After doing grunt work from Monday through Thursday, I was ready to have a little fun. More specifically, I was ready to have a little fun at First Friday. It’s a Mensa gathering that happens every… well, every first Friday of the month—pretty self-explanatory, really. But I wanted to attend for a very specific reason: I wanted to give my thanks to Paul Jensen. As you may have read before, he was the catalyst for my appearance on Beauty and the Geek—he told the casting agency about me and the rest is still becoming history. However, I’d wanted to wait to tell him until I knew when the show was going to debut so I could spring it all on him at once. I feel so devious…
Devious or not, I think he knew what I was talking about as soon as the words “Thank you” came out of my mouth, but given the circumstances, I can understand why it didn’t sink in right away. I imagine it was similar to placing a haphazard bet on a horse race for win, place and show and getting them right. Very small odds, very big results: he talked to a person at a casting agency, I was thanking him because I got on the TV show. But that was just the beginning of the evening.
He took off for a minute, during which time I told a couple other people about what had happened. That led to a general conversation about reality TV among them, but by then, Paul came back and we were soon joined by Connie, the PR person for Minnesota Mensa. (Actually, I didn’t know who she was at first—up until we were introduced, I was wondering why this attractive woman was grabbing a chair to sit at the end of the table where we were instead of using an empty seat nearby.) Paul filled her in on a couple details and we started talking about… pretty much whatever I was allowed to tell them. Basically, I was being flogged for whatever press we could get. Or floggified. Or floggilized. Take your pick—they all sounded like neat words when we used them.
So the final results of that conversation are still pouring in: Connie used the info she jotted down to write a brief article on the Mensa website (see link to the right) and it’ll be included in the next “Mensagenda” as well. I committed myself to attend First Friday next month because, as Connie put it, “Any beauties who’d like a part in Shawn’s reality can take their chances at First Friday.” Who knows? It might lead to a higher attendance of beauties or it might lead to a bunch of uglies getting false hopes (which could be my half of the equation, really…). Paul even suggested that it might lead to some bets about who’ll eventually win. If I only place or show… I might get flogged for that, too.
The final bit of weirdness emerging from the conversation will happen tomorrow at 4:25, when I’ll be getting a phone call from the DJs (“Moon and Stacy”) at KS95. I’ve never done a phone interview before, I haven’t the slightest idea what they’ll ask or what I’ll say… I just hope I don’t overstep the boundaries of what I’m allowed to say. I have this horrible fear that there’ll be a bunch of attorneys driving home from work, they’ll hear me screw up and call the WB: “Ooh! Ooh! Let me file the suit against him! I’ll take a 30% cut of a five million dollar lawsuit!” You know just as well as I do that lawyers are devious bastards… oh, wait… crap.
