Press release

At this point, I’m waiting for an e-mail with some questions from a magazine writer who’ll be “doing an interview” with me. Admittedly, the “good publicity” temptation is trying to dig its way into my head whenever I think about it. “Well, Joe, I can’t say a whole lot about the movie or what my role is, but Jessica told me that I’ll have to fuck a sheep. Don’t worry, we’ll get it cleared by the ASPCA first.” (If the questions are about DDR… that’ll spoil all of my fun. Unless I make up stuff about sheep sodomizing the cast members.)

Along with that, it sounds like she’s already signed me up for a visit to a radio show (“Don’t overexert yourself and vomit on the microphone, please…”) and possibly a morning TV show as well. For the TV stint, we needed to send a write-up to the station about Beauty and the Geek, my role on there (“Don’t let your fingers cramp up and vomit on your keyboard, please…”), etc., so I sat down in front of my laptop, did a little research and came up with this:
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Shawn Bakken was cast as a “geek” on the reality show Beauty and the Geek. The show was intended to be a “social experiment”: pair up seven smart and socially awkward guys with attractive, but ditzy girls. Each episode of the show provided challenges in which each person tried to share their strengths with their partners, ultimately attempting to make the “geeks” more comfortable in their own skin and allow the “beauties” to realize they are more than just a pretty face. While Shawn and his partner fell short and were eliminated in the second-to-last episode, he believes that the things he learned during his time on the show were worth much more than the $250,000 prize.

Beauty and the Geek first aired in the summer of 2005. Since then, Seasons 2 and 3 have already been produced and the CW network has pledged to pick up two more seasons in the near future. Moreover, the show has been broadcast across the globe and spawned other versions in the U.K., Italy, Norway and even Estonia.
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There was another one in the Netherlands and possibly in Australia as well, but the sentence was getting kinda bulky already. Oh yeah, and when I wrote it and sent it to Jessica to pass it along to the TV people, I didn’t realize until afterwards that I wrote “1995” instead of “2005.” If she hadn’t caught that little mistake… oops.

So that’s the scoop of the hour. I’m flying to Toronto in a couple weeks and the screening of Drop Dead Roses will be July 7th, 9:30 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto, Canada. Be there or… don’t. But if you can’t make it, please send up some food for the craft services table—I’m getting hungry already.