I was waiting for a phone call from someone in Toronto on Monday. In the middle of the afternoon, I did get a call, but I didn’t recognize the number and the area code was 818—San Fernando Valley (a.k.a., Los Angeles). “Who would be calling me from there?”
Allow me a moment to flash back. I was undergoing physical therapy earlier in the fall. I had been playing soccer, got a wicked muscle cramp in the middle of my back sometime during the first half and (naturally) kept playing through the rest of the game. I got home and the pain was getting worse. I laid down in my bed to take a nap and was trapped momentarily—I wanted to take off my glasses, but every time I tried to roll around or shift my weight onto my elbows, my back would start screaming at me. And trust me, when a back screams, it makes the windows vibrate.
Have you ever seen one of those pain scales where you try and measure how much it hurts on a scale of 1-10? (On an episode of Scrubs, “10” was someone falling through the hospital window—after dropping for 10-20 feet, the back of the person’s thong caught on something to stop their fall… yeah, that sounds like a 10 to me, too.) Well, rolling around on the bed to take off my glasses was an 8. Thankfully, my back was not wearing any sexy undergarments or I could have been in deep, deep trouble.
Anyway, at one point during treatment, Nate (my physical therapist) was talking about how he watched a lot of reality TV and brought up the FOX Reality Channel. “Well, you’ll probably never see me on there.” “Huh?” I explained that I was on Beauty and the Geek—“I thought you looked familiar!” (Both he and the girl at the front desk recognized me, but couldn’t figure out why…)
The reason said flashback is relevant is because the person calling me was from said FOX Reality Channel. She explained that they had bought the rights to Beauty and the Geek and were bringing people back from all three seasons within the next couple weeks for interviews: “What are you doing now, how has the show changed your life, is that a thong on your back?” Same old, same old.
Consequently, they’ll be flying me back to L.A. at the end of the month to talk to a camera for a couple hours. I might fly in and stay for a single night or—if I’m lucky—I’ll be there the entire weekend hanging out with Bill and Chuck, neither of whom I’ve seen since the Aftermath episode back in July, 2005. That’d be sweet…
One other noteworthy item: they’ll be paying me to do it. If I remember right, it’ll be another stipend and some per diem money (cash to buy food, movie tickets or handjobs from two-dollah hos). Regardless, it’ll be more than the $1000 I got for helping Ashton Kutcher earn his multi-bajillion dollars. Damn, that’d pay for a lot of handjobs… or physical therapy if I threw out my back while getting one.
