she needs to remember to pick up some spirulina at Whole Foods on the way home. As for the dancing, you know what else bothered me? This is petty, but I didn’t like the sound of people dancing. On my stupid show, they edit out the noise of the dancers leaping and landing back on the ground. At this thing, everyone sounded like a herd of cattle because we could hear every foot slapping the stage. I found it distracting.”

  She looks thoughtful as she picks at the pecans on her tartlet. “I guess I didn’t notice.”

  “As part of my project, I’ve been watching a ton of old dance movies lately. They took out the stage noise, too, except in the tap-dancing scenes, which are supposed to be heard.”

  Joanna gives me a wry grin. “My oldest takes Irish-dancing lessons. I guess I expect dance to make a lot of racket. By the way, have you seen Singin’ in the Rain yet?”

  “Yes, and I loved it so much!” I exclaim. “What’s funny is after seeing some old musicals, I told Stacey I thought the SYTYCD dancers are way more athletic than Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Maybe these kids don’t have their charisma, but in a lot of ways, their technique is better. She countered by telling me after Michael Jackson moon-walked for the first time on the VMAs, Gene Kelly called to congratulate him. Then Michael told Gene if it weren’t for him, he’d never have become a dancer. Now a lot of the guys on SYTYCD attribute their love of dance to Michael.”

  “Maybe it’s just as simple as that soda commercial—every generation inspires the next,” Joanna remarks while stifling a yawn.

  “Are you exhausted?” I ask, glancing at my watch. “You realize if we were still in college, we’d just be getting ready to go out now.”

  “A little bit, but I’m fine. Although tomorrow I’ve got to work our block party with a vodka-and-chocolate hangover; I may regret this then.”

  I laugh. “Twenty-four years later and I’m still a bad influence on you.”

  Joanna drains her glass and finishes her truffle. “What should we do now? You want another drink, you want more chocolate, or do you want to call it a night? I’m game for one more if you are.”

  I consider all our options. “You know what? As long as you don’t hit me with your dreadlocks, I’m pretty happy with whatever’s next.”

  Joanna just sent me a link to a review of the dance. Apparently the people in the loose clothes were supposed to be subsistence farmers.

  And I still don’t get it.

  “If we go tomorrow, they’ll have belly dancers,” I say.

  “Yeah?” Stacey replies. “Then let’s definitely go tonight. Want me to see if the girls are free?”

  Stacey and I are on the phone coordinating our outing to a Turkish restaurant, and I’m glad she’s suggested our friends join us because I’ve discovered that the Eat the World portion of my project works better in groups. More people not only means more dishes, but it also increases the likelihood that SOMEONE there will want to discuss The Real World: Cancún with me.

  I know.

  I know.

  I know.

  If at any point you’re compelled to mock me for still having the Bunim-Murray monkey on my back this deep into my cultural Jenaissance, feel free. No ridicule dished out could be equal to the embarrassment I feel for indulging in this urge.

  My relationship with The Real World started at the show’s inception. When the New York season premiered in 1992, I was twenty-four and stuck living in my childhood bedroom. After my parents stopped paying for college, I had no choice but to move home and commute to a regional branch of my university. Between classes, I worked two jobs in order to scrape together the cash I needed to get the hell out of my parents’ house.

  At the time, I was understimulated and in a funk, and I desperately craved the company of people my own age. In my hometown, anyone I’d have wanted to be around scattered the second we’d graduated seven years before. When I could arrange time off work, I’d scamper back down to the main campus, but those stolen days weren’t enough to keep my loneliness at bay. I felt like my twenties were escaping me.

  Sure, I was involved with a sorority, but with my work schedule I rarely got to spend time with my sisters. Most of them had apartments together off campus, but I lived thirty miles away. On the one hand I didn’t have to share a bathroom with half a dozen girls, but on the other, no one was waking them up at six fifteen a.m. on Saturdays after their double shifts to “Use the stiff brush to scrub algae off t
he steps in the pool before you go to work, Jennifer.”

  I yearned for conversations that didn’t revolve around the extent to which I’d fucked up my educational trajectory or why I’d mulched the lawn instead of bagged it.214 I don’t blame my parents for being hard on me; they were none too thrilled to have an adult chick back in the nest, either.

  So when I saw the promos for The Real World, I was desperate for entertainment and, more so, fascinated by the premise that anything could happen on camera. I thrilled at the prospect of being around people my own age, vicarious as it might have been.

  I had a rare night off when the show premiered, and I sat transfixed during the opening credits. As the cast members were introduced, I found that they lived in the kind of funky loft I’d always dreamed of living in myself.

  Every participant had been hand-selected not because they were going to get naked in the Jacuzzi or punch random strangers in bar fights, but because they were pursuing their talents in New York.215 Bunim and Murray filled that house with aspiring writers and musicians and dancers and models. And these individuals didn’t spend their time trying to outdo one another with outrageous behavior; instead, they used the experience to try to understand their roommates, themselves, and their place in the world.

  Of course complications arose, but nothing was manufactured back then. Apparently, Bunim and Murray originally kicked around the idea of scripting the program, but scrapped it. Occasionally you could see the hand of production encouraging the cast members to discuss certain topics, but they were important issues, like racism and sexuality and homelessness. In one episode, Julie’s mother came up from Alabama, and Julie poured her heart out to her roommates about how much trouble she had finding a connection with her mother. I knew exactly how it felt to have a mom whose idea of how a daughter should behave was diametrically opposed to her own. Julie’s personal growth felt like my personal growth.

  Did they have issues with one another? Of course. But the problems came about organically because you simply can’t stick that diverse a group of people under one roof and not have them, you know, stop being polite and start getting real.

  For me, The Real World filled a void and made me believe that I was hanging out with friends for half an hour each week. Even if we were in different places, I understood exactly where they were in their worlds. I was there, too.

  The Real World: New York is, or rather was, the utopia of reality television. The next season in Los Angeles was a fine follow-up with another totally diverse cast. They dealt with issues of violence and alcoholism and politics. And everyone still had normal names like Beth and Glen and David, and not one of them had been surgically enhanced. My passion for the show remained, but when it premiered, I’d managed to move back to campus, so I didn’t afford it the importance of season one.

  I wondered if the show might lose a touch of its original magic in the third iteration, but then San Francisco premiered. There was an urgency to that season, as cast member Pedro passed away from HIV complications the night of the premiere. Conflicts were amplified by Pedro’s looming illness, and relationships were shattered when common ground could not be found. The house was rife with misunderstandings, and everyone was on edge from the first episode. If New York was the utopia of reality television, San Francisco was the perfect storm.

  By the time the London came on, I was dating Fletch, who’d developed a distaste for all things MTV. He claimed that the show held no value, but I suspect he was just jealous he’d turned twenty-five and missed the opportunity to audition.

  When the Miami season rolled around, I’d graduated from college and was working my first professional job. I mostly caught up with the show during the weekend marathons. Suddenly watching a bunch of college kids lying around on couches and bitching about who had moved their stuff stopped being “must-see” TV.216 With the exception of cast member Dan that season, the series ceased to interest me. I only kept watching because I was addicted.

  I planned on quitting cold turkey when they went back to New York. I couldn’t relate to any of the cast members. Yeah, I laughed at some of their antics, but the show was intrinsically different by then. The first season was almost the next generation of The Breakfast Club. They were people who’d been tossed together and who’d forged uncommon friendships. Were it not for an in-school suspension, you’d never see criminal Bender and prom queen Claire making out in a file room or Claire giving basket case Allison a makeover. And in real life, you’d never find the flamboyantly gay Norman befriending Julie, the repressed Southern virgin who was so naive she assumed Heather B. was a drug dealer because she was an African-American woman with a beeper.

  The further the feel of the episodes got from the originals, the less voraciously I watched. My interest waned as the number of boob jobs on the show waxed. The return to New York should have been the last season I tuned in, but then the Chicago season took up residence in spitting distance of me, and I had no choice.

  And then the Real World went to Las Vegas . . . and that season was so distasteful that its hold on me finally broke. I’m not sure how episodes went from Julie camping out in a “Reaganville” for the night to understand the plight of a homeless family to roommate threesomes,217 but it did and I’d had enough.

  I thought I’d successfully kicked my habit after the disease-infested, hot-tub-filled Las Vegas season in 2003, only to be sucked in by a snowy day, the appallingly amoral Denver cast, and the discovery of my cable box’s on-demand feature in 2006.

  My Shame Rattle at being back on The Real World bandwagon was palpable.

  Fortunately, it was short-lived.

  I had enough self-respect to avoid Sydney, Hollywood, and Brooklyn, and when this latest season rolled around, I really believed I was home free.

  So, what broke my resolve? What lured me back into the fold? What got me up on the Bunim-Murray horse again? I knew the show would never be as good as it once had been, so quality wasn’t a motivator. And I’d have laid money on the Cancún kids being the most vapid, self-indulgent group yet, wrapped in a cocoon of arrogance and ignorance and abs, none of which appealed to me.

  What sucked me in this time?

  Weather?

  Weakness?

  Want?

  Nope. Welty.

  Specifically Eudora Welty.

  I’ve been diligently working my way through the classic novels list that my friend Jen put together for me. Mostly I’ve been reading them on my Kindle because classics are dirt-cheap that way.218

  However, not long ago I found myself at the bookstore unexpectedly,219 and there were a few titles I hadn’t yet downloaded. I didn’t have my list with me, so I tried to remember what I didn’t have. I knew there was some book written by a woman with the initials E.W. but I couldn’t remember who or what. I asked for help.

  I located a clerk and said, “Hi, I’m looking for a classic novel but I can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it. I can picture her name, though, and her initials are E.W.”

  The clerk immediately pointed me in the direction of a summer reading display. “You probably want Edith Wharton or Eudora Welty.” Wow. Incidentally, I’ve yet to stump a bookstore clerk, video store employee, or wine shop cashier with what I always assume are out-of-the-ordinary requests.

  (You have no idea how much this impresses me. They should probably make a reality show about this. I’d totally watch.)

  Anyway, I bought both Edith Wharton and Eudora Welty and figured I had my bases covered. As it turns out, Jen meant for me to get Evelyn Waugh, who, I should mention, isn’t even a chick.220

  I immediately fell in love with Edith Wharton, toggling back and forth between The Age of Innocence on my Kindle and The House of Mirth in paperback. Her style is deceptively breezy because her wit is so biting. In her novels, she painstaking catalogues the messed-up social mores of the Upper East Side glitterati.

  This, in Jen-speak, means I totally develop a girl crush on her.

  Wharton pro
mpts me to send gushing e-mails to my agent, saying stuff like:The strangest thought occurred to me today—without the vicious social satire of Edith Wharton, we’d never have had a Blair Waldorf. Personality- and circumstance-wise, they seemed to have an awful lot in common

  Also, I think this may be why Gossip Girl is so popular with you gals in publishing—it is RAMPANT with nods to all kinds of books. For example, having Lily marry Bart Bass? Lily Bart? Sound familiar? And isn’t Newland Archer awfully similar to, oh, say . . . Nate Archibald? Same kind of character, too. And Wharton loved to make plays on names; ergo, Chuck Bass becomes Chuck Bastard in a minute. Or perhaps it’s a wink to Faulkner, because Chuck Bass is a motherless boy? (She died and now his mother is a fish.)

  After going on and on about my brilliant discoveries to Fletch, I mention how Kate sent me a link to a twenty-five-page comparison of a certain Gossip Girl episode to The Age of Innocence, which prompts him to wonder, “Is it that you discovered this literary connection, or is this maybe one of those cases when you’re the last horse to cross the finish line?”

  While Wharton helped me get in touch with my inner cognoscente, Welty made me want to slap babies. I specifically picked up Welty’s Delta Wedding because I liked the title and the concept appealed to me. According to the book jacket, this is a “sometimes-riotous portrait of a Southern family.” Since there’s almost nothing I dig more than some old-fashioned Southern dysfunction, full of mint juleps and creeping vines and creepy uncles and no-necked monsters, I figured I’d take to it like a kudzu to a telephone pole.221

  What I didn’t count on was my developing an urge to maim myself and others rather than read one more frigging description of spready ferns and golden-winged butterflies and skies the color of violets and snow-white moons and can something please happen because oh, my God, enough with the descriptions stop already!222

  I did a Google search to see if I’m the only one to have such a visceral reaction to Delta Wedding. As it turns out, I’m not. The consensus is that once one gets fifty pages in, the pace quickens, but I wasn’t sure I could make it that far without kicking my pets or something. Others suggested the reader take a piece of paper and draw a family tree to keep track of the sprawling cast of characters, which . . . no. If a book requires a Visio diagram to keep everyone straight, it’s too damn complicated. And then I saw that a Kirkus reviewer had described little Miss Pulitzer Prize’s prose as being “lucid yet tortuous.”